Kailash Satyarthi: a world hero defender of the weak

A freed slave child in India, saved last month from a factory in Delhi along with 24 other children

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 goes to India’s Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzay “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education”.  “Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain.”

 “When they get tips on working children in a dark basement somewhere in India so he takes with him a team and go in and frees the children from this slave labor.” He says that these children are often robbed their families and set to work. After several years of slave labor, there are many who have been severely affected both physically and mentally. Many people have trouble remembering where they come from.”

Excerpt from New York Times (Click image to see source)

It is to be hoped that the many unscrupulous factory owners and employers who use slave labour provided by slave-drivers will begin to realise that this horrendous treatment of children will not be tolerated to such a degree that it has been until now by the Indian authorities. Knowing the mentality of these slavers, however, the strictest purges of all such employers must be carried out by the government. The positive reaction of the press throughout the world (not without unpleasant exceptions by Hindu.nationalists in India) makes known the depths of iniquity to which far too many Indian Indian human traffickers and their employers sink. Parents who sell their children to these criminal people in the belief and hope of providing them with a better existence are less to blame since they are duped and pressured by gangs.

Looking at this in the context of the long series Prime Ministers and Presidents of India who worshipped Sathya Sai Baba, including Narendra Modi today, it is pertinent to remind that none of them have done anything of real note to protect the countless Indian young children in slavery – as miners, carpet weaver, factory and above all in forced prostitution and all manner of dangerous work. Sai Baba never once so much as mentioned the problem… it as if he was completely out of touch with the sufferings of the millions of victims of the most heinous criminality. Surrounded by yea-sayers and worshippers in the luxury of his apartments and virtual palaces, he was a willing prisoner of his own fawning and sycophantic court, claiming to know absolutely everything about everybody into the bargain! Despite his repeated and enormous boasts about how he would solve India’s problems (then, when completed, those of the entire world) he left India in just about as parlous, corrupt and calamitous a state as ever with mounting unsolved life-threatening problems it faces today.