Sunday, 21 April 2013

US Report: There’s Massive Corruption in Nigeria

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President Goodluck Jonathan
   
A new report submitted to the United States Congress by the Secretary of State John Kerry has alleged massive corruption at all levels of the Nigerian government.
The document titled:  "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012" was prepared by the Department of State using information from US embassies and consulates abroad, foreign government officials, non-governmental and international organisations, and published reports.
Under the chapter on Nigeria in the latest report made available at the weekend,  Section 4, which deals with "Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government," states: "Massive, widespread, and pervasive corruption affected all levels of government and the security forces."
Noting that though Nigerian law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, the report said, "government did not implement the law effectively, and officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity."
It also scored the judiciary low as its noted, "There was a widespread perception judges were easily bribed and litigants could not rely on the courts to render impartial judgements. Citizens encountered long delays and alleged requests from judicial officials for bribes to expedite cases or obtain favourable rulings".
Chronicling all major financial scandals within the period under review and how the issues were handled by government, the report said: "On April 18, a House of Representatives Committee led by Representative Farouk Lawan and charged with investigating the fuel subsidy programme from 2009 to 2011 released a report showing massive fraud, corruption, and inefficiencies in the operation of the program. The report alleged misappropriation of nearly half the subsidy funds, with poor or nonexistent oversight by government agencies.
"The report estimated government money lost to “endemic corruption and entrenched inefficiency” amounted to 1.067 trillion naira ($6.8 billion). The committee recommended reform of the oversight and enforcement mechanisms and further endorsed investigation and prosecution of culpable officials."
It further stated: 'In July the government released a list of those who had benefited illegally from the subsidy programme, which included relatives and colleagues of key government officials. In late July the EFCC began arraigning suspects, first with a group of 20 indictments, including six oil companies and 11 individuals.
"By year’s end the EFCC initiated prosecutions of approximately 50 cases related to the subsidy scam. The majority of these cases involved companies and individuals who had fraudulently received subsidy revenue. Investigations and trials had not produced any convictions by year’s end."
It also recalled the twists in the subsidy probe, noting that in June (2012) "allegations and a video surfaced, allegedly showing Lawan accepting a 94.2 million naira ($605,000) bribe from entrepreneur Femi Otedola, who had advised Lawan on the investigation but whose company had not received fuel subsidy payments."
The report said: "After Lawan solicited the bribe from Otedola, the latter approached the SSS to record the hand-off as part of a “sting” operation. The attorney-general referred the case to the police for further investigation. The allegations initially overshadowed the committee’s findings, but the EFCC continued with investigations at year’s end."
It also cited the stealing of 32.8 billion naira ($210 million) Police Pension Fund, which led to the arraignment of six suspects including a director at the Police Pension Office, Atiku Abubakar Kigo, who later rose to become permanent secretary in the Ministry of the Niger Delta, and the criminal charges against former Governor of Bayelsa State, Timipre Sylva, for laundering close to five billion naira ($32 million) of funds belonging to state.
Noting that the charges were instituted on February 24, 2012, the report said the court adjourned the trial until January 2013.

Saturday, 20 April 2013

Suspects With Foot in 2 Worlds, Perhaps Echoing Plots of Past

Three years ago, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was assigned by his high school English teacher to write an essay on something he felt passionate about, he chose the troubled land of his ancestors: Chechnya. He wrote to Brian Glyn Williams, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
 
“He wanted to know more about his Chechen roots,” recalled Mr. Williams, a specialist in the history of Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s southern Caucasus Mountains. “He wanted to know more about Russia’s genocidal war on the Chechen people.”
Mr. Tsarnaev was born in Dagestan and had never lived in neighboring Chechnya, relatives said, but it fascinated him. The professor sent him material covering Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Chechens to Central Asia, in which an estimated 30 percent of them died, and the two brutal wars that Russia waged against Chechen separatists in the 1990s, which killed about 200,000 of the population of one million.
As law enforcement and counterterrorism officials try to understand why Mr. Tsarnaev, 19, and his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, would attack the Boston Marathon, they will have to consider a cryptic mix of national identity, ideology, religion and personality.
Even President Obama, when he addressed the nation on Friday night after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured, seemed to be searching for answers. “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?” he said.
It remains to be seen whether personal grievance or some type of ideology was behind the attack, in which investigators say the Tsarnaevs packed black powder into pressure cookers to kill and maim people they had never met.
Both brothers were open about their devotion to Islam, and Tamerlan’s Web postings suggested an attraction to radicalism, but neither appears to have publicly embraced the ideology of violent jihad. The construction of the bombs used in Boston resembled instructions in the magazine Inspire, the online publication of the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen, but the design is also available elsewhere on the Internet.
Their relatives have expressed anguished bafflement at their reported actions, and it is conceivable that the motive for the attack will remain as inscrutable as those of some mass shootings in recent years.
Still, as investigators try to understand the brothers’ thinking, search for ties to militant groups and draw lessons for preventing attacks, they will be thinking of a handful of notable cases in which longtime American residents who had no history of violence turned to jihadi terrorism: the plot to blow up the New York subway in 2009, the Fort Hood shootings the same year and the failed Times Square bombing of 2010, among others.
“I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where Americans turn to violent jihad — are you American first or are you Muslim first? And also of proving yourself as a man of action,” said Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington.
Mr. Fishman cautioned that it was too early to draw any firm conclusions about the Tsarnaev brothers, but said there were intriguing echoes of other cases in which young men caught between life in America and loyalty to fellow Muslims in a distant homeland turned to violence, partly as a way of settling the puzzle of their identity.
Akbar Ahmed, the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, described such men: “They are American, but not quite American.” His new book, “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terrorism Became a War on Tribal Islam,” examines how tribal codes of hospitality, courage and revenge have shaped the reaction to American counterterrorism strikes.
“They don’t really know the old country,” Professor Ahmed said of young immigrants attracted to jihad, “but they don’t fit in to the new country.”
Add feelings of guilt that they are enjoying a comfortable life in America while their putative brothers and sisters suffer in a distant land and an element of personal estrangement — say, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s statement in an interview long before the attack that after five years in the United States, “I don’t have a single American friend” — and it is a combustible mix.
“They are furious,” Mr. Ahmed said. “They’re out to cause pain.”
After about a decade in the United States, the Tsarnaev brothers had both enrolled in college — the elder brother at Bunker Hill Community College, though he had dropped out; the younger at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Tamerlan was a Golden Gloves boxer and was married with a child; Dzhokhar had been a popular student at a Cambridge school and earned a scholarship for college.
On the face of it, they were doing reasonably well. But the same might have been said, at least at certain stages in their lives, of those behind other recent attacks. Faisal Shahzad, who staged the failed Times Square bombing at age 30, had graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, earned an M.B.A. and worked as a financial analyst. He married an American-born woman of Pakistani ancestry, and they had two children. But as he became steadily more focused on radical religion, he traveled to Pakistan and sought training as a terrorist.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

UK PAUSES TO BID MARGARET THATCHER FAREWELL

"After the storm of a life lived in the heat of political controversy, there is a great calm."

And so it seemed inside St. Paul's Cathedral on Wednesday as more than 2,300 guests from 170 countries stilled their quiet chatter and waited, silently, for the coffin of Margaret Thatcher to enter.
Those words from the Right Rev. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, in many ways summed up the mood within: This was a farewell to a stateswoman and Britain's pioneering first female prime minister but also to a very human mother and grandmother now gone to her final rest.
The domed white marble splendor of St. Paul's, Christopher Wren's masterpiece, only served to remind those within of how insignificant even the greatest of leaders is in the end.

In pictures: Funeral of Margaret Thatcher In pictures: Funeral of Margaret Thatcher
The coffin's solemn arrival was signaled to those waiting inside by the muffled tone of the cathedral clock tolling the hour.
Far from the fierce political debate and fervent protests that raged in Thatcher's life -- and indeed in the nine days since her death -- the coffin was carried quietly in by uniformed members of the armed forces.
Draped in a Union flag and topped with a white flower arrangement, it was placed carefully on a bier directly before the guests of honor at the service, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.
They sat across the aisle from Thatcher's children, Mark and Carol; and her grandchildren, Michael and Amanda; and next to serving Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife.

A ceremonial mourning sword lay on a red-covered table before the queen, carried in by the Lord Mayor of London.
The royals' red velvet-covered chairs had been the last to be filled, as steadily the cathedral filled to its capacity.
Those who'd taken their places in the tight-packed rows of seats behind and to either side included men in formal military uniform, adorned with gold braid and medals, cardinals with their distinctive red caps, women in elaborate black hats and foreign dignitaries, some in dark suits, others in more distinctive traditional dress.

Grey hair was much in evidence, and men outnumbered women -- as was the case by a much greater margin when Thatcher was in office. After all, when she entered Parliament in 1959, she made up part of only 4% who were women.
From time to time during the ceremony, sunlight poured through the windows of the cathedral to glint off the gold mosaic tiles and gilded carvings below the frescoed dome, lit also by gleaming candelabra.
There was no sign within the grand cathedral walls of the tight security outside, with crowds of supporters and a few pockets of protesters kept under the watchful gaze of some 4,000 police officers.
Welcoming the congregation, the Very Rev. David Ison, dean of St. Paul's -- who himself this week evoked the lasting anger and hurt felt by some in Britain as a result of Thatcher's policies -- recalled now "her leadership of this nation, her courage, her steadfastness, and her resolve to accomplish what she believed to be right for the common good."
Giving thanks for the country's traditions of freedom, democracy and rule of law, he invited those gathered to pray.
Only twice did a quiet murmur of laughter punctuate the solemn calm of the proceedings, when Chartres recounted anecdotes which gave a more personal sense of Thatcher's dealings with those she met.
She may not be able to control how she is judged by future generations, but the late prime minister's hand was behind much of the service that marks the end of her physical presence on Earth.

As Chartres pointed out, at her request this was not a memorial service, filled with eulogies, but a simple funeral that reflected her disciplined Methodist upbringing as a grocer's daughter in Grantham.
He acknowledged the contentious nature of her legacy, saying, "the storm of conflicting opinions centers on the Mrs. Thatcher who became a symbolic figure -- even an 'ism,' " but said that lying there, she was "one of us," subject to human destiny.
"There is an important place for debating policies and legacy; for assessing the everyday lives of individuals and communities ... but here and today is neither the time nor the place," he said.
"This is a place for ordinary human compassion of the kind that is reconciling. It is also the place for simple truths which transcend political debate."
Thatcher's granddaughter, Amanda, gave the first reading, her voice clear and steady despite the gravity of the occasion.
Its theme of righteous struggle, "not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the ruler of darkness of this world" was perhaps meant to bring to mind Thatcher's own struggles, first to reach power as a woman in the 1970s and then to exercise it for the good of her country.
As the Bishop of London said, "In a setting like this ... it is easy to forget the immense hurdles she had to climb."
Cameron, who now leads the Conservative Party that Thatcher headed from 1975 to 1990, gave the second short reading from the King James Bible.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, rounded off the service with the final blessing.
The hymns and predominantly English music, chosen by Thatcher and her family, reflected the tastes of a woman Cameron described last week as a "patriot prime minister" with a "lion-hearted love" of her country.
And at the end of the funeral, as the other illustrious guests filed out -- including 11 serving prime ministers, 17 serving foreign ministers and senior clergy from around the world, as well as many British lawmakers -- the sense was reinforced that this was a farewell to a woman who, like her or loathe her, was truly out of the ordinary.

Sunday, 14 April 2013

OMINI PRESENCE NATURE OF GOD

The prefix omni- comes from the Latin meaning “all.” So, to say that God is omnipresent is to say that God is present everywhere. In many religions, God is regarded as omnipresent, whereas in both Judaism and Christianity, this view is further subdivided into the transcendence and immanence of God. Although God is not totally immersed in the fabric of creation (pantheism), He is present everywhere at all times.

God's presence is continuous throughout all of creation, though it may not be revealed in the same way at the same time to people everywhere. At times, He may be actively present in a situation, while He may not reveal that He is present in another circumstance in some other area. The Bible reveals that God can be both present to a person in a manifest manner (Psalm 46:1; Isaiah 57:15) and present in every situation in all of creation at any given time (Psalm 33:13-14). Omnipresence is God's characteristic of being present to all ranges of both time and space. Although God is present in all time and space, God is not locally limited to any time or space. God is everywhere and in every now. No molecule or atomic particle is so small that God is not fully present to it, and no galaxy so vast that God does not circumscribe it. But if we were to remove creation, God would still know of it, for He knows all possibilities, whether they are actual or not.

God is naturally present in every aspect of the natural order of things, in every manner, time and place (Isaiah 40:12; Nahum 1:3). God is actively present in a different way in every event in history as provident guide of human affairs (Psalm 48:7; 2 Chronicles 20:37; Daniel 5:5-6). God is in a special way attentively present to those who call upon His name, who intercede for others, who adore God, who petition, and who pray earnestly for forgiveness (Psalm 46:1). Supremely, He is present in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 2:19), and mystically present in the universal church that covers the earth and against which the gates of hell will not prevail.

Just as the omniscience of God suffers apparent paradoxes due to the limitations of the human mind, so does the omnipresence of God. One of these paradoxes is important: the presence of God in hell, that place unto which the wicked are departed and suffer the unlimited and unceasing fury of God because of their sin. Many argue that hell is a place of separation from God (Matthew 25:41), and if so, then God cannot be said to be in a place that is separated from Him. However, the wicked in hell endure His everlasting anger, for Revelation 14:10 speaks of the torment of the wicked in the presence of the Lamb. That God should be present in a place that the wicked are said to be departed unto does cause some consternation. However, this paradox can be explained by the fact that God can be present—because He fills all things with His presence (Colossians 1:17) and upholds everything by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3)—yet He is not necessarily everywhere to bless.

Just as God is sometimes separated from His children because of sin (Isaiah 52:9), and He is far from the wicked (Proverbs 15:29) and orders the godless subjects of darkness to depart at the end of time to a place of eternal punishment, God is still there in the midst. He knows what those souls suffer who are now in hell; He knows their anguish, their cries for respite, their tears and grief for the eternal state that they find themselves in. He is there in every way as a perpetual reminder to them of their sin which has created a chasm from every blessing that might be otherwise granted. He is there in every way, but He displays no attribute other than His wrath.

Likewise, He will also be in heaven, manifesting every blessing that we cannot even begin to comprehend here; He will be there displaying His manifold blessing, His manifold love, and His manifold kindness—indeed, everything other than His wrath. The omnipresence of God should serve to remind us that we cannot hide from God when we have sinned (Psalm 139:11-12), yet we can return to God in repentance and faith without even having to move (Isaiah 57:16).


No regrets about Alamieyeseigha’s pardon — Jonathan



President Goodluck Jonathan and Alamieyeseigha
President Goodluck Jonathan on Saturday said he had no regret over the state pardon he recently granted his political benefactor, former governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, despite the public outcry that trailed the exercise.
Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati, made the President’s position known while featuring on a Radio Nigeria programme, Business Hour, monitored by our correspondent in Abuja.
Abati restated the Presidency’s position that the gesture granted the former governor, who was convicted of corruption, was in order as the process leading to the pardon conformed with the provisions of the nation’s constitution.
He said, “The President does not regret what he has done because it is clearly within the powers of the President of Nigeria to grant pardon within the purview of Section 175 of the constitution.
“What has been done from the point of view of law is in order. But people say that they are not talking about the law, they are talking about morality.
“On that issue, I have said it before that pardon is given to persons who have been convicted. So when a man commits an offence, he goes through the legal process and he is convicted, then he is pardoned later.
“There is nowhere you grant pardon that it has not generated some level of controversy. The is always some kind of political drama around. So our own experience has not been exceptional.”
While featuring on a Channels Television programme, Sunrise, earlier in the day, Abati also said despite the criticism trailing the appointment of a former speaker of the House of Representatives, Salisu Buhari,  on the governing board of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the former lawmaker like every other Nigerian, was fit for the job.
He said although it was true that Buhari was removed from office for forgery and perjury, the former speaker apologised to his colleagues on the floor of the House and he had since been granted pardon by the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
He said rather than for Nigerians to be criticising the President on the matter, Jonathan should be seen as “a good man” because he did not act arbitrarily.
He said, “The criticism about the appointment of governing boards for federal universities has centred on just one person, Buhari, out of about 251 people.
“People are saying that he was convicted for forgery and perjury under the Obasanjo’s administration. If you recall after that conviction, he not only apologised on the floor of the House, the administration at the time subsequently granted him pardon.
“Pardon means you can no longer be punished for whatever offence you have committed. It means that your rights have been restored and you can again legitimately act for the society. The pardon says you can’t be shut out of the society.
“If you have opportunity again to serve your country, of course, you can be asked to be part of the process.”
Abati however said as a listening government, the administration was ready to rescind its decision on any of the appointees if genuine protest was received from either the Academic Staff Union of Universities or from the concerned university.

Friday, 12 April 2013

THE GIRL WHO FIRED AN OUTCRY IN INDIA

 
One horrible night, innocent victims, devastated families—and a country seething with rage and violence, stuck between feudal hierarchies and the modern economy.
Mahavir Enclave is a bustling working-class colony at the hard extremities of New Delhi. Houses snake up here in haphazard bursts whenever their inhabitants can afford to elbow a little more space for themselves in the world. For an outsider, these seem less homes, more just slivers of precarious brick slapped together. But for those who live there, it’s psychological solidity: a toehold, finally, on life.
Here in Mahavir Enclave, in a tiny mole hole of a room a few feet below ground, in a warren of other similar rooms, two brothers, 20 and 16, struggle to hold on to a dream. The elder is studying to be an engineer; the younger wanted to be an astronaut. But their frontrunner, the lively, quick-brained sister who birthed these ambitions—who made them seem so tantalizingly possible in this nether layer—is no longer there. She has morphed into a symbol: globally known now as Nirbhaya, which means “the fearless one.”
On March 8, Michelle Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry posthumously honored Nirbhaya with an International Woman of Courage Award. A week earlier, in his annual budget speech, Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram announced a 10 billion–rupee (about $200 million) Nirbhaya Fund to empower and promote safety for women. Briefly the Indian Parliament considered dedicating a new criminal-law bill to her name.
Over the last three months, the story of Nirbhaya—a 23-year-old paramedic who was gang raped with unspeakable brutality on a bus on December 16, 2012, and died 13 days later of her injuries—has triggered shock and outrage across the world and galvanized spontaneous and unprecedented protests in India. She has become an icon of resistance, a watershed moment. (Indian law forbids revealing the names of rape victims, so when an Indian media house came up with Nirbhaya as a substitute, it stuck: it encapsulated the spirit with which she fought.)
India can be a cruel place for women. Each day, the papers teem with stories of anonymous women raped, killed, and dumped in different parts of the country. Sometimes they are minors, girls no older than 3. The spectrum of chronic gender violence stretches even further: acid attacks, marital rapes, honor killings, female feticide, acute malnutrition, discriminative access to schools and jobs, the cultural misogyny rolls on. Of course none of this has abated since December 16, but something has shifted in India. The response to sexual assault in this country will never be the same again. The silence has been broken. Women everywhere are speaking up more; men feel freed (or enjoined) to be more supportive. Some of the stigma has been yanked off. Laws are being revised; judicial and administrative machinery is being revamped. Clumsy and inadequate as it may be, the government is being forced to respond.
At one level, therefore, the story of Nirbhaya could be read as a tragic yet celebratory one: a simple but soaring binary about courage in the face of immeasurable bestiality. But at another level, it is a window into a much more complex, perhaps even darker and sadder, narrative about contemporary India and the terrible collision of aspiration and frustration that has been unleashed within it.
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The new Indian economy is creating a collision between poverty and wealth. (Wang Ye/Xinhua Press, via Corbis)
Until December 16, Nirbhaya was just one among millions of faceless young people in India trying to break through the stifling fixity of their lives. Her father, Badrinath Singh, had left rural Uttar Pradesh decades earlier in search of a larger life, but failed to find it. Having run through a series of petty jobs in small industrial towns, he had come to Delhi in 1983, his wife pregnant with their first child. Singh carried a schism in his heart. His own impoverished father had had money to educate only two of his four sons. One son now had a job in the paramilitary; the other had risen to be a judge. In stark contrast, the younger two were fated to remain casual farm laborers or scrabble a life out of some urban fringe.
Understandably, education was the driving hunger in the Singh household. Working grueling double shifts, first as a watchman, then as a cargo loader with an airline, earning a mere 200 rupees ($4) a day, Singh put all three of his children—by turns—into a private school that used English as the language of instruction. (English, in India, is the most coveted vehicle of social advancement and mobility.) “My father was determined to give all three of us a strong foundation,” says Gaurav, Nirbhaya’s brother.
“My daughter was different from the beginning,” says Singh. “She was hungry for school even as a toddler. And she was so lucky; she always got what she wanted. We only managed to buy this piece of land when she was born.” From that tenuous perch—the mole-hole home in the ground—the family had begun to build a life.
Nirbhaya—obsessive, industrious, optimistic, face always set inexorably to the sky—was the centerpiece of that life. She had an innate taste for fine things; she was determined to carve a slice of it for her family and herself. After fifth grade, she had to switch to a cheaper government school, because her father couldn’t afford private school for all three. By the time she was in 10th grade, she had started tutoring 25 to 30 neighborhood kids, in 2 shifts every day, to pay for her own fees and help her parents put her brothers through school.
“She hardly had any friends. She never had any time,” recalls her mother. “She was always busy, always rushing. She’d wake at 6 a.m. for yoga, rush to school at 7 a.m., return at 1 p.m., give tuitions till 6 p.m., then study herself.” Despite her ascetic schedule, Nirbhaya loved gadgets, streaking her hair, and trendy clothes—netted tops and high heels were her favorite—and she always strove to speak in English, often even to her mother. She hated going back to the village her parents were from. There was nothing there for her. “She was always dressed like you,” her mother says, pointing to my jeans. “She didn’t like traditional clothes.”
“Both she and I worked double shifts. Sometimes we could only afford to eat rotis and salt,” says her father, “but there was a wonderful atmosphere at home. We were working to improve our lives. We could feel the good times were going to come.”
In 12th grade, Nirbhaya decided she wanted to study medicine. Her father told her he couldn’t afford even the application forms. “She literally fainted with anxiety,” he says. “When we revived her, she told me, give me whatever money you’d have spent on my wedding for my course; I’ll pay for the rest.”
In 2008 Nirbhaya left for Dehradun—a town five hours from Delhi—to pursue a bachelor’s degree in physical therapy. (Neurosurgery fascinated her, but she failed to clear the national entrance test; she kept her interest in it going, however, with additional reading.) In Dehradun, the hard routines of her childhood took over again. To pay her way, she joined a Canadian call center and worked nights, sleeping only two hours every day before rushing to class.
In the end, she came home barely a few weeks before she died, after four years of being away. She had landed an internship with a prestigious hospital, bought watches for her family and a laptop for herself, and put highlights in her hair—fire red, golden, and snow white. Her taste in music had moved from Bollywood to Bryan Adams. In all her textbooks, she had proudly prefixed “doctor” to her name in neat handwriting. “She was finally going to enjoy the fruit of all these years of striving,” says her mother (sangharsh is the word she uses in Hindi, with its inflection of striving against great odds, layered with intense sacrifice). “But that joy was taken from her.”
I ask the mother her name. Asha Devi, she says. His mother’s name “means hope,” Nirbhaya’s brother Gaurav emphasizes with conscious irony. He’s stopped going for his engineering coaching classes; his sister’s death has set him back three months. Now he’s preparing to take the entrance exams on his own instead. “I still dial her number every time I have a question about my application forms or some decision I have to make,” he says.
His father lies back dispiritedly on the bed. He’s developed a bad infection in the knee. His youngest son, Saurabh, no longer wants to be an astronaut. His ambition now is to be a doctor and live out an unfulfilled dream.
The harsh ironies pile up. The family sitting disconsolately on two beds crammed against each other will soon be gone from here. The government has promised them a middle-income house of their own; they’ve also been paid a compensation of 3.5 million rupees ($70,000), partly by the Delhi government, partly by Uttar Pradesh. Nirbhaya’s kept her promises even in death. She’s pulled her family out of the nether region. She’s made good.
“Except it all tastes like sawdust,” says her father.
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The dull apathy of the political class helped to bring protesters into the street. (Anindito Mukherjee/EPA)
December 16, 2012. Awindra Pandey, 28, a broad-chested, soft-spoken engineering professional, picked up Nirbhaya from her home in the afternoon to take her to a movie in a tony South Delhi mall. It should have been an ordinary, happy day. There was a Christmas cheer in the air. The pair watched Life of Pi, loitered in the mall a while, window-shopped, then headed home. It was early in the evening, but none of Delhi’s infamously testy auto rickshaws was willing to go the distance. The couple coaxed one to take them halfway to a bus stop. No public bus came around. A white chartered bus was parked close by. A young boy beckoned them to enter. Anxious to get home, they did.
According to media reports and the police, in a slum cluster not far away from the bus stop, six young men had gathered earlier that day to drink. They played marbles and cursed. One can imagine how the booze must have smudged their heads, erased the squalor of their lives, made them feel zesty, reckless, bold. It uncorked a deadly cocktail boiling inside them. They were sick of being matchstick men, sick of the shining alien city always bustling outside their reach. They wanted a piece of the action. They wanted to feel like kings of the road. One of them was a bus driver. He drove schoolchildren by day; the vehicle lay with him by night. According to the police, he urged his raucous friends out for a joyride: “Let’s have some fun,” he said.
First the gang found a carpenter returning from a day’s work. They lured him onto the bus, stole his cellphone and the 8,000 rupees ($160) in his pocket, then dumped him on the road. They’d tasted blood. A feral exhilaration must have gripped them. They wanted more.
Awindra and Nirbhaya knew something was wrong within minutes of boarding the bus. Their skin prickled. There were only six men inside; the windows were tinted black. The door was slammed shut. As the bus set off, one of the men began to taunt the girl for being out late. Awindra tried to shut him up. The others immediately surrounded him like wolves. Nirbhaya rushed to defend her friend. Her defiance enraged the men. The altercation spun out of control. They began to beat Awindra mercilessly with an iron rod. As he lay pinned at the front of the bus, floating through bouts of unconsciousness, Nirbhaya was dragged, fighting and kicking, to the back and raped and bitten and sodomized in turn by the six men. When she resisted, biting three of them herself, they pushed the rusted iron rod inside her all the way to her diaphragm and ripped her intestines out. “An intestine is 23 feet long, ma’am,” her brother Gaurav had said stoically in his room. “Barely 5 percent of it was left intact.” The doctors who treated her said they’d never seen a rape victim so brutalized.
The men drove the bus in circles for almost an hour as they raped her. When they were done, they stripped the couple of their belongings, tossed them naked on the highway, then tried to run the bus over the girl. Failing in that, the rapists calmly took the bus back, washed it clean, divvied up the spoils, and returned to their homes.
Nirbhaya and Awindra lay mangled and naked in the December cold for two hours before the police finally turned up. Cars kept whizzing by. No one stopped.
In a sense, Nirbhaya embodied a new India no one has a full measure of yet. India’s cities and small towns are full of young men and women like her: restless and on the move; hungry for an education, for jobs, for English, for social mobility, for belonging. They’re an Internet generation; they know there’s a wider world out there. They’re reinventing themselves with energy, dissolving—or at least challenging—centuries-old boundaries of caste and station and wealth. They love their families with a grave sense of duty, but they long to leave the old ways behind. If it’s to be a toss of coin, they’d rather look good than eat, rather have a TV set than a bed. They’ve sloughed off old skins, but not quite acquired the new. Just one chromosome binds them all: aspiration. They are the neo–middle class.
Nirbhaya’s friendship with Awindra was made possible by this new India. He is the son of a lawyer, a high-caste Brahmin; she was a Kurmi, much lower in that unforgiving ladder. His family lives in a three-story house in Uttar Pradesh; hers was cramped in the space it takes to park a car. Yet, introduced by a common friend, they felt instant affinities. They went on trips together to religious places, shared rooms, hugged, held hands, but stayed away from other intimacies, aware that beyond the cocoon of their friendship, a real and more questioning world awaited. They bought each other clothes, talked about their ambitions, discussed the Bhagavad-Gita, advised each other on their careers and investments. He introduced her to books like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. He was a friend to her brothers, too, helping them choose their subjects, make decisions, write résumés. He spoke to her mother sometimes on the phone, but, aware of Nirbhaya’s discomfort, never visited their home. He always picked her up from the road outside. She called him “a perfect man.”
“We never thought of each other as unequal. Sometimes I felt my family and I were not of the same wavelength. But I could speak to her about anything,” he says on an early March evening, reluctant to dredge through these memories again. “Nothing else mattered. In friendships, you don’t have to be the same; you just have to complement each other. But she’s gone now, and I have only one goal. I have to get justice for what happened.”
Awindra paces about uncomfortably on a cane in a small hotel room, perching awkwardly every now and then at the edge of the bed. He’s still recovering from his injuries. He finds it hard to sit or stand too long. Three months have passed; so has the juggernaut of attention. No politicians are willing to meet him now; no one’s asking after him. Away from global attention, a harrowing trial is under way. He is the sole eyewitness.
“I don’t like being alone,” he says. “I am afraid to live with my thoughts.” He had gone to meet the dying Nirbhaya in intensive care on December 20, four days after. He wore a jacket she’d bought him. Dates mattered to her: December 20 was the day they had first texted each other. But she was sleeping, and he had to go again the next day. He says she was touched he’d remembered. She tried to hug him through the maze of tubes attached to her petite frame. In the end, she could only make a gesture of a hug.
It was the last time they would see each other. She died eight days later in Singapore, her genitals destroyed; her stomach hollowed out; wracked by septicemia, brain injuries, and multiple infections.
He had wanted to linger longer at the mall that fatal day. She told him she wished she’d listened. Perhaps they’d have missed the rogue bus. Perhaps they’d have earned the time to dare disturb the universe.
Perhaps, he says, he would have been with her all his life. In an interview with other media, his father said, “Perhaps if my son had made a very passionate case, we may have listened.”
chaudhury-fe0213-india-women-embed3
Nirbhaya’s horrific story led to spontaneous and unprecedented protests. (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)
The story of the gang rape hit the papers the next morning and began to spool out relentlessly over the next few weeks, horrific detail upon horrific detail. There are many reasons why this story caught fire in the public imagination more than any other rape in recent Indian history. There was, most of all, the unfathomably brutal violence involved. But many other things coalesced: the location of the crime, in upper-class South Delhi; the impunity of the attack; the fact that it was early evening; that she was accompanied by a male friend; that there were no complex caste or feudal hierarchies at play; that this was just random urban crime. That she was an average “wholesome” girl making her way in the world. Women across the country felt, “but for the grace of God, that could have been me.” She was Everywoman.
But there was other tinder for the fire: the chronic inefficiencies of the system, the habitual callousness of the police, the dull apathy of the political class, the new hyperconnectivity of the young. And something deeper and more inchoate, too: a seething restlessness that underlies Indian society today. A desire for better governance shot through with a fear of dead ends. As the comatose establishment failed to swing into action, young men and women across strata poured into the streets. Could something so colossal happen, and the Indian state would still lumber on as usual?
Nirbhaya’s own composure also alchemized the air. In the 13 days that she lived after the assault, she testified twice before a magistrate, giving a detailed and clear-eyed account of the attack. Startlingly, her doctors said she showed no psychological distress, no self-pity. She broke the mold: she wanted her name to be known; she wanted her rapists to be brought to account; she wanted them “burnt alive.”
Under intense pressure, the Delhi police made arrests in record time. Within a week, six men were in custody. Ram Singh, 33, the bus driver; Mukesh, 23, his brother; Vinay Sharma, 25, a gym assistant; Pawan Gupta, 24, a fruit seller; Anurag Thakur, 24, a cleaner of the bus; and a 17-and-a-half-year-old juvenile—known as Raju—who worked odd jobs at roadside eateries.
With the arrests, the protests reached a crescendo. These protests encapsulate profound sociological changes under way in India. On the upside, they demonstrate that the vocabulary of feminism has percolated down to the street. For weeks young people who’ve never been part of any formal political movement braved water cannons and baton charges, demanding not only better policing and a swifter judiciary, but also complete autonomy for women over their bodies and lives. India has a galling history of blaming women for the violence that happens to them. But now, when an older generation tried to mouth venal idiocies about how women should be chaste and cautious, the young turned on them with fierce scorn.
The protests also made visible a disturbing phenomenon: India’s increasingly illiberal gene. Nirbhaya’s desire to see her rapists burnt alive is understandable. But on the streets, too, the demand for justice morphed too quickly into a roar for revenge. For the most part, the media and political establishment followed suit: castration, capital punishment, and a reduction in the age of those deemed juvenile became the dominant discourse.
Nirbhaya’s rapists were demonic: there can be no argument about that. But if they’d merely been six deviant, psychopathic men, this story may have found easier closure. Perhaps then, hanging them would have weeded out an isolated virus. But even a cursory look at the back histories of the accused is proof that there are no such neat answers.
Rather, in a bitter twist, both the exhilarations and the devastation of Nir—bhaya’s life are part of the same continuum. There is a terrifying sociology of rage and violence building up in the country. On March 15, a Swiss woman, on a cycling trip with her husband, was gang raped and robbed by six men in central India. The husband was brutally beaten as well. The archetype is hard to ignore.
As the new economy is forcing millions of Indians from their land and traditional livelihoods into hostile megalopolises, a storm of colliding worlds is being created. The glittering city with its bold new ways and siren images now sits in intimate proximity with rural backgrounds. The membrane that separated them is gone, but the divide remains.
Frustration can be a very dark underside of aspiration.
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A protest on the one-month anniversary of Nirbhaya’s rape. (Raveendran/AFP/Getty)
In a dramatic development, on March 11, 2013, three months after the gang rape, Ram Singh, the key accused in Nirbhaya’s rape, hung himself in his high-security cell in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. He and the juvenile had reportedly been the most savage of the assaulters. It is hard to know what drove him to take his life. Sudden remorse? Or just bottomless despair?
I was with Ram Singh’s parents in Ravi Dass Colony the evening before he committed suicide. Over the last few months, the media have described the colony in the easy stereotype of the squalid Indian slum—open drains, great poverty, families crammed like sardines into boxes. On the surface, Ravi Dass Colony is all of that, but there’s something more complex about it, too. Like Mahavir Enclave, where Nirbhaya lived, a kind of restless and optimistic energy runs in its arteries. Resigned acceptance, that old Indian status quo, is gone. Parents here may have started out as petty laborers, but their children have moved one rung up. They dress smart, talk smart. Yet for the most part they have to reconcile their new dreams with the harsh reality of their lives. This makes them sleeping volcanoes. Four of the accused rapists came from this colony.
By all accounts, Ram Singh—the said-to-be leader of the pack—was a scrappy, volatile man. He drank heavily. His neighbors spoke of him as “mental.” He had disappeared with a married woman for a few years, then returned even scrappier, saying she’d died of an illness. The night of the savagery, Ram Singh apparently came home and calmly cooked a chicken, ate it, and went to sleep. He had a mutilated arm from an accident on the job a few years earlier for which his employer had refused to compensate him.
“I wish he had died in that accident,” his mother had said, weeping wildly, the night before he committed suicide. “Perhaps my younger son would’ve been spared then. Now we’ve been shamed so much, we can’t even go back to our village. I wish they’d hang us with our sons.”
Her husband, a construction worker, squatted on the floor, head buried in his knees in absolute despair. A mouse ran about on their bed. Both had not an ounce of flesh on them. They were the archetype of the urban Indian dispossessed: skin, bone, and the grind of years.
As they spoke, the parents swung in dizzy arcs from guilt, shame, and angry accusation against the girl for being out late to bizarre conspiracy theories. The father seemed a bit unstable, flaring up in sudden bursts at his wife. “I’m sure Sonia Gandhi has a hand in this,” he said darkly once. The mother, though, was in a place of suffering beyond description.
“We’ve starved ourselves to bring up our boys,” she said. “What demon took hold of them? I always believed God lives within each of us. There were six souls on the bus that night. Did the voice of God not speak within even one of them?”
That question strikes at the inexplicable heart of this story. Barring Ram Singh, none of the other accused appear to have any history of violence before that apocalyptic night. Mukesh, Ram’s brother, was a mild young man (“a follower,” his mother calls him) with a passion for clothes and music. His clothes were always clean, his mother says. No matter how late he’d come home, he’d skip a meal, but definitely wash his clothes. Apparently that’s what he was doing when his brother called him out to drink that fateful night. His parents had just found him a girl to marry.
Vinay, one of five siblings, a gym cleaner and commerce graduate, was also known to be a polite young man. He had started working early to help his father, a construction worker and balloon seller, pay the bills. Their home was no larger than a train berth; the family of seven had to share it, living their dreams and desire out of that inhumanly cramped space. Standing outside that room, the debris of all the wasted years of effort hanging over him like a shadow, the father, a heartbreakingly dignified and stoic man, said, “I met my son in jail once. I’ve told him if he’s done this, he has to pay for it. He should be hanged.”
The fruit seller and the bus cleaner, Pawan and Anurag, have similar stories. Raju, the juvenile, though, was the most dispossessed of them all. He’d left home as a boy many years earlier. His father had become a vegetable after a brick fell on his head and injured his brain. His mother could barely scrape together a living for her children. Raju used to send 600 rupees ($12) twice a year to her. For a few years, he hadn’t done even that. When the police reached her hut in the village—not even tenuous brick, just plastic sheets yoked together—she said, “I didn’t know my son was alive. I thought he was dead.” She hasn’t come to see him even once in jail. She cannot afford the ride to the city.
After he left home, Raju worked odd jobs for years at dhabas, India’s ubiquitous roadside eateries, mostly washing dirty plates. One of his employers, who was fond of him and found him to be a very efficient worker, has a telling story about him. Raju apparently came to him abruptly one day and asked to be made a manager of the eatery; he could not bear to wash another dirty dish ever again in his life, he said. Unable to make him a manager, but wanting to keep him, the manager raised his salary by 1,000 rupees ($20) a month to do the same job. The next morning the boy had packed his bag and gone. He did not even take his last salary. For a couple of years there was no news of him. And then came the headlines about a demonic night.
To ask about the backstories of the accused is not to mitigate or humanize the brutality of Nirbhaya’s attack. It is to understand where it might stem from. By no means is rape the exclusive domain of the working classes. But as the stories of inhuman violence continue to flow inexorably in the Indian media, unless one examines the harsh landscape they arise from—a deadly landscape of squalor and hope and thwarted ambition—and the untapped rage that must inevitably underlie it, the wailing mothers of both assaulters and victim will never have their answer. There were six souls on the bus that night. Why didn’t the voice of God speak in even one of them?

Ever since "western barbarians" invaded India and occupied it even after 1947 (numbering 250 million muslims), savage violence has been a traumatizing and terrorizing experience for the civil society of India. Partly because of the fact that Bollywood moguls have deep links to the Mumbai underworld and islamist fraudsters across its borders.

Contrast millions Malala is getting with notoriety Nirbhaya is bringing. Isn't this a cruel irony?!  It is India that is much poorer and Indian women have no safety or security leave alone education that Malala is demanding putting the rest of the world under duress - indirect begging if not on he knees bu through staged maneuver, manipulaiton and machinations.

Contrast Malala with millions of war widows that three wars was forced upon India. Those other widows like Mrs Shetty whose husband was most savagely murdered by islamists. Again with those daughters, wives and mothers who lost their loved ones in countless serial blasts in temples, markets, trains, etc. Is Tina or Shoma even aware of such "UNSPEAKABLE BRUTALITY" that occurs week after week, century after century over and over again on the Holy Land of the Hindus who have been denied their identity and separate homeland even after so-0called independence in 1947?!
MariaThomas
oot cause is poverty and joblessness and exploitation by colonial criminal migrants like the ones who provoked savage attack in Myanmar-
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/08/us-myanmar-violence-idUSBRE85714E20120608
Islamists provoke savage attack in many places..

 Pop culture of movies glorifying violence and scenes trivilizing women, govt officials and bollywood types having good time, etc are not helping jobless youths puppeteered by colonial elements of the type that is hurting many parts of France, UK, Holland.

The slumdogs now accused cant do what the bollywood millionaires do. Namely, seduction by words and alcohol - basically rape of thousands of girls.
EXHIBIT-A:- 11 injured in acid attack in Mandi
Tribune News Service Mandi, May 27 2005
..the attacker has been identified as Muhmud Magrub from Muzaffarnagar in UP.

EXHIBIT-B:- Human trafficking scam kingpin surrenders
Hyderabad, May 4: The story of Rasheed, alleged kingpin in

EXHIBIT-C:- Three men Shahid Sayed, Tariq Sayed and Abu Bakr were arrested for the alleged gang rape of a teenager in Surat..
EXHIBIT-D:-
Patna, Jun 28 Depite Government's efforts to rein in human
trafficking,Bihar has registered an alarming rise..(One Saleem has been
implicated..Siddharth Kara researched sex slaves in several nations but was attacked only in India)
EXHIBIT:-E Jewellers want to bar burqa December 27: The Pune Saraf (jewellers’) Association has decided not to conduct business

To prove more upper caste muslims practice violent discrimination, this example may be cited:
EXHIBIT-F:-
...dalit Mukhtar Mai was gang raped in Pakistan by the upper caste. Meaning, there is casteism over there too; we heard of Muktar Mai who was raped by upper caste masters for a mistake her brother did. She was then manipulated to visit USA to beg for schools for girls. Double manipulation!! Nice tricks we need to learn from muslims of S Asia!!!

EXHIBITT-G:- "SC upholds conviction of rapist on child victim's testimony New Delhi, Jun 15 2008 A minor rape victim's testimony is reliable ... A sessions court in Bihar had earlier convicted and sentenced Mohammad Kalam to ten years RI and a fine of Rs 500 for raping the minor under section 376 ipc (conviction for rape). Kalam's appeal before the Patna High Court was dismissed .. also claimed that the sentence imposed on him was too harsh."

Look at afghans where girls get acid while going to schools despite bil spent on them as 'infidel tax'. It is a very common crime in India and Pakistan where infidel girls are abducted, raped and converted to islam - all from subversion/conversion type entrenched tricks. You read Kalam raped a child and was fined Rs 500!! That is how bad the legal system is!!!

Nor can they procure girls like this islamist politician who has too much power-
Anisur Rahman, the Left Front’s muslim leader, allegedly made this remark: “I told her if you want to bring some girls, bring some good girls. There is no better girl than you. We can give her Rs 20,000. We ask, Didimoni, what is your fee? How much will you take for getting raped?"
That is, India is the most permissive/decadent nation on earth - anyone can do/say such thing against women since  there is no risk.

Patriarchy exists all acroos the globe- Italy's Levi-Montalcini nobel winner overcame her father's objections that women should not study "

It is to be conceded foreigners get better deal in India than Indians elsewhere. "New York: The 46-year old man who was pushed to his death in front of a subway train here by a ‘mumbling’ woman has been identified as Sunando Sen, an Indian who lived in the city's Queens neighborhood" Many Indians have been killed by racists in A'lia and UK.  Many say-
"Probably this was all staged by alien hands like 9/11, Malala, fall of Nepal monarchy, in order to bring Wilson dollars to one region not others."

"Father Piero Corsi said scantily dressed women bring out the worst instincts in men and cause violence or sexual abuse. He claimed women end up exacerbating tensions by 'leaving children to themselves, having filthy houses, serving cold meals, buying fast food and providing dirty clothes.'"

Probably this was all staged by alien hands like 9/11, Malala, fall of Nepal monarchy, in order to bring Wilson dollars to one region not others.

Famous politicians of USA- Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Sanford, Tiger Woods (several dozen times), USA  staff in Columbia, NYC official, Gen Petraeus, DSK of France, Roman Polanski of 13 yr old notoriety, all fell to temptations of rape or seduction.

Savage violence happened to a Hindu  very recently - perhaps by a group that killed Mr Shetty; it is cited here-
http://www.daijiworld.com/news/news_disp.asp?n_id=169749 

My Hindu friends often confront me with questions on church rape of minors in my Catholic parishes and pastoral ministries.  Many pedophile priests have been jailed in the West.  None in the East I know of. They ask why this is true. I say law is weak in the Asian countries and Catholics are the most powerful politically next to the islamists. 
Local Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others are weak and vulnerable - the weakest being women and girls.  Yes, these cultures alien to 9500 old Asian Indic civilization that originated in India where the number system, chess, jewelry, spices, yoga, hospitality to strangers, family values, village democracy, cultivation of rice/cotton, garbanzo beans,  and all the best things were given birth to. Now muslims and christians are the richest in India, Lanka, Burma, etc. from colonial plundering and neo-colonial looting. They have made media, bollywood, hospital and education as profiteering or propaganda machines in order to collect infidel tax or pagan tax.  That was interpretation of history by  my pals.

It is critical to know the basic root causes of violence- religio-political impact on every aspect of life, perpetuation of colonialism and colonial remnants illegitimately occupying and dominating India [colonial domination], rampant poverty and joblessness, etc.  Slum kids that did this have no other venue to better themselves; no dating for mixing with other sex. NATO forces have killed many civilians in af-pak region, teens are killed routinely in Middle-east, gun violence is rife in USA, domestic violence is common in the West including Russia. Hard to know who is more barbaric, as islamists cause most sectarian violence in Iraq, Nigeria, India, Burma, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka,  now Mali, etc. Is Tina fudning shelters for rape victims? Is she funding training for the 70% poor of India [only 30% are in the middle-class, rest 70% are poor or very poor]?  Talk is cheap. I would appreciate a genuinely truthful blog not one full of colonial bias and prejudice. 

One of the five was a muslim who might been most brutal of the five. It was the case in Guwahati, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, etc. Thus, colonial remnants with alien cultures cause most sexual assaults. India has had more than a millennium of sex slavery, sex trafficking, procurers for mogul harems, etc. Those from Portugal used to sell girls cheaper than horses.  Political violence is also notorious in India. One Mr Shetty was cut to pieces merely for being a leader. Here is the evidence-
"Mangalore, Mar 31: Rahamat alias Kalandar, who has been lodged in the local district jail after being arrested in the case pertaining to the murder of BJP leader Sukhanand Shetty, has succeeded in securing bail.

Kalandar was arrested on charges of being involved with the murder of Sukhanand Shetty on December 1, 2006 at Kulai near Suratkal. His advocate Latif Badagannur said, the state High Court has granted him bail on the basis of a personal bond for one lac rupees and with the condition that he should present himself at Suratkal police station once a week and sign the attendance register.

It may be recalled that Sukhanand Shetty was hacked to death by a gang of miscreants in front of his shop in Kulai."
CULLED FROM www.newsweek.com