With less than a week to go before the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to India , mainstream and social media conversations on the subject have centred on what the summit meeting could mean for bilateral ties, prospects for a trade deal, security questions, and a fixation on guesstimating the likely strength of the crowds that will attend. However thrilling the optics may be, or however sparkling the personal chemistry between Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is worth remembering that in the longest arc of cooperation between the world’s oldest and largest democracies it is not only governments that matter but people-to-people relations.
In this context, there are many signs of organic convergence that has happened in recent decades, including the spread of the classic, consumer-focused, consumption-driven models of Western capitalism seeping into every pore of Indian culture and, conversely, the proliferation of yoga, Indian cuisine and lifestyle habits getting transmitted from the subcontinent to the U.S.
Yet there are still points of dissonance that become evident now and again, often quite controversially. One such source of cultural friction that I encountered and reported on more than once during my time as The Hindu ’s U.S. correspondent goes to the very heart of each country’s value system: parenting. Almost with clockwork regularity, every few years an Indian immigrant family in the U.S. would find themselves in a crisis after the courts or social services took their children into protective custody or arrested a parent on suspicions of abuse towards a child.
In several cases that I reported on, the troubles began during a doctor’s visit, ostensibly a routine matter from the perspective of the parents. Typically, the physician would identify medical symptoms that raised a red flag according to a predetermined list of objective criteria for potential cases of abuse. One example is retinal damage, which is consistent with ‘shaken baby syndrome’. After interviewing the parents, separately and together, and potentially interviewing the child without the parents present, the physician would, perhaps along with a social worker, draw up a report testifying to the possibility of abuse.
At this point the case would usually enter a grey area depending on the specific reason for the injuries given by the parents. In one case that I examined, the father and mother were on the same page as they described how their child had been taken away from them by hospital staff after they reported head injuries that the child had suffered after falling off a bed. In another case a child reported a tibia fracture while engaged in play with a parent, yet a lack of consistency between the parents’ accounts regarding how the accident occurred led to suspicions that resulted in the father facing criminal charges and a ban on meeting his family.
In each of these cases the biggest challenge as a reporter was to remain, in the absence of overwhelming evidence or a conviction by a court, neutral in the sense of not taking the parents’ side or backing the host country government’s position. While I‘d like to think that The Hindu ’s U.S. reportage held firm to this standard, to this day I have not figured out whether the authorities in each case were being overzealous, or whether the tenets of “Indian-style parenting” were strongly at odds with a more universal conception of child rights.
