The Delhi piece attempts to explain the assault
on the young woman as the result of “two worlds colliding.” The shopworn cliché aside, such an assertion
is bound to raise hackles. Explaining
crime as a function of structural poverty went out of fashion in the United
States decades ago. Similarly, although
the Delhi incident clearly raises questions of entrenched gender inequality in
the developing world, these questions also obscure the very real problem of poverty
and privilege which are exacerbated by uneven development and a growing divide
between rich and poor.
Although no one deserves the fate of the
Delhi victim and those responsible for the crime must be held accountable, one
should ask whether this incident received wide attention because of the victim’s
social status. If she had been a slum
dweller and not the daughter of an affluent family, would this story have made
local, let alone global, headlines? If she had been the illiterate child of a common laborer instead of a promising student, would we have been as concerned?
The story from Assam concerns the murder of a tea plantation owner and his wife, who were burned alive in their house by a mob of women tea pickers fed up with abusive working
conditions. The plantation owner was
notorious for withholding pay from his employees and was known to sexually
abuse the women in his employ. More
ominously, he was accused of murdering a child worker last year during a
protest and yet he remained at liberty. The
article accuses the Assam police of working in collusion with the plantation
owner to suppress unrest.
The Assam article appeared in Dissident Voice. I found virtually no mention of the incident
in mainstream news sources. This should
come as no surprise. Americans find it
easy to muster outrage over assaults on individual rights and dignity, but feel
scant sympathy for mistreatment of groups.
It may be just as well that the U.S. news media neglected to report the
Assam story, because I suspect it would have been framed to vilify the laborers
while downplaying the crimes of the plantation owner. One can just imagine the lead—“Job Creator Slain
by Ungrateful Employees.”
The events leading up to the tea plantation
incident should serve as a warning to Western workers. While I cannot imagine American employees collectively
resorting to something as dire as killing the boss—individual workplace rampages
are more our style—the conditions that brought about the tea pluckers' revenge, such as the absence of a union to safeguard workers’ rights, the
employer’s wage theft, and the open flouting of labor laws as the authorities
turn a blind eye are harbingers of what may come in the U.S. Our laws already have a strong bias in favor
of property rights and property owners, and in those states which have adopted “right
to work” legislation individual employees are at a growing disadvantage versus
employers. It might not be long before American
workers experience a kinder, gentler version of what their sisters in India
have endured for years.
These events may have occurred abroad, but
the dominant themes are familiar enough in our culture: male privilege, abuse
of power, the immiseration of society’s most vulnerable people, and the
mystification of mainstream society on those occasions when the poor and
desperate lash out. We would do well to
heed the lesson of these examples set so far away.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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