MOTHER India, the 1950s' hit movie, was India's maiden attempt at an Oscar which it unfortunately missed. Its musically told story described the bitter struggles and moments of joy of an Indian village community.

A popular song sequence in the film showed village youth — men and women — engaged in lyrical ribaldry during a bullock cart race. The subtext of the otherwise colourful poetry in the Poorbi dialect of eastern Uttar Pradesh reflected an awkward sociology, which middle-class Indians mostly rush to ignore.

The point to take from this is that mediaeval practices straddle the Indian subcontinent. Women's noses are cut off for alleged infidelity across the religio-cultural mosaic. In fact, Prof Kailash Nath Kaul, Nehru's Lucknow-based botanist brother-in-law, had asserted that Indian idioms reflected a cannibal past.

His observation was based on the invectives angry people hurl at each other. They inevitably threaten to chew up the rival's bones, make mincemeat out of the offender or even drink their blood. However, cutting the nose, usually of women, is still widely prevalent. Suspected thieves and other assorted societal outcastes lose their ears and noses as well.

A huge menace in India today is the so-called Khap panchayat of village elders in some northern states. They issue death sentences and even carry them out on young men and women who dare to marry outside the prescribed caste or religious boundaries. The government, waging a severe war against left-wing extremists supposedly to re-establish the 'rule of law' in states like Chhattisgarh, seems helpless in challenging the kangaroo courts that daily defy the constitution with cocky brazenness.

Is one atavism superior to another? How are the Taliban in Afghanistan or their partners in crime in Pakistan any worse than the defiant communities in India, Nepal and Bangladesh who revel in treating their women as mute slaves? They issue fatal edicts which they back with immense muscle power and entrenched tradition.

This then is the question to pose to the Time magazine's correspondent who recently put up an Afghan girl's picture on the cover. The horrific image featured the nose badly mutilated. Her ears, covered by her hair, had been dismembered, we are told, because she ran away from her husband's home where she was ill-treated. “What happens if we leave Afghanistan,” said the blurb accompanying the picture.

Commending the story the Time editor says: “I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of Time . First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha's safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban. We also confirmed that she is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women.” Aisha is now in Los Angeles for treatment.

Meanwhile, a row has broken out over the message of the story. The Huffington Post carried a report by the New York Observer's John Gorenfeld accusing the Time correspondent Aryn Baker of not disclosing an alleged conflict of interest in running the story.

“The piece lacked a crucial personal disclosure on Baker's part,” says Gorenfeld. Her husband, Tamim Samee, an Afghan-American IT entrepreneur, he says, is a board member of an Afghan government minister's $100m project advocating foreign investment in Afghanistan. He has run two companies, Digistan and Ora-Tech, that have solicited and won development contracts with the assistance of the international military, including private sector infrastructure projects favoured by US-backed leader Hamid Karzai.

In other words, argues Gorenfeld, the Time reporter's story bolsters the case for war but she appears to have benefited materially from the Nato invasion. “Reached by The Observer , a Time spokesperson revealed that the magazine has just reassigned Baker to a new country as part of a normal rotation, though he declined to say where.”

Time has denied any problem with the report, insisting that “Baker's husband has no connection to the US military, has never solicited business from them and has no financial stake in the US presence in Afghanistan whatsoever.”

However, two years before his wedding to Baker, Samee told Radio Free Europe in 2006 that Digistan — apparently the local arm of an international IT operation, run from a villa in Kabul — was discovering for itself that the “opportunities are definitely here” in the telecom field, thanks to “quite a bit of involvement from ISAF [International Security Assistance Force]”.

How then are we to explain the focus on a young girl's travail in the context of the American occupation of Afghanistan? Are the American forces going to feel guilty about beginning to leave Afghanistan as scheduled in July next year, because of the evident fear of the Taliban's return?

Time has implied that Aisha's plight would worsen not abate with President Hamid Karzai wooing the Taliban. But why limit the fear to the Taliban-stricken region? There are many noses, hands and necks being chopped between the Indian subcontinent and Saudi Arabia.

And talking of Saudi Arabia, US troops have not discouraged mediaeval justice there. The moral of the story that Time magazine would not admit to can be gleaned from a Saudi proverb, 'if the camel gets its nose in the tent, the body will soon follow'. Is the American camel sniffing for prospects of a prolonged stay in Kabul? As the Mother India song suggests, lovers can take the risk of annoying village elders. Strange that foreign troops can't always take that liberty.

The writer is Dawn's correspondent in Delhi .

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