Delhi WiFi costs more if you’re white

The Delhi airports just got wireless Internet access today for Rs. 60/hour at the domestic airport. But if you’re (wink, wink) at the international airport, you pay the more princely sum of Rs. 100. It’s a subtle way to soak foreigners, just like the higher tourist fee for foreigners at the Taj Mahal.

What constitutes a foreigner, exactly? What about a Canadian desi who’s an Indian citizen and, just to throw the game off, has an Amrikan accent? Entire genres of literature have been written on these shades of sepia.

And nothing makes consumers see red like discriminatory pricing. It puts off visitors and marks a country as Third World in mentality. In contrast, it’s precisely the U.S.’ tolerant atmosphere that siren-songs the global wunderkind. The number of Americans happily working in India is just starting to increase. For some short-term revenue, you’d mortgage your country’s economic future?

Gujarat massacre still unpunished

The killers who participated in recent, government-sanctioned anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat will likely get away scot-free, says the Economist. There have been no convictions to date. None.

…not a single murderer has been convicted, although perhaps 2,000 people died. The state government is under pressure from local activists, human-rights groups and India’s staunchly interventionist Supreme Court to see that justice is at last done. But it continues to act less like a scourge of illegal violence than its sponsor.

In retaliation for the deaths of 58 Hindus who burned alive in a train under suspicious circumstances, 2,000 Muslims were massacred in Gujarat:

Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP’s leader and, at the time, prime minister, seen as a moderate, asked “Who lit the fire first?”. That foreigners and the liberal English-language press in Delhi largely ignored the Godhra massacre, concentrating on the killings of Muslims—some 9-10% of Gujarat’s 50m population—heightened the sense of grievance.

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