Robert De Niro personally invited her to attend.

Some people claim they don’t exist. Others want to ignore them. In reality, there are thousands of kidnapped children forced to beg each day from sunrise to sunset for their gang masters’ profits in India. Who is the Beggar Mafia? In 2008, the movie Slumdog Millionaire stunned the world with its portrayal of the “Beggar Mafia” in India. The film was marketed as a “feel-good” flick, but also served to expose the plight of children forced into service of the beggar mafia. The movie was nominated for 10 Oscars and won four Golden Globes, but has been largely forgotten. The “Beggar Mafia”  operates across all major cities in India, where it kidnaps young children, even stealing newborns from hospitals, to raise and train them to beg on the streets. The money the children collect is then forcibly taken and put into the pockets of the leaders of criminal gangs. It’s an extremely lucrative business, with yearly profits estimated at 1.8 crore, equal to $215,499. Police statistics put the number of abducted children in India at 44,000 per year, but other sources have put the number as high as one million. There are 18 million “street children” in India, the highest number of any country in the world. After their abduction, children are often forcibly made into addicts, to drugs, alcohol, or both, while the gang masters control their supply to ensure compliance and obedience. Other tactics used by gangs to control the children include torture, beatings, and starvation. When the children are no longer useful, or become too ill to even beg, they are abandoned and left to die. The beggar mafias often maim the children as well to garner more sympathy from passersby so that the children earn more money. The maiming can include (but is not limited to) disfigurement with acid, the closure of veins with stitches to bring about gangrene, and forced amputation of healthy limbs. The sole purpose of this barbarity? To elicit sympathy from people so that more money is offered to the beggars and therefore ends up in the pockets of the beggar mafia masters. Critics Some critics branded the film Slumdog Millionaire as “poverty porn,” claiming it unfairly displayed the poverty-stricken side of India, which has worked hard to portray itself as an economic superpower. Some have also said that because India is, as they claim, a modern economic superpower, the barbarities shown in the film were outdated and provided a backward look at a part of the country that doesn’t exist anymore. The film aside, some have flat-out claimed beggar mafias don’t exist at all, but that they are “McDonaldised” myths conjured up by the middle class out of entitlement and a need for moral superiority over a lesser class.  Still others, including the Indian government, lean toward ignoring the problem altogether because of the country’s desire to be seen as an economic superpower. Beggar mafias and street children don’t support that image.    Indian Election and Government Response Complaints to the Indian police are often futile. At least one-fourth of the children abducted are never recovered and police are also often in the pockets of the beggar mafia. “There is collusion between lawmakers and lawbreakers,” child rights activist Swami Agnivesh says. (READ MORE: INDIA’S ONTOLOGICAL QUESTION: REGIONAL OR GLOBAL) The most recent elections in India, resulting in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election for a third consecutive term and also resulting in his party’s loss of the majority in the Lok Sabha, do not bode well for the economy in India. Their stock market suffered its biggest crash since 2020 and concerns have been raised about Modi’s ability to continue his pro-business agenda. Though one of the fastest growing in the world, India’s expanding economy has been unable to reach the enslaved beggars and most destitute citizens, a trend that will undoubtedly continue after the most recent election. There is also a shocking deficit in the number of quality jobs to match the large population in which economic inequality and corruption, as seen with the police and the beggar mafias, are growing. Modi’s third term will likely be accompanied by compromise and changes in economic policies, for good or for ill, because of the loss of the parliamentary majority. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the beggar children will find relief from the political changes and will continue to be India’s invisible citizens, forgotten by all for the sake of a “superpower-level” economy.  The post The Beggar Mafia — A People India Hopes the Rest of the World Will Forget appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Occasionally, the historical narrative will dabble in fairytales, usually at the intersection of knowable facts and unknowable mystery. Those stories are important not because they’re factual, but because they’re part of a nation’s story about itself. The story of Frederick Barbarossa, the man who made Germany great again, is just this kind of historical narrative. (READ MORE: The Mother of Invention) Barbarossa was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1152 because he was the most obvious pick for the job — not necessarily because he was the best man. But as sometimes happens with monarchs, it was a lucky pick. The red-bearded German was not just stereotypically charismatic and quick-tempered, he was also a brilliant political and military strategist — gifts that mattered in the complex political landscape of medieval Europe. Germany, at the time a scattered collection of semi-autonomous states ruled by petty lords with a penchant for quarrels involving pikes, was just a minor headache compared to Europe at large. The Concordat of Worms had effectively ended the Investiture Controversy the year Barbarossa was born and had left imperial power weakened in Europe. But Barbarossa wasn’t the kind of man who makes a weak emperor and had every intention of building out the Holy Roman Empire as he saw fit — an intention that put him at odds with the Pope. He earned his name, Barbarossa (red beard), not from his German subjects (who loved him) but from the Italians he campaigned against while building his empire. The threats to a European Holy Roman Empire weren’t limited to warring lords and the occasionally unfavorable pontiffs. The empire — the embodiment of Christendom — was also threatened by Muslim forces in the Middle East who threatened to overwhelm Constantinople and cross into Eastern Europe. (READ MORE: The Time Prison Was an Effective Campaign Strategy) Barbarossa, with his charismatic attitude and his brilliant military instincts, was the obvious choice to lead a crusade, and he was eager to do it. But, he never quite made it to Constantinople. The story goes that Barbarossa stopped to take a drink from the Saleph river in Armenia and slipped and drowned under the weight of his armor on June 10, 1190. There are enough holes in the story that even historians don’t quite believe it. (How does a man who spent his entire life in armor just slip and drown? It seems unlikely at best.) Neither did Germans at the time. They were never quite sure that Barbarossa had died. (READ MORE: Where Are All the Airships?) Instead, the legend goes, that Barbarossa sits half asleep in a castle somewhere, his famous red beard growing through a crack in the table in front of him. Now and then he opens his eyes to ask a boy to check if the ravens are still winging their path around the castle’s turrets. When the antichrist comes and the end of the world is nearly on us, the ravens will leave and Barbarossa will rise from his slumber. The post The Man, The Myth, The Legend appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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