When Yadav Eleven played a different cricket match

So, eleven Yadav boys from the rural outskirts came to play a cricket match in Noida. On their way back home they picked up a young woman and her male friend, beat the crap out of them, took them to a secluded place and assaulted the woman. The woman happens to be an MBA student.

Indians have grown pretty fond of metaphors, so you could say just like 10 Pakistani boys raped Mum-Bai on 26/11. If you are of the socialist type, you ought to say it is the rape of "This India" by "Other India". In the popular caste prism view, this is a rape of a "upper-caste" woman by OBCs. Arundhati Roy would call it an assault by the land dispossessed.

The point is, every now and then one of these incidents get reported and then people get into a tizzy for a few days. New Delhi is the capital of sexual assault - a fashionable thing to say. Apparently Delhi clocked up more than 500 such cases in 2007. In our slow society, figures for 2008 will take time to tabulate. But we do know that young women generally feel unsafe in the capital region. Within the 24 hour period of this incident, another young woman was abducted from a market area and released shortly. Yet another woman wasn't released so quickly - she had to suffer a six hour ordeal in a car in the hands of three masked men.

Usually social scientists take the three step process - women's position in society -> patriarchy -> a certain religion, and let it go at that. Yet this case changes something. This is also the first case in which a politician has come out in defenses of the accused, while "protesting" the assault.

The sociological import of aggravated assaults in the cities is staring right at our face. The specific modus operandi of groups of men looking for an opportunity and grabbing a female seems to be fairly common. Who could be these men?

In any case, we will just mention a few articles and let it go at that. We leave the intellectuals to figure out how to deal with it.

Time warp. It’s the first thing to come to mind on visiting Garhi Chowkhandi.

The village’s dusty veneer is deceptive. Shiny new mansions with cars and motorbikes parked in their sprawling patios are its new reality. There’s a washing machine on every verandah. The women have modern gadgets to assist in their household chores. But that is where the similarity with city households ends.

Women are expected to know their place, know that they can lose their lives if they are even perceived to be stepping over the line.

The 12,000-strong village dominated by Yadavs has several well-connected families with relatives in politics. “You will hear the reverberations of this case in Lucknow. Our boys have been wronged,” claimed a relative of Sanjay, one of the accused.

With their farmlands more or less gone, the focus is on business, be it small dairies, factories or schools. Sanjay’s brother, for instance, runs a cement tile and pipe factory. Buffaloes and cows chew cud alongside shiny new cars the villagers have purchased with the compensation they received for their land acquired by Noida Authority.

[...]

Nepal Yadav had received a handsome amount as compensation for his 20 bighas of land that was acquired. [...] Nepal Yadav admits that life was basic before the compensation for the land came. “I used to be a farmer, now I don’t do anything. Omkar is also not doing anything. He attends an English medium public school in Noida, but had secured a compartment in his Class X exams. The results were late and he could not join Class XI,” explains Yadav, who has a daughter who attends a school, a rarity in these parts. The local inter-college has about 1,400 students, of these only 100 are girls. Very few girls study beyond Class VIII.
[Deep pockets but a narrow, feudal mindset, Anuradha Mukherjee, Hindustan Times]

Let us add to that - a CNN-IBN video showed this "village". Men wear ill fitting shirts (untucked) and trousers. Do not shave every day. Women wear a foot long pallu.

Today, there is massive migration of Dalit youth to cities where they are taking up caste-neutral occupations. The OBCs on the other hand, remain obsessed with agrarianism and don't leave the village unless they get Government jobs. Most Dalits prefer settling down in cities as they have no assets and no attraction to go back to their villages.

The OBCs on the other hand, tend to return to villages. Most OBCs i the last three decades saved money to buy land. That land drags them back to villages. I also find that majority of Dalit parents prefer private schooling over Government run schools despite the free meals given. The OBCs on the other hand despite affluence, prefer Government run schools. Most OBCs have buffalos, the OBC girls are least likely to complete schooling, while, a good number of Dalit girls study up to college as they have no such binding.
[OBC's Emancipator, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Daily Pioneer]

If the buffalo-dominated west Uttar Pradesh was to be a nation, it would have been called "The Buffalo Nation," and buffalo dung cake would have been the national emblem. [...]

I had turned my focus on the fingers of the women serving the buffaloes and realised that none had applied nail polish or kohl. It is said that darkening eyelids provides relief from the sun.

Only few were seen with bindi on their foreheads and even fewer sported sleepers. Not that all women should apply kajal, bindi, or wear slippers. But, most women aspire to apply the above in order to enhance their personality. In other words, despite wealth, the women under the Buffalo Republic can never match Brinda Karat, or Sushma Swaraj in personality enhancement enterprises.

The logic of this denial of the right of choice -- of using cosmetics, is simple. Since lifting the buffalo dung is an-only-women affair, there is no way a woman in the "Buffalo Nation" would find any reason, leave alone time, to polish her nails as she has to dip her hands at least three times a day in the dung. How decently are the women dressed!

Since buffalos keep waving their tails to scare flies, they often drench women from their urine and hence, women in the Buffalo Republic would not wash their clothes for days as the clothes they wear turn dirtier within hours. Wearing washed clothes thus makes no sense. Since pre-historic ages, people all over the world have had artistic expressions. While sipping tea, I would look into the walls in search of artistic expressions. Bewildered as I was, there were no trace of artistic expressions. I ultimately found artistic expressions elsewhere instead. [Life in a buffalo republic, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Daily Pioneer]

Clearly, India is a huge social experiment gone horribly wrong. What could fix these people? Perhaps another round of reservations. We did that, no takers though. So we are going to have to live with this thing. We are going to have to witness India assaulted by Bharat on a daily basis and get blamed for it.