Human Rights Watch has a report out which says that discrimination against Dalits is equivalent to apartheid. This is patently stupid, since apartheid was institutionalised by the South African state, whereas at least legally, the Indian state is constitutionally bound to discriminate for Dalits. (The fact that is fucks the implementation up is a separate matter altogether.) Anyway, I foresee a lot of people getting offended by this, especially the Hindutva types. But check out what HRW wrote in the press release:
“International scrutiny is growing and with it the condemnation of abuses resulting from the caste system and the government’s failure to protect Dalits,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “India needs to mobilize the entire government and make good on its paper commitments to end caste abuses. Otherwise, it risks pariah status for its homegrown brand of apartheid.” (emphasis mine)
This is fucking hilarious, in the context of this:
Though our Acts prohibits the derogatory usage of the words such as `pariah’, the people in media still continues to use it in a casual manner. They must learn some lessons from countries like America where the Blacks were called once as `nigger’. Now they use `African Americans’ to identify Black people. This kind of insensitivity should not be tolerated. I request everybody to share my pain and come forward to feel like a `pariah’.
This rocks. HRW will piss off both the Hindutva loonies and the Dalit loonies. If the Dalit Panthers attack HRW for being politically incorrect and insulting Dalit sentiments I will weep tears of delight.
HRW is not the only organisation which manages to piss off two usually antagonistic sets of people. Camlin does it too. Charu Kesi is outraged that their permanent marker ad glorifies regressive behaviour:
Yes, really permanent. Widowhood, breaking of bangles, erasing of sindoor… the works. In the last scene, the poor man comes back to life, else what would have been the next shot in the ad, I wonder – sati? Even “worse”, what if the poor man does not come back to life, and the bindi does not got erased? What a blow to Indian culture that would have been…
but the Rational Fool thinks that it mocks orthodox Hindus:
I wonder if the lawyer from Indore, who recently sued the former Indian cricketer Ravi Sastri for hurting the sentiments of the Hindu faithfuls by extolling the virtues of eating biltong, had noticed the Camlin ad!
This rocks too. I have visions of angry feminists attacking the Camlin HQ from the front side and RSS workers attacking from the back side, charging their way through cubicle space until they eventually read the CEO’s cabin and pulverize him between the two of them. It will be like Unhygenix and Fulliautomatix setting aside their differences when it comes to the big punch-up in the last few pages of an Asterix book.
Of course, when it comes to pissing off people who are usually at odds, the Chinese were way ahead in the game.