Free Republic

A raft of evidence shows that caste discrimination has been imported from India to the United States. Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects—and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence, including Vice President...

What do you call an economic system where a relative few individuals own all the land and most of the people who live on that land do so at the sufferance of the landowner? It's feudalism. This was the economic system in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of the population was born into, lived and died in poverty. There was little hope for upward mobility unless one opted for a career in military service or the clergy. (From time to time, extraordinarily pretty peasant girls might be married off to a lesser lord.) The rise...

Before the three sisters and their children were found dead in a well, they left a message blaming the family they had married into. Kalu, Kamlesh and Mamta Meena were victims of a dispute over dowries, the often hefty sums Indian parents pay to marry off their daughters. The sisters had wed brothers from the same household and lived under the same roof, but suffered constant violence from their husbands and in-laws, according to the trio's grieving relatives. They were abused constantly, they say, including when their father failed to meet demands for more money. All three were found dead...

The Italian government has moved to ban unvaccinated people from public transport, outdoor dining, sports centres and more until at least March 31st of this year. The Italian government is imposing further restrictions on the unvaccinated this week, requiring the country’s “Super Green Pass” health passport for access to public transit, which is only eligible to those fully vaccinated or those recovered from the Wuhan coronavirus, compared to the regular Green Pass which allows unvaccinated people to qualify temporarily by presenting a negative coronavirus test. Local and regional buses, subways, trains and trams all required the Super Green Pass as...

We can tell illegals till the cows come home that learning English is the real path to assimilation and upward mobility and all we hear is that diversity is "strength" or maybe that we have yanqui imperialista racist prejudices. But over in India, we are seeing that idea coming to life. Quartz has a long and utterly fascinating piece by Sajith Pai, titled "India has a new caste for native English speakers only,' describing how English is not only a great skill to have in the global economy, and a path upward in a big striving country such as...

LUCKNOW, India -- Police arrested a shopkeeper for axing to death a couple from a lower caste for not promptly paying a meagre debt of 15 rupees (29 cents) for groceries, an official said Friday. District Magistrate Pramod Chandra Gupta said the upper caste shopkeeper killed the couple in a rage Thursday, severing both their heads, when they asked for more time to pay for the groceries they bought from his shop in Mainpuri, a town in Uttar Pradesh state. The Dalit couple were construction workers and left behind five children, Gupta said. "The shopkeeper panicked after killing the couple...

Twelfth-century Hindu temple breaks with tradition after Supreme Court rules against two Brahmin families who have claimed exclusive ancestral rights to choosing priests for centuriesA twelfth-century Hindu temple that attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually is to admit women and lower-caste men as priests for the first time. The historic break with tradition came about after India's Supreme Court ruled against the two Brahmin families, Badve and Utpat, who had provided the temple's priests for centuries. The court ruled against their claim to exclusive ancestral rights over the earnings and rituals at Vitthal Rukmini temple, in the town of...

A Miami police officer has been suspended pending an investigation into a brawl he had with an alleged speeding driver he recently pulled over who turned out to be his ranking officer. Officer Marcel Jackson didn't know he was pulling over a fellow cop when he made the traffic stop and was shocked when he says the driver lunged at him and told him to get back in his car. The driver turned out to be Lieutenant David Ramras with the force's internal affairs unit. Despite Ramras's apparent combativeness toward the uniformed officer, it's now Jackson who's been suspended. Scroll...

A police officer lost his take-home car for 10 days after not activating equipment that would have showed whether he was speeding, according to newly released Internal Affairs records. A Coral Springs resident filed a complaint saying he saw Officer Justin Miller, 38, speeding in his Plantation police cruiser east on the Sawgrass Expressway between Coral Ridge Drive in Coral Springs and a Florida's Turnpike toll on Nov. 12. The resident said he followed the police car and caught Miller going 85 mph and 65 mph through the toll plaza. The speed limits are 65 mph and 25 mph, respectively....

Recognising the damage that the diplomat row has done to the India-US relationship, there is a realisation in the top American leadership that "it was the most stupid thing to do" on their part and that they would now have to "work overtime" to bring back the ties on track. As Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade landed in New Delhi last night, there was a sense of relief in the US government, with officials expressing their determination to move forward the relationship, which President Barack Obama has described as the defining partnership of the 21st century. "The US and India enjoy...

'Cowboy cop' who planted crack under couple's car seat to boost arrest quotas escapes jail after SOBBING in court. A veteran NYPD detective framed an innocent couple by planting crack in their car during a search. Arbeeny was convicted of ‘flaking,’ the practice of planting drugs on blameless people to reach their quota of felony collars and claim overtime, the New York Daily News reported. He was found guilty of putting a twist of crack under a car seat in Yvelisse DeLeon and Juan Figueroa’s car during a January 2007 bust in Coney Island, New York. The trial which ended...

Steal $40,000 from a bank, and you’ll spend a decade or two in prison. Steal $40,000 from an airplane passenger’s luggage and you’ll get six months — if you’re a Transportation Security Administration employee, that is. On January 10, 44-year-old Coumar Persad and 31-year-old Davon Webb, eight-year veterans of the TSA force at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, were sentenced to six months in jail and five years’ probation after pleading guilty to having stolen $40,000 from a passenger’s suitcase in January 2011. At the time of the men’s arrest, authorities told CBS New York that the suspects...

The state attorney’s office’s announcement last year that it was arresting six people in the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office kickback scheme was big news. It also set off a scramble for mug shots that exposed a potential point of contention the next time a law enforcement officer is arrested. Florida Statute 119.071 gives a sworn law enforcement officer the right to request in writing that his or her arrest photograph not be released to the public. Controversy can arise when the media looks for the photograph and a jail supervisor must decide whether to snub the media or ignore the...

Last week, this column highlighted major economic improvements for dalits in Uttar Pradesh, based on a research paper by Devesh Kapur and others (Rethinking inequality : Dalits in UP in the market reform era). But the real dalit revolution has been in social status, far more than economic. In material terms, inequality (technically measured by the Gini coefficient) in UP has always been low — less than in Kerala or the national average. UP's problem has always been social inequality, not consumption inequality. The good news is that social inequality is being transformed. The practice of seating dalits separately in...

White British actresses told to leave Bollywood British actresses who appear in Bollywood films are being targeted in a hate campaign by one of India's most feared political leaders. By Dean Nelson in New Delhi Published: 5:55PM GMT 17 Mar 2010 Actress Hazel Crowney: British actresses have flocked to Bollywood Stars including Alice Patten, the daughter of Lord Patten of Barnes, and Hazel Crowney, a former model from Kent, have been accused of stealing jobs from local girls. Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), a Mumbai nationalist street gang and political party which inspires terror throughout the city, has called...

I AM often asked to talk at schools and almost always ask students three questions about a film that lies about the "stolen generations". First: "How many of you have been shown Rabbit-Proof Fence?" Answer: every one. Second: "Have you been shown the movie as a great piece of film-making, or as a history lesson?" Answer: in every case as history. You know, like you learn America's history from John Wayne movies. And third: "How many of you have checked whether the film is actually true, by, say, reading the book on which it's based?" Answer: of thousands of students,...

Accusing Christians in India of carrying out a campaign of illegal or fraudulent conversions is a tactic being used by Hindu fundamentalist movements for mere political reasons, says an ecumenical forum of over 500 priests and pastors from different Christian denominations in the state of Karnataka who met in recent days in Bangalore. The Forum is chaired by Archbishop Bernard Moras of Bangalore and has denounced the attempt by the governments of some Indian states, to approve "anti-conversion" laws, offensive to the religious freedom of Indian citizens. The allegations of conversions "were exaggerated with the specific intention of creating insecurity...

Birmingham police beating video: Five officers fired Five Birmingham police officers have been fired for a January 2008 beating of an already-unconscious suspect with fists, feet and a billy club, a battering caught on videotape until a police officer turned off the patrol car camera, city and police officials said today.

A white police officer was acquitted Monday in the drug-raid shooting death of an unarmed black woman that set off protests about how police treat minorities in a city where one in four residents is black. The all-white jury found Sgt. Joseph Chavalia not guilty of misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and negligent assault. He had faced up to eight months in jail if convicted of both counts. Chavalia shot 26-year-old Tarika Wilson and her year-old son she was holding, killing her and hitting him in the shoulder and hand, during a Jan. 4 SWAT raid on her house. One...

RALEIGH - A hearing into the firing of a state trooper accused of mistreating his police dog opened today with a video of the officer kicking the dog as it was suspended from the railing of a loading dock. The 15-second video, taken by another trooper using his cell phone, shows Sgt. Charles L. Jones kicking the dog, Ricoh, five times. The dog was tied to the railing by its leash at the time, with its front paws in the air and its rear paws touching the ground. With each kick, the dog swung about two feet under the dock.