Prometheus 6

Call me provincial, but this is some fucked up shit. Still..

Smita Narula, the faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law who has studied the effects of the Indian caste system, said violence over caste differences and intercaste marriages still occurred in India, although discrimination against the lowest caste has been outlawed for decades.

“What is surprising,” Ms. Narula said, “is that it might happen here.”

It ain't too long ago that sort of thing could have happened right here in the good ol' USofA. And the power of the old symbolic actions never dies. And we've resisted healing our racial divide for over a century. So maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

Father Says He Set Fire That Killed Three
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO — A man set a fire last weekend that killed his pregnant daughter, his son-in-law and his 3-year-old grandson, prosecutors say, because he disapproved of his daughter’s marriage.

The man, Subhash Chander, who lives in Oak Forest, a suburb south of here, told investigators that he was upset with his daughter, Monika Rani, and her husband, Rajesh Kumar, for what he saw as “a cultural slight,” said Robert J. Milan, the first assistant state’s attorney of Cook County.

Mr. Chander said that the couple had married without his consent and that Mr. Kumar was from a lower caste in India than Ms. Rani’s family, Mr. Milan said.

Mr. Chander, 57, was held without bail on Wednesday, charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated arson and intentional homicide of an unborn child.

Ms. Rani, 22, was five months pregnant with the couple’s second child.

A defense lawyer assigned to Mr. Chander’s case did not respond to a telephone message.