According to a new report, India isn't doing enough to combat human trafficking.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 21, 2009
FARIDABAD, India —Teerath Ram came to Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, to work in one of its many stone quarries. Recruited by a labor contractor who promised he'd earn much higher wages here than he could ever make in his native state of Chhattisgarh, Teerath Ram took a notional "advance" of a few thousand rupees to pay the contractor for getting him the job and agreed to work in the quarry to repay his debt. Fifteen years later, he's still there.
The high wages he was meant to receive never materialized, and at the end of the month when the rock he had risked his neck to blast out of the ground was weighed against the dynamite he'd "bought" from the company store, the owner told him that his wages were just enough to cover the interest on his debt.
"They just kept records of what they loaned me in a notebook," he said. And because Teerath Ram is illiterate as well as desperately poor, "They could change the figures anytime they wanted."
There are literally millions like Teerath Ram in India, which has failed to meet minimum standards to combat human trafficking, according to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report released by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week.
"India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation," according to the report.
Because it has been on the “tier two” watch list — the second-worst category of offenders — for two years, India now faces the prospect of being moved to the “tier three” blacklist of egregious violators next year if it fails to improve its record in fighting human trafficking. Those countries face sanctions under which the U.S. can withhold non-humanitarian aid and oppose aid projects from agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Band, though it is likely India would receive a presidential waiver.
The sad thing for India is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Though they are still being cheated and exploited, laborers like Teerath Ram, for instance, don't even understand that they were the victims of trafficking, since nobody clubbed them on the head and threw them in the back of a truck. Nor do the police.
“The word trafficking has not been defined in India,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with the New Delhi-based Global March Against Child Labor. “There is no comprehensive definition, despite the fact that trafficking in human beings has been banned as [violating] a fundamental right.” That means when people are duped into migrating for work, rather than kidnapped, India's law enforcement agencies rarely recognize them as the victims of traffickers.
Technically, Teerath Ram is now no longer a bonded laborer. He knows exactly how much money he owes the quarry owner and the rate of interest on his debt. He can leave anytime, provided he finds someone else — which would mean another labor contractor — to grant him another loan to pay off his debt. But he still has to pay for the blasting equipment he uses from the quarry to which he's indebted, and the owner and debt-holder still assesses the value of the rock Teerath Ram blasts out of the ground. Naturally, the price of dynamite always seems to climb, while the price for stone plunges.
The quarry workers of Faridabad — only a 15-minute drive from the heart of Delhi — are victims of what some Indian economists are terming "modern bonded labor."
Unlike in the past, when agricultural laborers were forced to work because of traditional feudal ties to landlords or debts that went back generations, these modern bonded laborers migrate to new farms or industrial sites where wages are higher. They enter "freely" into loan agreements with their employers and sometimes even pay off what they owe at the end of the year. This has prompted some economists to argue that the laborers aren't the victims of traffickers, and that they opt to take these jobs because they are better than the alternatives available to them elsewhere, said Professor Ravi Srivastava, a labor economist at Jawarhalal Nehru University.
But, as Teerath Ram knows, the reality is very different. "This is the way the new bonded labor relationships are emerging," Srivastava said. These relationships are not purely economic contracts, even though employees may enter them due to necessity, rather than compulsion. And once employees enter into these relationships, there are high exit costs that the employees did not understand at the outset.
Bonded labor has been illegal in India since the enactment of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act in 1976, and a series of progressive Supreme Court judgments expanded India's definition of bonded labor to make it more comprehensive.
India's highest court ruled in Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. the Union of India (1984) that all laborers who are working for below the nationally mandated minimum wage should be presumed to be bonded to their employers. The ruling recognized that economic compulsions can be as powerful as historical feudal relationships and even the threat of physical harm, and that proving exploitation can be a knotty problem when employers keep all the records and their workers are illiterate and mathematically ignorant.
While this law doesn't go so far as to define anybody who is working for less than minimum wage to be a bonded laborer, it shifts the burden onto the employer to prove that his employees are there of their own volition. But despite this progressive interpretation of the law, forced labor, debt servitude and even slavery persist, according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector.
Numbers are hard to come by. The Bandhua Mukti Morcha (or Bonded Labor Liberation Front) claims that as many as 300 million Indian workers should be presumed to be bonded laborers, based on the Supreme Court's definition.
The working conditions for such laborers are grim. They handle hazardous chemicals — and even explosives — without any safety equipment. Crippling and fatal accidents are routine. The work is backbreaking, and the pay is miserable. For instance, the “rapaswala,” a kiln worker who buries the bricks before firing, earns only 8 rupees (or about 20 cents) for every thousand bricks he produces.
Things are no better for Teerath Ram and the other the “modern” bonded laborers of Faridabad, even though they have fought long and hard for their rights, and, according to some definitions, they're free.
Organized by the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labor Liberation Front) in 1984, they have secured a school and access to electricity at the cost of the life of one of their own — allegedly at the hands of company goons. But they still have yet to receive the legally mandated minimum wage for their labor. They handle dynamite and blasting caps without proper safety equipment because their employer requires them to pay for their gear themselves, and fatal accidents are so commonplace no one has an accurate count.
"I owe 20,000 rupees ($500), which I borrowed to buy dynamite and other equipment," said Resham Lal, another quarry worker. "Every month, I repay 250 rupees. Nobody has told me how long it will take me to pay off my debt at this rate, and I keep working and spending more money on equipment and the interest on my loan keeps growing."
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
everybody was kung fu fighting
South Indian prostitutes learn martial arts to protect against creeps and other bad customers.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 19, 2009
CHENNAI — Scorned by society and ignored by the police, sex workers in the South Indian city of Chennai are learning karate to protect themselves against the beatings, robberies and rapes they say are part of a prostitute's daily life here.
“Sometimes I make an agreement with one customer, and then later he tries to bring his friends along as well,” said Kalaiarasi, a woman who works as a prostitute near the Chennai neighborhood of Anna Nagar. “Other times they want to have sex with me and they beat me up so they don't have to pay.”
According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India has about 3 million prostitutes. But other organizations, like Human Rights Watch, suggest that the figure could be as much as five times higher than that.
Because of desperate poverty, high rates of unemployment and the low status of women in Indian society, these sex workers have few options. Prostitution is illegal, and, recently, efforts have been made to decriminalize prostitution and make clients — instead of just the prostitutes — liable to prosecution. But these efforts have had little impact.
Kalaiarasi is all too aware that it is rape, not business, when a client brings along his friends. But in the past she has never been able to do anything about it because the local police are not interested in the legal rights of a woman who takes money in exchange for sex. In fact, if the allegations of local sex workers and activists are true, the police officers charged with upholding the law are the worst offenders.
“The law never says the policemen can beat them up, they can rape the women, they can abuse them,” said AJ Hariharan, founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a nonprofit that aims to protect the rights of sex workers and homosexuals. “The law doesn't say that. But the people implementing the law are taking advantage of it ... So no one can go and complain to the police.”
That's why, along with 75 other sex workers here, Kalaiarasi is learning karate so she can fight back. So far, Kalaiarasi has only taken a 15-day crash course. But as she and her fellow students kick and punch in imitation of their instructor, you can already see how the basic knowledge of karate — together with the recognition that they have the right to protect themselves — has given them a huge surge in confidence.
Dressed in white karate uniforms and wearing Spiderman masks to hide their faces from my camera, these women are clearly having fun. At one point, Valli, another sex worker, attacks Kalaiarasi with a wooden knife — haieeya! Kalaiarasi blocks the thrust with her nunchaku, or “numchuks,” catching Valli's wrist with the chain connecting the wooden sticks and twisting it painfully so her would-be attacker is forced to drop the knife. Everyone's Spiderman mask shakes with laughter.
While most karate students will probably never have to use their skills on a real attacker, the prostitutes' precarious position in society makes an assault almost certain.
“The clients feel that the women are vulnerable,” Hariharan said. “If they pay, they can do anything [they believe]. We want to pass on a message that this is enough. That the women will protect themselves.”
“I have to keep going out after dark [because of my job],” Valli said. “Sometimes clients misbehave. Sometimes they refuse to pay. What we want is to be able to protect ourselves from hooligans.”
Hariharan hopes that learning karate will not only help protect these women from abuse, but also raise awareness about their plight and cause others to realize that sex workers, too, deserve basic human rights.
“When you look at the [total] number of sex workers, the number who know self-defense is very less,” he said. “But we want to send this message across the country, (to) women in Kanyakumari and other districts of Tamil Nadu, or elsewhere in the country, maybe Rajasthan or Delhi or Gujarat. We want this message to be taken that sex workers can equip themselves to prevent violence against them.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 19, 2009
CHENNAI — Scorned by society and ignored by the police, sex workers in the South Indian city of Chennai are learning karate to protect themselves against the beatings, robberies and rapes they say are part of a prostitute's daily life here.
“Sometimes I make an agreement with one customer, and then later he tries to bring his friends along as well,” said Kalaiarasi, a woman who works as a prostitute near the Chennai neighborhood of Anna Nagar. “Other times they want to have sex with me and they beat me up so they don't have to pay.”
According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India has about 3 million prostitutes. But other organizations, like Human Rights Watch, suggest that the figure could be as much as five times higher than that.
Because of desperate poverty, high rates of unemployment and the low status of women in Indian society, these sex workers have few options. Prostitution is illegal, and, recently, efforts have been made to decriminalize prostitution and make clients — instead of just the prostitutes — liable to prosecution. But these efforts have had little impact.
Kalaiarasi is all too aware that it is rape, not business, when a client brings along his friends. But in the past she has never been able to do anything about it because the local police are not interested in the legal rights of a woman who takes money in exchange for sex. In fact, if the allegations of local sex workers and activists are true, the police officers charged with upholding the law are the worst offenders.
“The law never says the policemen can beat them up, they can rape the women, they can abuse them,” said AJ Hariharan, founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a nonprofit that aims to protect the rights of sex workers and homosexuals. “The law doesn't say that. But the people implementing the law are taking advantage of it ... So no one can go and complain to the police.”
That's why, along with 75 other sex workers here, Kalaiarasi is learning karate so she can fight back. So far, Kalaiarasi has only taken a 15-day crash course. But as she and her fellow students kick and punch in imitation of their instructor, you can already see how the basic knowledge of karate — together with the recognition that they have the right to protect themselves — has given them a huge surge in confidence.
Dressed in white karate uniforms and wearing Spiderman masks to hide their faces from my camera, these women are clearly having fun. At one point, Valli, another sex worker, attacks Kalaiarasi with a wooden knife — haieeya! Kalaiarasi blocks the thrust with her nunchaku, or “numchuks,” catching Valli's wrist with the chain connecting the wooden sticks and twisting it painfully so her would-be attacker is forced to drop the knife. Everyone's Spiderman mask shakes with laughter.
While most karate students will probably never have to use their skills on a real attacker, the prostitutes' precarious position in society makes an assault almost certain.
“The clients feel that the women are vulnerable,” Hariharan said. “If they pay, they can do anything [they believe]. We want to pass on a message that this is enough. That the women will protect themselves.”
“I have to keep going out after dark [because of my job],” Valli said. “Sometimes clients misbehave. Sometimes they refuse to pay. What we want is to be able to protect ourselves from hooligans.”
Hariharan hopes that learning karate will not only help protect these women from abuse, but also raise awareness about their plight and cause others to realize that sex workers, too, deserve basic human rights.
“When you look at the [total] number of sex workers, the number who know self-defense is very less,” he said. “But we want to send this message across the country, (to) women in Kanyakumari and other districts of Tamil Nadu, or elsewhere in the country, maybe Rajasthan or Delhi or Gujarat. We want this message to be taken that sex workers can equip themselves to prevent violence against them.”
Thursday, June 18, 2009
can the indian government end hunger?
That's the new plan, anyway.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 7, 2009 12:04 ET
NEW DELHI — In a move some are hailing as the boldest — and most needed — action taken by any administration since the country gained independence in 1947, India's new government has promised to eliminate hunger and malnutrition nationwide with a powerful National Food Security Act.
In her June 4 speech to parliament outlining for the first time the agenda for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's new United Progressive Alliance government, President Pratibha Patil said, “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide a statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas will be entitled, by law, to 25 kilograms of rice or wheat per month at three rupees (about 6 cents) per kilogram. This legislation will also be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the public distribution system.”
Even usually trenchant critics of the nation's policies toward its farmers and its poor were cheered by the pledge. “After independence, this will be the most important program any government has ever thought of launching,” said agriculture policy expert Devinder Sharma. “It should at least allow us to put our heads up for the first time of being a democracy. How could democracy coexist with such appalling hunger?”
India's starvation and malnutrition problems have always been as perplexing as they are horrifying. With more than 200 million people classified as hungry by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has the world's largest population of the starving and malnourished — despite being the world's second-largest grower of rice and wheat and boasting a surplus of 56.5 million tons of food grains in government warehouses.
“If you put one bag of grain over another bag of grain, you can walk to the moon,” Sharma said. “That's the quantity of food lying in India, and we have the largest population of hungry also in India.”
Sharma gives credit for this program, last year's massive farm loan waiver, and a jobs scheme that guarantees rural laborers at least 100 days of work each year to Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi. And he points out that the scale of these programs is unprecedented. “She has launched the world's largest social security program with the NREGA, and this is the world's largest food security program,” he said. “I can tell you she deserves the Nobel Prize.”
Part of a breathtaking array of landmark changes to public policy — many of which will also present a hefty bill to the exchequer — the new food security law will cost the government more than $10 billion at today's exchange rate. To foot the bill, the government will need to push forward with the sale of stakes in state-owned companies in the oil and gas sector and complete the sale of 3G telecom licenses. In a sense, therefore, it is both the mother of all social welfare policies and the biggest impetus for the growth-spurring economic reforms that business has long demanded.
More importantly, together with the UPA's groundbreaking Right to Information Act, which was passed in 2005, the national food security guarantee will be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the Public Distribution System (PDS) through which India already distributes subsidized food to the poor. Notorious for corruption — yes, people steal from the starving, too — the PDS was vulnerable to exploitative vendors because nobody was able to track where the food actually went.
But with the introduction of national identity cards with biometric and radio frequency technology to prevent fraud, which is also part of an anti-terrorism initiative of the home ministry, many believe there is a real chance of plugging the holes in the sieve.
Not everyone is convinced. According to Bibek Debroy, an economist at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, the vague plan to reform the PDS doesn't go nearly far enough to succeed. “It's a terrible idea,” Debroy said.
Citing the silence about just how the distribution system will be reformed and drawing attention to several past efforts that have failed ignobly, he argues that the solution is actually much more simple. Instead of funneling even more money through the PDS and making an unwieldy behemoth still larger, he said, India should put the monster out of its misery.
“The simple point I'm making is that it's far more efficient to have direct cash transfers,” he said, echoing an argument that has recently gained credence in international development circles.
Through the NREGS, India already has a database of the working poor, including their bank accounts, so it would be easy to transfer food subsidy money directly to them in the form of cash — a move that would slash the government's bill by as much as two-thirds and put thousands of corrupt officials out of business overnight. It would also eliminate an internal conflict between India's food policy and its farm policy: For farmers, the government continually tries to push prices up, while for the poor it struggles to push prices down.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 7, 2009 12:04 ET
NEW DELHI — In a move some are hailing as the boldest — and most needed — action taken by any administration since the country gained independence in 1947, India's new government has promised to eliminate hunger and malnutrition nationwide with a powerful National Food Security Act.
In her June 4 speech to parliament outlining for the first time the agenda for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's new United Progressive Alliance government, President Pratibha Patil said, “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide a statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban areas will be entitled, by law, to 25 kilograms of rice or wheat per month at three rupees (about 6 cents) per kilogram. This legislation will also be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the public distribution system.”
Even usually trenchant critics of the nation's policies toward its farmers and its poor were cheered by the pledge. “After independence, this will be the most important program any government has ever thought of launching,” said agriculture policy expert Devinder Sharma. “It should at least allow us to put our heads up for the first time of being a democracy. How could democracy coexist with such appalling hunger?”
India's starvation and malnutrition problems have always been as perplexing as they are horrifying. With more than 200 million people classified as hungry by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has the world's largest population of the starving and malnourished — despite being the world's second-largest grower of rice and wheat and boasting a surplus of 56.5 million tons of food grains in government warehouses.
“If you put one bag of grain over another bag of grain, you can walk to the moon,” Sharma said. “That's the quantity of food lying in India, and we have the largest population of hungry also in India.”
Sharma gives credit for this program, last year's massive farm loan waiver, and a jobs scheme that guarantees rural laborers at least 100 days of work each year to Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi. And he points out that the scale of these programs is unprecedented. “She has launched the world's largest social security program with the NREGA, and this is the world's largest food security program,” he said. “I can tell you she deserves the Nobel Prize.”
Part of a breathtaking array of landmark changes to public policy — many of which will also present a hefty bill to the exchequer — the new food security law will cost the government more than $10 billion at today's exchange rate. To foot the bill, the government will need to push forward with the sale of stakes in state-owned companies in the oil and gas sector and complete the sale of 3G telecom licenses. In a sense, therefore, it is both the mother of all social welfare policies and the biggest impetus for the growth-spurring economic reforms that business has long demanded.
More importantly, together with the UPA's groundbreaking Right to Information Act, which was passed in 2005, the national food security guarantee will be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the Public Distribution System (PDS) through which India already distributes subsidized food to the poor. Notorious for corruption — yes, people steal from the starving, too — the PDS was vulnerable to exploitative vendors because nobody was able to track where the food actually went.
But with the introduction of national identity cards with biometric and radio frequency technology to prevent fraud, which is also part of an anti-terrorism initiative of the home ministry, many believe there is a real chance of plugging the holes in the sieve.
Not everyone is convinced. According to Bibek Debroy, an economist at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, the vague plan to reform the PDS doesn't go nearly far enough to succeed. “It's a terrible idea,” Debroy said.
Citing the silence about just how the distribution system will be reformed and drawing attention to several past efforts that have failed ignobly, he argues that the solution is actually much more simple. Instead of funneling even more money through the PDS and making an unwieldy behemoth still larger, he said, India should put the monster out of its misery.
“The simple point I'm making is that it's far more efficient to have direct cash transfers,” he said, echoing an argument that has recently gained credence in international development circles.
Through the NREGS, India already has a database of the working poor, including their bank accounts, so it would be easy to transfer food subsidy money directly to them in the form of cash — a move that would slash the government's bill by as much as two-thirds and put thousands of corrupt officials out of business overnight. It would also eliminate an internal conflict between India's food policy and its farm policy: For farmers, the government continually tries to push prices up, while for the poor it struggles to push prices down.
india: the coming defense boom
With a new government, and a new nuclear deal with Washington, Delhi turns to the U.S. for military hardware.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 10, 2009 17:44 ET
NEW DELHI — With India's new government firmly in place, a top U.S. envoy landed in New Delhi Wednesday to discuss some key pacts to remove roadblocks for arms and aerospace companies keen to tap this country's $30 billion market for military hardware.
United States Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns visits New Delhi and Mumbai from June 10 to 13 to meet senior government officials and industry leaders and discuss “a broad agenda to further strengthen the partnership between the United States and India,” according to a State Department spokesman.
Following last year's pivotal Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement, which freed India from limitations on technology transfer imposed after its Pokhran-II nuclear test in 1998, the two nations need to hammer out an agreement that will allow U.S. companies to sell arms and high-end military electronics to India. Now that India's political left is out of the equation following last month's elections, Indian defense analysts expect these pacts to go through smoothly. India has a powerful desire to upgrade its military hardware and U.S. defense companies are more keen than ever to tap its potentially huge market — which could be worth as much as $80 billion by 2020.
According to Rahul Bedi, India correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, India has already started the ball rolling for some big purchases from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, including 126 multi-role combat aircraft, eight maritime reconnaissance aircraft, 22 attack helicopters, 15 heavy lift helicopters and a Patriot missile defense system.
The completion of these deals would mark a substantial shift in India's military spending. “Broadly, India's largest supplier remains Russia,” said Bedi. “The second-largest over the last eight or nine years has been Israel. The U.S. is the new kid on the block.”
But there is more at stake than money. “An arms sale purchase relationship is a long-term relationship, and that has a political commitment to it as well,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired major general in the Indian army who is now a defense analyst with the New Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “If an aircraft is purchased, it has to last three to five decades, so that relationship remains, not only between companies, but also it leads to a type of partnership between companies and countries that are important, are long-term, and are in the interest of both countries to sustain.”
Laying the groundwork for a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in July, Burns will also be keen to discuss two more controversial pacts, a logistical support agreement (LSA) similar to the one the U.S. has signed with the members of NATO and the proliferation security initiative (PSI), which is intended to prevent the spread of technologies used in nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction. Both of these agreements faced heavy opposition from India's communist parties.
According to analysts at New Delhi's Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, the LSA would require both countries to provide their bases, fuel and other kinds of logistics support to each others' fighter jets and naval warships. The left believed that this arrangement would compel India to adopt America's foreign policy goals and participate in its military adventures, but defense analysts say that is not how similar agreements with NATO countries have played out. Similarly, under the PSI, the Indian Navy would potentially be required to board and search vessels suspected of transporting sensitive nuclear technologies in the Indian Ocean.
“We should have an understanding on the PSI sooner rather than later,” said Banerjee. “It started off with only a small number of countries, and India was asked to adhere to some of its regulations. But India would like to be part of the organization that sets out the rules. That is the primary issue involved in the PSI.”
The stickiest part of the discussions won't have anything to do with Indo-U.S. agreements, however. India aims to wring some promises out of Burns (and, later, Clinton) regarding the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where New Delhi perceives its interests are being undermined by America's eagerness to end the war on terror.
India is expected to take a tough line on the recent release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed — which New Delhi cites as evidence of the emptiness of Pakistan's promise to crack down on terrorists using it as a base of operations. And officials will also express concerns about the large military aid package that Washington has offered Islamabad as an incentive to take the fight to the Taliban on Pakistan's eastern border. India argues that Pakistan has in the past used U.S. aid to bulk up the conventional hardware it would need in a military confrontation with India, rather than the quick-strike gear needed for fighting terrorists.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 10, 2009 17:44 ET
NEW DELHI — With India's new government firmly in place, a top U.S. envoy landed in New Delhi Wednesday to discuss some key pacts to remove roadblocks for arms and aerospace companies keen to tap this country's $30 billion market for military hardware.
United States Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns visits New Delhi and Mumbai from June 10 to 13 to meet senior government officials and industry leaders and discuss “a broad agenda to further strengthen the partnership between the United States and India,” according to a State Department spokesman.
Following last year's pivotal Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement, which freed India from limitations on technology transfer imposed after its Pokhran-II nuclear test in 1998, the two nations need to hammer out an agreement that will allow U.S. companies to sell arms and high-end military electronics to India. Now that India's political left is out of the equation following last month's elections, Indian defense analysts expect these pacts to go through smoothly. India has a powerful desire to upgrade its military hardware and U.S. defense companies are more keen than ever to tap its potentially huge market — which could be worth as much as $80 billion by 2020.
According to Rahul Bedi, India correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, India has already started the ball rolling for some big purchases from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, including 126 multi-role combat aircraft, eight maritime reconnaissance aircraft, 22 attack helicopters, 15 heavy lift helicopters and a Patriot missile defense system.
The completion of these deals would mark a substantial shift in India's military spending. “Broadly, India's largest supplier remains Russia,” said Bedi. “The second-largest over the last eight or nine years has been Israel. The U.S. is the new kid on the block.”
But there is more at stake than money. “An arms sale purchase relationship is a long-term relationship, and that has a political commitment to it as well,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired major general in the Indian army who is now a defense analyst with the New Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “If an aircraft is purchased, it has to last three to five decades, so that relationship remains, not only between companies, but also it leads to a type of partnership between companies and countries that are important, are long-term, and are in the interest of both countries to sustain.”
Laying the groundwork for a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in July, Burns will also be keen to discuss two more controversial pacts, a logistical support agreement (LSA) similar to the one the U.S. has signed with the members of NATO and the proliferation security initiative (PSI), which is intended to prevent the spread of technologies used in nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction. Both of these agreements faced heavy opposition from India's communist parties.
According to analysts at New Delhi's Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, the LSA would require both countries to provide their bases, fuel and other kinds of logistics support to each others' fighter jets and naval warships. The left believed that this arrangement would compel India to adopt America's foreign policy goals and participate in its military adventures, but defense analysts say that is not how similar agreements with NATO countries have played out. Similarly, under the PSI, the Indian Navy would potentially be required to board and search vessels suspected of transporting sensitive nuclear technologies in the Indian Ocean.
“We should have an understanding on the PSI sooner rather than later,” said Banerjee. “It started off with only a small number of countries, and India was asked to adhere to some of its regulations. But India would like to be part of the organization that sets out the rules. That is the primary issue involved in the PSI.”
The stickiest part of the discussions won't have anything to do with Indo-U.S. agreements, however. India aims to wring some promises out of Burns (and, later, Clinton) regarding the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where New Delhi perceives its interests are being undermined by America's eagerness to end the war on terror.
India is expected to take a tough line on the recent release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed — which New Delhi cites as evidence of the emptiness of Pakistan's promise to crack down on terrorists using it as a base of operations. And officials will also express concerns about the large military aid package that Washington has offered Islamabad as an incentive to take the fight to the Taliban on Pakistan's eastern border. India argues that Pakistan has in the past used U.S. aid to bulk up the conventional hardware it would need in a military confrontation with India, rather than the quick-strike gear needed for fighting terrorists.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Singh's 100-day plan to revolutionize India
He may be shy, but his 100-day plan for India is strikingly bold.
Jason Overdorf and Sudip Mazumdar
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009
For much of the past 15 years, Indian politics were so chaotic that a prime minister would spend most of his first 100 days focused on a single objective: holding onto power. But Manmohan Singh's surprisingly decisive victory in last month's election—coupled with the global economic crisis—has suddenly put him on an American president's schedule: you have 100 days, now get to work fast.
Believing that the Congress Party's near-majority in Parliament will free Singh to slash red tape and spur growth, bankers, columnists, lobbyists and think tanks have spent the time since the poll results were announced on May 16 issuing a torrent of to-do lists for the prime minister. But probably the boldest and most innovative agenda has come from Singh himself. Conceived during the election campaign, at a time when nobody else had much faith in him, his 100-day plan is filled with specific, substantive measures that range from selling stakes in state-owned companies to restructuring rules on public-private partnerships to removing bottlenecks that have delayed some $15 billion worth of road projects to enacting a new food-security law. Together, the advances might just amount to the big-bang reforms that India has been awaiting for nearly a decade now. And having vanquished his foes on the left and the right and earned the unquestioning faith of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, his party's leaders, Singh might even manage to get it all done.
Not everyone is happy with his plans. Despite being best-known as the architect of India's economic opening in 1991, today the prime minister's got other things on his mind. He, Sonia and Rahul are intent on reforming—or transforming—India, but not in a way prescribed by international moneymen or CEOs. Instead, under the shorthand "inclusive growth," they aim to carve out a new path that, if successful, could provide a road map for developing countries worldwide.
Central to their goal are measures some people might not consider reforms at all. First among them are a National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and a Right to Information Act (RTI). Decried by some economists as a populist sop, the NREGS is in fact designed to revolutionize India's leaky bureaucratic mechanism for dispersing money and to free the poor from exploitative middlemen by channeling an unprecedented level of funds (and decision-making power) to village-level elected officials. Singh believes that, like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this stimulus plan will put money in the hands of the people most likely to spend it well and will create a social safety net that will help unleash their productive capacities. Meanwhile, Congress plans to expand the use of the RTI, which was enacted in 2005, and to pass a few new laws to make bureaucrats, politicians and judges more accountable by shining a bright light on their activities.
In a country where even the trash in a government wastebasket is frequently considered classified information, the RTI is groundbreaking. Under the law, ordinary people can for the first time get a look at the books of their local ration shops, say, or at government departments—and see what corrupt officials have been skimming off the top, delivering to fictitious beneficiaries, or just plain stealing. And because the information must be made available within 30 days or the official in charge will face immediate punishment, whistleblowers get results from RTI cases much faster than they would from India's progressive but slow-as-molasses legal system.
Still, until recently, no one has pushed RTI far enough to enjoy its full potential. Now Rahul is striving to do just that by urging youth to storm the barricades of the bureaucracy with an ever-expanding number of RTI cases. The effects could be revolutionary. In Uttar Pradesh—India's largest state and a place where the Congress Party made a huge and unexpected surge in the recent election—Shailendra Singh, a former police officer who now heads the party's RTI cell, became such an irritant in September that the state's chief minister, Mayawati, had him arrested. With the rise of Rahul's youth brigade, there could soon be thousands of other gadflies just as irritating.
This isn't to suggest that the prime minister's 100-day agenda is only aimed at the poor and destitute. It also includes controversial measures that bankers have been advocating for a long time, such as the sale of state-owned enterprises. Though Singh himself has only said that disinvestment of public-sector units "will be tackled by the finance minister in the budget," sales of shares in Oil India Ltd. and the hydropower firm NHPC Ltd.—which were approved for IPOs of 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in 2007 but then blocked by the left—are reported to top the agenda. Deregulation of the oil industry—another move the left opposed because it would mean higher prices at the pump—is now also expected to be put before the cabinet within six to eight weeks. Instead of a vague pledge to increase capacity, the Power ministry has promised to deliver 5,600 megawatts of new power by the end of August and to unveil three 4,000 megawatt projects in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Orissa within 100 days. Investors have already taken note, pumping more than $4 billion into Indian equity markets in May and sending the benchmark Sensex on a 28 percent climb.
It's no small irony that all these measures are being driven forward by such a humble, soft-spoken man. At public gatherings Singh often seems to step backward and offer the microphone to someone else. The modest prime minister was denigrated during the campaign as the weakest leader in India's history. But he has turned his apparent shortcomings as a politician—his poor oratorical skills and incapacity for court intrigue—into strengths. His reputation for honesty is unparalleled in a country where a fourth of the legislature faces criminal charges or investigations and politicians have come to be generally reviled. Singh's name has never been mentioned in association with any scandal. And his refusal to trumpet his achievements or play political games has endeared him to the public and given him a reputation for impartiality, which has allowed him to build consensus and should help him implement his agenda. "He's been a very good arbiter when two departments disagree, or there's a disagreement between ministers," said Transport Minister Kamal Nath, who was Commerce minister in charge of World Trade Organization negotiations during Singh's first term.
The prime minister has another big weapon helping him in his current campaign: he knows what he's talking about. The Oxford-educated economist has served as governor of India's central bank, head of its planning commission and as finance minister—a unique résumé for a world leader and an especially potent one during the current crisis. "Others have to depend on so many inputs, and have to be briefed and have to try to understand. He briefs the others. He's a man who understands the subject better than any world leader today," says Nath. In these economic times, it turns out, you can afford to speak softly—if you carry a big calculator.
Just as important as his own qualities, though, is the degree of support that Singh now enjoys from Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, the dynasty's emerging heir apparent. Singh today is not so much India's prime minister as the leader of its first triumvirate. Yet the clear division of responsibilities makes him more powerful, not less. With Sonia managing the internecine rivalries within the party and Rahul focused on rebuilding Congress's grassroots network, the prime minister can concentrate on policy, not the party's next campaign. It's a unique political formulation for India and, as the recent election showed, a formidable one. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was derailed by divisions among its various leaders, Sonia and Rahul squashed internal efforts to undermine Singh's candidacy, performed the heavy lifting for him on the campaign trail and protected him from opposition attacks. Since concerns about her Italian birth forced Sonia to make Singh her surrogate in 2004, the two have developed a strong relationship built on mutual trust and respect. That good feeling facilitated Rahul's entry into their troika and should help when he someday assumes the top spot. "Singh needs Sonia as much as Sonia needs him. And they work very well in tandem," says a senior Congress leader who asked not to be identified.
Singh is far from Sonia's puppet, as some allege. This became especially clear during the negotiation of the nuclear pact with the U.S. last year. Though there was much domestic pressure to scrap the deal, Singh managed to convince Sonia that it would end India's isolation and make it a much larger player in world affairs, even offering his resignation if the pact were scuttled, according to one of his former aides. Since then, with the emergence of Rahul, the team has become more effective. Though outwardly very different, the three leaders have much in common. For example, all are sensitive to the plight of India's minorities: Singh because he is a Sikh, Sonia because she was born a Christian and Rahul because he is linked through his grandfather to the tiny Parsi community. All three share a loathing for the Hindu supremacist rhetoric of the rival BJP. And all three are courteous and humble, traits that have endeared them to an electorate accustomed to imperious behavior from its pols.
Now the triumvirate's big challenge is living up to expectations. They face a slothful political system that is a holdover of the colonial mindset and they must contend with a culture of bureaucratic obstructionism that has outlasted many previous would-be reformers. Entrenched interests within Congress itself will also no doubt seek to derail Singh's programs and the Gandhis' efforts to make the party more democratic and to allow fresh faces to emerge. But with his newly enhanced grip on the reins of government, Singh knows that his 100-day deadline is a nominal one intended to light a fire underneath his subordinates. He has a full five years to perform. That said, the stakes couldn't be higher. This is more than Congress's big chance; it is India's. Failing to capitalize on it would be costly indeed, for the party, the country, and most of all, for its citizens.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200866
Jason Overdorf and Sudip Mazumdar
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009
For much of the past 15 years, Indian politics were so chaotic that a prime minister would spend most of his first 100 days focused on a single objective: holding onto power. But Manmohan Singh's surprisingly decisive victory in last month's election—coupled with the global economic crisis—has suddenly put him on an American president's schedule: you have 100 days, now get to work fast.
Believing that the Congress Party's near-majority in Parliament will free Singh to slash red tape and spur growth, bankers, columnists, lobbyists and think tanks have spent the time since the poll results were announced on May 16 issuing a torrent of to-do lists for the prime minister. But probably the boldest and most innovative agenda has come from Singh himself. Conceived during the election campaign, at a time when nobody else had much faith in him, his 100-day plan is filled with specific, substantive measures that range from selling stakes in state-owned companies to restructuring rules on public-private partnerships to removing bottlenecks that have delayed some $15 billion worth of road projects to enacting a new food-security law. Together, the advances might just amount to the big-bang reforms that India has been awaiting for nearly a decade now. And having vanquished his foes on the left and the right and earned the unquestioning faith of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, his party's leaders, Singh might even manage to get it all done.
Not everyone is happy with his plans. Despite being best-known as the architect of India's economic opening in 1991, today the prime minister's got other things on his mind. He, Sonia and Rahul are intent on reforming—or transforming—India, but not in a way prescribed by international moneymen or CEOs. Instead, under the shorthand "inclusive growth," they aim to carve out a new path that, if successful, could provide a road map for developing countries worldwide.
Central to their goal are measures some people might not consider reforms at all. First among them are a National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and a Right to Information Act (RTI). Decried by some economists as a populist sop, the NREGS is in fact designed to revolutionize India's leaky bureaucratic mechanism for dispersing money and to free the poor from exploitative middlemen by channeling an unprecedented level of funds (and decision-making power) to village-level elected officials. Singh believes that, like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this stimulus plan will put money in the hands of the people most likely to spend it well and will create a social safety net that will help unleash their productive capacities. Meanwhile, Congress plans to expand the use of the RTI, which was enacted in 2005, and to pass a few new laws to make bureaucrats, politicians and judges more accountable by shining a bright light on their activities.
In a country where even the trash in a government wastebasket is frequently considered classified information, the RTI is groundbreaking. Under the law, ordinary people can for the first time get a look at the books of their local ration shops, say, or at government departments—and see what corrupt officials have been skimming off the top, delivering to fictitious beneficiaries, or just plain stealing. And because the information must be made available within 30 days or the official in charge will face immediate punishment, whistleblowers get results from RTI cases much faster than they would from India's progressive but slow-as-molasses legal system.
Still, until recently, no one has pushed RTI far enough to enjoy its full potential. Now Rahul is striving to do just that by urging youth to storm the barricades of the bureaucracy with an ever-expanding number of RTI cases. The effects could be revolutionary. In Uttar Pradesh—India's largest state and a place where the Congress Party made a huge and unexpected surge in the recent election—Shailendra Singh, a former police officer who now heads the party's RTI cell, became such an irritant in September that the state's chief minister, Mayawati, had him arrested. With the rise of Rahul's youth brigade, there could soon be thousands of other gadflies just as irritating.
This isn't to suggest that the prime minister's 100-day agenda is only aimed at the poor and destitute. It also includes controversial measures that bankers have been advocating for a long time, such as the sale of state-owned enterprises. Though Singh himself has only said that disinvestment of public-sector units "will be tackled by the finance minister in the budget," sales of shares in Oil India Ltd. and the hydropower firm NHPC Ltd.—which were approved for IPOs of 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in 2007 but then blocked by the left—are reported to top the agenda. Deregulation of the oil industry—another move the left opposed because it would mean higher prices at the pump—is now also expected to be put before the cabinet within six to eight weeks. Instead of a vague pledge to increase capacity, the Power ministry has promised to deliver 5,600 megawatts of new power by the end of August and to unveil three 4,000 megawatt projects in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Orissa within 100 days. Investors have already taken note, pumping more than $4 billion into Indian equity markets in May and sending the benchmark Sensex on a 28 percent climb.
It's no small irony that all these measures are being driven forward by such a humble, soft-spoken man. At public gatherings Singh often seems to step backward and offer the microphone to someone else. The modest prime minister was denigrated during the campaign as the weakest leader in India's history. But he has turned his apparent shortcomings as a politician—his poor oratorical skills and incapacity for court intrigue—into strengths. His reputation for honesty is unparalleled in a country where a fourth of the legislature faces criminal charges or investigations and politicians have come to be generally reviled. Singh's name has never been mentioned in association with any scandal. And his refusal to trumpet his achievements or play political games has endeared him to the public and given him a reputation for impartiality, which has allowed him to build consensus and should help him implement his agenda. "He's been a very good arbiter when two departments disagree, or there's a disagreement between ministers," said Transport Minister Kamal Nath, who was Commerce minister in charge of World Trade Organization negotiations during Singh's first term.
The prime minister has another big weapon helping him in his current campaign: he knows what he's talking about. The Oxford-educated economist has served as governor of India's central bank, head of its planning commission and as finance minister—a unique résumé for a world leader and an especially potent one during the current crisis. "Others have to depend on so many inputs, and have to be briefed and have to try to understand. He briefs the others. He's a man who understands the subject better than any world leader today," says Nath. In these economic times, it turns out, you can afford to speak softly—if you carry a big calculator.
Just as important as his own qualities, though, is the degree of support that Singh now enjoys from Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, the dynasty's emerging heir apparent. Singh today is not so much India's prime minister as the leader of its first triumvirate. Yet the clear division of responsibilities makes him more powerful, not less. With Sonia managing the internecine rivalries within the party and Rahul focused on rebuilding Congress's grassroots network, the prime minister can concentrate on policy, not the party's next campaign. It's a unique political formulation for India and, as the recent election showed, a formidable one. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was derailed by divisions among its various leaders, Sonia and Rahul squashed internal efforts to undermine Singh's candidacy, performed the heavy lifting for him on the campaign trail and protected him from opposition attacks. Since concerns about her Italian birth forced Sonia to make Singh her surrogate in 2004, the two have developed a strong relationship built on mutual trust and respect. That good feeling facilitated Rahul's entry into their troika and should help when he someday assumes the top spot. "Singh needs Sonia as much as Sonia needs him. And they work very well in tandem," says a senior Congress leader who asked not to be identified.
Singh is far from Sonia's puppet, as some allege. This became especially clear during the negotiation of the nuclear pact with the U.S. last year. Though there was much domestic pressure to scrap the deal, Singh managed to convince Sonia that it would end India's isolation and make it a much larger player in world affairs, even offering his resignation if the pact were scuttled, according to one of his former aides. Since then, with the emergence of Rahul, the team has become more effective. Though outwardly very different, the three leaders have much in common. For example, all are sensitive to the plight of India's minorities: Singh because he is a Sikh, Sonia because she was born a Christian and Rahul because he is linked through his grandfather to the tiny Parsi community. All three share a loathing for the Hindu supremacist rhetoric of the rival BJP. And all three are courteous and humble, traits that have endeared them to an electorate accustomed to imperious behavior from its pols.
Now the triumvirate's big challenge is living up to expectations. They face a slothful political system that is a holdover of the colonial mindset and they must contend with a culture of bureaucratic obstructionism that has outlasted many previous would-be reformers. Entrenched interests within Congress itself will also no doubt seek to derail Singh's programs and the Gandhis' efforts to make the party more democratic and to allow fresh faces to emerge. But with his newly enhanced grip on the reins of government, Singh knows that his 100-day deadline is a nominal one intended to light a fire underneath his subordinates. He has a full five years to perform. That said, the stakes couldn't be higher. This is more than Congress's big chance; it is India's. Failing to capitalize on it would be costly indeed, for the party, the country, and most of all, for its citizens.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200866
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
india's new government takes shape
The bar has been set high for Prime Minister Singh's first 100 days.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 20:03 ET
NEW DELHI, India — Most of the time, nobody expects too much out of the government in India.
The business of politics is business as usual, and the entrenched bureaucracy and revolving-door leadership seems designed to perpetuate the moribund status quo. But this election's surprise result has raised hopes so high that the shine could come off Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's big victory in as little as three months.
On the eve of swearing in the rest of his cabinet to complete the formation of the government Tuesday, Singh comes to power at a very difficult time. India is proving to be less immune to the global economic crisis than was originally supposed, stimulus packages and populist policies have left the country with a disturbingly high deficit, and observers from the left and right poles of the ideological spectrum are expecting bold, decisive actions in the new government's first 100 days — a ridiculously brief moment of time for an Indian administration.
“Even if you can't get a lot done in a hundred days, you can at least lay out a set of priorities that will be focused on in each ministry,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “If it doesn't come, the judgment repercussions will be fairly significant. The hope will start to die quite quickly.”
Most people will be expecting more than that. During the campaign, Singh himself promised to come out with a new economic stimulus within his first 100 days in office, and greedy appetites have been whetted by the action plans leaked by various government departments.
The 100-day actions being bandied about by bankers, economists and editorial writers comprise a wish list of social welfare measures and economic reforms that would be a tall order for a five year term. Thanks to the perception that the new government won't face opposition from allies, it includes items like starting a national urban poverty mission to complement the last term's rural employment guarantee scheme, boosting government revenue by divesting bloated state-owned enterprises, and further slashing bank lending rates for farmers and the poor. It also involves releasing some of the $8.5 billion of government money for infrastructure projects that has been stuck in the pipeline, and a host of other measures.
The initial signs look promising. For instance, the ministry of road transport, highways and shipping is reportedly planning to review and correct the implementation problems that derailed the national highways development program during Singh's first term, when the department failed to award contracts for road projects worth some $10 billion.
Similarly, the telecom ministry has vowed to finally get moving on the auction of 3G and Wimax licenses to spur further growth in the broadband Internet business. And reports are surfacing that the finance ministry is preparing for initial public offerings of state-owned companies like hydropower firm NHPC, Oil India Limited and infrastructure consultancy Rail India Technical and Economic Services, which would provide much needed revenue for the treasury.
Observers have also interpreted Singh's first moves in appointing cabinet ministers, announced Saturday, as a good sign. In the six key ministries that have been allotted — finance, home, external affairs, agriculture, defence, and railways — he has brought back experienced loyalists with reputations for efficiency, and managed to cede only the railways to an ally with the potential to be mercurial. The rest of the cabinet posts were yet to be announced at the time this article was published.
In many other areas, this government already has a course chalked out for it by the various commissions and study groups Singh set up during his first term, which the Congress party mentioned specifically in its election manifesto. These groups include bodies devoted to reforming the bureaucracy; addressing social security for the millions of workers employed by tiny, unregulated sweatshops; restructuring commodities pricing and other policies to boost the agricultural sector; and improving the quality and availability of education from the primary to postgraduate level. There are some 34 bills pending from the last parliamentary session, many of them stemming from these bodies.
But level-headed observers of India's political system say India has always been brilliant at forming committees and making plans; it's the actual doing that's the weakness. They also suggest that making hard choices may be nearly as difficult for this government as it was for the previous one. To start with, the economic crisis has rejuvenated the hoary old socialists of the Congress (at its nadir inspiring Sonia Gandhi to laud the nationalization of banks). But more importantly, the difficult economic times will mean that everybody is looking for handouts and that money will be tighter than ever.
“In the immediate future, there are fiscal issues,” said Gokarn. “How do you create resources that will sustain an infrastructure investment program, particularly as foreign investment inflows look to be rather sporadic and not very large over the next couple years? The other agendas will start to flow from that, depending on whether you have enough resources for the government to play a role or not.”
That means, like always, it will be easy to give things away—whether in the form of price subsidies or job programs—by increasing deficit spending. But it will remain difficult to initiate real change. What could be worse for Singh, is that there won't be anybody to blame for lack of progress this time around—the handy role of the Left last time--and the electorate's high expectations means that tolerance for business as usual will be especially low.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 20:03 ET
NEW DELHI, India — Most of the time, nobody expects too much out of the government in India.
The business of politics is business as usual, and the entrenched bureaucracy and revolving-door leadership seems designed to perpetuate the moribund status quo. But this election's surprise result has raised hopes so high that the shine could come off Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's big victory in as little as three months.
On the eve of swearing in the rest of his cabinet to complete the formation of the government Tuesday, Singh comes to power at a very difficult time. India is proving to be less immune to the global economic crisis than was originally supposed, stimulus packages and populist policies have left the country with a disturbingly high deficit, and observers from the left and right poles of the ideological spectrum are expecting bold, decisive actions in the new government's first 100 days — a ridiculously brief moment of time for an Indian administration.
“Even if you can't get a lot done in a hundred days, you can at least lay out a set of priorities that will be focused on in each ministry,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “If it doesn't come, the judgment repercussions will be fairly significant. The hope will start to die quite quickly.”
Most people will be expecting more than that. During the campaign, Singh himself promised to come out with a new economic stimulus within his first 100 days in office, and greedy appetites have been whetted by the action plans leaked by various government departments.
The 100-day actions being bandied about by bankers, economists and editorial writers comprise a wish list of social welfare measures and economic reforms that would be a tall order for a five year term. Thanks to the perception that the new government won't face opposition from allies, it includes items like starting a national urban poverty mission to complement the last term's rural employment guarantee scheme, boosting government revenue by divesting bloated state-owned enterprises, and further slashing bank lending rates for farmers and the poor. It also involves releasing some of the $8.5 billion of government money for infrastructure projects that has been stuck in the pipeline, and a host of other measures.
The initial signs look promising. For instance, the ministry of road transport, highways and shipping is reportedly planning to review and correct the implementation problems that derailed the national highways development program during Singh's first term, when the department failed to award contracts for road projects worth some $10 billion.
Similarly, the telecom ministry has vowed to finally get moving on the auction of 3G and Wimax licenses to spur further growth in the broadband Internet business. And reports are surfacing that the finance ministry is preparing for initial public offerings of state-owned companies like hydropower firm NHPC, Oil India Limited and infrastructure consultancy Rail India Technical and Economic Services, which would provide much needed revenue for the treasury.
Observers have also interpreted Singh's first moves in appointing cabinet ministers, announced Saturday, as a good sign. In the six key ministries that have been allotted — finance, home, external affairs, agriculture, defence, and railways — he has brought back experienced loyalists with reputations for efficiency, and managed to cede only the railways to an ally with the potential to be mercurial. The rest of the cabinet posts were yet to be announced at the time this article was published.
In many other areas, this government already has a course chalked out for it by the various commissions and study groups Singh set up during his first term, which the Congress party mentioned specifically in its election manifesto. These groups include bodies devoted to reforming the bureaucracy; addressing social security for the millions of workers employed by tiny, unregulated sweatshops; restructuring commodities pricing and other policies to boost the agricultural sector; and improving the quality and availability of education from the primary to postgraduate level. There are some 34 bills pending from the last parliamentary session, many of them stemming from these bodies.
But level-headed observers of India's political system say India has always been brilliant at forming committees and making plans; it's the actual doing that's the weakness. They also suggest that making hard choices may be nearly as difficult for this government as it was for the previous one. To start with, the economic crisis has rejuvenated the hoary old socialists of the Congress (at its nadir inspiring Sonia Gandhi to laud the nationalization of banks). But more importantly, the difficult economic times will mean that everybody is looking for handouts and that money will be tighter than ever.
“In the immediate future, there are fiscal issues,” said Gokarn. “How do you create resources that will sustain an infrastructure investment program, particularly as foreign investment inflows look to be rather sporadic and not very large over the next couple years? The other agendas will start to flow from that, depending on whether you have enough resources for the government to play a role or not.”
That means, like always, it will be easy to give things away—whether in the form of price subsidies or job programs—by increasing deficit spending. But it will remain difficult to initiate real change. What could be worse for Singh, is that there won't be anybody to blame for lack of progress this time around—the handy role of the Left last time--and the electorate's high expectations means that tolerance for business as usual will be especially low.
the whiskey diaries
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
Sunday, May 24, 2009
from the network that brought you MTV: child marriage
Can a TV sensation in modern India change an ancient tradition?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
in india, the congress wins big
Analysts see ruling party's decisive victory as a rejection of identity politics.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party's secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won't depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
Previously, the most optimistic exit polls had suggested that the entire UPA coalition would win just 216 parliamentary seats and the Congress Party just 160. To form a majority government in India and select the prime minister, a single party or coalition must win 272 of 543 constituencies. Even if the UPA tally doesn't increase as counting finishes, with 257 seats it can easily attain a majority with the addition of one of the smaller parties that will be angling for influence.
The verdict vindicated Singh's steadfast refusal to give up last year's path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India's diversity over the BJP's ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Because India's communist parties continue to oppose the nuclear pact with the U.S. and remain suspicious of India's burgeoning economic and military ties with America, it is also a verdict that is sure to go down well in Washington. And because the Left blocked Singh from pushing forward with liberalizing India's economy — preventing progress on loosening labor laws, selling off state-owned enterprises, and opening up new sectors like retail to direct foreign investment — the results will also provide some unexpected cheer to the business community.
The Indian stock exchange, too, will doubtless get a boost on Monday from the prospect of a stable government that will almost certainly survive for its entire five-year term.
“Clearly, the perception of stability will be reinforced, so there's no fear of government collapse and mid-term elections,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “That's absolutely critical in these circumstances for medium- and long-term planning" of business activities and investments.
But the most exciting implications of these results lie in the complex terrain of India's domestic politics. The vote has been hailed as marking the official arrival of Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi as a major figure, signaling the decline of identity politics and sounding the death knell for religious extremism.
Throughout his early career, and, indeed, throughout this campaign, Rahul Gandhi — who is the direct descendant of three of India's most respected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — was decried as an untested political ingenue, much as John F. Kennedy Jr. was in the years shortly after he finally passed the bar exam.
This election was Rahul's first real test. Despite his inexperience he made some bold moves — convincing senior members of the party that the Congress should fight the elections alone rather than forming pre-poll alliances in several key states, for instance.
He was the party's chief campaigner, traveling constantly and logging thousands of kilometers by convoy and helicopter. He sometimes went as far as to ditch his security cordon to woo voters from India's poorest classes with symbolic gestures like eating meals in the homes of Dalits (the people once called Untouchables). In both respects, he was incredibly successful, simultaneously rejuvenating the Congress as a national force and shaking the stranglehold that the Dalit leader Mayawati held on Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state.
“It was a huge victory for him, at many levels,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “One, the fact that there's a revival underway in UP, where he took the decision to go without allies and campaigned very hard. Second, the Congress has done well in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Gujarat — these are the states where Rahul experimented with reviving the Youth Congress. In that sense, it might strengthen his hand about the kind of organization that is needed in the party.”
Longtime political observers now also say that the Congress's huge gains in UP — and its strong performance in many other states where pollsters and pundits had been predicting that regional parties based on caste and ethnic formulations would dominate — may signal an end to the identity-based voting that has ruled Indian politics since the mid-1980s.
In this regard, it wasn't just the gains that Rahul's Congress made against Mayawati in UP that were significant; also significant was the thumping defeat in Bihar of Lalu Prasad Yadav, a middle-caste icon once as powerful and controversial a figure in his state as Boss Tweed.
The verdict points toward an end of regional factionalism, Mehta said. “Two things are clearly coming out,” he said. “It's a vote against the politics of opportunism — all kinds of small parties and formulations [allied for cynical reasons]. The second interesting trend is that you cannot take any vote bank for granted. The things that we took for granted, the Muslim vote, the Dalit vote, were all up for grabs.”
For the Hindu nationalist BJP, the election was a total debacle. As the results rolled in on the local television network CNN/IBN, historian Ramachandra Guha drew attention to the electorate's rejection of divisive and extremist politics to call this “the most sensible verdict in an Indian election since 1977.”
As such, this will undoubtedly be the swan song for Lal Krishna Advani — who could not shake the reputation for prejudice and extremism he had acquired while spearheading the agitation that led to the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in 1992 — and it confirms that the BJP faces a full-on leadership crisis.
“We never imagined this unexpected result,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh as he conceded defeat and announced that the party would retreat to headquarters Saturday night for a long session of troubled soul-searching.
They have plenty of reason to worry. Analysts see the verdict as a rejection of jingoistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some suggest this could relegate the BJP to a perennial also-ran. None of the BJP's attempts to polarize the electorate over issues like terrorism or the dredging of a canal through a natural land bridge that some devout Hindus believe was built by the god Ram ever got off the ground. And there are serious questions about whether the party's erstwhile alliance partners will accept Advani's heir apparent, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, due to his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom that killed as many as a thousand Muslims in Ahmedabad.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party's secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won't depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
Previously, the most optimistic exit polls had suggested that the entire UPA coalition would win just 216 parliamentary seats and the Congress Party just 160. To form a majority government in India and select the prime minister, a single party or coalition must win 272 of 543 constituencies. Even if the UPA tally doesn't increase as counting finishes, with 257 seats it can easily attain a majority with the addition of one of the smaller parties that will be angling for influence.
The verdict vindicated Singh's steadfast refusal to give up last year's path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India's diversity over the BJP's ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Because India's communist parties continue to oppose the nuclear pact with the U.S. and remain suspicious of India's burgeoning economic and military ties with America, it is also a verdict that is sure to go down well in Washington. And because the Left blocked Singh from pushing forward with liberalizing India's economy — preventing progress on loosening labor laws, selling off state-owned enterprises, and opening up new sectors like retail to direct foreign investment — the results will also provide some unexpected cheer to the business community.
The Indian stock exchange, too, will doubtless get a boost on Monday from the prospect of a stable government that will almost certainly survive for its entire five-year term.
“Clearly, the perception of stability will be reinforced, so there's no fear of government collapse and mid-term elections,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “That's absolutely critical in these circumstances for medium- and long-term planning" of business activities and investments.
But the most exciting implications of these results lie in the complex terrain of India's domestic politics. The vote has been hailed as marking the official arrival of Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi as a major figure, signaling the decline of identity politics and sounding the death knell for religious extremism.
Throughout his early career, and, indeed, throughout this campaign, Rahul Gandhi — who is the direct descendant of three of India's most respected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — was decried as an untested political ingenue, much as John F. Kennedy Jr. was in the years shortly after he finally passed the bar exam.
This election was Rahul's first real test. Despite his inexperience he made some bold moves — convincing senior members of the party that the Congress should fight the elections alone rather than forming pre-poll alliances in several key states, for instance.
He was the party's chief campaigner, traveling constantly and logging thousands of kilometers by convoy and helicopter. He sometimes went as far as to ditch his security cordon to woo voters from India's poorest classes with symbolic gestures like eating meals in the homes of Dalits (the people once called Untouchables). In both respects, he was incredibly successful, simultaneously rejuvenating the Congress as a national force and shaking the stranglehold that the Dalit leader Mayawati held on Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state.
“It was a huge victory for him, at many levels,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “One, the fact that there's a revival underway in UP, where he took the decision to go without allies and campaigned very hard. Second, the Congress has done well in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Gujarat — these are the states where Rahul experimented with reviving the Youth Congress. In that sense, it might strengthen his hand about the kind of organization that is needed in the party.”
Longtime political observers now also say that the Congress's huge gains in UP — and its strong performance in many other states where pollsters and pundits had been predicting that regional parties based on caste and ethnic formulations would dominate — may signal an end to the identity-based voting that has ruled Indian politics since the mid-1980s.
In this regard, it wasn't just the gains that Rahul's Congress made against Mayawati in UP that were significant; also significant was the thumping defeat in Bihar of Lalu Prasad Yadav, a middle-caste icon once as powerful and controversial a figure in his state as Boss Tweed.
The verdict points toward an end of regional factionalism, Mehta said. “Two things are clearly coming out,” he said. “It's a vote against the politics of opportunism — all kinds of small parties and formulations [allied for cynical reasons]. The second interesting trend is that you cannot take any vote bank for granted. The things that we took for granted, the Muslim vote, the Dalit vote, were all up for grabs.”
For the Hindu nationalist BJP, the election was a total debacle. As the results rolled in on the local television network CNN/IBN, historian Ramachandra Guha drew attention to the electorate's rejection of divisive and extremist politics to call this “the most sensible verdict in an Indian election since 1977.”
As such, this will undoubtedly be the swan song for Lal Krishna Advani — who could not shake the reputation for prejudice and extremism he had acquired while spearheading the agitation that led to the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in 1992 — and it confirms that the BJP faces a full-on leadership crisis.
“We never imagined this unexpected result,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh as he conceded defeat and announced that the party would retreat to headquarters Saturday night for a long session of troubled soul-searching.
They have plenty of reason to worry. Analysts see the verdict as a rejection of jingoistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some suggest this could relegate the BJP to a perennial also-ran. None of the BJP's attempts to polarize the electorate over issues like terrorism or the dredging of a canal through a natural land bridge that some devout Hindus believe was built by the god Ram ever got off the ground. And there are serious questions about whether the party's erstwhile alliance partners will accept Advani's heir apparent, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, due to his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom that killed as many as a thousand Muslims in Ahmedabad.
give it a good shake
By Jason Overdorf
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
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