Today's Situation Room:
Wolf Blitzer delivers the most important breaking news and political, international, and national security stories of the day. Tune to The Situation Room weekdays 5-7pm ET on CNN.
Wolf Blitzer delivers the most important breaking news and political, international, and national security stories of the day. Tune to The Situation Room weekdays 5-7pm ET on CNN.
December 20th, 2013
08:07 PM ET
Domestic workers stage counter-protests in spat with India
After days of protests in India, domestic workers in the U.S. rallied in support of a nanny who was being paid below minimum wage by an Indian diplomat in New York. The diplomat's arrest has caused a rift between India and the U.S. CNN's Deb Feyerick reports.
About this Show
The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer is the command center for breaking news, politics and extraordinary reports from around the world. Tune in weeknights from 5-7pm ET on CNN.
The issue concerns caste and must not be reduced to the status of a political spat.
The strip-search of the diplomat is but a symbol of the greater shamelessness with which India humiliates her own people by brutally stripping them of human rights.
Caste is India's anti-democratic system of institutionalized injustice under which her teeming masses are systematically denied human rights on a scale of suffering that we cannot even begin to imagine and as if immeasureable human suffering were not enough, India reserves a yet inferior living hel! for its 18% condemned as outcastes, those treated as literally unfit to breathe the same air as other castes!
The reason for the disproportionate magnitude of India's response in this matter is that her priviledged castes fear that the staggering abomination of caste will be nakedly brought to light before the world. They fear the unmasking of evil and the loss of socially sanctioned superiority.
The United States has a moral obligation to stop turning a blind eye and should generalize the present issue into a policy stand on human abuse in India. We should take this opportunity to generalize the present issue into a definitive policy stand on sanctions and preconditions for continued business with India.
The United States should put India on notice that we will no longer tolerate the importation onto our soil of caste abuse in any shape or form and that henceforth India is required to provide evidence of substantial progress in human rights as a precondition for business as usual.