Thursday, March 5, 2020

The part of India known as “vasectomy colony”

From an Isaac Chotiner interview at The New Yorker about the recent violence:
What happened yesterday, to my mind, is the culmination of a fairly explicit effort to reframe India’s protest movement from one as Indian citizens challenging the government into being a battle between Muslims and Hindus. That’s been in the cards for a while.

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How would you describe the feelings of Muslim communities in Delhi right now?

Those areas of Delhi have seen a lot of riots and pogroms in the past. They are especially vulnerable, and especially economically marginalized. There is an area in northeast Delhi that is called Nasbandi Colony, which means “vasectomy colony,” because the people who were resettled there from slums in the center of Delhi were resettled only in exchange for being sterilized. That’s the level of how marginalized that area is.