If India is a charming, spiritual and unique country attracting plenty of tourists from all over the world, it is also a cruel place where slavery and a deep social injustice still exist and apparently it cannot be fought nor defeated by local institutions.
A recent photo essay by a journalist of The Economist group has shown in pictures the harsh reality of a society based upon the Hindu caste system 's
social divisions, where millions of workers belong to owners (of an upper social caste).
Slaves here are not in chains, but they are overburdened by debt, paid virtually nothing and treated harshly. And if for slave we can define people who are not free to leave their place of work, from an estimate of one American NGO, Indian slaves today are around 20m.
An informal market allows landlords to buy and sell them; some workers earn nothing and have to borrow more from their employers, this way they become bonded- they have taken a loan from their employers to pay for basic needs and must work to pay it off so cannot leave their job- .
Many workers are disabled today because of the work done for their landlord.
Even relationships between different castes are forbidden by this social system and if caught it can lead to murder and any punishment.
Some suspected murders of thsi kind sometimes are not even investigated by the police which is too often on the side of the criminals. On the other side the slave-owners are hardly ever brought to justice, and the legal system is clogged with arrears of tens of millions of pending cases.
If there is a new India of the IT genius, of Mumbai-based multinationals and nuclear power stations, Bollywood blockbusters and mass mobile-telephony, it still exists another face: an extremely sad medieval reality full of poverty and violence.
India's daily injustices are being fought by the Volunteers for Social Justice (VSJ), a group devoted to freeing people from bondage which has brought the release of some 30,000 since it was founded in 1985.
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