Another depressingly familiar report comes out of supposedly civilized India: a 42-year old woman was stripped and paraded naked through the streets of a village in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Her crime? Well, nothing, really. Her 24-year old son had eloped with his 18-year old girlfriend, and the village elders, well, didn't like that, and decided to take the law into their own hands.
So, the poor woman, who apparently knew nothing about her son's relationship or his plans, became the scapegoat for the outraged family of the girlfriend. Not content with parading her naked through the streets, she was then tied to an electricity pole and beaten mercilessly for hours. She is now suffering from severe trauma.
Eventually, more than a dozen people were arrested for the action, and a local police officer has been arrested for dereliction of duty (i.e. looking the opposite way). But this is far from an isolated incident in Hindu-fundamentalist rural India, where people think they know better than the laws of the land. Just this July, two women in Manipur state were dragged into the street and one of them was gang-raped. In August, a 20-year old pregnant woman was paraded naked by her husband and in-laws in Rajasthan after she left the husband for another man. A 23-year old woman was stripped and paraded in the streets in Gujarat when she eloped with another man. A few years earlier, five Dalit women were paraded naked and publicly caned after one of them eloped with a Dalit boy in Uttar Pradesh. A 45-year old woman was paraded naked on a donkey in Rajasthan after being accused (but not convicted) of killing her nephew. You get the idea.
This is all happening in Narendra Modi's modern India, where moon-shots and cutting-edge computer developments occur side-by-side with medieval punishments and witchcraft. You have to assume that the Hindu zealots are being encouraged by Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda.
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