by SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA
So, this is how the borders of the Republic of India are also defended. With sticks, ropes and bluetooth enabled mobile phones. Eight soldiers of the Border Security Force, hold down a young Bangladeshi man accused of cattle smuggling. He is stripped naked, hogtied and then thrashed. He screams in agony and humiliation. The soldiers act as if they are out on a picnic. They discuss whether or not to give him some tea. Where to hurt him, on which body parts. How big a stick to use on him. Someone says “cut his ear off”. They stroll casually around him as he is humiliated. They laugh. He cries, as people usually do in these circumstances, and seems to call for his mother. Someone, probably one of the soldiers, records it all on video, on the 9th of December, 2010, somewhere along the Indo-Bangladesh border in Murshidabad, West Bengal
I am not embedding the video, which is as of now, still available on Youtube and circulating through Facebook Forwards because I feel the images it contains are a little too disturbing to upload on a blog like Kafila. However, all you have to do to see it is to type ‘INDIA: Violence by the BSF at Murshidabad” in the Youtube search bar. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
If you do access the footage online I urge you to remember that this video was taken with the express intention of humiliating the man who is shown being beaten. It is my request that readers of Kafila, and anyone else who comes across this text (and I can do nothing other than request here) refrain from doing anything that might add to the Bangladeshi man’s humiliation while they watch the footage, if they choose to open the link.
The soundtrack you hear is chilling. One of the BSF men, perhaps the man who is filming, (because his voice sounds like it is closest to the recording device), says, “don’t give him tea in our utensils, and wash it out, if he uses it. The sisterfucker, eats cows, the motherfucker”.
One of the other soldiers, he is one of those doing the actual thrashing, asks the person filming to make sure that he has him on camera as he humiliates their captive. He and another soldier pose, like hunters with a trophy. One of them plants one well-shod foot on the prone, naked man. The soldier who asks to be photographed, makes another request to the man doing the filming. He wants it ‘bluetoothed’ to him. And so it goes on. And on. The recording lasts five minutes.
It is alleged that the man was tortured because he refused to pay the soliders at the BSF picket a bribe. If this is true then it becomes especially interesting to observe that the torturer-in-chief, who is so piously offended at beef-eating that he wants anything that touches the offender’s body to be ‘cleansed’ after contact is so eager to take a bribe that he has no moral compunction in unleashing (as punishment) a little bit of non-consensual recreational (for him and his mates) sadism on the side when he is refused one. Is this the kind of sophisticated and nuanced moral sense that prevails amongst responsible members of our security forces stationed at the border?
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)