India is on horseback
Pepsi-Cola in one hand, clutching condom in another
Third armed with Rampuri knife, in fourth the 'Hari Om' banner
What a seductive, dashing fellow, India on horseback.
– Ashtabhuja Shukla in Bharat ghode par sabar hai
New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA) falls in the territory of Uttar Pradesh and is administered from Lucknow. But for all practical purposes, it is an extension of the New Delhi metropolis. This teeming township is the brainchild of Sanjay Gandhi, enfant terrible of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. He conceived Noida as an urban cluster that would take the "immigrant load" off the stately boulevards of New Delhi.
At the height of his megalomania, during the years of dreaded Emergency (1975-1977), Sanjay initiated a brutal beautification drive to free the Indian capital of what he called "filth". He wanted the streets of New Delhi safe for his People's Car. Though he failed to produce a single piece of his pet vehicle, the ideology that he let loose has begun to canter. Consumerism, chauvinism, criminality and communalism are the four arms of the monster astride the horse called Growth – with an upper-case G, as in Globalisation. This beast tramples over the weak, the marginalised, the poor and the differently-abled, even as its rider gloats over the devastation it has wrought in its wake. The village of Nithari on the outskirts of Noida is a testimony to the cruelties of this brute (see accompanying story, "Questions about Nithari").
It is tempting to dismiss the horrors of Nithari as an aberration. It is even more convenient to make a scapegoat of the culprits. Explanations of personal pathology have the strange effect of transforming perpetrators of grisly crimes into victims of human failings. But the ease with which Moninder Singh Pandher and his servant Surender Koli are accused of engaging in horrifying acts of molestation and murder of children is a symptom of a much deeper malaise, a social disease slowly eating into the innards of Southasian society. It is dreadfully difficult to describe a devil, and superstitiously dangerous to name it; but call it 'Sezophilia', as in paedophilia, to understand its nature. Sezophilia claims many victims as it matures, but it begins to devour migrants from the moment its initial symptoms manifest.