Posted on 08/06/2023 1:26:46 PM PDT by aimhigh
On coming to know of their daughter being in love with a Dalit boy, her parents had admonished her and told her to end the relationship.
In a case of suspected “honour” killing in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, a 19-year-old Dalit youth was murdered on Sunday, 23 July, by the relatives of an upper-caste Hindu girl with whom he was in a relationship. The youth was identified as Muttiah, a resident of Swamidas Nagar in the Appuvilai village near Thisayanvilai in Tirunelveli district. According to the police, Muttiah was working in the wedding-card-manufacturing industry and fell in love with a co-worker who belongs to the Nadar community. On coming to know of their daughter being in love with a Dalit boy, her parents admonished her and told her to end the relationship.
On Sunday afternoon, the girl came to meet Muttiah at his residence in Swamidas Nagar. In the evening, Muttiah took the girl on his motorcycle to drop her off at her residence in the Itamozhi village. He returned home after dropping her. Around 8 pm, Muttiah informed his parents that he was going to meet a friend who stayed nearby. As the hours passed and the boy did not return home, his brothers and relatives went out in search of him. At midnight, they found Muttiah near a water body, lying in a pool of blood with multiple stab wounds on his neck, chest, and abdomen. His body was taken to the house.
Meanwhile, Muttiah’s relatives accused the girl’s parents of his murder. During the investigation, the police found that the girl’s relatives were missing. However, the Tirunelveli Superintendent of Police (SP) N Silambarasan maintained that the murder was not a case of honour killing and that the investigation was underway to ascertain the motive behind the crime. Heavy police cover was deployed in the region to avoid untoward incidents between the two communities because of the incident, as the region has witnessed caste conflicts over the years.
On Monday, a group of Dalit activists protested in front of the district collectorate during the grievance meeting, urging the collector to take action against those who murdered the Dalit boy. They also alleged that the police were trying to downplay the murder and were threatening the family of the deceased.
So what did you Google search to smear Vivek by association ?
Animals, but not much different than American women who demand the right to kill their children when they’re inconvenient.
Not that there is any association but that wont stop stories like these on FR.
In December 1829, Lord William Bentinck, the first governor general of British-ruled India, banned sati, the ancient Hindu practice of a widow immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre.
Bentinck, then the governor general of Bengal, sought the views of 49 senior army officers and five judges, and was convinced that the time had come to "wash out a foul stain upon British rule". His regulation said sati was "revolting to the feelings of human nature" and that it shocked many Hindus as well as "unlawful and wicked".
The regulation said that those convicted of "aiding and abetting" in the burning of a Hindu widow, "whether the sacrifice be voluntary on her part or not" would be found guilty of culpable homicide. It empowered the courts to impose the death penalty for persons convicted of using force or assisting in burning alive a widow "who had been intoxicated and could not have exercised her free will".
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]
Charles James Napier - Commander-in-Chief in India.
The practice of widow burning did not end until the 1870s.......
Indeed, widow-burning (suttee) was suppressed by the British over a century ago. In today's American politics, suttee is as relevant as slavery.
I don't love or hate any ethnic group, nor is the 2024 election a referendum on some ethnic group. I support an individual and his ideas. You are conflating a political candidate and his agenda with your obsessive hatred of his ethnic identity.
Suttee was bad. But if someone wants to talk social ills you don’t have to go that far back. Many thousands of “witches” faced “trials” and were sentenced to die by burning. It happened for centuries, not just in Europe but right here in the US. Social ills weren’t limited to one particular culture or geography. Some just happened to get rid of theirs before others.
Hanged (colonial era only), but not burned.
Thanks. Noted.
“Dalit also previously known as untouchable, is the lowest stratum of the castes in the Indian subcontinent.”
It’s interesting that a number of these stories about the persistence of the Indian caste system are coming out when Vivek Ramaswamy (sp?) is running for President, isn’t it?
More media smear jobs.
(FD: I’m supporting Trump.)
How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years
By Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel
Al Jazeera
December 2, 2023
Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.
Dylan Sullivan
Adjunct Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University
Jason Hickel
Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Published On 2 Dec 2022
[Image] Our research finds that Britain’s exploitative policies were associated with approximately 100 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period, write Sullivan and Hickel [British Raj(1904-1906)/Wikimedia Commons]
Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.
This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record. According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.
Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.
In a recent paper in the journal World Development,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
we used census data to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s. If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.
Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate. Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.” We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.
While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism. This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.
How did British rule cause this tremendous loss of life? There were several mechanisms. For one, Britain effectively destroyed India’s manufacturing sector. Prior to colonisation, India was one of the largest industrial producers in the world, exporting high-quality textiles to all corners of the globe. The tawdry cloth produced in England simply could not compete. This began to change, however, when the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal in 1757.
According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs, allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.
This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country. As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520267596/the-modern-world-system-iii
in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.
To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population and then used the revenues to buy Indian products – indigo, grain, cotton, and opium – thus obtaining these goods for free. These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia.
This system drained India of goods worth trillions of dollars in today’s money. The British were merciless in imposing the drain, forcing India to export food even when drought or floods threatened local food security. Historians have established that tens of millions of Indians died of starvation during several considerable policy-induced famines in the late 19th century, as their resources were syphoned off to Britain and its settler colonies.
Colonial administrators were fully aware of the consequences of their policies. They watched as millions starved and yet they did not change course. They continued to knowingly deprive people of resources necessary for survival. The extraordinary mortality crisis of the late Victorian period was no accident. The historian Mike Davis argues
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2311-late-victorian-holocausts
that Britain’s imperial policies “were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.”
Our research finds that Britain’s exploitative policies were associated with approximately 100 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period. This is a straightforward case for reparations, with strong precedent in international law. Following World War II, Germany signed reparations agreements to compensate the victims of the Holocaust and more recently agreed to pay reparations to Namibia for colonial crimes perpetrated there in the early 1900s. In the wake of apartheid, South Africa paid reparations to people who had been terrorised by the white-minority government.
History cannot be changed, and the crimes of the British empire cannot be erased. But reparations can help address the legacy of deprivation and inequity that colonialism produced. It is a critical step towards justice and healing.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Dylan Sullivan
Adjunct Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University
Jason Hickel
Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Dr Jason Hickel is a Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The Divide and Less is More
This is standard operatign procedure for Hindustan.
The Dalits are among the most oppressed people on Earth, but they also like to kill Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Assamese, Bodos, Tamils, etc., etc., etc.
Remember all of this when a Hindu asks for your vote, America!
What caste are the police in?
Is there a reason to think Brahman police investigating a Dalit murder at the hands of a Brahman murderer would be fair?
The practice started when the Moghul invaders rounded up all females and carried them away to keep as slaves. ISIS still does that. To avoid that fate, widows committed suicide. The practice became institutionalised because the Muslim rule lasted centuries and stopped only when it was replaced by British rule.
Now that I did not know. Slavery brutalizes people. That is also why I hate the caste system.
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