A water bottle
An incident in India, via the Times of India:
BHOPAL: In a case of extreme brutality, a Jabalpur youth was allegedly tied to the window grille of a Mumbai-bound train and thrashed by three youths for drinking water from their bottle.
A video of the incident that took place on the Patliputra-Lokmanya Tilak Terminal (12142) train on March 25 went viral on Tuesday. Police ordered a probe into the matter after studying the footage.
Sumit Kachi, who was travelling to Mumbai, boarded the train in Jabalpur on March 24. While on the train, he drank water from a bottle belonging to co-travellers Vicky, Ravi and Balram, all from Patna.
The trio allegedly tied him to window grille of the coach and whipped him with their belts whenever the train stopped, throughout the 245km journey from Jabalpur to Itarsi. The youth was ultimately rescued by vendors at Itarsi railway station on March 25 and taken to the police station.
The ToI doesn’t say it, but I gather from Facebook discussions that what’s going on here is untouchability…and indeed it’s hard to make sense of it otherwise.
H/t Nirmukta
Yes, I’ll bet caste was involved. It’s probably a sign of progress that the ‘Jabalpur youth’ wasn’t killed outright.
What a bizarre culture, half of India defecates in the open, but caste still determines the country’s ‘hygiene’ standards.
One of the weirdest things about this is: did it really happen? Because if it did, it sounds like the kind of thing someone would do when they felt completely at ease. Like they had already become so friendly on the journey that, as they were passing their water around, he thought they wouldn’t mind him taking a swig. Which, strange as it seems, isn’t so strange. There are plenty of whites in America who think they aren’t racist because they are on friendly terms with black people they meet– and yet they will react badly if they discover the black person thinks that they are actually equals and treats them accordingly.
(Did it really happen meaning I question if the victim did drink their water or if they just made up an excuse.)
@2 Samantha Vines,
“There are plenty of whites in America who think they aren’t racist because they are on friendly terms with black people they meet– and yet they will react badly if they discover the black person thinks that they are actually equals and treats them accordingly.”
I doubt that’s a valid analogy, you’re projecting US or Western racial prejudice onto the Hindu caste system. I’m not sure, even today, how many high caste Hindus would even bother to assume ‘friendly relations’ with lower castes, particularly Dalits. Although you have a point, we don’t really know the details of the case.
“(Did it really happen meaning I question if the victim did drink their water or if they just made up an excuse.)”
An ‘excuse’, with caste as the mitigating circumstances? That’s a rather repugnant ‘excuse’.