A Different Chemical Warfare: The Bhopal Gas Tragedy

I remember the afternoon of 3 December 1984. Year-end examinations were going on at school, and I’d finished taking the morning paper and was waiting for the afternoon exam to begin. I can even remember where I was; our school’s old art class, built in the old British style and hung with abstract oil paintings in dark colours, which has long since been demolished to make way for a swank concrete eyesore where paper “craft” cutouts hang from the ceiling. 

So this is what happened. As we were all waiting for the exam to begin, we began to hear a rumour that some kind of gas had escaped from a factory in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh state in the centre of the country, and that many people had been killed. That was a year when many things had happened, was 1984; the first, and to date only, Indian citizen in space, Rakesh Sharma, went up on a Soviet Soyuz rocket; the Golden Temple, headquarters of the Sikh religion in Amritsar, had been “liberated” from Sikh “terrorists” demanding an independent state of Khalistan, and then, a few months later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was murdered by two of her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation, followed by a frenzied government-sponsored anti-Sikh pogrom across India. It was a year in which so many things happened that one’s brain tended to get numbed from all the input.

Over the next few days, the newspapers and magazines and what passed for TV (only the one channel, which showed only what the government allowed it to show) overflowed with photographs of corpses; corpses lying on the streets, corpses laid out in rows on hospital lawns, corpses being buried (one famous photo was of a child’s face, sightless eyes open), corpses, corpses, everywhere.



The actual story came out in bits and pieces. A toxic gas had escaped from a factory in Bhopal (1), owned by a subsidiary of the American company Union Carbide, and had killed an unknown number of people (at the time, it seemed that Bhopal must have been depopulated, such were the reports). We were all familiar with Union Carbide, since its logo appeared on the batteries we bought for our torches and transistor radios and electric clocks. Eveready, the commonest brand, was then a Union Carbide product (2). We all wondered what kind of poison in our batteries did this, because we didn’t know what a multitentacled creature Union Carbide actually was. How could batteries kill a city?

Later, when things had settled down a little, the “official figures” (I might as well say here that official figures in India are quite properly believed by nobody since they have nothing to do with reality, especially when death tolls are concerned) spoke of some two thousand five hundred deaths, which were later expanded to four thousand. By then, though, independent sources were already talking of upwards of fifteen thousand dead, and uncounted more (today, there are five hundred thousand registered survivors of the gas leak, and the number of deaths is over twenty thousand) affected, in many cases for life.

What was the “toxic gas” responsible for this?

Back then, hardly anyone had heard of methyl isocyanate, MIC as it came to be known to one and all. MIC was a chemical used in the manufacture of pesticides sold under the brand names Sevin and Temic, which were also (surprise!) manufactured by Union Carbide. Union Carbide had initially imported the MIC from factories in the US, but had begun manufacturing it, right there on the spot, instead, and stored it in giant underground concrete tanks.



Now MIC isn’t exactly the safest of chemicals. It’s prone to corrode containers, and in contact with air it breaks down to a mixture of gases including carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide. It is also extremely volatile and in bulk it has to be stored at a temperature below 15 degrees Celsius and preferably at zero degrees, and at above atmospheric pressure. In fact, (vide Union Carbide’s own brochure,Methyl Isocyanate, July 1976) it is not recommended to be stored in bulk; the normal practice is to store it in sealed steel drums, and not to manufacture it in larger quantities than needed (3). For the amount of pesticides actually produced by the plant at Bhopal, the amount of gas needed was between three and four tons. Yet, as attested by former employees at the plant, from June 1984, upwards of ninety tons was being stored in the tanks, and of those, no less than forty two tons were in Tank No 610. And to top it all, the tank’s contents were under atmospheric pressure and at atmospheric temperature, the refrigeration facilities having been shut off as part of a cost cutting exercise.(4)

Why was so much of this highly toxic gas manufactured and stored in these underground tanks, so much in excess of requirements? An obvious answer is that since it was a highly toxic gas, manufacture had been removed from the home territory of the US and shifted to an expendable “Third World” nation where lives were cheap. And though there were safer alternatives, they were more expensive, and therefore would cut into profits.

To get back to the point: there was this highly toxic gas stored in a tank without refrigeration and without the high pressurisation that would stop contaminants from entering from outside. There were also few or no safety mechanisms installed and most of those were not working properly. No evacuation plans existed, and the local administration had not been informed as to the contents of the tanks and what the toxic effects might be in case of a leak.

Sounds like a mess? I’m just getting started.

It wasn’t as though there hadn’t been prior leaks from the plant; employees had died previously and the leak had actually been predicted fairly accurately by a local journalist, but nobody had been interested. Now, on the night of 2 December, all the things that went wrong were about to come together.

First of all, what happened was the entry of some 500 litres of water from an installation called the Vent Gas Scrubber (meant to neutralise leaking gas) into Tank No 610. This caused an immediate exothermic reaction with tremendous increase in heat, to over 200 degrees Celsius. This increase in temperature went unnoticed because the temperature recording devices were out of order and had not been repaired. (4)

What happened after that can be told. The entire tank burst out of its underground confines and began leaking gas in tremendous quantities, starting at approximately five minutes past midnight and continuing for about 45 minutes. The gas could not be burned off because the systems to do so were (quite predictably) inoperative. Wind carried the gas over the entire locality, which was crammed with slum clusters filled with poor people.

It’s not easy to remain unemotional about what happened next. Starting awake (remember it was past midnight) with burning eyes and lungs, their breath turning to fire in their throats, people stumbled in the darkness trying to flee the enemy they couldn’t see, as liable to run towards a concentration of gas as away from it. Thousands collapsed and died on the streets and in the Bhopal railway station, one of the sites affected (among the dead was the elder son of an engineer killed in a leak three years earlier). The drifting gas was blown over much of the city before finally dispersing; and in its wake it left dead and hurting, everywhere. It’s been estimated that three-fourths of the then 800,000 people living in the city were affected to some degree. (5)

One of the many problems rescuers faced was that they had no idea at the time what the gas was, or what it was capable of. Doctors weren’t told what antidotes could be administered, so treatment was basically symptomatic and – with the hospitals swamped – often inadequate. 

Four days after the incident, on 7 December, Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson flew into Bhopal along with other executives, and was arrested for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. His arrest lasted all of six hours, after which he was hurriedly granted “bail” on the orders of “someone in a high position” (more anon on this) and was flown out by special plane from Bhopal airport to New Delhi. According to the pilots, senior Madhya Pradesh police officers saluted Anderson at the airport and even offered to carry his luggage (6). He flew back to the US the same day...and, officially, has been “untraceable’ ever since.

Meanwhile, as time passed, more and more people continued to succumb to the effects of the gas (5) around the now closed and sealed factory. Chemicals continued to leach into the ground and contaminate water supplies (and continue to contaminate water supplies to this day). Cases were lodged against Union Carbide demanding compensation to the tune of $3 billion for the victims. Union Carbide responded by alleging that it was either a pure and simple accident and so not their fault, or, apparently not recognising the contradiction, that it was all due to sabotage by a disgruntled employee. The judicial authorities in Bhopal froze the 50.9% of the shares Union Carbide held in its Indian subsidiary, but the Supreme Court of India not only allowed the subsequent sale of those shares but diluted the liability of Union Carbide from $3 billion to just 15% of that amount – a paltry $470 million, and absolved Union Carbide of all responsibility for the accident (though that was later revoked after protests). The Supreme Court judge hearing the case, Justice Ahmadi, became, after retirement, chairman-for-life of a Union Carbide trust (3). Something rotten in the state of Denmark, perhaps?

Even the meagre compensation that was to be paid under the new terms was mostly not paid. The worst of Indian officialdom rapidly raised its ugly head. Centres to train survivors in alternate professions either never functioned or functioned only briefly and shut down. Those who were to get compensated for the deaths of relatives didn’t just have to produce death certificates; in order to prove that the certificates weren’t faked, they were supposed to produce the people who had been at the funeral, and so on. I told you this was Indian officialdom. (7)

Meanwhile, what happened to the criminal charges? After a long delay, charges of culpable homicide (causing death by actions performed while knowing they were capable of causing death, while not actually intending to cause death) were brought against eight Indian employees of Union Carbide, and of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary; and against Warren Anderson, Union Carbide Corporation, and Union Carbide’s Hong Kong based subsidiary which was the direct owner of the Indian subsidiary. Of these, the three foreign entities (Anderson, the parent Union Carbide, and the Hong Kong subsidiary) refused to appear before Indian courts – and for the others the charges were reduced from culpable homicide, for which the maximum punishment is ten years, to causing death from negligence, carrying a maximum sentence of just two years. (3,8) 

In the meantime, something else happened. Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemicals in 2001 (9); and Dow promptly disclaimed all responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, saying, in effect, that if you knowingly buy stolen property, it’s yours no matter what the original owner might think. This same Dow Chemicals is now eager to invest in India, and the extremely pro-US/pro-big business Congress government of India is bending over backwards to find a way of letting it do so.

On 7 July, 2010, the verdict in this case, at the lowest level of the judicial system, was finally declared (after only 26 years – these are Indian courts, my friends); the seven survivors of the eight Indians were sentenced to two years each, and then released on bail with full freedom to appeal. It caused a surprising degree of outrage among people who had virtually forgotten Bhopal; an outrage that can only be understood as a reaction against the government’s policies per se, of which this was only a symptom.

What policies were those?

According to popular perception and also according to those in the know, the government does not actually want any real punishment to come to the criminals of Bhopal. It’s scared that any such punishment will scare off big business investments, as will enforcing corporate accountability; so it did not pursue the case vigorously and also diluted the case against the accused as far as possible. Dow doesn’t even have to pay for cleaning up the old factory site any longer; a government committee’s decided that Indian firms will be asked to bid for that at Indian government expense (10). “Bending over backwards” may be a term too weak to fit.

Union Carbide’s then CEO, Warren Anderson had reputedly vanished and is allegedly untraceable, though Greenpeace found him (11) with little or no effort and informed the Indian authorities as to his precise whereabouts. He is still wanted in India for culpable homicide, and despite all government efforts to let him off the hook, the case against him still stands. Remember that he was allowed to escape by special plane in 1984? Well, today, the buck is being passed around (10) over who, exactly, ordered his escape. The Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh at the time was Arjun Singh, a cravenly obsequious functionary of the Congress’ ruling Gandhi family. He would – could – never have taken a step without orders from Delhi, and in fact he does admit having such orders, though he refuses to state who issued him those orders. Every single objective person’s suspicions then come to the then owner of the Congress Party, the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. Gandhi’s widow and children are now the owners of the party, and their only priority is to deflect blame from the family. Hence, desperate efforts are on to find scapegoats; efforts that have to take into account as well the need to protect Anderson at all costs. He’s untraceable, they insist; he’s too old; there’s no proof against him; and, when all fails, “he can still be extradited to face trial.” When? 

It’s not just the fate of Anderson or of foreign corporations; the fact is that the government is desperate to please the US at all costs, and its only (alleged) foreign policy success was the Nuclear Deal it signed with the Bush administration to sell nuclear reactors to India. The US won’t sell nuclear reactors unless the government passes laws to insulate the sellers against all liability for accidents. So far, despite two efforts, it has been unable to pass this law, and the renewed public interest in Bhopal may make it more difficult still.

One of the (unelected) “Prime Minister” of India’s recent statements, then, shows everyone exactly what the government’s actual attitude is: “Bhopals may happen,” he said, “but the country must progress.”

Tell that to the gassed corpses lying on the streets.



Sources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energizer_Holdings
3. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100702271301000.htm
4. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100702271300400.htm
5. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100702271302000.htm
6. http://www.asianwindow.com/environment/how-warren-anderson-escaped-from-india/
7. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100702271302500.htm
8. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100702271301300.htm
9.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company#Union_Carbide_merger
10. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100702271301600.htm
11. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/carbide-criminal-found/


Note: There is a book by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro on the subject, It Was Five Past Midnight in Bhopal. I have read the book but chosen not to quote from it because I find it little better than pulp fiction. It provides no sources, has no references, and apparently takes every participant’s unsupported word for the truth. Significantly, at least one of its heroes, SI Qureishi, was one of the men sentenced recently to two years for criminal negligence.

The Executioner's Song

From Nov 2009:

There is a story I read in one of those collections of tales of murder and mystery Alfred Hitchcock used to introduce, mostly published back in the 1950s and 60s, well before I was born. My dad was an aficionado of those stories, which is why my bookshelves are loaded down with those books.


This story I mentioned was about a man who shot himself, and the relevant fact was that the author talked about the “other fingers” that he said were on the trigger, in this case the finger, specifically, of his jilted girlfriend’s sister. It wasn’t much of a story, except for that.


Now, I read on the net about the execution of the Beltway Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, for the shooting and killing of ten people in 2002 and the wounding of several others. I remember, at the time, watching the somewhat breathless TV coverage of the Beltway Sniper Attacksand wondering how on earth one madman (as then thought) with a gun could run rings round the self-professed Leader of the World. It was quite an interesting sociological phenomenon, anyway, to watch Police Chief Moose (if I recall his name right) pontificating on camera (as seen on BBC News) about how the shooter was a “weekend warrior” who had a full time job during the week, and white, since most victims were white. A lot of criminological theories probably quietly bit the dust when Muhammad and his teenage associate Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested; two of them, black, and unemployed to boot.


Since I had watched the whole thing unfold on TV, I was interested in what happened to John Allen Muhammad in a way I wouldn’t be in the case of most Thomases, Richards and Harriettas who end their lives at the receiving end of the US penal justice system. The only other equally interesting, to me, case was of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who was as fascinating, and, I’m convinced, part of the same syndrome as the Beltway Sniper.


Before I get any further, let me lay out my position on the John Allen Muhammad case. I, personally, am convinced the man was guilty of at least some of the killings of which he was accused. You don’t have a sniper outpost built into the boot of your car, complete with scope-sighted high-powered Bushmaster rifle, if you’re innocent.


OK, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was some kind of bizarre coincidence; Mr Muhammad was playing out a fantasy of going around the country shooting people from the boot of his car while – absolutely independently – a completely separate psychopathic sniper was at work shooting people at random. Fine, you just might be right. Unlikely, but you might be right. Coincidences do happen.


But then you have to ask just how Mr Muhammad and his teenage friend happened to be in the area when the shootings happened, how his voice was on a phone call to the cops, and suchlike evidence. You have to explain why the shootings stopped when he was arrested. You have to explain away the other evidence in the case. You’ll probably have to explain away too much. There is such a thing as too many coincidences.


The logical answer is, therefore, that Mr Muhammad was guilty of some or all of the killings that were attributed to him, although one can’t really shrug off the possibility that one or more of the killings laid at his door might have been the work of copycat killers or were actual random coincidences. Even if so, for the majority of the murders, Mr Muhammad is by most standards of logic, guilty. He was the Beltway Sniper.


Well, then, we get back to the question I heard that story ask: how many  fingers, other than his, were on the trigger?


Let’s take a look at Mr Muhammad’s life history. Wikipedia’s entry on him (I wonder if I’ll ever have a page of my own on Wikipedia!) says Mr Muhammad was a US military veteran with service in the anti-Iraq war of 1991 and holder of an expert rating as a marksman. He was also trained as a metalworker, which must have come in useful when it came to fixing up his car as a sniper post. His service training practically fitted him to become the sniper he was, but of course it can’t be blamed for making him a sniper.


Now I’ll probably stick out my neck when I say this: there is such a thing as delayed random blowback. If you put young men into a high stress conflict environment where they have to kill and see people getting killed, often in acts of random senseless violence, you can’t expect them not to be scarred by this. As the Vietnam War’s veterans so clearly demonstrated, the war doesn’t stop when it officially stops. It lives on in the minds and the hearts of the survivors of the war, and surfaces, sometimes many years later, in random and ugly ways. You might call it post-traumatic stress disorder, you might call it psychosis, or you can go ahead and call the person exhibiting it a sociopath. Whatever it is, one finger of those on the trigger would be that of those who send soldiers off to an unnecessary war with no thought to what happens to them afterwards.


(And there again you have the connection to Timothy McVeigh, another veteran who called his victims “collateral damage”. In the context of recent US military activities, you would have to say that from his standpoint he was quite right.)


Then again, one might ask, would Mr Muhammad have been able to embark on his killing spree if he hadn’t been able to lay his hands on high-performance weaponry? I’ve repeatedly raised this question on this website and elsewhere: where does the right to own lethal weaponry stop being a good idea and become a dangerous and stupid one? Michael Moore and Bowling For Columbine apart, even if Mr Muhammad had fantasies of going on a lethal rampage, what could he have achieved if he had been unable to purchase a weapon? Run amok with a bread knife? So, there you have another finger on the trigger: that of the gun-supporting lobbies.


While I’m on the subject of lethal rampages, there seems to be a major contradiction in Mr Muhammad’s motives for his murder spree. One the one hand, he was supposed to have begun the killings only to camouflage the planned homicide of his ex-wife in order to secure the custody of his children. At the same time, here’s what his associate revealed about Muhammad’s plans which

consisted of three phases in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore metro areas. Phase one consisted of meticulously planning, mapping, and practicing their locations around the DC area. This way after each shooting they would be able to quickly leave the area on a predetermined path, and move on to the next location. John Allen Muhammad's goal in phase one was to kill 6 white people a day for 30 days (180 per month). Malvo went on to describe how phase one did not go as planned due to heavy traffic and the lack of a clear shot and/or getaway at different locations.
Phase two was meant to be moved up to Baltimore. Malvo described how this phase was close to being implemented, but never was carried out. Phase Two was intended to begin by killing a pregnant woman by shooting her in the abdomen. The next step would have been to shoot and kill a Baltimore City police officer. Then, at the officer's funeral, they were to create several improvised explosive devices complete with shrapnel. These explosives were intended to kill a large number of police, since many police would attend another officer's funeral.
The last phase was to take place very shortly after, if not during, Phase Two. The third phase was to extort several million dollars from the United States government. This money would be used to finance a larger plan. The plan was to travel north into Canada. Along the way they would stop in YMCAs and orphanages recruiting other impressionable young boys with no parents or guidance. John Allen Muhammad thought he could act as their father figure as he did with Lee Boyd Malvo. Once he recruited a large number of young boys and made his way up to Canada, he would begin their training. Malvo described how John Allen Muhammad intended to train all these boys with weapons and stealth, as he had been taught. Finally, after their training was complete, John Allen Muhammad would send them out across the United States to carry out mass shootings in many different cities, just as he had done in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore
   
   
Read over this again. Does this (assuming Malvo was telling the truth) sound like the product of a rational mind? Do normal thought processes produce drivel like this? Somehow, I don’t think so.


And, if we arrive at the conclusion that a person thinking along these lines isn’t sane, should he be executed? Are mad people guilty for the actions they commit?

And, dare I ask, did executing Muhammad bring his victims back to life?

So, finally, we arrive at the death penalty. I’ll say this right away before going any further: as some of you, those who have been long-term readers of mine undoubtedly know, I have a hang-up about capital punishment. One of my recurrent dreams (described here, for instance, and here) is about my own execution, always in unpleasantly vivid terms and always without any indication of what it is that I’m supposed to be guilty of. I am, therefore, unable to be objective about the death penalty. Everything I say from this point on will be coloured by my own, quite personal, abhorrence of capital punishment.


Still, biased or not, these are my objections to capital punishment, per se (I won’t talk about methods here; if I’d have to choose a method, I’d put the firing squad as the only acceptable one):


1.    Capital Punishment is not, worldwide, applied equally across the board. Whether one is guilty or not, one’s chances of being sentenced to death and of the sentence being carried out increase drastically if one is poor or from a religious or ethnic minority.


As an illustration, the last person executed in India (which has many persons on death row but is now observing a de facto moratorium on capital punishment) was one Dhananjay Chatterjee, convicted and hanged for the rape and murder of a girl named Hetal Parekh. The point isn’t whether he was guilty; the point is that another man was, within days of Chatterjee’s hanging, convicted for an identical crime and only sentenced to life imprisonment. Chatterjee was too poor to afford competent legal representation. The other man was not. And another man, Manu Sharma, who shot dead a model named Jessica Lall in front of a roomful of witnesses (including, allegedly, Hollywood tough guy Steven Seagal), not only virtually got away with his crime for years, buying off witnesses and so on, but is currently out on jail on parole and partying it up, or so say the TV channels. Oh well, he’s rich, very rich. You know how it is.


Similarly, just as in the US, the percentage of black inmates on Death Row is disproportionately higher than that of blacks in the general population, in India a convicted killer stands a much higher chance of being sentenced to death if he happens to belong to one of the “lower castes” or is Muslim.


2.    Capital Punishment may irretrievably punish the innocent. The annals of execution are loaded with tales of people who were either extremely likely to have been innocent (like Cameron Todd Willingham, for instance, who was almost certainly wrongly executedby grandstanding courts and politicians) or have been, after their execution, proven not guilty. You could release a wrongfully imprisoned person and financially (undoubtedly inadequate, but better than nothing) compensate them for the years of lost liberty. What can you do for someone who’s been executed? Issue a posthumous pardon? I’m sure his ghost would love to use that as toilet paper.


3.    Capital Punishment undoubtedly does not deter murder. If it did, nations that apply capital punishment would be either murder-free or have much lower homicide rates than those which do not have the death penalty. My knowledge on the subject may be a mite deficient, but as far as I know that is not the case. In fact, the truth may be the reverse.


While I’m on this subject, I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some murderers commit their crimes as a convoluted way of committing suicide by forcing the state to do it for them. This was undoubtedly the case of the American serial killer Ted Bundy, who deliberately searched out jurisdictions in which he was most likely to be sentenced to death and committed his crimes there.

4.    Capital Punishment may turn unsavoury people into martyrs. Remember Saddam Hussein? He was undoubtedly an unsavoury dictator and had people killed, besides being responsible, as a CIA agent in his younger days, for crimes including crushing the Iraqi Communist Party and beginning the Iran-Iraq War. But by hanging him, the occupation forces made him (by then irrelevant to the Iraqi freedom movement) into a martyr. Nothing was gained by hanging him except exposing the brutality and stupidity of the occupation and its puppet collaborators to everyone, quite apart from raising suspicions that he was killed to stop him from telling all he knew.


So far as terrorists of a particular martyrdom-seeking stripe are concerned, of course, execution is a positive badge of honour, and far from being deterred, they may actively take actions calculated to achieve it. Therefore capital punishment can actually increase your chances of being blown away.


5.    Capital Punishment is more about retribution than about justice. On death row in India sits a man named Afzal Guru. He was convicted and sentenced to death for planning a jihadist suicide attack on the Indian Parliament that took place in December 2001. Though there are such glaring reasons for suspicion about the evidence against him that the Indian Supreme Court acknowledged that it was possible that he was innocent, it confirmed the death sentence because, in its own words, the “collective conscience of the society” demanded someone be punished for a crime of this magnitude. In translation: “he should be hanged because the mob’s baying for someone’s blood.”

As a corollary, I have never understood this practice in the US of allowing “witnesses” including the relatives of murder victims to watch the convicted murderer being executed. What’s the idea? To satisfy their bloodlust? From this site, I got the following piece about the reaction of one of Muhammad’s victim’s relatives, who was flown to the execution by, of all things, the organisers of a TV show:


Several relatives are due to witness the execution. Among them is Marion Lewis, 57, of Mountain Home, Idaho, whose daughter Lori Lewis Rivera was shot dead by Muhammad and Malvo - who pulled the trigger is not known - at a petrol station in Kensington, Maryland.
He is being flown to Virginia by a syndicated television show and told The Washington Post he was looking forward to seeing the death penalty imposed.
"I want to see what he made me see. He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to see him take a last breath...I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family.
Muhammad will be given the chance to say some final words. Mr Lewis, who said he would have preferred a more "gruesome" execution method, wished he could say something too. "It would be short and simple: 'I'm here to see you die...son of a bitch'."


This is not justice. This is brutalisation and playing to the camera.


6.    A majority of murders tend to be crimes of passion, decided on the spur of the moment. In most of those cases, the killer can’t afterwards ever forgive himself or herself anyway. So if you exclude these crimes, where do you draw the line? How about the person who murdered someone who was making his or her life hell? You exclude him or her too? Then what about those who killed in cold blood? You’ll execute them? Fine. Now how are you to decide who killed in cold blood? Suppose someone’s family was slaughtered before his eyes and the state did nothing. Would you kill him for planning and wreaking revenge on the perpetrator? No? Yes? What?


7.    Capital Punishment for some crimes can actually serve to make the crimes worse. For instance, let’s take rape. If one makes rape a capital crime, as feminist groups very often demand, doesn’t it make it more likely that the rapist will kill his victims to minimise the likelihood of their testifying against him in court?


8.    Ultimately, of course, the stupidest thing about the death penalty is that the really big criminals can’t be touched by it: the politicians who send armies off to war, the capitalists who ruin entire ecologies and are responsible for the deaths of millions, the profiteers who ensure that those who can’t pay their rates don’t have access to such basics as food, shelter and clothing, and so on.


As long as they aren’t punished, what the hell’s the point of executing the killer of only a few people, anyway?  


Note: Yes, the title of this blog post is taken from Norman Mailer's book on the execution of Gary Gilmour.

Rape She Said

From Dec 2010:

“I'm kind of tired of that same old trick,” the lady raged, “to bringing (sic) the woman's character and background into question in a matter such as this.”

The matter at hand was the sexual “molestation” accusation against Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, which happens to be the reason due to which the man had to spend time in jail and is only now out on bail. The lady I’ve quoted above, a self-styled left-winger from Calcutta now working in Bombay, had protested vigorously on her Fakebook page, not against Assange’s persecution, but against anyone saying his accusers were less than innocent victims.

“Not relevant in the least,” she huffed. “Simply because she might have CIA links doesn't "automatically" mean that he didn't play dirty with her. It's the argument which morons take to say that prostitutes cannot be raped because sex is their business. That's fucking stupid."

Her tirade was against my saying that the so-called victims were so clearly perpetrators of a set-up that I couldn’t understand how any thinking person could believe otherwise. Having unburdened herself, she then deleted and blocked me from her page, so that I couldn’t reply.

Kind of childish and immature of her, methinks.

But let us leave Ms Sucheta Chatterjee to her puerile echo chamber and move on to the broader question of the accusations against Assange. I believe that people on both sides of the line, whether pro- or anti-Assange, who know anything of the matter, have more or less concluded that these accusations aren’t worth the web space they occupy.

Let’s just go over the situation again, briefly:

We have a man who certain sections in the US establishment have designated as Public Enemy No 1 for putting online leaked US diplomatic cables. For the purpose of this article it isn’t significant just why he’s doing it, or the actual import of the cables. The only significant fact is that he isn’t exactly the favourite of the American establishment, and certain individuals in the US government have been calling for him to be assassinated, no less.

Right.

Now, this man was invited to Sweden by a faction of the Social Democratic Party, the press secretary of which was one Anna Ardin, who proposed that since she’d be away with her family, he could stay at her flat for the duration. For some unannounced reason, she returned early from her “trip”, and according to her own account she had consensual sex with the man in question. They used a condom, but it tore. Neither of them denies that the man used a condom, or that it tore. However, Ardin claims that the man ripped the condom deliberately, and also lay on top of her, immobilising her with the weight of his body. Um, guys, I suggest you rethink the missionary position, next time.

Well, now, let’s give Ms Ardin the benefit of the doubt and say she’d found the experience humiliating and distressing. If we do, though, we find that she seemed remarkably non-humiliated and undistressed the next day; far from evicting the man, or going to the cops, she threw a party for him at her home. During this party, she tweeted her friends, she was “...Sitting outside … nearly freezing, with the world’s coolest people. It’s pretty amazing!” 

Distressed and humiliated? Somehow, I think not.

Things get even murkier when we note that this woman, Anna Ardin, was also the author of an article called “Seven Steps To Legal Revenge,” basically a tutorial on how to make a former partner’s life miserable; and that she was also expelled from Cuba due to ties with groups funded by the CIA. You know, the same CIA which was gunning for the man in question?

“Not relevant in the least?” Really?

That day, too, the man I’m discussing had spoken at a symposium hosted by the same Social Democratic Party, during which one of the attendants was a woman who was self-confessedly obsessed with him. Her name was Sophia Wilen, and she invited herself to his inner circle after the talk. They arranged to meet in Stockholm, where she invited him to her home in Enkoping; in fact she paid for his ticket. Once there, they had sex, twice; the first time with and the next morning without a condom. Ms Wilen didn’t seem to find the experience distressful either; they went to breakfast together cordially, and afterwards he returned to Stockholm.

Now this is the point where things get a bit odder than they were. For no apparent reason, Wilen called Ardin, and they got to talking of having bedded this man. OK, coincidences happen, but it seems kind of strange as random happenstance. And suddenly, Wilen discovered that she was terrified by the idea that the unprotected sex would have given her AIDS.

What happened next? As Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com says,

It was the weekend, and the regular prosecutor was off duty: a substitute prosecutor listened to their story and decided, on her own authority, to go after Assange...This indictment was later rescinded, however, by the regular prosecutor, due to the fact that, as the office put it, there was “no evidence” a crime had been committed.

And then, with the set-up beginning to fall apart, Ardin leaked the story to a major Swedish tabloid.

Here's the timeline of the accusations, with thanks to this site:

August 13: Assange has sex with Ardin, who hosts him in Stockholm during his Sweden tour.
August 14: Wilen attends a meeting addressed by Assange, makes contact with him, gets herself invited to a party that evening.
August 16: Assange is invited by Wilen to her home in Enkoping, and has sex with her twice; once with a condom, the second time without.
August 18: Wilen gets in touch with Ardin and they share notes, after which they decide they've been raped.
August 20: They file charges, which are immediately leaked to the press.
August 21: Eva Finne, chief prosecutor for Stockholm, rejects the rape charges. The same day Ardin says in a newspaper interview that Assange was not violent and she didn't feel threatened by him.
August 23: Claes Borgstrom, a lawyer - politician, inserts himself into the case.
August 30: Borgstrom approaches a prosecuter in Gothenburg, Marianne Ny, who agrees to resurrect the charges against Assange.
August 31: Assange gives a deposition before the prosecutor, and applies for a Swedish work and residency permit.
After Assange leaves the country, the prosecutor decides his deposition wasn't enough; so an Interpol notice, an international manhunt, and an incarceration in London follow.

“Innocent victims?” Surely the lady doth protest too much.

Actually, I don’t want to talk only of this particular frame-up, whose hollowness is self-evident. What I’d like to discuss is the wider phenomenon of self-styled feminists jumping to the defence of every woman who claims sexual molestation at the hands of a man, simply because he’s a man and she’s a woman.

First: I am a man, and I admit that rapes happen, every day, and that it’s a crime. I also acknowledge that millions of women are seriously hurt and/or traumatised by rape all over the world, every year.

Second: I do not agree that all men are the same, or that we are all potential enemies of women, or that we are all potential rapists, any more than all women are potential hookers.

Then, these ladies who defend even the most absurd accusations made by the most transparently fraudulent accusers are

1.    Risking ending up with egg on their faces when the charges fall apart, unless, of course, they blame the failure of the charges on the male establishment.
2.    Betraying all the women who have been genuinely raped and traumatised. Their tormentors can now pass them off as another set of sensation-seeking bloodsuckers and scam artists, and find a receptive audience.

These two poisonous little vipers framed Assange. I don’t know if they did it at the behest of the CIA, or because of some twisted reasoning of their own sick minds. But a frame-up it clearly was.

And is it wrong of me to think that their defenders either have ulterior motives or aren’t exactly firing on all mental cylinders?

I don’t think so.

"Eve Teasing"

e

They call it “eve teasing”. Sounds like it’s a little game.

If you’re in India and you happen to turn on the TV, you can’t miss the thing that’s overtaken Benazir Bhutto in hogging media attention.

This is the stripping and roughing up of two young women, both American citizens of Indian origin, in the early hours of January 1 by a mob of up to eighty men. This happened bang in the middle of Mumbai (Bombay), which loves to pretend to be the one city of India where women are always safe.

The whole incident was copiously photographed and it was only much later that the police arrived. They didn’t do much except rescue the victims, who chose not to register formal complaints. (According to victims of previous abuse, complaints would not have helped them anyway. One said her assailant was arrested and released on bail, after which he turned up on her doorstep to threaten her and demand a refund of his bail money, He could have got her address only from the police.)

Only after a media outcry was the police forced to register complaints against the men involved, some of whom have reportedly been arrested. I’m curious to know if any action will be taken against them, even though the evidence (in terms of the photographs) would seem to be conclusive.

The police chief of Bombay had gone on record (Freudian slip and all) to say “Don’t make a mole…a mountain out of a molehill. Such little incidents can occur anywhere.”

Little incidents? Around the same time as the Bombay incident of this year, foreign women were forcibly groped in Kochi in South India, and I’m sure many more such assaults have gone unreported. And a friend of mine reports that all her female classmates had to withstand the sight of a man fondling himself while watching them climb the stairs of their college. Complaints brought no action whatsoever.

And I'm not even mentioning the rapes going on literally every minute somewhere in this land... 

The reasons aren’t all that far to seek: a sex-starved country with an extremely high level of latent violence which puts no price whatsoever on the dignity or well-being of women. But this will never be admitted by a society where women are counselled by police to cover up if they want to avoid being raped or molested and where a rapist can say “You must understand – sometimes a man has no choice.”

Someone should tell the women that.

Crimes I'd forgotten I'd written about

Some things are difficult to believe, but they still happen.
There is an Assamese woman called Monika Pegu Singh.
On 2 January  2007 she came from her village to Guwahati to seek her husband, a bus driver who had come to the city and "gone missing". She was pregnant. While at the city, where, remember, she was a total stranger, she suddenly had onset of labour on the street and was rushed by bystanders to a nursing home (Guwahati Maternity Home) where she gave premature birth to a baby girl.Two days later, on January 5, the nursing home discharged her and demanded she pay Rs3000/- for the delivery. When she could not pay it at once, the home refused to let her go. At last she said she would go and get it, but the home said it would hold her baby as collateral. She was crying on the roadside when other people found her, raised about Rs1300/- for her, and went back to the home on January 7. They were refused admittance and told the baby was not there. She found Rs 3000/- somehow and went back to the home where she was told that she had taken the baby with her when she was discharged. Locals helped her file a complaint with the police for illegal confinement and kidnapping on January 8. Suddenly, the next day, after the story was in the paper, the baby was found abandoned at the doorstep of a Hindu orphanage cum temple (Matri Mandir), dressed in a set of expensive baby clothes. Obviously the nursing home had sold the baby to people who, when the heat was on, decided it was better to get rid of the kid.  Fortunately they did not murder it or dump it somewhere quiet where it would have starved or died of hypothermia. Also fortunately the mom got her baby back. Three nursing home employees have been arrested, of whom one is already hospitalised feigning illness. The prime accused is on the run.
It certainly doesn't pay to always depend on public callousness or the inherent helplessness of the villager in the big city.
I don't know what happened to the father, though.

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There was this novel, by Beth Gutcheon, called Still Missing, which if I'm not mistaken was made into a film.

It was the story of a woman whose son went missing from school. Years went by, and her life disintegrated, but she never gave up hope, despite the barely concealed scepticism of those around her, that he would be found. Predictably, at the very end of the book, he was.

In real life, it doesn’t happen like that.

The place: Indian-administered Kashmir (comprising about a third of what we pretend Kashmir is).

As crowds watched, officials exhumed bodies of "Pakistani terrorists" killed in various "encounters" (the standard Indian terminology for firefights, whether real or stage managed, so that someone bumped off by the forces is said to have been "encountered") – and weeping relatives identified them as innocents missing, sometimes for years, after having been arrested by the army or police.

They had all been killed and passed off as enemy combatants. And this was far from the first time. The number of missing in seventeen years of war stands at, according to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, between eight and ten thousand. At least some of them must have met the same fate as the carpenters and labourers who were shot by the forces as terrorists.

The reason: official pressure to show results in our very own "war on terror", and the considerable financial and other rewards on offer.

For killing an "ordinary" militant, a police team gets a reward of Rs 30,000. For a "B-grade" militant (I’m sure I can’t tell you how they classify these things) the reward money is a hundred thousand rupees. And for a top class "A grade" militant’s elimination or arrest, the reward is three hundred thousand to half a million rupees. So now you know.

(Wait a minute…did I say "arrest"?

Well, actually, the "arrest" of militants hardly ever happens any more. Even when they are captured, most are simply shot after interrogation in fake "encounters". No need for messing about with prisons and things. And a dead man can’t reveal that, no, he has never actually touched a gun in his life before.)

Besides, killing a militant usually brought out of turn promotion for soldiers (I’m told the current army chief has stopped this). Another incentive.

And rather than fight your actual fanatic jehadi, isn’t it rather easier to pull some poor fool off the street, shoot him, drop a gun on his body, and take a nice grisly trophy photo?

The army is ruthless enough. I, myself, have had an AK pointed at me for the crime of not moving out of the path of an army officer's little convoy fast enough on the streets of my own city. Civilian life means nothing to them.

It’s been done less lethally. In North East India a colonel, at the behest of his brigadier, poured ketchup over the recumbent bodies of commandeered villagers and took photos telling of how he had killed "terrorists". They both ended up court martialled.

I guess Hansraj Parihar, the police officer accused of orchestrating the latest killings, hadn’t any ketchup handy.

***********************************************************************

As if we hadn't had Enron and Halliburton to shine before us...
It's taking place at all levels nowadays. Gyp the customer if at all you can.
On Saturday, the 3rd  of February, 2007, at about noon, I sent a parcel by FIRST FLIGHT COURIERS to Calcutta, containing an urgently required item. The consignment number was E82244880 dated 3 Feb 2007, the charge levied was Rs 80 (about twice I'd have expected to pay with a less upmarket firm), and I was assured that the parcel would be delivered on Monday 5 February.
However, my contact, to whom the parcel was addressed,having still not received it on 7 February, not any intimation of its arrival, I went to the office and asked about it. The office assured me that it had been sent and it had already reached Calcutta. I - with some difficulty, I was forced to phone their head office in Keatinge Road  -  acquired the phone number of the Calcutta office of the courier and passed it on to my contact.
When he went to the Calcutta office today (8th Feb), he was told that the packet had only been dispatched from Shillong yesterday - 7 February - presumably after I had gone personally to ask about it (and when I had been told it had already been sent on 3 Feb).
Now...
This is a case of not just grave deficiency of service but outright lying by FIRST FLIGHT COURIERS, who have no hesitation in charging premium rates and putting up self-congratulatory advertisements in the media extolling their premium services.
Let's remember all the big talk about how capitalism, and private service providers, are always superior to the state's bodies. And how, in this and for all I know in most other countries, the state deliberately neglects its own organisations in order to force people to use those private bodies.
If the profit motive is legitimate, and greed is good, then absolute greed is God, because the God hypothesis calls its central focus absolutely good.
It's a pity real humans just have to suffer.

******************************************************************

Back in the final days of the Second World War, when the German Reich was collapsing, Allied troops who liberated the concentration camps found that German civilians quite effectively turned a blind eye to what was going on inside them, although they did not hesitate to buy or use the equipment produced by the slave labour of those very same concentration camp inmates.

"We just didn't know," as one Burgomeister proclaimed.

Well...

Caterpillarmakes bulldozers. Caterpillar’s bulldozersare being used by the armed forces of the racist, zionist, so-called state of "Israel" to demolish Palestinian houses and uproot Palestinian orchards as part of a process of collective punishment. And Caterpillar now has an office in Delhi and sells those bulldozers in India.

Boeing proudly confirms that it supplies aircraft that transport CIA victims of "extraordinary rendition" to hidden prisons in American colonies in Eastern Europe where they are tortured. Boeing also manufactures aircraft like the B52 that bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in other countries that the US has invaded.

And of course Boeing sells commercial aircraft in quantity to Air India, apparently to keep the Americans in good humour, because the buying of Airbus aeroplanes by Indian Airlines has to be balanced out…

Now these are civilian items peddled in India by companies that are deeply involved in the muck of profiteering from war. And also, it’s not as if BHEL doesn’t make bulldozers or Airbus Industrie doesn’t make commercial aircraft.

There is no way one can separate the act of buying from one arm of these huge firms without making oneself vicariously responsible, because one’s payments are funding them, from the actions of the other arm. One absolutely cannot say, "We just did not know."

You can’t touch filth without being defiled.

***************************************************************

I was watching - with a total lack of surprise - the Ukrainian father of a swimmer in the  World Swimming Championships in Australia beat up his daughter for performing poorly, right in front of the cameras. The only thing odd about it was that it wasn't a South Asian dad.

After all, this is a part of the world where children, as I've pointed out previously, are thought to be the property of their parents and any concept of child rights is pretty  much nonexistent. Parents are free to keep their kids illiterate (they "have the democratic right not to educate their kids", and never mind that all modern nations -democracies or otherwise - got there by compelling parents to put their children in school), to put them to work (including hard manual work) as soon as they can work (child labour, though officially banned, is never stopped and in fact is probably vital to the low-cost outsourced economy), to put them to prostitution as soon as they hit puberty ("traditional custom", and never mind that it isn't actually), and to beg (often mutilating them to garner sympathy).

Parents can even kill their kids - South Asia is the home of the honour killing. Though Pakistan is the most notorious, India probably far outstrips Pakistan in the actual number of honour killings, but because of propaganda purposes these inconvenient   facts are suppressed. I recall one man who killed his daughter for the crime of falling in love tell the reporter - he had not yet been arrested - "She was my  daughter and I killed  her - what's it to you?"

And, like the Ukrainian girl's dad, thrashing children for failing in sports is not unknown. In Calcutta a couple of months back a man beat his son to death for not performing up to expectations in a table tennis tournament. If it hadn't been for the boy's mother, who went to the police, nothing of it might ever have come out.

Last year, a young boy named (by the media) "Prince" fell down a well and was rescued after a day and a half long operation played out live on national TV. This brought politicians flocking to give him and his family goodies and grants. Immediately afterwards, children began falling down similar wells all over. Either wells have magnetic properties for babies or else parents deem the possible sacrifice of a child worth the potential benefits. After all, investments are required to earn profits, right? 

The Victorians said "Children should be seen and not heard".

In an overpopulated country, they can be thought of as disposable as well. 

****************************************************************

Poor Babulal Katara.

The poor guy obviously has got a bad deal.

See, what did he do? He was going abroad. Well, gee whiz, as our American friends would say, if he had a visa to Canada he could visit Canada, couldn't he? It was his right and all? And if his wife and son had visas as well, they could go along, of course.

All right so far?

Now we know Mr Katara is a busy man, a national level politician and a Member of Parliament. How can he go around arranging visas, buying tickets, and so on? He has a secretary to do those things for him. So when he went to the airport, he went along perfectly innocently in the knowledge that his secretary had arranged everything. Of course, since his wife and son were travelling with him, they went along.

And now let us remember that Mr Katara is a busy man. Of course he is. He works hard all day and night for his constituents. In his line of work, he meets thousands of people every day. How can he remember individual faces and voices? How can anyone expect it of him?

So, is it really to be wondered that Mr Katara is - and was - honestly unaware of the fact that the woman travelling with him on a diplomatic passport was not his wife? Can it really be held against him that he failed to register the fact that the boy with her was not his son?

Not at all. The man is innocent. The facts speak for themselves.

It was all - all - the secretary's doing. Human trafficing bastard. Biting the hand that feeds him.

(OK, enough of the comedy. For those who don't know what I am talking about, check out this link.)

Now, I know Indian politicians are scum. But this time they have surpassed themselves, especially as nothing is going to be done about this. No party is clean. They are all criminals.

And in this India which is "booming, confident, globally in the ascendant," we have people still so desperate to go abroad for a "better " life (how? by loading garbage trucks in Toronto? I wonder if these people even speak a word of English, let alone French?) that they are willing to do anything to get there.

Some India Shining.

*********************************************************

Swindled

(From Jan 2007)

I have this tendency to attract swindlers. No idea why. Maybe it's my face.

I still keep on getting Nigerian letters in my mail, when no one else I know does, any longer. Then on at least two occasions in my life I let myself get consciouslyswindled – I’ll tell you about them, and then you will understand why. Both times were almost the same, too. The first time was when I was a student in Lucknow – right outside my college a guy accosted me and said "Do you live around here? I came from the village for an interview for a job, but I find the place shut and my pocket has been picked. I desperately need some money to go home and I have none. Tomorrow, I promise, I will come and return your money." I knew he was having me on – but on the off chance (the infinitesimal off chance) that he might be telling the truth I gave him all I had – forty rupees, which then was about a dollar and a quarter and is now less than a dollar. For a student (and you know that all students are always poor) it was a considerable amount at the time. I asked him, "How are you going to return it to me?" while knowing perfectly well he had no intention of returning it. He said "You write down your name on this note" – hell, it was one of the two twenty rupee notes I had given him! – "And tomorrow I will come to your college and return it to you." And I saw him disappear with my money and smiled at my own stupidity.

A year later, in the same city, I was standing at the bus stop when a man came straight up to me with the same story – the identical same story. This character had – he said – no money at all. I told him I could not help him – I’d heard this tale many times before. Without waiting to hear me out he turned on his heel and jumped into…a taxi. No money, yeah.

Many years later, I was walking on the street of my own hometown when a character came to me with the same story – this one just needed enough money for a ride on a truck to his village. I knew here was another crook, but, just in case he was telling the truth? I asked him how he would repay the money, but all he said was he would be on this street every day and I could find him here. Still, I gave him twenty rupees – as marks for effort in lying. He was better than the first character, made no ludicrous promises of seeking me out. So, total loss – sixty rupees. Not all that much.

Once when I was working in the Ramkrishna Mission Polyclinic in Shillong there were these two guys. One was my patient. They came straight out and asked me if I would be interested in buying "rare coins" from them of which they had no idea of the value. Or at least I could lend them some money with the coins as security. Yeah, right. I smelt a rat straight off. I told them they ought to have them valued. I even told them, "Bring them around tomorrow and I’ll take you over with me to a coin dealer for valuation." Sure. They, quite predictably, never turned up again.

Then there was this kid a few months back in my clinic who must have thought I was a real idiot. He came with a few friends of his who parked themselves in the waiting room. I had made a crown for him. He was supposed to have it fitted and pay me that day, and he knew this and he knew how much. He was the son of a central government official of some species and would get reimbursed treatment expenses. So, after I finished, I wrote out the usual receipt. But then he sys "Please give me the receipt, I’ll give it to my dad, he’ll get the money from the office and he’ll pay you." I said, of course, "Nothing doing. I don’t work like that." Didn’t give him the receipt. Promptly he went to the ATM in the same building and got the money. When he returned, paid me, and left with his receipt, his cronies in the waiting room all burst out laughing at him. He must have had a good plan – get the money, keep it for himself and his buddies, and palm his dad off with my receipt. After all, there was my signature on an official receipt that I had received the money. What dad would have believed me over his son? What dad would have publicly accepted (whatever his private belief) that his son was a swindler and a fraud? I wouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

Why do I attract these characters? Is it genetic?

I have a maternal uncle who has a very superstitious wife and a son who is an epileptic. The woman was appraoched by two "snake charmers" who claimed there were snakes in her house. Sure enough, they brought out two snakes. I don't know the species, but I'm sure they were large but harmless rat snakes. And I'm as sure as can be that the guys planted them beforehand, "salting the mine", after having done a recce. After having thereby gained her confidence, these men said how they could cure...epilepsy.   Of course she jumped at the offer. So these guys said they would have to worship, for a week...gold. And still the penny did not drop!
They came in the morning, and the gold (all the ornaments she had) were, as instructed, stitched up in a pillow case and given in their charge in a sealed room where they did whatever they did around a little fire.

That night, when they handed the pillowcase back and vanished, the woman and her husband opened it up to find the gold intact. They then stitched it up again. Every single day for the first five days they opened it up every night, found it OK, and stitched it shut. This was pretty much a chore. Also, although the men had made it a condition that they must not be spied on in the course of their "worship", they had spied the first few days – and found nothing suspicious. Just two dirty men burning incense and chanting who knows what. So by the end of the week they had tired of the nightly restitching of the pillowcase and the spying, and had stopped both. Then on the sixth evening, the penultimate day of the "exorcism" of epilepsy, my aunt (sad but true, she is my aunt) was told by the men that they would be coming at noon the next day and she should be sure to lay on a grand feast for them. The stupid woman did. She laid on a real bash, and waited, and waited. No sign. By late afternoon it finally occurred to the duo to open their precious pillowcase…and find a load of worthless costume jewellery. Serves them right.

OK, so she isn't a blood relative...but her husband is. And he is a devotee of some guy who claims to be able to predict anything and change anyone's fate...yet his own two sons are unemployed layabouts.
Some people are incurable.