“I haven’t seen anything like this in the US,” US Second Lady Dr Jill Biden told an embedded dna in an exclusive interaction at Bandra’s Bhabha Hospital. She wasn’t referring to the sanitised road leading from the Taj at Colaba to the Unicef office at Jogeshwari off the Western Express Highway but to the bumpy ride for her eight-vehicle convoy because of potholes.
“Everything looks so beautiful,” she said about Mumbai on her first visit. “It’s got a different character from Delhi.”
Biden was accompanied by her social-worker daughter Ashley, 32, and son-in-law Dr Howard Kreim who spends several weeks each year operating on underprivileged children around the world during medical missions for International Hospital for Children.
dna was not privy to whether the US second lady shared her views on road conditions with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) chief Sitaram Kunte who she met for a photo-op just before interacting with the beneficiaries of BMC’s Dilaasa project which works with victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Biden was all praise for the strength and resilience of the women she met, many of who recounted their struggle for empowerment and assertion of rights. “Both these are an acute problem in the US too. It has taken us a while to put mechanisms in place to take care of such cases. I am glad a beginning has been made in this regard by India,” she observed and drew parallels with the situation in other countries she had visited.
“I have seen a similar situation in both Russia and Kenya. In fact, the kind of violence that the women and children refugees fleeing Somalia face is really severe.”
She underlined how her husband, vice-president Joe Biden, has been at the forefront of bringing in legislation on domestic abuse and gender-based violence. “He has been relentlessly pursuing this cause since he was a senator,” she pointed out.
Earlier, at the Unicef office, she met representatives from NGOs and state NRHM director Vikas Kharge.
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