RedHanded - In Conversation with Sonia Faleiro: The Good Girls

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

In May 2014, the bodies of 2 teenage girls were found hanging from a tree in the Budaun district of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India. It was reported that the girls had been victims of a gang rape. This story sparked scandal and rage across the nation - but there were serious questions raised about the truth of what had occurred - author and journalist Sonia Faleiro spent four long years investigating the case, talking to relatives, the police, and even the accused... We had the amazing opportunity to speak with Sonia about her book The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, which details her investigation and the events that took place. We also had the chance to pick her brains on the wider religious, societal and cultural problems plaguing the women and girls of India. The full video version of this interview is available for all $10+ Patrons at patreon.com/redhanded Sonia's book The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is available on Amazon via this link.  Follow Sonia on Twitter and on Instagram.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, guys. Please do not be alarmed by the dark circles around my eyes. I haven't been fighting. We're just working really hard. And one of the things we are working really hard on is the interview you're about to watch slash listen to where we spoke to Sonia Falero about her brand new book The Good Girls. Sonia's incredible. I want to be her when I grow up

so have a good watch and listen. Welcome to Sonia. Thank you so much for joining us here today. We are interviewing renowned journalist and author Sonia, who's here with us right now, this second. Some of Sonia's most notable works include The Girl, Beautiful Thing Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, and 13 Men. Sonia, welcome. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you for having me. And we are delighted to have you here Sonia today to discuss your most recent book and I think dare I say most powerful probably because you've written about 10 books in total but I think this one felt very impactful when we read it. Everyone here at Red Handed was a huge fan

and it covers the heartbreaking cases of Padma and Lali, for which Sonia spent, and I was like blown away to read this in the author's notes of the book, that you had spent four years on the ground in Uttar Pradesh, tirelessly interviewing every single person that you could speak to who was even remotely involved with this case. And yeah, please, Sonia, if you could tell us a was even remotely involved with this case and uh yeah please Sonia if you could tell us a little bit about the book and we don't want to give everything away but tell us a bit about the case and about the book so you know in uh May 2014 um I was in London scrolling through Twitter as as one does and I came across the most shocking image, which was of two children, two little girls, hanging from a tree. It was clearly a tree in a village.

And at the base of the tree, there were some women who appeared to be guarding the bodies of the children. The rumor that was circulating on Twitter and which later migrated to the front pages of the newspapers and to every cable TV news channel was that the children, who I would go on to call Padma and Lalli, because under Indian law, victims of certain crimes can't be named. Padma and Lalli had reportedly been captured while they had gone to the fields abutting their village. They went to the fields to use the toilet. They had then been raped, killed, and then hanged by dominant caste men. So by dominant caste,

we don't mean an upper caste, we mean a caste that is more powerful. It may be of the same caste as that of the victim's family. But you know, there was no proof, right, because the event had, the tragedy had just happened. It had happened that morning. A reporter in that village, which is a village called Katra Sadatganj in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, had taken a picture, put it on Facebook, migrated to Twitter. So there was no way anyone could have known actually what had happened to the children. But because crimes like this happened to people all the time, had happened to the children. But because crimes like this happened to people all the time, they happened to children, it was so believable. And that

rumour became fact. I believed it and I responded like everybody else responded, which was with just a rage. You know, it had not been two years since the 2012 Delhi bus rape, which, of course, we all remember. A young medical student, who I also cannot name, had boarded a bus in Delhi, the national capital, at about 9 p.m. You know, so plenty of traffic, plenty of people. And she boarded a bus with a friend after watching The Life of Pi. And the bus was not a public bus. It was six men who were cruising the national capital looking for victims. And they raped her, they tortured her, and they threw her from the bus. And she died a few days later in a hospital bed in Singapore. And, you know, that case, it changed everything because there had been crimes against women before, of course, right,

as there are, sadly, all over the world. But this was the first time in my memory that I felt like I knew the victim because of how she had been covered by the media. I knew everything about her. I felt like this is somebody I knew, this is somebody who could be me. And I was processing it.

And I was still processing it in 2014. So when I saw the picture of these children, I thought, what is this country? Who are we? Who are these people? Why is nobody catching them? And I had wanted to write a book about this because I'd grown up in Delhi expecting to be sexually assaulted. You know, it was always... It was going to happen to me. I knew it.

I knew it like a lot of young women who grow up in places like India. It didn't. But I just... I couldn't wrap my head around this, you know? And so I thought, well, this is a case, the case of the children, Padma and Lali, that should be in this book that I am planning to write. And because it was so-called, you know, open and shut,

and because I had spent the last few years untangling a variety of really, really complicated cases, there was almost like a sense of relief that, okay, the work has been done. We know who did it. And I couldn't go there right away. But I did make it to India on the first anniversary of the children's deaths. So in May 2015. And my plan was, you know, I spent a week here. So I fly down from London to Delhi, drive from Delhi to western Uttar Pradesh, the district is called Badanyu, so that's six hours, and then my hotel was about two hours from the village.

So then I drove, you know, went to the hotel and then drove to the village. And I mean, I just expected to take these interviews, go home, come back to London at the end of the week, and then proceed with my book. And there was just something about this village. There's this seemingly bucolic little village with its houses and its fields and the cattle and on one side the river Ganga. It's just that and the fact that some people were not saying anything to me and that some people were just repeating the same thing over and over again, and that I was kind of being followed by family members, not in an intimidating way at all, but, you know, in a way that had an impact on what others said, just made me feel like, look, I am not confident, you know. Yeah, sure,

I can write about this book, write about this case, but I'm not confident. And this is after the case had been investigated. You know, so I was faced with the choice of, look, kind of just go back to London and figure out next steps, which would mean, you know, looking for another case, which frankly, you know, and tragically, under the circumstances would not have been difficult. But in India, because of you know how systems work or do not work right from the time that a victim is discovered to the time it goes to trial the mistakes are always the same so therefore as a reporter you are always confronted with the same challenges so yeah I could have left this complicated story, but every story is as challenging. You know, I mean, writing true crime in India is, it is like climbing a mountain in flip-flops, you know, it is super, super hard. You know, it is a classic case of, no, I don't have my investigation notes because the mice ate them. I mean, that is literally what somebody once said to me. So, you know, I just thought, well, why don't I just try and understand, you know, the

case had been investigated, but why don't I try and understand what happened to the children, and who they were, and what their village is like, and how this happened. Two kids hanging from a tree. How does this happen? And that's what I set out to do. Wow. And there is so much there to unpick that you've immediately said that springs out to Hannah and I. We covered, as our listeners will know, the Delhi rape case or the Nirbhaya case last year. And it was one that I think a lot of people weren't as aware of the details of that case. And I think especially if you are from outside of that region, geographically speaking, culturally speaking, while I think it is quite a unifying experience for a lot of women to feel that their own sexual assault is almost inevitable to some extent,

because that's what society has told us. I think there is a difference in India when it comes to, and this is something you explore so well in your book, The Good Girls, is the humanitarian crisis that is violence against women in India. And it is the cultural issues, it's the caste system, it's the religious aspects, it's the religious aspects, it's the politics, and it's the judicial system. Sonia, after you saw all that you saw, and knowing and understanding the country of India and the crisis that's there, do you have hope for women in India? Because I feel like to write true crime, to write the books that you do you you have to be somewhat hopeful so where does that hope come from is it there and where does it come from when you've seen some of these evils so up close you know on the one hand when um you go to a village

like Katra you know I mean uh Katra village uh some would say it's remote and isolated, but it's not really, right? I mean, it has a private school, which you would call a public school here, a small little private school that you pay a good amount of money to send your kids to. They learn math, they learn English, they learn science. And Padmanlali had gone to that private school. In addition to that private school, there was a government school. So government schools in India, they're free. And one way that they encourage parents to send their children is by providing a hot midday meal to the kids. So in

a place like Katra, and many places in India, the promise of a hot meal is very, very enticing, right? So you have a village with two schools. It even has a little police chowki and an outpost with five police officers. It's got a, you know, a bustling bazaar. Everybody in the village uses cell phones. So you could, on the one hand, say, you know, this is modern India. And modern India is, you know, is a place of enormous advancement in compared to, you know, even the generation before. Padma and Lalli knew how to use phones. They knew how to make calls, take calls, send and receive messages. Their

parents could have a phone, they could take calls, and if you told them what buttons to press, they could make calls. See, the difference in one generation is enormous, and the difference in the ambition and the hopes are also enormous. So although Padma and Lali's parents did not have an education, they wanted their children to know how to speak English. And this is something to be very proud of and to feel great optimism about. But the fact is that the education in those schools was not sufficient to teach the children how to read and write so that it could become a part of any job they had. It just wasn't that

good of an education. And their parents, although they wanted to educate them, they also wanted to marry them by the time they were 18, which meant taking them out of school by the time they were 16 and so by once the children were married the girls they followed the same trajectory of their mother's lives which means sitting at home covering your face sitting beneath your husband's which means you know if the husband is sitting on a charpoy, the wife is sitting below on the floor. It means shutting yourself out from the world. Your world is one of women. And your world is one where your conversations and your ideas are restricted. And that world obviously becomes smaller and smaller, right? So there is so much to be hopeful about, but because some of the old ways remain entrenched, and one of the reasons all those old ways remain entrenched is because mothers

and fathers fear for their daughters. They believe that if they do not marry their girls off, their girls will be considered loose, and then they will be raped. That is literally what some people believe, that marriage offers a woman protection. So the idea that, you know, actually one really good way of protecting a woman is by making her independent. Educating her, allowing her to get a job, allowing her to be free, allowing her to make those choices is not something that people think about because they see India as a scary place for girls and for women. They are scared, you scared. So even as India becomes more modern, it remains violent because the fear is everywhere.

So women are not given the opportunities and they're not equipped to do the things that they might, to leave a village, to support themselves financially, to go to the police and complain. If you are afraid to even open your mouth in the presence of a man, your own father, because he's a man, then how are you going to ever speak up when somebody does something terrible to you? You can't, you know. And having said that, so then, you know, then one might say, well, that means you're not

hopeful. And yet for me to say that, it would mean to discount the work of so many amazing women in India. I mean, the most amazing women, I mean, women in villages in Uttar Pradesh are running their own newspaper. Your viewers and your listeners can look it up. It's called Khabar Lahariya. It is a newspaper run by rural women. They report it. They edit it. They publish it. It's a BFD, you know. So if I say to you, yeah, I'm feeling hopeless, then I'm telling you, yeah, whatever Khabar Lahariya is doing is nothing and it's not they're awesome all the women fighting in rural areas in in the countryside as activists as local politicians as moms daughters wives whatever they want want to call themselves you know they are being let down but the fight is

going on so yeah of course you know you you have to be hopeful we're all such enormous fans of you having been sent your book everyone on the team has read it and we've been talking about you for about a week and um we've also consumed basically all of the interviews you've done and something that you say um that's come up a few times in the stuff we've we've read and listened to that you've done um is that when you're writing about you know people who live in a particular British or people who exist outside your own realm of existence you don't share personal experiences with them you find yourself editing out your voice more than you would usually um and you've said before that you're very conscious about your the privilege

that you may have with your own observations impacting upon a story did you find that with the good girls as well so one of the reasons i don't share information with people who i'm interviewing is because they don't ask it is fascinating and frankly great for me that nobody finds journalists interesting and nobody gives a shit. You know, like, oh, you've come from London, who cares? I mean, oh, you're married, not married, you have a kid, a dog, no one cares. So they don't ask, you know. So literally they're like, okay, so what's your name? Where are you from?

And never does it go beyond that. So, you know, I, like, what do I say? At what point do I just start volunteering information when it's clear there is no appetite? And, you know, fair enough. That obviously works for me because there is a huge, huge gap, right, between where I'm from and where the people are. And the challenge is, look, I can look beyond it. To me, it doesn't exist because I am a reporter

chasing a story, right? That's all. I'm just focusing on the story. My concern is that the people that I am talking to will be distracted by who I am and by that gap. And that will somehow affect how they view me, how they respond to me. So that is the only thing that concerns me you know and I find that even that goes away if I'm comfortable in my environment if I'm professional if I'm respectful that just that it's just me doing my job and the people that I'm talking to just responding to my questions. And everything is kind of OK from from there. And as I'm just fascinated by your career as like journalist and author and you just bridge that gap so beautifully. And what you've managed to do throughout your career is become a voice for millions of voiceless and silenced oppressed women in India who live

on the margins of society. Can you describe the pressure you felt to tell the story correctly? Because if you're representing to a certain extent a group of oppressed women that that's a lot to take on. Yeah you know I mean the thing is I just don't think of anybody as a group of anything right so if you're just talking about one person that that's it that's all they are I mean that is more than they have to be right I mean nobody we don't need to be spokesmen or spokeswomen for groups of people. Obviously, where we come from and influences our life, right? Our social conditions, our economic conditions, the politics, the citizenship, gender, race, so on and so forth. But ultimately, when I write about people, I just write about them as individuals. And the choices that they make

and the lives they live are really just theirs. So I don't feel, I feel the pressure to be accurate, to be honest. I try to be empathetic, but my fidelity is towards the truth. And I just don't focus on anything else. And I think what makes The Good Girls the story that it is, is because it is the story of these two kids, right? Padma and Lalli. Yeah, I mean, everything that happens with the investigation is really the story of modern India. It tells you how, you know, everything is kind of just falling apart, like the whole facade of a booming economy,

of a fast-moving country of modern ideas. It's just a facade behind it. Things are just, like, they're crumbling. It's like a, I don't know, an ant's castle. But really, it is the story of two kids. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who?

I just sent you her profile. Check out her place in the Hamptons. Huh. Fancy. She's a big carbon tax supporter, yeah? Oh, yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah. Higher taxes. Carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party.

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which is calling out a lot of people who you feel are involved in this humanitarian crisis of violence against women in India. Hannah and I, we don't fear being hyper-political on Red Handed or to call out any and all politicians, Modi included, quite regularly gets blasted on Red Handed. And I guess one of the questions we have for you as somebody who was writing this book that you knew would hopefully get a lot of attention after it was done. Were there trepidations for you on the potential repercussions of calling out the BJP party, calling out Modi? And did that cross your mind? How did you deal with that? I've been critical of Prime Minister Modi since he stood for elections at the national level in 2014,

with op-eds that I wrote in various places, including the New York Times, talking about Modi's relationship with marginalized communities, with women, and indeed with the truth and really felt the force of the party's commitment to undermining the truth, to attacking critics, and to spreading disinformation. You know, a very casual Google search that I wouldn't encourage you to make because, you know, your eyes will bleed, would show you the kind of disinformation

that's been spread about me, my family, my politics, my income. I wish I had all that money. You know I would not be writing for a living if I was as rich as they claim. But, you know, so this is a standard tactic for the party. It's a standard tactic of authoritarian regimes. I mean, one of the things that we know about Prime Minister Modi is that he's not original. He's not the first.

These tactics are taking place in Russia. He's not the first. These tactics are taking place in Russia, they're happening in China. I mean, we can go back to Germany. It is the same playbook. What do you do? You can look the other way. But a person like this, you know, eventually they'll come for you. Even if you if today you applaud them, tomorrow they'll come for you anyway. So, you know, it is so much more preferable to me as a journalist, obviously, but just as a human being. Isn't it like the basic responsibility of a human being to call out somebody who is responsible for the level of distress over a period of decades of violence is it is my duty and you know I mean what are you going to do this is the only way this is the only way there is there is no other way as as far as I am concerned have you faced any in real life repercussions so obviously um I hate to say that I have seen the things that

they have written and the things that have been said obviously it's whatever um but say when you've gone back to India has have there been issues for you I mean like at the border have they done anything I watched um a documentary by Al Jazeera in search of India's soul, which was focusing on the kind of rise of power, rise to power that Modi had. And I've forgotten the name of the journalist, but a New York Times journalist, I believe, who they just revoked his overseas citizen of India passport. He can't go back to India now. They've essentially barred him from entering. Have you felt anything like that in terms of when you've gone there? Or is this an online cyber attack they're waging against you? You know, these things often make the transition from the virtual world to the real world. So,

for example, I recently wrote a piece in Time magazine about a comic. This is what India has come to, a comic. 29-year-old comic named Munawar Faruqi, a marvellous young man, a real rags-to-riches Indian dream, son of a driver, who rose to become one of the most popular stand-up comics in India. You know, it never happens, because an India caste just keeps you frozen in your place of birth. And he managed to transcend that. This guy received death threats.

They threatened to rape the women in his family. I can't even tell you who the women in his family are, because for security reasons. So they threatened to rape the women in his family on the streets. And this was online. Then they filed police cases against him, which is the new thing that's happening in India. They do an online assault, and you think, well, this is just them being them

because it's been normalized. It's been happening since 2014. So it's standard. But at the same time, they do it in, quote unquote, real life. So this guy had two police cases against him in 2019, I believe, 2020, I'm sorry. And this year, in January 2021, while he was set to perform a set, the police picked him up and threw him into jail, took several of his associates as well, because of a joke that he had made the previous year on YouTube. I mean, it doesn't even make sense. And this is, of course, you know, this story is relevant because the people who came after him were the Hindu nationalists. So this is exactly

what is happening. He sat in jail for more than a month. He had to appeal to the Supreme Court. Never does this happen anywhere in the world. You know, in the US, the Supreme Court is looking at healthcare for the nation. In India, the Supreme Court is answering the question of whether a man who cracked a joke incited religious hatred. What is this? And so it's sort of a two-pronged attack now. And, you know, it's every day. If you go into social media, if you go to Twitter, Indian Twitter

if you are there every single day it is a roster of the latest arrests you know so there is our brains our mind is being demanded control of.

And those of us who, and I'm sitting in London, so, you know, I'm free, right? I am a person of immense privilege. Think of the reporters in India reporting right now from a place like Uttar Pradesh, where your thoughts are now being policed you know you say what you think and that's it you have committed sedition which is an actual crime you think it's out of the film no so this is it it does sound like it's exactly I'm sure the opening of about a boy there's some joke that's cracked about being a stand-up comedian in a country where you're not allowed to laugh. And that is astonishing that that's actually happening.

It was just a joke about Hindu gods or the religion. guess the the way we try to explain it to people who maybe aren't totally aware of Modi or what that what that party stands for is you know when you talk about the religious right in America when you have the white very privileged wealthy white mostly evangelical Christian who feel persecuted who feel like everybody else getting a stake is somehow wearing away their privilege and their rage at that and their their desire to continue the oppression of other people because they feel like privilege is or equality is some sort of zero-sum game from which if it's taken from them it's being taken from them to give to somebody else and the way we try to explain it is the BJP party and Modi are the same in terms of but think of them for the for the dominant upper caste Hindus and that's who they are there to

represent absolutely and men even among the dominant upper caste you know it's only the men who who ultimately matter I keep thinking about this um part of The Good Girls where you had to essentially watch a post-mortem. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was like, like an autopsy? So, you know, the children were found hanging in the tree the morning after they disappeared. And when their mother saw them at about 4.30 or so, they immediately sat down under the tree and they said, we're not moving because if we move, the police will take the bodies away. And we all know what happens with the police.

There's always a post-mortem that reveals nothing, a cursory investigation of that, and then the matter is closed. Somebody or the other is blamed or not blamed, but the matter is closed. So the mothers of Padma and Lalli were very conscious of this fact. So they sat down and protected the bodies of their children with their own body. And that meant that, you know, basically a day passed, you know, and there was a lot happening in the mango orchard. Dozens of TV stations, crews descended, politicians, villagers, family, friends,

well, not helicopters that day, but cars drove all the way right up to the orchard. It was just a free-for-all and in the midst the two children in May in Uttar Pradesh it is so hot that sometimes you know you feel like you can't breathe or you're breathing under a very heavy moist moist blanket. So in that 40 degree plus temperature, the children stayed up. And finally, the bodies were taken down. And they were finally put in a car, and they were off to go to the so-called post-mortem house, which is where autopsies are conducted. Just as the van with the children was leaving,

the favourite politician of the family showed up, and the family absolutely refused the van to move. So they took the key out from the driver's seat, and with the driver still sitting in the seat of the van with the children, pushed the van back. And in all that jostling on the uneven road, the bodies fell out. One of the bodies fell out. So you have, you know, the time, the heat, whatever injuries that body might have sustained as a result of the fall. And then finally the bodies go to the post-mortem house, which is a room in a buffalo field with train tracks. And much later on, the federal investigators looked at the case, and they described the gentleman who performed the post-mortem, his name is Lala Rang, as a sweeper who did his

work with a butcher's knife. And, you know, I thought, yeah, okay, that is just offensive. You know, okay, so he's not your kind of fancy city doctor, but he's still doing the best job he can. There's no reason to be rude. So I asked permission from the hospital to watch Lala Ram perform a post-mortem. So one day when I was in Badai, Lala Ram called me and he said, look, a man has fallen under the wheels of his own tractor. He died. I'm going to look at the body. So if you want to just hurry up and come

along. And so when I reached this room in the field of buffaloes, I went to it, and it was, there was nobody in it. You know, it looked like, just like it was deserted. There were cobwebs, the furniture was literally broken, and there was a bed which had clearly been used at some point for postmortems. So I looked for Lala Ram, and he was in the backyard. And there was this old metal table that had apparently been built by the British. And there were the trees and the trees were full of, you know, coying birds. And there was Lala Ram in his undershirt and his slippers with some knives and hammer. And the young man, know there's a poor young man who just died

and then at the by lala ram's feet there was a bucket so he was you know doing what he knew and then dropping things in the bucket this was a plastic bucket and uh the flies descended, of course. Again, Uttar Pradesh, heat, blood, outdoors. And flies covering this young man, flies covering the blood and Lalaram. And so I'm covering all of this. I'm watching, recording it. And then at the end of it, Lalaram just takes those your knives

and goes to the bottom of the garden washes the knives washes his hands and then that is it you know you're so brave i don't think i'd be able to handle that you know it it it it made me ill yeah you know uh something happens when uh i mean it made me ill uh look lala ram was a sweeper and he was uh he had got that job because a vacancy had fallen and the previous individual doing that job was also a sweeper, and there are not enough trained people to conduct autopsies in India because it is considered an unclean task. So people who belong to higher castes have traditionally refrained from doing it. So it has become a job that has been associated with lower caste people or so-called outcasts,

the Dalits. And that says maybe, but they are still not trained. So you have Lala Ram doing the job the best he knew, the way it had always been done. And he's a nice guy. Lalaram is a nice guy,

but Lalaram bought his knives from the vegetable market. The weighing machines where he weighs the body parts, also from the vegetable market. Hammer, thread, everything. They're not actually medical instruments. And Lalaram, like many of the people I encountered they're not actually medical instruments you know and Lalaram like many of the people I encountered in the course of working on this case

was just doing the best job he knew he really did the best job he could he didn't mean the children any harm but this is the best job and that's what you get, you know? I think that is one of the most important points, isn't it? Is that the impact of the cultural and caste system that flows through into the judicial system.

So the fact that there aren't enough trained pathologists there to do postmortems because it's seen as an unclean job. I mean, it tells you so much about the justice system and what can actually be done with that. And I think one of the key points sticking to that culture aspect that we discussed when we covered the Nirbhaya case in particular was talking about the men, the men's role in what happens to women in particular, and with these children as well. In India, Sonia, how much hope do you have for cultural change when it comes to the mindsets of men there, to become the arbiters of change to save the futures of their mothers, of their sisters, of their daughters. Is that too reductive a way to look at it, that we should look to men

to change their mindsets in order for women to be saved? Or is that something that just needs to happen? And do you have hope that that can happen? I mean, think about the father of the victim of the 2012 Delhi bus rape. He was an airport porter. He and his wife understood, they grasped very early on their daughter's love of education, of school. And they put her through school. They encouraged her to study. He worked double shifts to pay for a good education for her. And then he sold land. That never, ever happens. Land is the most precious resource that anybody can hope to have in India. You have a tiny little parcel of land, you know, you can barely just swing a cap there, but it is everything. It is, you know, your status in society. He sold

it. And what happened to his child? And then you think of Lalli's father or Padma's father, who also come from Uttar Pradesh, in a similar area, they have a similar background. And they also adored their daughters, of course, you know. But they did not believe that girls should be educated beyond a point. They did not encourage their children to even talk to other kids. They were so concerned about matters of honor. And what happened to their children?

You know, so it's men in their individual capacity, in, I would say, isolated, you know, little groups, are doing what they can or doing the best they know. But it's like the forces are against everybody. You know, it's against those who do their best. And it's against those who are not trying particularly hard. But it's everywhere. So that what we need is, you know, we need a cultural shift. So you need, for example, a huge, you know, a huge investment in some sort of a social public campaign that is going to educate people about gender equality. Then you need to give people incentives. You know, so for example, a very good incentive to send children to school is the hot meal.

But that ceases to be a good incentive or an incentive at all when children start dying because somebody put insecticide by mistake in the food, which happens in India. Or if there are insects, literally live insects in the food, which happens in Katra, Sadatganj, where Padmanalali lived.

Another really great incentive to educate your children until they grow up, all the way into adulthood, is to provide girls with bicycles. It's been done in some parts of India very successfully. Provide them with laptops. Again, it's been done successfully. So you need, number one, to educate, number two, to provide incentives, number three, you need to punish. You know, if people think that they can do what they want, because a child is property, and therefore, you know, it's my cycle, my table, my cornfield, and my daughter, then, you know, that's not going to work. So we need a justice system that exists not only in laws, but also exists in how, you know,

in how people are treated. So, you know, people should actually have a fear of the law, which they don't, because altogether the system doesn't work. And speaking of the system, and we've obviously touched upon this with Modi and his beliefs and his attitudes towards oppressed minorities, particularly in India. Sonia, what do you feel like is the hope? Is there any hope at this point for those who are from the lower class, from the lower caste, to ever be able to regain faith in a political system that is being run at the moment by someone like Modi in power? How does that happen? Is it even possible for them to feel that trust? You know, on the one hand, I think we are seeing more public participation, more public support, and more protests than we ever have before. A lot of the subjects that are very much a part of certainly social media campaigns,

and also on the streets, you know, farmers' rights, Dalits' rights, women's rights, the rights of, I mean, everybody who's being trampled on is becoming, the truth or simply demanding their fair share, for protest, for critiquing the government. The historian Ram Guha just today said that the situation in India today is the same or worse than it was under the British Raj. He said Modi would have sent Gandhi to jail. And this is the problem. There is more awareness. But there is also much more fear and a real reason to be afraid. You know, it's one thing to be afraid that your parents are going to shout at you and tell you to go back to your studies and don't get involved in politics.

It's another thing to be 22 years old. 22-year-old Disha Ravi, a climate activist who modeled her life on the teen activism that's taking place all over the world, and is currently sitting in jail for supporting farmers. So it is a very surreal situation in India right now but you know it's a it is a billion people and it is one man so the question is that you know is the desire for justice

greater than the hate is it because if more people don't start breaking ranks then unfortunately I I think, you know, then the situation will, there will be a downward spiral. You know, but essentially that is what the fight is, again, it is right now. Sonia, we could keep talking to you for hours and hours and hours. I think our listeners would love it.

And I know that Hannah and I would and I know that the rest of team Red Handed who are eagerly awaiting to get their hands on this interview definitely will Sonia I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your incredibly busy schedule to come and speak with us and with the listeners and viewers of Red Handed it was an absolute delight to have you on and if you guys haven't got the message yet then the book is the good girls by sonia falario and it is available now everywhere you guys can go buy it we'll leave some links below to um sonia's book where you can buy a couple of other books that as well that we've really enjoyed as well as her social media so go follow her because she tweets some really interesting things that you should be aware of and other and just become sonia super fans like we are now exactly um so yes with that guys we will

leave you and we will be back probably tomorrow with some more content so we'll see you then thank you so much bye Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall. That was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul. The man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry.

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