India reportedly hides beggars in advance of Ivanka Trump's visit

An Indian begger sits on the side of the road in Hyderabad on November 10, 2017.

(Image credit: Noah Seelam/Getty Images)

published 11 November 2017

President Trump's daughter and senior White House adviser, Ivanka Trump, is scheduled to visit Hyderabad in late November, and the southern Indian city is reportedly preparing for the occasion by hiding away its beggar population.

Local police are sweeping the streets for beggars, V.K. Singh, the city's director general of prisons, told CNN. "It's a permanent drive," he added. "The government, since 30 years, have been trying to figure out what to do about them" because there "is a mafia or a network behind this who force people to beg or kidnap some children and force them into begging."

Police representatives denied that the round-ups are connected to Trump's visit — begging has been illegal in the city since 1977 — and maintained that though the beggars have been held in the same location as prisons they are not in the prisons themselves. "All the facilities are there — security, medical, food," said A. Narasimha, an officer in the prisons department, "and all the basic amenities are being made to take care of the inmates." One of the structures to house the beggars is called "Hermitage of Happiness."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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