Daily News Channel
A journalist hurled a shoe at the Indian home minister, apparently in anger over his Congress party fielding a leader who had been accused of leading anti-Sikh riots in New Delhi in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984.
The spectacle in India is riveting: virulent anti-Muslim diatribes spouted by a pedigreed and ambitious young Hindu politician who shares the surname of the world’s foremost apostle of non-violence and who is descended from the Prime Minister who founded modern India as a secular state to serve the country’s multiplicity of faiths. Since early March, Varun Gandhi, 29, has been the scandal of India’s political class after he called for, among many things, the hands of Muslims to be cut off if they are raised against Hindus, their throats to be slashed, their population to be culled by strict birth control. His words triggered India’s stringent National Security Act, and for days the young Gandhi was a fugitive from the law
Babies lie side by side in warming beds or sprawled on blankets atop crude wooden tables. Children with wounds and broken bones are carried in by their parents to wait on stiff plastic chairs. Outside, coughing youngsters squat on the pavement with their anxious families, waiting for care