The uneasy mix of superstition and science in rural India
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: January 26, 2009 13:30 ET
BETUL, MADHYA PRADESH, India — As a priest wafts incense over her with a broom and recites an melodic incantation, Jyoti Salu begins to declaim loudly over the noise of the crowd. "All religions are one. All saints are one. Sai Baba and Guru Saheb are one. Only Guru Saheb understands the trouble in my heart."
Since collapsing at a marriage ceremony a month ago, Salu has been behaving strangely and raving about gods and saints. Her parents believe she may be possessed.
"Once or twice a day she has a fit and then she starts talking like this, taking the name of gods and saints," says the girl's father, Bhim Lal Sahu. "We took her to a psychiatrist and he prescribed some medicines for 20 days. But we are also taking her to shrines where they perform exorcisms, just in case."
Like most of the thousands of people who flock to the central Indian village of Mallajpur for the annual ghost fair — some traveling hundreds of kilometers — Bhim Lal believes more strongly in evil spirits than modern medicine. So he has brought his disturbed daughter to this shrine to Guru Saheb — an 18th century ascetic purported to have on this spot in 1770 attained moksha, or the liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death that is the ultimate goal of Hinduism. With smoke and mantras, a little help from Guru Saheb, and more than a few healthy whacks, the priests here claim to cast out demons and imprison them in the nearby trees. Bhim Lal hopes they can help his daughter.
The treatment appears to help Mahenge Lal, a farmer from the village of Hardu, about 10 kilometers away, who says he is possessed by 500 million ghosts that shake his body like a rag doll, torment him with migraines and fill his head with a clamor of voices. As the priest sweeps smoke from the shrine over him, Lal's head wags spasmodically, his eyes rolls skywards, and he cries out the name of the guru. The priest delivers a resounding slap to the middle of Lal's back, and the patient sighs with relief and eagerly slumps to lick a lump of raw sugar from the concrete base of the shrine. One down, 499 million to go.
Locals say the victims of evil spirits speak in odd voices and foreign languages that their families claim they never learned. Most of the afflicted are women, who according to Bhopal University sociologist Gyanendra Gautam lead heavily constricted lives with little hope of escape. With slack faces and off-kilter stares, most of them appear to be haunted by nothing more exotic than schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or mental retardation.
Psychological professionals agree. According to a recent study by the Indian Council of Medical Research, India's poorly educated masses most frequently ascribe the abnormal or inappropriate behaviors that Westerners would associate with insanity to black magic, evil spirits, masturbation and excessive sex. And even if it were desired, the appropriate medical treatment is rarely available. "Godmen of every faith that we have have forever been in charge of mental health in India," says Dr. Vinay Mishra, a Bhopal-based psychologist. "Science has not really caught on in our lives."
About ten years ago, Mishra and some colleagues attempted to educate rural clerics about mental illness, hoping to encourage them to counsel people with minor neuroses but to send those with chemical disorders like schizophrenia to urban hospitals for treatment. The project failed miserably. The priests depended on the cash and offerings of the possessed for their livelihoods, they were reluctant to give up the privileged status that performing exorcisms granted them, and they found the psychiatrists' scientific explanations utterly absurd. "They didn't believe that psychological problems could be triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain," says Mishra.
Perhaps that's why the possessed attending the fair seem so eager. Forming an impromptu lineup in hopes of attention from what appears to be a foreign specialist, they recount a litany of mysterious and random ailments. "I saw a doctor, but he couldn't understand my problem," says 35-year-old Kaushal. "The ghost gives me headaches and makes my body parts crack, but yet I am unable to cry."
"The ghost possessed me nearly two years ago," says 52-year-old Gauri Bai. "At the shrine I am finding some relief." And then 45-year-old Buri steps forward, snaps to attention, and sticks out her long, yellowish tongue. From her eyes, it is clear that she believed her problem to be self-evident.
But that is the last moment of humor. Soon after her exorcism, Jyoti's voice rings out in protest as the priest tries to convince her father to keep her there overnight. "You said I would only have to come here for two hours!" she shouts. "It's been two hours. Now I want to go home." Thanks to her education, she is strong enough to exert her will, whatever her problems. But that is not true for everyone. Soon a terrified 14-year-old girl is dragged to the altar. As the tears stream down her face, the priest winds up and smacks her in the middle of the back, then grabs her by the hair and forces her to lick the piece of raw sugar from the shrine.
Her ailment is unclear. But the devil who torments her is plain to see.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
beware the "killer blueline"
Private bus companies take a deadly toll on Indian pedestrians. Here's the problem: they're needed.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 9, 2009
NEW DELHI — Around 10 a.m. on a busy Wednesday last month, 38-year-old Raj Kumar had a narrow escape from death when a careening bus plowed into him from behind. He picked himself up, dusted off his clothes and felt his limbs for breaks. Shaken but not gravely injured, he climbed into an auto rickshaw headed for the hospital.
Twenty minutes later, he decided that he didn't need the emergency room, so he left. As he started crossing the road to make his way to work, a second bus slammed into him and dragged him under the wheels. This time, he didn't get up.
This bizarre story is not as unlikely as it seems. Kumar was the 118th person to be mowed down in 2008 by one of Delhi's “killer Blueline buses,” as the local press has christened the 4,500-odd buses contracted out to private operators by the Delhi government.
And he wasn't the last. The killer buses have claimed more victims in 2009, and despite a relentless media campaign, the government's plan to phase them out is progressing at a snail's pace.
To be sure, the Bluelines are symptomatic of a larger problem. With more than 100,000 traffic fatalities a year and a mortality rate about seven times that of the roads in developed countries, according to the World Bank, India's roads are among the world's most deadly. And Delhi, where the number of vehicles is growing faster than any other city in India, presents a frightening vision of the future.
Every few months pavement dwellers — sometimes whole families — are run over in their sleep by drunk drivers. Road rage assaults and even murders are on the rise, and nobody, but nobody, follows the rules. Last year, for instance, police statistics show that incidents of dangerous driving in India's capital nearly doubled, increasing to about 125,000 from 69,000 in 2007.
"The road safety issue of Delhi is not just the Blueline buses,” says Dinesh Mohan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) who studies traffic safety. “Our roads are still not designed for the amount of traffic in Delhi and other cities in India, and that's not likely to change for some time.”
Reckless drivers are indeed common on Delhi roads. But because of their mammoth size and the deafening whistles that they use instead of horns, the Bluelines are the most frightening of all. And when they strike, their victims are among India's most vulnerable people. “They may be rickshaw pullers, or people traveling on the bus, or just walking on the road,” says advocate Rajinder Singh, who has argued 20 such cases. “They're from the poorest strata of society.”
Since July 2007, when Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit announced that the Bluelines would be taken off the roads, they have killed as many as 200 people. Hardly a single bus has been removed from service, and when tough action was taken to cancel the permits of errant operators the government was forced to cave by a citywide strike.
Killers or not, it turned out that the Blueline buses were the only thing keeping the city running. “There are about 4,500 Blueline buses, and they transport about 6.5 million passengers per day,” said H.S. Kalra, president of the Federation of Delhi Bus Operators. Despite covering many kilometers in the city's worst traffic, he adds, “Bluelines are only responsible for about 10 percent of the city's traffic fatalities.”
Plans are still underway to get rid of them. Just a week before Kumar was hit twice in 20 minutes, Transport Minister R.K. Verma had unveiled a new scheme that — if implemented — steps up the phaseout deadline to 2010 from 2012. But observers remain skeptical that a plan to consolidate the Bluelines under corporations that own 100 or more vehicles, instead of individual owners, will be effective in reining in reckless drivers.
“The basic problem is that the drivers try to catch the maximum number of passengers by racing to overtake one another,” Singh says. “The reason is that the more tickets they sell, the more revenue they earn, and if the drivers don't bring in a base of revenue, the bus owners don't pay their salaries at the end of the day.”
Says Mohan: “You shouldn't have a public service which is given to private operators, because then you have a profit motive that drives the system. Any human being would behave the same way under that incentive system.”
Pedestrians have good reason to be cynical. The Bluelines are actually this decade's solution to last decade's problem — the relaunched and rebranded version of the Redline buses that enjoyed their own reputation for mayhem. Initially, the government opted to pay the Blueline operators by the kilometer, rather than letting them compete for ticket revenue, in an effort to stop the racing and careening into the bus stops that was thought to account for most accidents.
But when bus owners decided that it was more convenient, put less wear and tear on the fleet, and earned them just as much money not to stop for passengers at all, the kilometer scheme was scrapped and the Bluelines became nothing more than the Redlines with a less-bloody sounding name.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 9, 2009
NEW DELHI — Around 10 a.m. on a busy Wednesday last month, 38-year-old Raj Kumar had a narrow escape from death when a careening bus plowed into him from behind. He picked himself up, dusted off his clothes and felt his limbs for breaks. Shaken but not gravely injured, he climbed into an auto rickshaw headed for the hospital.
Twenty minutes later, he decided that he didn't need the emergency room, so he left. As he started crossing the road to make his way to work, a second bus slammed into him and dragged him under the wheels. This time, he didn't get up.
This bizarre story is not as unlikely as it seems. Kumar was the 118th person to be mowed down in 2008 by one of Delhi's “killer Blueline buses,” as the local press has christened the 4,500-odd buses contracted out to private operators by the Delhi government.
And he wasn't the last. The killer buses have claimed more victims in 2009, and despite a relentless media campaign, the government's plan to phase them out is progressing at a snail's pace.
To be sure, the Bluelines are symptomatic of a larger problem. With more than 100,000 traffic fatalities a year and a mortality rate about seven times that of the roads in developed countries, according to the World Bank, India's roads are among the world's most deadly. And Delhi, where the number of vehicles is growing faster than any other city in India, presents a frightening vision of the future.
Every few months pavement dwellers — sometimes whole families — are run over in their sleep by drunk drivers. Road rage assaults and even murders are on the rise, and nobody, but nobody, follows the rules. Last year, for instance, police statistics show that incidents of dangerous driving in India's capital nearly doubled, increasing to about 125,000 from 69,000 in 2007.
"The road safety issue of Delhi is not just the Blueline buses,” says Dinesh Mohan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) who studies traffic safety. “Our roads are still not designed for the amount of traffic in Delhi and other cities in India, and that's not likely to change for some time.”
Reckless drivers are indeed common on Delhi roads. But because of their mammoth size and the deafening whistles that they use instead of horns, the Bluelines are the most frightening of all. And when they strike, their victims are among India's most vulnerable people. “They may be rickshaw pullers, or people traveling on the bus, or just walking on the road,” says advocate Rajinder Singh, who has argued 20 such cases. “They're from the poorest strata of society.”
Since July 2007, when Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit announced that the Bluelines would be taken off the roads, they have killed as many as 200 people. Hardly a single bus has been removed from service, and when tough action was taken to cancel the permits of errant operators the government was forced to cave by a citywide strike.
Killers or not, it turned out that the Blueline buses were the only thing keeping the city running. “There are about 4,500 Blueline buses, and they transport about 6.5 million passengers per day,” said H.S. Kalra, president of the Federation of Delhi Bus Operators. Despite covering many kilometers in the city's worst traffic, he adds, “Bluelines are only responsible for about 10 percent of the city's traffic fatalities.”
Plans are still underway to get rid of them. Just a week before Kumar was hit twice in 20 minutes, Transport Minister R.K. Verma had unveiled a new scheme that — if implemented — steps up the phaseout deadline to 2010 from 2012. But observers remain skeptical that a plan to consolidate the Bluelines under corporations that own 100 or more vehicles, instead of individual owners, will be effective in reining in reckless drivers.
“The basic problem is that the drivers try to catch the maximum number of passengers by racing to overtake one another,” Singh says. “The reason is that the more tickets they sell, the more revenue they earn, and if the drivers don't bring in a base of revenue, the bus owners don't pay their salaries at the end of the day.”
Says Mohan: “You shouldn't have a public service which is given to private operators, because then you have a profit motive that drives the system. Any human being would behave the same way under that incentive system.”
Pedestrians have good reason to be cynical. The Bluelines are actually this decade's solution to last decade's problem — the relaunched and rebranded version of the Redline buses that enjoyed their own reputation for mayhem. Initially, the government opted to pay the Blueline operators by the kilometer, rather than letting them compete for ticket revenue, in an effort to stop the racing and careening into the bus stops that was thought to account for most accidents.
But when bus owners decided that it was more convenient, put less wear and tear on the fleet, and earned them just as much money not to stop for passengers at all, the kilometer scheme was scrapped and the Bluelines became nothing more than the Redlines with a less-bloody sounding name.
Monday, January 12, 2009
the boom from the bottom
Isolated from world trends, India's aspiring poor will help it grow through the credit storm.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009
Though it may not look it on the ground at times, India is one of the few bright spots in a global economy with decidedly dim prospects in 2009. It is forecast to grow at a robust 5 to 6 percent this year—which is faster than it averaged in the 1990s, and nearly double the rate of expansion over the country's first three decades of independence. Yes, its stock market has crashed, unemployment is spiking, swaths of the real-estate market have more than a passing resemblance to Miami Beach and it now turns out that Satyam Computer Services—one of the country's top five IT companies—has been cooking its books. But a one off incident of fraud in the flagship IT sector won't knock the country off the rails. India boasts an unlikely growth driver all its own: legions of poor whose incomes have risen just enough in recent years to create powerful demands for basic goods and services.
The rise of India's aspiring middle—a group that lives above the poverty line but hasn't yet attained true membership in modern consumer society—is hardly a new story. But what's surprising is the resilience of this cohort, and the extent to which it has counterbalanced the global credit crisis and the slump in the global export economy of which India is a key player. In part, this is a consequence of New Delhi's past failures; policymakers were never able to make India the export powerhouse that China has become over the past three decades, so now they don't rely nearly as heavily on growth driven by investment and demand from foreign markets.
Yet Indian planners deserve some credit, too, for avoiding a national addiction to cheap credit and creating "growth multipliers" like roads and telecom networks that now link the country's vast interior to modern cities. "The basic component of domestic demand [in India] is consumer demand, because people still have incomes to earn," says Saumitra Chaudhuri, chief economist at ICRA, an Indian credit-ratings agency affiliated with Moody's. "And those incomes are not substantially influenced by international developments."
The idea that Indian backwardness is a plus may sound absurd. But it is always easier to grow from a poor base, so the fact that India is not yet a major economy is an advantage in a downturn. A population so large that subsists at such a low economic base is a powerful economic driver if it can be mobilized. India's has been, and it is proving resilient to the prevailing headwinds in the global economy. "It's kind of a self-sustaining process," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "There's a huge, huge underpenetration of most commodities and services, and you have enough people at the bottom experiencing enough of an increase in income to sustain growth."
So even as middle-class consumption wanes in India—signified by a sharp drop in auto sales, airline travel and fine restaurant dining since mid-2008—domestic demand remains strong thanks to aspiring consumers, many still tied to the farms, who spend their rupees on essentials like soap, medicine and the shoes and clothing that they wear to work. As Gokarn puts it: "If you go back to the economic textbooks, they will tell you that the poorer you are, the stronger your propensity to consume."
The contrast with China, Asia's other economic giant, is stark. Domestic demand makes up three quarters of the Indian economy, compared with less than half for China, which is "why, relative to East Asian economies, India is somewhat insulated from the global trade slowdown," says Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government. Another Indian mainstay—agricultural growth—should remain steady this year, and the services sector, which now accounts for about 55 percent of India's GDP, is expected to be "more resilient" than manufacturing, says Acharya.
Despite the financial crisis, the nation's IT sector managed to grow some 20 percent in 2008, according to India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, and IT companies have already extended 100,000 new job offers for 2009. "For whatever reason, China has been highly focused on the export market, while Indian business has been highly focused on the domestic market, and their exports have been incidental," says Chaudhuri. Which makes India, more than China, a master of its own destiny.
The conventional wisdom has always held that India failed to become an export-driven dynamo on the Chinese model because its democratic system couldn't deliver the hard infrastructure and soft labor laws needed to manufacture competitively. While there is some truth to that, what is often overlooked is how much India's current growth multipliers—all of them linked to infrastructure—resemble China's in the 1980s.
One example: India's ambitious program to expand the national highway system, launched in 2003, which is now adding about 100 kilometers of highway per day to the grid. Each new strip of pavement links additional villagers to urban markets, allowing them to fetch more for what they grow or make and to travel farther afield for wage-paying jobs. Capitalized at a whopping 5 percent of GDP in 2000, India's rural roads program will ultimately connect all Indian villages of more than 500 people to one another with all-weather roads. Fewer than half of these villages had roads of any sort when the project started. Similarly, in a six-phase national project, the National Highway Authority plans to add or upgrade nearly 30,000 kilometers of highway, which would expand the existing system by a third.
Telecommunications has made faster inroads. In 2008 the subscriber base for India's national telecom network topped 350 million people, and India's telecom market is now growing faster than even China's. Charges have dropped to less than 50 U.S. cents per call. That connectedness has a huge potential impact on incomes in a job market "extremely sensitive to how quickly one can get information," says Gokarn. There's also the IT sector itself to consider. It has created 1.8 million jobs directly over the past decade, and as many as 6.5 million more support jobs for drivers, security guards and gofers with primary or high school educations. That has put rupees into the hands of people "more likely to spend it rather than save it," says Gokarn, and though job creation will slow as the IT sector cools off, the huge workforce creates a good deal of momentum.
India's bottom-up boom can't drive the economy at full speed, to be sure. But it is largely immune to the downturn that's evident higher up the consumer chain. The stock bust hasn't affected the aspiring underclass because its members are not invested in the markets, and they're not to blame for the drop in auto sales because they're too poor to afford cars. Even the housing bust is far removed from them; despite the glut of top-end condos in places like Mumbai and New Delhi, India as a whole is suffering an acute housing shortage. The problem: construction companies all aimed for the top of the market, leaving the lower tiers underserved. According to the National Planning Commission, urban India needs an additional 24.7 million ordinary homes to satisfy current demand. As evidence of this unquenchable thirst, when the Delhi Development Authority held a lottery last year to find buyers for 5,000 affordable flats it built in the city, some 500,000 applications flooded in.
The mismatch illuminates India's way forward. Like many other governments, New Delhi recently announced a major new spending package aimed at bolstering growth. And it, too, seeks to spur domestic demand. Yet the main target isn't the urban middle, as in China or the United States, but the poor. In October, Parliament approved additional spending of about $50 billion (or 4.5 percent of GDP) to boost salaries of government workers, waive farm loans, further fund the rural-employment-guarantee program and finance petroleum bonds so that oil and fertilizer companies can keep prices low. "While there are legitimate concerns about the long-term impact of some of these measures," says Gokarn, "they will undoubtedly help boost consumption spending, particularly by lower income households, which in turn will help shore up growth in the immediate future."
India avoided a U.S.-style housing bust and is better positioned to pump money into the cash-starved financial system today because its much-maligned central bank was never wooed by the allure of easy money—no matter how loudly industry clamored for faster growth. When the central banks of other countries were essentially offering free money, India's realized that, as a democracy of mostly poor voters, it couldn't afford to grow at 10 percent a year if that meant skyrocketing prices for essential commodities like rice and flour. For that reason, the central bank constricted the money inflating the real-estate bubble (and prices for everything else) by raising interest rates to a peak of 12.5 percent last summer, which earned it criticism for being out of step with more aggressively growth-oriented central banks. Because of this, India has ample ground clearance to lower rates and reduce reserve requirements for banks to spur growth and avert deflation.
The private sector is in pretty solid financial shape, too. The central bank kept a close eye on both state-owned and private banks, preventing them from leveraging to perilous heights by keeping the cash reserve ratio high, limiting the use of securitizations and derivatives and essentially barring the off-balance sheet vehicles that U.S. banks used, disastrously, to hide their debt. As a result, India's banks aren't sitting on a mountain of bad loans, which makes them freer to lend to companies in need. Indian companies, cognizant of the cash crunch that burned them in the late 1990s, didn't overextend this time, either. "[One] great source of strength is India's corporate sector, who have much stronger balance sheets [than in the past]," says Chaudhuri.
One sign of that is companies that are putting their wealth to work. In December, India's Wipro Technologies purchased Citigroup's captive IT services firm Citi Technology Services for $127 million in cash, and in October, Tata Consultancy Services was able to buy Citi's business process outsourcing business, Citigroup Global Services, paying $505 million. Both moves suggest that reports of the IT sector's demise in India are greatly exaggerated.
The biggest risk to India in 2009 at this point may not be the global economy but domestic politics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance will see its term expire in May, and India's election rules mean that he can no longer enact any significant policies—a measure adopted to prevent incumbents from stacking the deck with populist sops. That means as much as five months of paralysis, precisely when speedy, creative action is the order of the day. Moreover, though the nemesis of Singh's Congress party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—mostly favors similar policies, a change in government would likely result in some further slowing of infrastructure projects that are already running behind schedule. And elections in India can be tricky. In the last one, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost despite racing economic growth, because poor voters rejected the BJP's campaign claims of an "India Shining."
With the light bulb flickering, Singh's Congress may face an even bigger challenge winning them over. The poor don't care how much faster than other nations India is growing, only whether their lives are better than they were five years ago.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/178814
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009
Though it may not look it on the ground at times, India is one of the few bright spots in a global economy with decidedly dim prospects in 2009. It is forecast to grow at a robust 5 to 6 percent this year—which is faster than it averaged in the 1990s, and nearly double the rate of expansion over the country's first three decades of independence. Yes, its stock market has crashed, unemployment is spiking, swaths of the real-estate market have more than a passing resemblance to Miami Beach and it now turns out that Satyam Computer Services—one of the country's top five IT companies—has been cooking its books. But a one off incident of fraud in the flagship IT sector won't knock the country off the rails. India boasts an unlikely growth driver all its own: legions of poor whose incomes have risen just enough in recent years to create powerful demands for basic goods and services.
The rise of India's aspiring middle—a group that lives above the poverty line but hasn't yet attained true membership in modern consumer society—is hardly a new story. But what's surprising is the resilience of this cohort, and the extent to which it has counterbalanced the global credit crisis and the slump in the global export economy of which India is a key player. In part, this is a consequence of New Delhi's past failures; policymakers were never able to make India the export powerhouse that China has become over the past three decades, so now they don't rely nearly as heavily on growth driven by investment and demand from foreign markets.
Yet Indian planners deserve some credit, too, for avoiding a national addiction to cheap credit and creating "growth multipliers" like roads and telecom networks that now link the country's vast interior to modern cities. "The basic component of domestic demand [in India] is consumer demand, because people still have incomes to earn," says Saumitra Chaudhuri, chief economist at ICRA, an Indian credit-ratings agency affiliated with Moody's. "And those incomes are not substantially influenced by international developments."
The idea that Indian backwardness is a plus may sound absurd. But it is always easier to grow from a poor base, so the fact that India is not yet a major economy is an advantage in a downturn. A population so large that subsists at such a low economic base is a powerful economic driver if it can be mobilized. India's has been, and it is proving resilient to the prevailing headwinds in the global economy. "It's kind of a self-sustaining process," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "There's a huge, huge underpenetration of most commodities and services, and you have enough people at the bottom experiencing enough of an increase in income to sustain growth."
So even as middle-class consumption wanes in India—signified by a sharp drop in auto sales, airline travel and fine restaurant dining since mid-2008—domestic demand remains strong thanks to aspiring consumers, many still tied to the farms, who spend their rupees on essentials like soap, medicine and the shoes and clothing that they wear to work. As Gokarn puts it: "If you go back to the economic textbooks, they will tell you that the poorer you are, the stronger your propensity to consume."
The contrast with China, Asia's other economic giant, is stark. Domestic demand makes up three quarters of the Indian economy, compared with less than half for China, which is "why, relative to East Asian economies, India is somewhat insulated from the global trade slowdown," says Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government. Another Indian mainstay—agricultural growth—should remain steady this year, and the services sector, which now accounts for about 55 percent of India's GDP, is expected to be "more resilient" than manufacturing, says Acharya.
Despite the financial crisis, the nation's IT sector managed to grow some 20 percent in 2008, according to India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, and IT companies have already extended 100,000 new job offers for 2009. "For whatever reason, China has been highly focused on the export market, while Indian business has been highly focused on the domestic market, and their exports have been incidental," says Chaudhuri. Which makes India, more than China, a master of its own destiny.
The conventional wisdom has always held that India failed to become an export-driven dynamo on the Chinese model because its democratic system couldn't deliver the hard infrastructure and soft labor laws needed to manufacture competitively. While there is some truth to that, what is often overlooked is how much India's current growth multipliers—all of them linked to infrastructure—resemble China's in the 1980s.
One example: India's ambitious program to expand the national highway system, launched in 2003, which is now adding about 100 kilometers of highway per day to the grid. Each new strip of pavement links additional villagers to urban markets, allowing them to fetch more for what they grow or make and to travel farther afield for wage-paying jobs. Capitalized at a whopping 5 percent of GDP in 2000, India's rural roads program will ultimately connect all Indian villages of more than 500 people to one another with all-weather roads. Fewer than half of these villages had roads of any sort when the project started. Similarly, in a six-phase national project, the National Highway Authority plans to add or upgrade nearly 30,000 kilometers of highway, which would expand the existing system by a third.
Telecommunications has made faster inroads. In 2008 the subscriber base for India's national telecom network topped 350 million people, and India's telecom market is now growing faster than even China's. Charges have dropped to less than 50 U.S. cents per call. That connectedness has a huge potential impact on incomes in a job market "extremely sensitive to how quickly one can get information," says Gokarn. There's also the IT sector itself to consider. It has created 1.8 million jobs directly over the past decade, and as many as 6.5 million more support jobs for drivers, security guards and gofers with primary or high school educations. That has put rupees into the hands of people "more likely to spend it rather than save it," says Gokarn, and though job creation will slow as the IT sector cools off, the huge workforce creates a good deal of momentum.
India's bottom-up boom can't drive the economy at full speed, to be sure. But it is largely immune to the downturn that's evident higher up the consumer chain. The stock bust hasn't affected the aspiring underclass because its members are not invested in the markets, and they're not to blame for the drop in auto sales because they're too poor to afford cars. Even the housing bust is far removed from them; despite the glut of top-end condos in places like Mumbai and New Delhi, India as a whole is suffering an acute housing shortage. The problem: construction companies all aimed for the top of the market, leaving the lower tiers underserved. According to the National Planning Commission, urban India needs an additional 24.7 million ordinary homes to satisfy current demand. As evidence of this unquenchable thirst, when the Delhi Development Authority held a lottery last year to find buyers for 5,000 affordable flats it built in the city, some 500,000 applications flooded in.
The mismatch illuminates India's way forward. Like many other governments, New Delhi recently announced a major new spending package aimed at bolstering growth. And it, too, seeks to spur domestic demand. Yet the main target isn't the urban middle, as in China or the United States, but the poor. In October, Parliament approved additional spending of about $50 billion (or 4.5 percent of GDP) to boost salaries of government workers, waive farm loans, further fund the rural-employment-guarantee program and finance petroleum bonds so that oil and fertilizer companies can keep prices low. "While there are legitimate concerns about the long-term impact of some of these measures," says Gokarn, "they will undoubtedly help boost consumption spending, particularly by lower income households, which in turn will help shore up growth in the immediate future."
India avoided a U.S.-style housing bust and is better positioned to pump money into the cash-starved financial system today because its much-maligned central bank was never wooed by the allure of easy money—no matter how loudly industry clamored for faster growth. When the central banks of other countries were essentially offering free money, India's realized that, as a democracy of mostly poor voters, it couldn't afford to grow at 10 percent a year if that meant skyrocketing prices for essential commodities like rice and flour. For that reason, the central bank constricted the money inflating the real-estate bubble (and prices for everything else) by raising interest rates to a peak of 12.5 percent last summer, which earned it criticism for being out of step with more aggressively growth-oriented central banks. Because of this, India has ample ground clearance to lower rates and reduce reserve requirements for banks to spur growth and avert deflation.
The private sector is in pretty solid financial shape, too. The central bank kept a close eye on both state-owned and private banks, preventing them from leveraging to perilous heights by keeping the cash reserve ratio high, limiting the use of securitizations and derivatives and essentially barring the off-balance sheet vehicles that U.S. banks used, disastrously, to hide their debt. As a result, India's banks aren't sitting on a mountain of bad loans, which makes them freer to lend to companies in need. Indian companies, cognizant of the cash crunch that burned them in the late 1990s, didn't overextend this time, either. "[One] great source of strength is India's corporate sector, who have much stronger balance sheets [than in the past]," says Chaudhuri.
One sign of that is companies that are putting their wealth to work. In December, India's Wipro Technologies purchased Citigroup's captive IT services firm Citi Technology Services for $127 million in cash, and in October, Tata Consultancy Services was able to buy Citi's business process outsourcing business, Citigroup Global Services, paying $505 million. Both moves suggest that reports of the IT sector's demise in India are greatly exaggerated.
The biggest risk to India in 2009 at this point may not be the global economy but domestic politics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance will see its term expire in May, and India's election rules mean that he can no longer enact any significant policies—a measure adopted to prevent incumbents from stacking the deck with populist sops. That means as much as five months of paralysis, precisely when speedy, creative action is the order of the day. Moreover, though the nemesis of Singh's Congress party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—mostly favors similar policies, a change in government would likely result in some further slowing of infrastructure projects that are already running behind schedule. And elections in India can be tricky. In the last one, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost despite racing economic growth, because poor voters rejected the BJP's campaign claims of an "India Shining."
With the light bulb flickering, Singh's Congress may face an even bigger challenge winning them over. The poor don't care how much faster than other nations India is growing, only whether their lives are better than they were five years ago.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/178814
from bollywood to hollywood
The "Mozart from Madras" is ready for his close up after winning a Golden Globe for "Slumdog Millionaire."
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 12, 2009
NEW DELHI — Calling India's A.R. Rahman — who won a Golden Globe award for the score of "Slumdog Millionaire" last night — the best composer you've never heard of is beyond understatement.
Known locally as "the Mozart from Madras," Rahman has sold over 200 million albums worldwide: more than Madonna and Britney Spears combined. But the truth of the matter is you probably can't hum one of his songs. That's about to change.
"There are a number of gifts that single [Rahman] out as special. His handling of rhythmical elements is astonishing and his solutions very South Indian," said Ken Hunt, one of the authors of the upcoming third edition of "The Rough Guide to World Music." "His melodies are catchy, clever and reveal a command of theatrical music techniques," Hunt adds. "He was pretty much ready for the big time from the get-go."
And now the big time is ready for him. With a multicultural soundtrack unlike anything he's ever done for Bollywood, the 43-year-old composer-singer-producer might be on his way to becoming America's hottest new hand on the mixing board. Indian-origin DJs in New York and London have been saying it for years, but now it just may be true. Brown is the new black.
As far as Indians are concerned, it's about time. Audiences here, where "Slumdog Millionaire" has not yet been released, have been overjoyed by the film's surprise victories at the Critics' Choice and Golden Globe awards. Here's one tribute: Only three Indian films ever have been nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category, "Mother India" (1957), "Salaam Bombay!" (1988) and "Lagaan" (2001). None took home the prize.
So even though "Slumdog" — written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — is not technically an Indian production, or even a Bollywood-style film, the accolades for Rahman have provided some validation for the larger-than-life musicals that Indians often simply call "our films."
Rahman, who started to learn the piano at the age of 4, is something of a Slumdog Millionaire himself. After his father died, he was forced to start work as a keyboard player to support his family at just 11 years old. He later dropped out of high school to pursue his music career. About that same time, he converted from Hinduism to Islam, a brave choice in a country where Muslims often face persecution. But he says Islam "set [him] free."
From his humble beginnings, Rahman swiftly became one of Bollywood's biggest money spinners — a kind of Indian Quincy Jones — virtually owning the industry for more than a decade. His hits, like Chaiya Chaiya, Chhoti Si Asha and Thee Thee, have as much enduring appeal as any Beatles standard, and not only for Bollywood fans. "A.R. Rahman is nothing short of a melodic genius," Andrew Lloyd Webber has said. "I admire his unique sense of harmony, his staggering rhythms and his melodies that take an unexpected twist that no Western composer would dream of."
Bollywood insiders know that kind of staggering genius can make or break a film in India. "In Indian cinema, the music is such an important part of it that music can save a mediocre film," says film critic Jai Arjun Singh. "With Rahman, it happens frequently."
That's not an overstatement. Marketers use song-and-dance numbers from movies for the trailers, videos on Channel V and MTV drive repeat business, and soundtrack sales and music video rights account for a significant part of the picture's revenue.
That's why Indian producers swear by him. "He has demonstrated fusion of west and east more than most musicians over the world," said Ronnie Screwvala, chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, one of India's most successful film production companies. "All our tent pole [productions] have always been Rahman [films]—from Swades to Rang De Basanti to Jodha Akhbar and Delhi 6."
Nevertheless, though he performed with Michael Jackson and wrote the music for Webber's Broadway musical Bombay Dreams and the stage production of the Lord of the Rings, Rahman was virtually unknown to Western fans until last night.
Now he has to be considered a frontrunner for an Oscar, and a raft of offers from record companies and producers in the U.S. music industry.
Here comes the close up.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 12, 2009
NEW DELHI — Calling India's A.R. Rahman — who won a Golden Globe award for the score of "Slumdog Millionaire" last night — the best composer you've never heard of is beyond understatement.
Known locally as "the Mozart from Madras," Rahman has sold over 200 million albums worldwide: more than Madonna and Britney Spears combined. But the truth of the matter is you probably can't hum one of his songs. That's about to change.
"There are a number of gifts that single [Rahman] out as special. His handling of rhythmical elements is astonishing and his solutions very South Indian," said Ken Hunt, one of the authors of the upcoming third edition of "The Rough Guide to World Music." "His melodies are catchy, clever and reveal a command of theatrical music techniques," Hunt adds. "He was pretty much ready for the big time from the get-go."
And now the big time is ready for him. With a multicultural soundtrack unlike anything he's ever done for Bollywood, the 43-year-old composer-singer-producer might be on his way to becoming America's hottest new hand on the mixing board. Indian-origin DJs in New York and London have been saying it for years, but now it just may be true. Brown is the new black.
As far as Indians are concerned, it's about time. Audiences here, where "Slumdog Millionaire" has not yet been released, have been overjoyed by the film's surprise victories at the Critics' Choice and Golden Globe awards. Here's one tribute: Only three Indian films ever have been nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category, "Mother India" (1957), "Salaam Bombay!" (1988) and "Lagaan" (2001). None took home the prize.
So even though "Slumdog" — written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — is not technically an Indian production, or even a Bollywood-style film, the accolades for Rahman have provided some validation for the larger-than-life musicals that Indians often simply call "our films."
Rahman, who started to learn the piano at the age of 4, is something of a Slumdog Millionaire himself. After his father died, he was forced to start work as a keyboard player to support his family at just 11 years old. He later dropped out of high school to pursue his music career. About that same time, he converted from Hinduism to Islam, a brave choice in a country where Muslims often face persecution. But he says Islam "set [him] free."
From his humble beginnings, Rahman swiftly became one of Bollywood's biggest money spinners — a kind of Indian Quincy Jones — virtually owning the industry for more than a decade. His hits, like Chaiya Chaiya, Chhoti Si Asha and Thee Thee, have as much enduring appeal as any Beatles standard, and not only for Bollywood fans. "A.R. Rahman is nothing short of a melodic genius," Andrew Lloyd Webber has said. "I admire his unique sense of harmony, his staggering rhythms and his melodies that take an unexpected twist that no Western composer would dream of."
Bollywood insiders know that kind of staggering genius can make or break a film in India. "In Indian cinema, the music is such an important part of it that music can save a mediocre film," says film critic Jai Arjun Singh. "With Rahman, it happens frequently."
That's not an overstatement. Marketers use song-and-dance numbers from movies for the trailers, videos on Channel V and MTV drive repeat business, and soundtrack sales and music video rights account for a significant part of the picture's revenue.
That's why Indian producers swear by him. "He has demonstrated fusion of west and east more than most musicians over the world," said Ronnie Screwvala, chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, one of India's most successful film production companies. "All our tent pole [productions] have always been Rahman [films]—from Swades to Rang De Basanti to Jodha Akhbar and Delhi 6."
Nevertheless, though he performed with Michael Jackson and wrote the music for Webber's Broadway musical Bombay Dreams and the stage production of the Lord of the Rings, Rahman was virtually unknown to Western fans until last night.
Now he has to be considered a frontrunner for an Oscar, and a raft of offers from record companies and producers in the U.S. music industry.
Here comes the close up.
for which it stands: india
Decoding Obama's (increasingly) complex India problem
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (Jan. 8, 2009)
NEW DELHI — Like many countries, India was rooting hard for Barack Obama to become America's 44th president. But the enormous challenges that Obama faces in South Asia — and India's huge expectations — could make the love affair short-lived.
Since former President Bill Clinton's second term, U.S.-India ties have been growing ever closer. With the nuclear agreement signed in September, the relationship has begun to look like a strategic alliance.
But that warm embrace could turn into a cold shoulder. The rub: Obama's commitment to building a viable state from the rubble of Afghanistan, which will likely lead him to lean on Pakistan for assistance.
Indians worry that the U.S. may allow Pakistan to wriggle out of its espoused promises to arrest and prosecute the terrorists responsible for the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai.
"We expect the U.S. to apply the same strict standards that they have for the western border of Pakistan for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism against India," said former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha.
"The litmus test for this will be the surrender or repatriation to India of those criminals who have taken shelter in Pakistan, and no alibi by the Pakistani rulers should be allowed to stand in the way," he added.
India has banked heavily on America's ability to pressure Pakistan to bring the Mumbai culprits to justice. But the U.S. needs the Pakistani army's help in fighting the Taliban on Pakistan's western border.
If in return the U.S. allows Islamabad to skate on its promises to catch and prosecute the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack, India's love affair with Obama would come to a speedy end.
And it could well reverse the trajectory of India's increasingly U.S.-centric foreign
policy — which has seen New Delhi step back from Iran, inch closer to Israel and distance itself from the Shanghai Cooperation's Russia-China-India formulation in favor of a budding alliance with the U.S., Japan and Australia.
"President Bush has left a very strong legacy of establishing a strategic relationship between India and the United States and President Obama will have to find ways and means to consolidate that relationship and build on it," said Kanwal Sibal, a former India foreign secretary.
"However, (Obama's) thinking about Afghanistan and what the United States needs to do there — the surge strategy that is being propounded by Gen. Petraeus — will require certain tough policy decisions vis a vis Pakistan," Sibal added.
Pakistan has maneuvered U.S. intervention after the Mumbai attacks into an effort to stop India from taking action, rather than compelling Pakistan to do so, according to M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career Indian diplomat.
That has already "exposed the fallacy" of India's thinking that in the post-Cold War world it is a natural ally of the U.S., while the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is a mere marriage of convenience, said Bhadrakumar.
And when Obama takes office, the rhetoric of putting pressure on Pakistan to arrest terror suspects will likely give way to a multibillion-dollar aid package, including $300 million in annual military aid for the next five years.
"That gives Pakistan a misplaced confidence that they can get away with terrorist acts against India. That the world will watch for awhile, then remain quiet and wait for the next strike, and India will be helpless to act," Sinha said.
"Mumbai, with the kind of deep hurt it has caused to the Indian psyche, is making India increasingly unwilling to accept this situation," he added.
So far, Obama's early efforts at developing a strategy for balancing America's complex dual alliance with India and Pakistan have appeared to Indians like naive blunders that play into Pakistan's hands.
According to U.S. media reports, for instance, Obama suggested he might appoint former President Clinton as special envoy to Kashmir as part of an effort to resolve India-Pakistan tensions, freeing Pakistan to be more aggressive in fighting al-Qaida on the Afghan border.
That might sound like a good idea to non-Indian readers.
But to most Indians, the suggestion betrays either a basic ignorance or a deliberate oversight of India's point of view: that Kashmir is a bilateral issue in which it occupies the literal and the moral high ground.
India has trumpeted the fact that despite the attacks on Mumbai and a call for a boycott by separatists, more than 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for state elections held in Kashmir in November and December, and the clear majority chose pro-India parties.
Pakistan's chief argument against the legitimacy of India's dominion over Kashmir is that India has never held the plebiscite to determine who will have sovereignty over the state that the U.N. Security Council ordered as part of the original peace plan for the region in 1948.
"The inherent message that you get from this is that by appointing a special envoy, the United States would want India to make additional compromises," Sibal said.
"That is where the rub is," Sibal continued. "What additional compromises? Because we have a purely defensive strategy on Kashmir. It's Pakistan that has the offensive strategy, which wants to grab part of the territory, which wants to destabilize the situation from within, which is engaging in terrorism."
Though India remains skeptical, the latest news out of Pakistan has been relatively positive.
Under increasing U.S. pressure as the FBI progresses in its own investigation of the Mumbai attacks, Islamabad has at least acknowledged that the terrorist in Indian custody is a Pakistani national.
What remains to be seen is whether Obama's administration will be as forceful in dealing with Islamabad at the beginning of his term as Bush suddenly seemed to be in his final days in office — when he knew his successor would have to deal with the consequences.
For Indians, the answer could define the Obama presidency almost before it begins.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (Jan. 8, 2009)
NEW DELHI — Like many countries, India was rooting hard for Barack Obama to become America's 44th president. But the enormous challenges that Obama faces in South Asia — and India's huge expectations — could make the love affair short-lived.
Since former President Bill Clinton's second term, U.S.-India ties have been growing ever closer. With the nuclear agreement signed in September, the relationship has begun to look like a strategic alliance.
But that warm embrace could turn into a cold shoulder. The rub: Obama's commitment to building a viable state from the rubble of Afghanistan, which will likely lead him to lean on Pakistan for assistance.
Indians worry that the U.S. may allow Pakistan to wriggle out of its espoused promises to arrest and prosecute the terrorists responsible for the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai.
"We expect the U.S. to apply the same strict standards that they have for the western border of Pakistan for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism against India," said former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha.
"The litmus test for this will be the surrender or repatriation to India of those criminals who have taken shelter in Pakistan, and no alibi by the Pakistani rulers should be allowed to stand in the way," he added.
India has banked heavily on America's ability to pressure Pakistan to bring the Mumbai culprits to justice. But the U.S. needs the Pakistani army's help in fighting the Taliban on Pakistan's western border.
If in return the U.S. allows Islamabad to skate on its promises to catch and prosecute the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack, India's love affair with Obama would come to a speedy end.
And it could well reverse the trajectory of India's increasingly U.S.-centric foreign
policy — which has seen New Delhi step back from Iran, inch closer to Israel and distance itself from the Shanghai Cooperation's Russia-China-India formulation in favor of a budding alliance with the U.S., Japan and Australia.
"President Bush has left a very strong legacy of establishing a strategic relationship between India and the United States and President Obama will have to find ways and means to consolidate that relationship and build on it," said Kanwal Sibal, a former India foreign secretary.
"However, (Obama's) thinking about Afghanistan and what the United States needs to do there — the surge strategy that is being propounded by Gen. Petraeus — will require certain tough policy decisions vis a vis Pakistan," Sibal added.
Pakistan has maneuvered U.S. intervention after the Mumbai attacks into an effort to stop India from taking action, rather than compelling Pakistan to do so, according to M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career Indian diplomat.
That has already "exposed the fallacy" of India's thinking that in the post-Cold War world it is a natural ally of the U.S., while the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is a mere marriage of convenience, said Bhadrakumar.
And when Obama takes office, the rhetoric of putting pressure on Pakistan to arrest terror suspects will likely give way to a multibillion-dollar aid package, including $300 million in annual military aid for the next five years.
"That gives Pakistan a misplaced confidence that they can get away with terrorist acts against India. That the world will watch for awhile, then remain quiet and wait for the next strike, and India will be helpless to act," Sinha said.
"Mumbai, with the kind of deep hurt it has caused to the Indian psyche, is making India increasingly unwilling to accept this situation," he added.
So far, Obama's early efforts at developing a strategy for balancing America's complex dual alliance with India and Pakistan have appeared to Indians like naive blunders that play into Pakistan's hands.
According to U.S. media reports, for instance, Obama suggested he might appoint former President Clinton as special envoy to Kashmir as part of an effort to resolve India-Pakistan tensions, freeing Pakistan to be more aggressive in fighting al-Qaida on the Afghan border.
That might sound like a good idea to non-Indian readers.
But to most Indians, the suggestion betrays either a basic ignorance or a deliberate oversight of India's point of view: that Kashmir is a bilateral issue in which it occupies the literal and the moral high ground.
India has trumpeted the fact that despite the attacks on Mumbai and a call for a boycott by separatists, more than 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for state elections held in Kashmir in November and December, and the clear majority chose pro-India parties.
Pakistan's chief argument against the legitimacy of India's dominion over Kashmir is that India has never held the plebiscite to determine who will have sovereignty over the state that the U.N. Security Council ordered as part of the original peace plan for the region in 1948.
"The inherent message that you get from this is that by appointing a special envoy, the United States would want India to make additional compromises," Sibal said.
"That is where the rub is," Sibal continued. "What additional compromises? Because we have a purely defensive strategy on Kashmir. It's Pakistan that has the offensive strategy, which wants to grab part of the territory, which wants to destabilize the situation from within, which is engaging in terrorism."
Though India remains skeptical, the latest news out of Pakistan has been relatively positive.
Under increasing U.S. pressure as the FBI progresses in its own investigation of the Mumbai attacks, Islamabad has at least acknowledged that the terrorist in Indian custody is a Pakistani national.
What remains to be seen is whether Obama's administration will be as forceful in dealing with Islamabad at the beginning of his term as Bush suddenly seemed to be in his final days in office — when he knew his successor would have to deal with the consequences.
For Indians, the answer could define the Obama presidency almost before it begins.
Friday, December 19, 2008
india's new wave
A community of Krishna devotees combines surfing and spirituality on the shores of Karnataka
By Jason Overdorf/Mulky, India
DESTINASIAN (December 2008)
ON A STEAMY AFTERNOON IN SOUTHERN KARNATAKA, Jack Hebner—a.k.a. Bhakti Gaurava Narasingha, a.k.a. Swamiji, a.k.a. Guru Maharaj (“Great Teacher”)—steps off a Mangalore jetty onto the rocks that form the pier’s foundation. He slides his Pope surfboard into the chocolate brown waters of the Arabian Sea for the epic paddle out to India’s busiest surf break, which sees maybe a handful of surfers a couple of times a month.
Hebner’s 61-year-old muscles aren’t all they used to be. “A couple years ago, I got down to do some pushups, and I couldn’t get one. That’s when I told myself, ‘The Swami’s life is too sedentary.’ ” So instead of fighting the white water, Hebner paddles out through the harbor and around the jetty to get outside the break. It’s a one kilometer slog, and by the time he’s made it, three of his disciples —among the first Indians to take up surfing—have already dropped in on a bunch of waves. Since there’s no lineup anywhere along India’s 7,500-kilometer coastline, that’s easy to do. It takes Hebner 15 minutes or so to recover his breath. Then he knee-paddles into a curling two-meter swell, drops in, and rides it as majestically as anybody known as the Great Teacher could be expected to do.
A guest at Hebner’s Ashram Surf Retreat in the nearby town of Mulky, I watch for a few more minutes before paddling out myself. I’d stumbled across Hebner and his crew online a few months earlier back home in Delhi. Even though I’d never caught a wave in my life, I’d seen enough clips from movies like Endless Summer to convince myself that one day I had to learn. When I read about Hebner and the Mantra Surf Club he cofounded two years ago, it was like, well, karma.
Jack Hebner, who took the name Swami Narasingha in 1976, isn’t your typical surfer. For one thing, the sun-burnished native of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, doesn’t drink, and he has kept a vow of celibacy for three decades. For another, he’s a devotee of the Hindu god Krishna. But it’s that eccentric combination of passions that brought him in the early 1990s to India’s southwestern coast, where he’s now working to develop a surfing community that reveres the ocean, helps the poor, and wakes up every morning at 4:30 to pray. Led by Hebner and Rick Perry (another American follower of Krishna, who goes by the name Baba), they call themselves “the Surfing Swamis.” According to Hebner, a recognized Hindu guru with almost 200 local disciples, “Surfing isn’t just about getting in the water and catching a few waves, it’s about something much deeper than that. It’s about a spiritual experience.”
The spiritual experience offered by his Ashram Surf Retreat—which, at US$60 a night, can seem a little too monastic at times—isn’t for everybody. That’s probably why this bizarre hybrid of commune, temple, and hotel has only two guest rooms. The resident devotees—who include Hebner, Perry, a California couple, and five young Indian brahmacharyas (novice monks)—all chip in to keep the place running, shopping for food, cleaning, teaching guests to surf, and so on. Every morning they hold a prayer service that involves blowing a conch shell, ringing cymbals, singing, chanting, and just about everything else that inspired the invention of the Do Not Disturb sign. Although the food is satisfying enough after a few hours in the pounding waves, it is strictly vegetarian. Alcohol and drugs are forbidden, and guests are requested to abstain from sex. Those caveats aside, however, I can tell you that I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I also lost four kilograms and kicked the gout that had been troubling me for weeks. And, yes, after three days of long paddles, lungfuls of water, nosedives, and brutal wipeouts, I learned to surf.
INDIA’S COASTLINE INCLUDES at least 200 surfable river mouths and countless bays, coves, and points, all of which hint at the presence of secret waves. It’s completely uncharted territory for surfers, and every break is deserted; in India, almost nobody knows how to swim, let alone surf. But it won’t always be so. According to India Today magazine, the subcontinent’s adventure-tourism business—including trekking, climbing, caving, diving, and paragliding—is growing at more than 35 percent a year, and has the potential to attract half a million foreign tourists annually. Surf safaris could be just over the horizon, considering that many of India’s known surf spots boast awe-inspiring cultural attractions, such as the ancient Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu and the dramatic Juggernaut Festival at Puri in Orissa. Indeed, the buzz has already started. Last year, one of Hebner’s
team led a group of professional surfers and photographers for Surfing Magazine on a two-week photo tour of southern India. The legendary French surf explorer Anthony “Yep” Colas has included India in the latest volume of his World Stormrider Guides, while filmmaker Taylor Steel is said to be featuring the country in his next surfing documentary. And with the Surfing Swamis spreading the word locally, India’s undiscovered breaks won’t be deserted for long.
The best place for beginners is the Ashram Surf Retreat’s home break in Mulky, a sleepy hamlet near Mangalore (about 360 kilometers from Karnataka’s state capital, Bangalore, offically Bengaluru) on India’s southwestern coast. The retreat itself is nestled in a grove of palm and banana trees at the mouth of the Shambhavi River, so you don’t even have to load up the jeep to hit the water. It’s a long paddle out to the local beach breaks—named, in good surfer tradition, Baba’s Left, Tree Line, Swami’s,
and Water Tank—but if you time it right, you can ride the river current out and catch the tide coming in when you call it quits, a big energy saver after two or three hours of surfing. The jetty in Mangalore, which provides a more predictable wave than the river mouth, is about an hour’s drive away. There are also some interesting day trips available to the local Jain and Hindu temples, and the ashram has a boat for wakeboarding and snorkeling trips to nearby islands. That’s good news for would-be learners,
because, believe me, you may not be up to surfing every day.
On my first day at the ashram, I woke at 6 a.m. as instructed by Govardhan, the Californian charged with getting me up on a board. By the time I’d fixed myself a cup of coffee, I could hear the trumpet of the conch shell announcing the beginning of prayers, and then the muted beat of the drum, the tinkle of finger cymbals, and the familiar chant: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare/Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. Unlike the temple worshippers that I have cursed soundly from ill-positioned hotel rooms in Indian cities from Ahmedabad to Lucknow, the Surfing Swamis don’t feel compelled to shout the house down to express their spirituality. So the service offered a pleasant, if somewhat surreal, soundtrack as I finished the novel I’d brought with me (there are no TVs or phones in the rooms). At 7 a.m. we hit the beach.
Looking back at my notes, I see that I’ve written “Baptism by fire this morning.” It was grim. The wash was murky from the churn, a light rain was falling, and the waves were breaking almost on top of each other, in some places crashing vertically into foam instead of rolling gradually toward shore. Again and again, Govardhan helped me drag the board—a giant learner model as unwieldy as a canoe—out into the surf, and again and again I was pummeled, swept under, and pulled into shore by the leash securing the board to my ankle. This must be what water torture feels like, I thought. I took it in 30-minute intervals, between which I stood gasping on the beach with a few fishermen, who evidently looked upon Govardhan as some kind of freakish water god. Even most of India’s fishermen, it seems, can’t swim; for them, the ocean is a fearsome place to earn a living, or to die trying. And here was a bunch of guys playing on it like it was a roller coaster. Even I earned some grudging respect for my apparent willingness to undergo a painfully slow form of drowning. Bottom line: don’t believe the “flat as a pancake” stories you hear from ravers back from a New Year’s trip to Goa, when the Arabian Sea is as calm as Buddha himself. India’s southwest coast is not only for beginners. It gets some big waves—up to six-meter breakers during the October–December post-monsoon season.
After breakfast, I slept most of the day. That night I had an audience with Hebner, whom I’d come to call Swamiji in his official capacity as guru of the Sri Narasingha Chaitanya Math (his 200-member ashram in Mysore) and the Ashram Surf Retreat. Like most people, I knew a bit about the so-called Hare Krishna movement, which is perhaps most renowned for its widely criticized (and now banned) fundraising efforts in American airports. But I didn’t know that the radical social movement had made a gradual transformation to something more like a conventional church since the death of its founder, Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada. And I certainly didn’t know that many of Prabhupada’s followers, like Hebner, had been repelled by the growing commercialism of the movement and distanced themselves from the official “church”—the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON. Frankly, I’d half expected to find a throwback society of brainwashed freaks, though my morning on the water with the Surfing Swamis had already disabused me of that notion. Now, I was treated to the full story of Jack Hebner’s metamorphosis into Swami Narasingha, a humorous yarn that ventured as far and wide as the famous Morningstar Commune in California, Mama Papauna’s hellfire-and-brimstone Huelo Door of Faith Church on Maui, and some of the less religiously tolerant countries of Africa. By the end of the tale, at least in the context of India, Hebner’s beliefs struck me as eminently normal. He, too, was an easily recognized character. Citing the military careers of his father and brother, he told me, “I’m the saffron sheep of the family. The orange sheep.” Semi-employed, penniless, and free-thinking, I could relate—at least for a week.
Two days later, when the guys convinced me to paddle out beyond the break and I finally dropped in on a two-meter wave that I rode all the way into shore, I began to understand a little of the whole surfing-spirituality connection. Okay, my performance was more like that of Sandra Dee in Gidget than surf celeb Kelly Slater in Step Into Liquid. But even a guy who’d once bailed from the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune because they wanted me to buy an orange robe could feel the vibe. For days, I’d been fighting the ocean—this omnipotent, amorphous, drowning thing—and now I was at once surrendering to and mastering its blind energy. It wasn’t hard to see how you could find a metaphor in that.
For more information about India’s nascent surfing scene and Jack Hebner’s Ashram Surfing Retreat, visit the Mantra Surf Club at surfingindia.net.
By Jason Overdorf/Mulky, India
DESTINASIAN (December 2008)
ON A STEAMY AFTERNOON IN SOUTHERN KARNATAKA, Jack Hebner—a.k.a. Bhakti Gaurava Narasingha, a.k.a. Swamiji, a.k.a. Guru Maharaj (“Great Teacher”)—steps off a Mangalore jetty onto the rocks that form the pier’s foundation. He slides his Pope surfboard into the chocolate brown waters of the Arabian Sea for the epic paddle out to India’s busiest surf break, which sees maybe a handful of surfers a couple of times a month.
Hebner’s 61-year-old muscles aren’t all they used to be. “A couple years ago, I got down to do some pushups, and I couldn’t get one. That’s when I told myself, ‘The Swami’s life is too sedentary.’ ” So instead of fighting the white water, Hebner paddles out through the harbor and around the jetty to get outside the break. It’s a one kilometer slog, and by the time he’s made it, three of his disciples —among the first Indians to take up surfing—have already dropped in on a bunch of waves. Since there’s no lineup anywhere along India’s 7,500-kilometer coastline, that’s easy to do. It takes Hebner 15 minutes or so to recover his breath. Then he knee-paddles into a curling two-meter swell, drops in, and rides it as majestically as anybody known as the Great Teacher could be expected to do.
A guest at Hebner’s Ashram Surf Retreat in the nearby town of Mulky, I watch for a few more minutes before paddling out myself. I’d stumbled across Hebner and his crew online a few months earlier back home in Delhi. Even though I’d never caught a wave in my life, I’d seen enough clips from movies like Endless Summer to convince myself that one day I had to learn. When I read about Hebner and the Mantra Surf Club he cofounded two years ago, it was like, well, karma.
Jack Hebner, who took the name Swami Narasingha in 1976, isn’t your typical surfer. For one thing, the sun-burnished native of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, doesn’t drink, and he has kept a vow of celibacy for three decades. For another, he’s a devotee of the Hindu god Krishna. But it’s that eccentric combination of passions that brought him in the early 1990s to India’s southwestern coast, where he’s now working to develop a surfing community that reveres the ocean, helps the poor, and wakes up every morning at 4:30 to pray. Led by Hebner and Rick Perry (another American follower of Krishna, who goes by the name Baba), they call themselves “the Surfing Swamis.” According to Hebner, a recognized Hindu guru with almost 200 local disciples, “Surfing isn’t just about getting in the water and catching a few waves, it’s about something much deeper than that. It’s about a spiritual experience.”
The spiritual experience offered by his Ashram Surf Retreat—which, at US$60 a night, can seem a little too monastic at times—isn’t for everybody. That’s probably why this bizarre hybrid of commune, temple, and hotel has only two guest rooms. The resident devotees—who include Hebner, Perry, a California couple, and five young Indian brahmacharyas (novice monks)—all chip in to keep the place running, shopping for food, cleaning, teaching guests to surf, and so on. Every morning they hold a prayer service that involves blowing a conch shell, ringing cymbals, singing, chanting, and just about everything else that inspired the invention of the Do Not Disturb sign. Although the food is satisfying enough after a few hours in the pounding waves, it is strictly vegetarian. Alcohol and drugs are forbidden, and guests are requested to abstain from sex. Those caveats aside, however, I can tell you that I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I also lost four kilograms and kicked the gout that had been troubling me for weeks. And, yes, after three days of long paddles, lungfuls of water, nosedives, and brutal wipeouts, I learned to surf.
INDIA’S COASTLINE INCLUDES at least 200 surfable river mouths and countless bays, coves, and points, all of which hint at the presence of secret waves. It’s completely uncharted territory for surfers, and every break is deserted; in India, almost nobody knows how to swim, let alone surf. But it won’t always be so. According to India Today magazine, the subcontinent’s adventure-tourism business—including trekking, climbing, caving, diving, and paragliding—is growing at more than 35 percent a year, and has the potential to attract half a million foreign tourists annually. Surf safaris could be just over the horizon, considering that many of India’s known surf spots boast awe-inspiring cultural attractions, such as the ancient Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu and the dramatic Juggernaut Festival at Puri in Orissa. Indeed, the buzz has already started. Last year, one of Hebner’s
team led a group of professional surfers and photographers for Surfing Magazine on a two-week photo tour of southern India. The legendary French surf explorer Anthony “Yep” Colas has included India in the latest volume of his World Stormrider Guides, while filmmaker Taylor Steel is said to be featuring the country in his next surfing documentary. And with the Surfing Swamis spreading the word locally, India’s undiscovered breaks won’t be deserted for long.
The best place for beginners is the Ashram Surf Retreat’s home break in Mulky, a sleepy hamlet near Mangalore (about 360 kilometers from Karnataka’s state capital, Bangalore, offically Bengaluru) on India’s southwestern coast. The retreat itself is nestled in a grove of palm and banana trees at the mouth of the Shambhavi River, so you don’t even have to load up the jeep to hit the water. It’s a long paddle out to the local beach breaks—named, in good surfer tradition, Baba’s Left, Tree Line, Swami’s,
and Water Tank—but if you time it right, you can ride the river current out and catch the tide coming in when you call it quits, a big energy saver after two or three hours of surfing. The jetty in Mangalore, which provides a more predictable wave than the river mouth, is about an hour’s drive away. There are also some interesting day trips available to the local Jain and Hindu temples, and the ashram has a boat for wakeboarding and snorkeling trips to nearby islands. That’s good news for would-be learners,
because, believe me, you may not be up to surfing every day.
On my first day at the ashram, I woke at 6 a.m. as instructed by Govardhan, the Californian charged with getting me up on a board. By the time I’d fixed myself a cup of coffee, I could hear the trumpet of the conch shell announcing the beginning of prayers, and then the muted beat of the drum, the tinkle of finger cymbals, and the familiar chant: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare/Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. Unlike the temple worshippers that I have cursed soundly from ill-positioned hotel rooms in Indian cities from Ahmedabad to Lucknow, the Surfing Swamis don’t feel compelled to shout the house down to express their spirituality. So the service offered a pleasant, if somewhat surreal, soundtrack as I finished the novel I’d brought with me (there are no TVs or phones in the rooms). At 7 a.m. we hit the beach.
Looking back at my notes, I see that I’ve written “Baptism by fire this morning.” It was grim. The wash was murky from the churn, a light rain was falling, and the waves were breaking almost on top of each other, in some places crashing vertically into foam instead of rolling gradually toward shore. Again and again, Govardhan helped me drag the board—a giant learner model as unwieldy as a canoe—out into the surf, and again and again I was pummeled, swept under, and pulled into shore by the leash securing the board to my ankle. This must be what water torture feels like, I thought. I took it in 30-minute intervals, between which I stood gasping on the beach with a few fishermen, who evidently looked upon Govardhan as some kind of freakish water god. Even most of India’s fishermen, it seems, can’t swim; for them, the ocean is a fearsome place to earn a living, or to die trying. And here was a bunch of guys playing on it like it was a roller coaster. Even I earned some grudging respect for my apparent willingness to undergo a painfully slow form of drowning. Bottom line: don’t believe the “flat as a pancake” stories you hear from ravers back from a New Year’s trip to Goa, when the Arabian Sea is as calm as Buddha himself. India’s southwest coast is not only for beginners. It gets some big waves—up to six-meter breakers during the October–December post-monsoon season.
After breakfast, I slept most of the day. That night I had an audience with Hebner, whom I’d come to call Swamiji in his official capacity as guru of the Sri Narasingha Chaitanya Math (his 200-member ashram in Mysore) and the Ashram Surf Retreat. Like most people, I knew a bit about the so-called Hare Krishna movement, which is perhaps most renowned for its widely criticized (and now banned) fundraising efforts in American airports. But I didn’t know that the radical social movement had made a gradual transformation to something more like a conventional church since the death of its founder, Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada. And I certainly didn’t know that many of Prabhupada’s followers, like Hebner, had been repelled by the growing commercialism of the movement and distanced themselves from the official “church”—the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON. Frankly, I’d half expected to find a throwback society of brainwashed freaks, though my morning on the water with the Surfing Swamis had already disabused me of that notion. Now, I was treated to the full story of Jack Hebner’s metamorphosis into Swami Narasingha, a humorous yarn that ventured as far and wide as the famous Morningstar Commune in California, Mama Papauna’s hellfire-and-brimstone Huelo Door of Faith Church on Maui, and some of the less religiously tolerant countries of Africa. By the end of the tale, at least in the context of India, Hebner’s beliefs struck me as eminently normal. He, too, was an easily recognized character. Citing the military careers of his father and brother, he told me, “I’m the saffron sheep of the family. The orange sheep.” Semi-employed, penniless, and free-thinking, I could relate—at least for a week.
Two days later, when the guys convinced me to paddle out beyond the break and I finally dropped in on a two-meter wave that I rode all the way into shore, I began to understand a little of the whole surfing-spirituality connection. Okay, my performance was more like that of Sandra Dee in Gidget than surf celeb Kelly Slater in Step Into Liquid. But even a guy who’d once bailed from the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune because they wanted me to buy an orange robe could feel the vibe. For days, I’d been fighting the ocean—this omnipotent, amorphous, drowning thing—and now I was at once surrendering to and mastering its blind energy. It wasn’t hard to see how you could find a metaphor in that.
For more information about India’s nascent surfing scene and Jack Hebner’s Ashram Surfing Retreat, visit the Mantra Surf Club at surfingindia.net.
surfin' swamis: catching waves, and spirituality, in india
By Jason Overdorf -- for GlobalPost in The Huffington Post
NEW DELHI -- Swami Bhakti Gaurava Narasingha paddles hard and drops into a 6-foot wave off the coast of Mangalore in South India.
As the 61-year-old surfer cuts left and races down the face of the wave spiralling toward the wastewater treatment plant up the beach, half a dozen local fishermen look on with bemused fascination at the aging white dude, who also goes by his given name of Jack Hebner.
Though India has 4,500 miles of coastline and gets 20-foot waves during the monsoon season, fear of the ocean and beaches that double as toilets have prevented surfing from catching on. But Hebner and his followers -- who call themselves "the Surfin' Swamis" -- are seeking to change all that with India's first surf ashram, or religious community.
"Surfing isn't just about getting in the water and catching a few waves," Hebner says. "It's about something much deeper than that. It's about a spiritual experience."
Hebner -- a Hindu monk from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, who doesn't drink or smoke and took a vow of celibacy 30 years ago -- isn't exactly what you picture when you think of a surfer.
But it's that weird combination that in 1991 brought Jack to India's southwestern coast, where he's working to start a surfing community that reveres the ocean, helps the poor and wakes up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to chant "Hare Rama, Hare Krishna."
Hebner has been a devotee of the Hindu god Krishna since the early 1970s, when he became a disciple of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the controversial Hare Krishna movement in America.
However, like many Krishna devotees, he severed his association with the official inheritors of Prabhupada's American movement, the International Society for Kriskna Consciousness (ISKCON), not long after the guru's death in 1977.
He didn't give up his beliefs, though. He went to India, where the worship of Krishna, or Vaishnavism, goes back thousands of years.
With more than 200 Indian disciples in Mangalore and Mysore, Hebner has shown that Krishna consciousness can still find an audience among lifelong Hindus. "I'm like the saffron sheep of the family -- the orange sheep," says Hebner, whose brother and brother-in-law were already career U.S. military men when he began to float around Krishna communes.
One of the keys to respectability has been self-sufficiency. The American Hare Krishnas, best remembered for the bald devotees in orange robes who chanted "Hare Rama, Hare Krishna" in airports and bus stations to raise money for their communes, were condemned for their unconventional fundraising tactics.
But Hebner's ashram doesn't beg, they earn. In addition to renting rooms (and boards) to surfers, the monks do web design work contracted through a San Francisco company called Alian Design, and they run a Bangalore-based art gallery and a local bottled water company.
"We don't go out and ask for any money," says 21-year-old Kunjabihari, one of Hebner's Indian disciples. "To support the ashram, we start businesses. That's where the surfing comes in." Residents donate all their earnings from the ashram businesses to the commune.
By teaching India to surf alongside ancient monuments like the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram and the pilgrimage city of Dwarka, where according to Hindu mythology Lord Krishna is believed to have set up the capital of his empire 2,500 years ago, Hebner may also introduce the world to its last undiscovered breaks.
So far, Hebner and the Surfin' Swamis have taught about a dozen locals to surf, and they have already made a big dent in the perception that India's waters are flat as a pancake.
Last year, one of Hebner's disciples led pro surfers Justin Quirk, Warren Smith and Jesse Columbo as well as photographers for Surfing Magazine on a two-week photo tour of South India. This year the Surfin' Swamis will host another set of pros sponsored by Surfer Magazine. Anthony "Yep" Colas is featuring India in the next edition of World Stormrider Guide, known as "the surfer's bible." And surf filmmakers Taylor Steel and Dustin Humphrey are including India in their next movie.
Global financial crisis aside, the Surfing Swamis' timing looks to be right. McKinsey & Co. predicts that by 2025 the Indian middle class will grow tenfold to 500 million people. As Indians get richer, they're getting braver, too.
According to India Today magazine, the adventure tourism business -- including trekking, climbing, caving, diving and paragliding -- is growing at more than 35 percent a year, with the potential to attract another half a million foreign tourists.
Two of Hebner's Indian disciples -- Kunjabihari and Kirtanananda -- have already floated a company called Surf Adventure Enterprises that offers surf tours and lessons and sells gear online. The 20-something Indian youths consider working for Krishna the opportunity of a lifetime.
"My dream is to promote surfing in India," says Kunjabihari.
GlobalPost.com launches January 12, 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/18/surfin-swamis-catching-wa_n_152230.html
NEW DELHI -- Swami Bhakti Gaurava Narasingha paddles hard and drops into a 6-foot wave off the coast of Mangalore in South India.
As the 61-year-old surfer cuts left and races down the face of the wave spiralling toward the wastewater treatment plant up the beach, half a dozen local fishermen look on with bemused fascination at the aging white dude, who also goes by his given name of Jack Hebner.
Though India has 4,500 miles of coastline and gets 20-foot waves during the monsoon season, fear of the ocean and beaches that double as toilets have prevented surfing from catching on. But Hebner and his followers -- who call themselves "the Surfin' Swamis" -- are seeking to change all that with India's first surf ashram, or religious community.
"Surfing isn't just about getting in the water and catching a few waves," Hebner says. "It's about something much deeper than that. It's about a spiritual experience."
Hebner -- a Hindu monk from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, who doesn't drink or smoke and took a vow of celibacy 30 years ago -- isn't exactly what you picture when you think of a surfer.
But it's that weird combination that in 1991 brought Jack to India's southwestern coast, where he's working to start a surfing community that reveres the ocean, helps the poor and wakes up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to chant "Hare Rama, Hare Krishna."
Hebner has been a devotee of the Hindu god Krishna since the early 1970s, when he became a disciple of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the controversial Hare Krishna movement in America.
However, like many Krishna devotees, he severed his association with the official inheritors of Prabhupada's American movement, the International Society for Kriskna Consciousness (ISKCON), not long after the guru's death in 1977.
He didn't give up his beliefs, though. He went to India, where the worship of Krishna, or Vaishnavism, goes back thousands of years.
With more than 200 Indian disciples in Mangalore and Mysore, Hebner has shown that Krishna consciousness can still find an audience among lifelong Hindus. "I'm like the saffron sheep of the family -- the orange sheep," says Hebner, whose brother and brother-in-law were already career U.S. military men when he began to float around Krishna communes.
One of the keys to respectability has been self-sufficiency. The American Hare Krishnas, best remembered for the bald devotees in orange robes who chanted "Hare Rama, Hare Krishna" in airports and bus stations to raise money for their communes, were condemned for their unconventional fundraising tactics.
But Hebner's ashram doesn't beg, they earn. In addition to renting rooms (and boards) to surfers, the monks do web design work contracted through a San Francisco company called Alian Design, and they run a Bangalore-based art gallery and a local bottled water company.
"We don't go out and ask for any money," says 21-year-old Kunjabihari, one of Hebner's Indian disciples. "To support the ashram, we start businesses. That's where the surfing comes in." Residents donate all their earnings from the ashram businesses to the commune.
By teaching India to surf alongside ancient monuments like the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram and the pilgrimage city of Dwarka, where according to Hindu mythology Lord Krishna is believed to have set up the capital of his empire 2,500 years ago, Hebner may also introduce the world to its last undiscovered breaks.
So far, Hebner and the Surfin' Swamis have taught about a dozen locals to surf, and they have already made a big dent in the perception that India's waters are flat as a pancake.
Last year, one of Hebner's disciples led pro surfers Justin Quirk, Warren Smith and Jesse Columbo as well as photographers for Surfing Magazine on a two-week photo tour of South India. This year the Surfin' Swamis will host another set of pros sponsored by Surfer Magazine. Anthony "Yep" Colas is featuring India in the next edition of World Stormrider Guide, known as "the surfer's bible." And surf filmmakers Taylor Steel and Dustin Humphrey are including India in their next movie.
Global financial crisis aside, the Surfing Swamis' timing looks to be right. McKinsey & Co. predicts that by 2025 the Indian middle class will grow tenfold to 500 million people. As Indians get richer, they're getting braver, too.
According to India Today magazine, the adventure tourism business -- including trekking, climbing, caving, diving and paragliding -- is growing at more than 35 percent a year, with the potential to attract another half a million foreign tourists.
Two of Hebner's Indian disciples -- Kunjabihari and Kirtanananda -- have already floated a company called Surf Adventure Enterprises that offers surf tours and lessons and sells gear online. The 20-something Indian youths consider working for Krishna the opportunity of a lifetime.
"My dream is to promote surfing in India," says Kunjabihari.
GlobalPost.com launches January 12, 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/18/surfin-swamis-catching-wa_n_152230.html
Sunday, December 14, 2008
buying peace of mind
India turns to the private sector for security New Delhi can't provide.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 22, 2008
India's private-security industry has exploded in recent years, thanks to the country's longstanding terrorism problem and its inept police forces. Now business is likely to grow even faster in the wake of the Mumbai killings.
Just ask Vikram Singh, India's best-known private detective. Singh, who favors natty clothes and a Hercule Poirot mustache, has had a career that embodies the meteoric growth of his profession. Now chairman of the Central Association of the Private Security Industry (CAPSI), the 60-year-old former intelligence officer bet on the security business 30 years ago, when the Indian industry had no major players and security meant hiring an untrained guard with a club and a whistle. But Singh saw potential, and in 1995, he talked George Wackenhut, founder of the U.S.-based Wackenhut Corp., into forming a joint venture. Six years later, Singh sold his stake to focus on his own investigation agency, Lancers, which is now India's top-rated risk-consulting firm.
Now others are trying to get into the world's hottest market for private security, valued at $2 billion to $3 billion and employing 5.5 million personnel. Even before the Nov. 26 Mumbai attacks, the Indian industry was growing at an astounding clip of 35 percent. This year alone saw the founding of 200 new companies, and the sector expects to add 1 million new employees in 2009, which would make it India's largest employer. And that figure dates from before the attacks. Six international companies from Israel and Germany have also approached CAPSI about providing antiterrorism training, and surveillance-equipment companies are flocking in.
The reason is simple, says terrorism expert Ajai Sahni. India's police are dramatically understaffed, ill equipped and overburdened. "Our public systems are collapsing because there has for decades been insufficient investment in agencies meant to protect civilians," Sahni says. India has 1.45 police for every 1,000 citizens, less than half the global average, according to the United Nations. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor, sectarian tensions and external terrorist threats have all intensified, driving demand for protection. India's crime rate is rising, and incidents like the recent lynching of a multinational's CEO have stoked fears. Then there are the more than 4,000 terrorist attacks India suffered between 1970 and 2004.
The government's failure to respond has left the field open for private operators. But that's raised its own problems. The quality of many firms is questionable; around 200 Indian firms approach international standards, at least on paper, but 15,000 more operate under the radar without much training or background checks for personnel. Poorly enforced regulations mean that most guards earn less than the legal minimum wage. "It's by and large an exploitative industry, with poorly qualified, poorly trained recruits being flogged out by largely mercenary security agencies," said Sahni. The rent-a-cops are also barred by law from carrying guns, which can make them poor substitutes for the real deal.
Post-Mumbai, many Indian companies are demanding more sophisticated protection and better-trained, better-educated guards. Consumers are also migrating to globally recognized brands. "In the U.S. or Europe, security professionals get paid $25,000 to $60,000 a year," Arjun Wallia, chairman of Walsons-Securitas, said. "Whereas in the security industry here you get $100 a month. You pay peanuts, and you get monkeys."
The central government has also finally stepped in and, and after 10 years of lobbying by CAPSI, introduced legislation that requires firms to get a license and set norms for training and compensation. Among other things, the new law requires companies to give their guards a minimum of 160 hours of training. CAPSI is also making improvements voluntarily. It has formed agreements with three state governments to organize job fairs in rural areas and provide training facilities, and it is in talks with four other states.
In the meantime, business is booming. Singh says that about 25 percent of the work done by India's police could be outsourced. Already New Delhi is considering entrusting CAPSI with access control for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and high-ranking police officers are keen to farm out grunt work. The Army chief of staff estimates that 80,000 troops currently work as security guards and is considering outsourcing some of those jobs at noncritical locations, says Singh.
If these programs succeed, private security firms, rather than the beleaguered public sector, could soon become the country's first line of defense. In many ways, they already are.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/174525
© 2008
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 22, 2008
India's private-security industry has exploded in recent years, thanks to the country's longstanding terrorism problem and its inept police forces. Now business is likely to grow even faster in the wake of the Mumbai killings.
Just ask Vikram Singh, India's best-known private detective. Singh, who favors natty clothes and a Hercule Poirot mustache, has had a career that embodies the meteoric growth of his profession. Now chairman of the Central Association of the Private Security Industry (CAPSI), the 60-year-old former intelligence officer bet on the security business 30 years ago, when the Indian industry had no major players and security meant hiring an untrained guard with a club and a whistle. But Singh saw potential, and in 1995, he talked George Wackenhut, founder of the U.S.-based Wackenhut Corp., into forming a joint venture. Six years later, Singh sold his stake to focus on his own investigation agency, Lancers, which is now India's top-rated risk-consulting firm.
Now others are trying to get into the world's hottest market for private security, valued at $2 billion to $3 billion and employing 5.5 million personnel. Even before the Nov. 26 Mumbai attacks, the Indian industry was growing at an astounding clip of 35 percent. This year alone saw the founding of 200 new companies, and the sector expects to add 1 million new employees in 2009, which would make it India's largest employer. And that figure dates from before the attacks. Six international companies from Israel and Germany have also approached CAPSI about providing antiterrorism training, and surveillance-equipment companies are flocking in.
The reason is simple, says terrorism expert Ajai Sahni. India's police are dramatically understaffed, ill equipped and overburdened. "Our public systems are collapsing because there has for decades been insufficient investment in agencies meant to protect civilians," Sahni says. India has 1.45 police for every 1,000 citizens, less than half the global average, according to the United Nations. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor, sectarian tensions and external terrorist threats have all intensified, driving demand for protection. India's crime rate is rising, and incidents like the recent lynching of a multinational's CEO have stoked fears. Then there are the more than 4,000 terrorist attacks India suffered between 1970 and 2004.
The government's failure to respond has left the field open for private operators. But that's raised its own problems. The quality of many firms is questionable; around 200 Indian firms approach international standards, at least on paper, but 15,000 more operate under the radar without much training or background checks for personnel. Poorly enforced regulations mean that most guards earn less than the legal minimum wage. "It's by and large an exploitative industry, with poorly qualified, poorly trained recruits being flogged out by largely mercenary security agencies," said Sahni. The rent-a-cops are also barred by law from carrying guns, which can make them poor substitutes for the real deal.
Post-Mumbai, many Indian companies are demanding more sophisticated protection and better-trained, better-educated guards. Consumers are also migrating to globally recognized brands. "In the U.S. or Europe, security professionals get paid $25,000 to $60,000 a year," Arjun Wallia, chairman of Walsons-Securitas, said. "Whereas in the security industry here you get $100 a month. You pay peanuts, and you get monkeys."
The central government has also finally stepped in and, and after 10 years of lobbying by CAPSI, introduced legislation that requires firms to get a license and set norms for training and compensation. Among other things, the new law requires companies to give their guards a minimum of 160 hours of training. CAPSI is also making improvements voluntarily. It has formed agreements with three state governments to organize job fairs in rural areas and provide training facilities, and it is in talks with four other states.
In the meantime, business is booming. Singh says that about 25 percent of the work done by India's police could be outsourced. Already New Delhi is considering entrusting CAPSI with access control for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and high-ranking police officers are keen to farm out grunt work. The Army chief of staff estimates that 80,000 troops currently work as security guards and is considering outsourcing some of those jobs at noncritical locations, says Singh.
If these programs succeed, private security firms, rather than the beleaguered public sector, could soon become the country's first line of defense. In many ways, they already are.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/174525
© 2008
Monday, December 08, 2008
india's obama?
How the "Dalit Queen" is changing India, and slapping foes with sandals
By Jason Overdorf -- GlobalPost
December 12, 2008
NEW DELHI, India — As her lavish birthday celebration approaches, Mayawati Kumari, a powerful politician known for fiery speeches and a diva's temperament, has once again run into controversy. This time, it's not the size of her cake or her diamond necklace that has her in trouble with India's muckraking press, but the alleged murder of an engineer from the state's public works department by one of her party workers.
There's a thin line between politicians and gangsters in India, with as many as a third of the politicians forming the government of various Indian states facing criminal charges. But when a member of Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) — a party dedicated to uplifting India's oppressed Dalits — runs afoul of the law, it gets special attention.
This time around, the Indian press immediately jumped to the conclusion that the accused — a BSP member of the legislative assembly in Uttar Pradesh, where Mayawati is chief minister — committed the alleged murder in the course of extorting money for Mayawati's annual birthday bash on Jan. 15. But now the police say there was no basis for the extortion motive reports.
Because she is a Dalit herself, Mayawati's birthday party has always been controversial. But due to her rising political power, the desire among her rivals to take her down a peg is today stronger than ever.
For centuries India's Dalits, the outcasts once called untouchables, were considered subhuman. Upper-caste Hindus forced them to do society's most humiliating jobs — like cleaning filth from toilets and sewers — and if they resisted, they were beaten, raped, dismembered or murdered.
Atrocities like these still occasionally take place. But today Mayawati is giving these long-persecuted people hope that soon they may win truly equal status in this obsessively hierarchical society. As parliamentary elections approach this spring, she has emerged as a likely kingmaker and a dark horse possibility for the prime minister's office.
The daughter of a clerk in the government's telecommunications department and his illiterate wife, the pugnacious leader — known for her fiery speeches and diva's temperament — is sometimes called "the Dalit queen" and sometimes simply "Behenji," or "older sister."
A graduate of Kalindi College in Delhi, she holds bachelor's degrees in law and education, and worked as a teacher until joining politics in 1984, when she was instrumental in forming the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) with her mentor, Kanshi Ram, who was at that time India's most prominent Dalit politician.
Eclipsing her mentor, Mayawati rose to prominence as a Dalit leader through strident rhetoric — frequently calling upon her people to beat the Brahmins with shoes.
But in a move that prompted some observers to call her India's Obama, she has radically reinvented herself in her bid for the nation's highest office.
Last year, Mayawati led the BSP to a stunning victory in her home state of Uttar Pradesh, becoming chief minister through a seemingly impossible alliance with the high-caste Brahmins she once threatened to slap with her sandal.
That was in itself an enormous achievement, as no leader has been able to win an outright majority in Uttar Pradesh — India's largest state — for a decade and a half.
But because Uttar Pradesh is a bellwether state with 114 million voters, and neither the Congress Party or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been able to achieve an outright majority in national polls since the early 1990s, it also means that Mayawati could very well determine who will be India's next national leader.
In a bid to make that happen, Mayawati is pushing the regional BSP nationwide. In state elections held in November, the BSP contested more seats in Delhi, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh than ever before, and in each of the four states the party increased the number of its representatives in the assembly and won a higher portion of the votes than ever before.
"This is the first time a Dalit leader has attained such stature, as head of a vast social coalition consisting of haves and have nots," said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan. "She's the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, which has more people in it than Pakistan or Bangladesh. It's a state with 190 million citizens."
That's an impressive feat for any politician. But for a Dalit, it means even more.
"It is a really big achievement," said Chandrabhan Prasad, one of India's few Dalit journalists. "She has made Dalits visible and respectable. Earlier, people hated her or disliked her. Now they fear her."
By Jason Overdorf -- GlobalPost
December 12, 2008
NEW DELHI, India — As her lavish birthday celebration approaches, Mayawati Kumari, a powerful politician known for fiery speeches and a diva's temperament, has once again run into controversy. This time, it's not the size of her cake or her diamond necklace that has her in trouble with India's muckraking press, but the alleged murder of an engineer from the state's public works department by one of her party workers.
There's a thin line between politicians and gangsters in India, with as many as a third of the politicians forming the government of various Indian states facing criminal charges. But when a member of Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) — a party dedicated to uplifting India's oppressed Dalits — runs afoul of the law, it gets special attention.
This time around, the Indian press immediately jumped to the conclusion that the accused — a BSP member of the legislative assembly in Uttar Pradesh, where Mayawati is chief minister — committed the alleged murder in the course of extorting money for Mayawati's annual birthday bash on Jan. 15. But now the police say there was no basis for the extortion motive reports.
Because she is a Dalit herself, Mayawati's birthday party has always been controversial. But due to her rising political power, the desire among her rivals to take her down a peg is today stronger than ever.
For centuries India's Dalits, the outcasts once called untouchables, were considered subhuman. Upper-caste Hindus forced them to do society's most humiliating jobs — like cleaning filth from toilets and sewers — and if they resisted, they were beaten, raped, dismembered or murdered.
Atrocities like these still occasionally take place. But today Mayawati is giving these long-persecuted people hope that soon they may win truly equal status in this obsessively hierarchical society. As parliamentary elections approach this spring, she has emerged as a likely kingmaker and a dark horse possibility for the prime minister's office.
The daughter of a clerk in the government's telecommunications department and his illiterate wife, the pugnacious leader — known for her fiery speeches and diva's temperament — is sometimes called "the Dalit queen" and sometimes simply "Behenji," or "older sister."
A graduate of Kalindi College in Delhi, she holds bachelor's degrees in law and education, and worked as a teacher until joining politics in 1984, when she was instrumental in forming the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) with her mentor, Kanshi Ram, who was at that time India's most prominent Dalit politician.
Eclipsing her mentor, Mayawati rose to prominence as a Dalit leader through strident rhetoric — frequently calling upon her people to beat the Brahmins with shoes.
But in a move that prompted some observers to call her India's Obama, she has radically reinvented herself in her bid for the nation's highest office.
Last year, Mayawati led the BSP to a stunning victory in her home state of Uttar Pradesh, becoming chief minister through a seemingly impossible alliance with the high-caste Brahmins she once threatened to slap with her sandal.
That was in itself an enormous achievement, as no leader has been able to win an outright majority in Uttar Pradesh — India's largest state — for a decade and a half.
But because Uttar Pradesh is a bellwether state with 114 million voters, and neither the Congress Party or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been able to achieve an outright majority in national polls since the early 1990s, it also means that Mayawati could very well determine who will be India's next national leader.
In a bid to make that happen, Mayawati is pushing the regional BSP nationwide. In state elections held in November, the BSP contested more seats in Delhi, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh than ever before, and in each of the four states the party increased the number of its representatives in the assembly and won a higher portion of the votes than ever before.
"This is the first time a Dalit leader has attained such stature, as head of a vast social coalition consisting of haves and have nots," said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan. "She's the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, which has more people in it than Pakistan or Bangladesh. It's a state with 190 million citizens."
That's an impressive feat for any politician. But for a Dalit, it means even more.
"It is a really big achievement," said Chandrabhan Prasad, one of India's few Dalit journalists. "She has made Dalits visible and respectable. Earlier, people hated her or disliked her. Now they fear her."
no fanning the flames
India avoids lashing out at Pakistan and its own Muslims after the Mumbai attacks.
Jason Overdorf and Sudip Mazumdar
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008
Most people probably expected the Nov. 26 terrorist attacks on Mumbai to lead to another showdown between India and Pakistan. After all, the last time Islamic militants carried out such a major attack, on Delhi in 2001, the Indian government massed troops on the Pakistani border. Now as then, evidence suggests that the militants were trained and equipped by groups operating in Pakistan. And to dampen the flames, Washington has so far done little more than suggest that Islamabad cooperate with the Indian investigation and crack down on suspects.
Last week, when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region, thousands of Indians did take to the streets of Mumbai, Delhi and other cities to protest. Yet while there were a few scattered chants of "Death to Pakistan," the marchers, who carried roses, candles and posters, directed most of the ire not at India's perennial enemy, the terrorists, or the ruling Congress party. Their anger was reserved for India's politicians in general. The protesters' slogan: "Enough is enough."
The marchers had plenty to be mad about. According to the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, India has suffered more than 4,000 terrorist attacks since 1970, with an average of about one killing per day. But India's leaders have taken little action to protect the population, even while ensuring themselves heavy security. The government also appeared clueless in the face of the Mumbai attacks and took hours to respond.
Yet there's been remarkably little jingoism in the overall reaction. India's leaders, its media and its population—even the far right—have largely rejected the kind of anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim rhetoric the terrorists must have hoped for. This forbearance won't last forever, especially if Pakistan fails to cooperate with India's demand for a crackdown on militants. But for the time being, India is surprising many Western observers—and even some Indian ones—by maintaining a resolute calm and refusing to rattle its saber.
Despite comparisons in the Indian media, the nation's reaction so far to "26/11" has differed profoundly from America's response to 9/11, Spain's to 3/11 or London's to 7/7. Indians have neither rallied round their leader and demanded he pull up the drawbridges, as Americans did to George W. Bush, nor rushed to throw out a bungling government, as the Spanish did to José MarÃa Aznar after he misled voters about the involvement of Basque separatists.
There have been no clashes between Indian Hindus and Muslims. Nor has there been a swing to embrace Hindu nationalism. Indeed, opposition politicians who have sought to capitalize on the mayhem have been roundly punished for it. For example, Narendra Modi, the BJP chief minister of Gujarat, rushed to Mumbai after the attacks to lionize the slain head of Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad. But Mumbai denizens greeted Modi with boos and accused him of political opportunism.
The official response, meanwhile, has been studiously measured. India's home minister and both the chief minister of Maharashtra and his deputy have resigned. A review of India's intelligence system has begun and New Delhi has called on Pakistan to extradite 20 suspects. Pranab Mukherjee, India's foreign minister, has sent mixed messages in recent speeches, first ruling out military action against Pakistan and then, during Rice's visit, reversing tack and warning that India will use "all the means at [its] disposal." But overall, the government's behavior has been anything but warlike.
The reason, says Mahesh Rangarajan of Delhi University, is that "India has learned that a hysterical response does not serve any purpose." Experience shows that rash action only makes things worse. Congress party sources point out that massing troops on the border, as the BJP-led government did following terror attack on India's Parliament in December 2001, accomplished nothing—except to ensure that the BJP was roundly criticized for raising tensions. Senior government sources also admit that India can't behave like America did after 9/11 because India is "not a superpower and does not have that kind of capability," says a senior government official.
Out of necessity, then, New Delhi has turned to realpolitik. That's taken the form of "maintaining the pressure, getting the U.S. and other allies to put equal pressure on Pakistan without actually ratcheting up tension and weakening [Pakistani President Asif Ali] Zardari's position too much," says a top official who asked to remain nameless because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press.
In eschewing militarism, India is placing tremendous faith in the United States and the international community. Pundits, for example, have called on India to make its case against Pakistan at the U.N. Security Council. But this strategy is risky, for India will feel betrayed if the international or U.S. response remains tepid. And so far, the signals from Washington haven't been promising. Rice, on her visit to New Delhi, said that "there has to be direct and tough action," but she seemed—at least to Indians—to water down that message when she visited Islamabad.
Indians are already frustrated with Pakistan's behavior and its rejection of India's call to extradite the suspects. "What is disquieting is that the Pakistanis are resorting to a technical response by saying, 'Give us evidence and we will respond'," says former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "They're resorting to the old, stock responses, and that is sending a negative message and raising demands on the Indian side to hurt Pakistan."
Should this continue, domestic pressure will mount from the public, as well as the BJP and the radical Hindu nationalist right—especially with a national vote looming next year. The BJP will begin hammering Congress for its failure to stop terror, and if there is no action in Pakistan that, too, will come into play. "The BJP pitches its whole propaganda on that terrain," says Delhi-based political analyst Praful Bidwai.
For the time being, though, Indians are watching and waiting. The details of Rice's visit remain unclear. But unless she asked for and received quiet assurances that Islamabad intends to take some immediate, concrete steps, conditions could worsen for all parties, America included—after all, the terrorists who strike at India also work on Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan. As for India, if it feels that its forbearance has yielded nothing, this sense of betrayal could cause events to spiral out of control, bringing India and Pakistan—nuclear-armed nemeses—back to the brink once more.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/172610
Jason Overdorf and Sudip Mazumdar
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008
Most people probably expected the Nov. 26 terrorist attacks on Mumbai to lead to another showdown between India and Pakistan. After all, the last time Islamic militants carried out such a major attack, on Delhi in 2001, the Indian government massed troops on the Pakistani border. Now as then, evidence suggests that the militants were trained and equipped by groups operating in Pakistan. And to dampen the flames, Washington has so far done little more than suggest that Islamabad cooperate with the Indian investigation and crack down on suspects.
Last week, when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region, thousands of Indians did take to the streets of Mumbai, Delhi and other cities to protest. Yet while there were a few scattered chants of "Death to Pakistan," the marchers, who carried roses, candles and posters, directed most of the ire not at India's perennial enemy, the terrorists, or the ruling Congress party. Their anger was reserved for India's politicians in general. The protesters' slogan: "Enough is enough."
The marchers had plenty to be mad about. According to the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, India has suffered more than 4,000 terrorist attacks since 1970, with an average of about one killing per day. But India's leaders have taken little action to protect the population, even while ensuring themselves heavy security. The government also appeared clueless in the face of the Mumbai attacks and took hours to respond.
Yet there's been remarkably little jingoism in the overall reaction. India's leaders, its media and its population—even the far right—have largely rejected the kind of anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim rhetoric the terrorists must have hoped for. This forbearance won't last forever, especially if Pakistan fails to cooperate with India's demand for a crackdown on militants. But for the time being, India is surprising many Western observers—and even some Indian ones—by maintaining a resolute calm and refusing to rattle its saber.
Despite comparisons in the Indian media, the nation's reaction so far to "26/11" has differed profoundly from America's response to 9/11, Spain's to 3/11 or London's to 7/7. Indians have neither rallied round their leader and demanded he pull up the drawbridges, as Americans did to George W. Bush, nor rushed to throw out a bungling government, as the Spanish did to José MarÃa Aznar after he misled voters about the involvement of Basque separatists.
There have been no clashes between Indian Hindus and Muslims. Nor has there been a swing to embrace Hindu nationalism. Indeed, opposition politicians who have sought to capitalize on the mayhem have been roundly punished for it. For example, Narendra Modi, the BJP chief minister of Gujarat, rushed to Mumbai after the attacks to lionize the slain head of Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad. But Mumbai denizens greeted Modi with boos and accused him of political opportunism.
The official response, meanwhile, has been studiously measured. India's home minister and both the chief minister of Maharashtra and his deputy have resigned. A review of India's intelligence system has begun and New Delhi has called on Pakistan to extradite 20 suspects. Pranab Mukherjee, India's foreign minister, has sent mixed messages in recent speeches, first ruling out military action against Pakistan and then, during Rice's visit, reversing tack and warning that India will use "all the means at [its] disposal." But overall, the government's behavior has been anything but warlike.
The reason, says Mahesh Rangarajan of Delhi University, is that "India has learned that a hysterical response does not serve any purpose." Experience shows that rash action only makes things worse. Congress party sources point out that massing troops on the border, as the BJP-led government did following terror attack on India's Parliament in December 2001, accomplished nothing—except to ensure that the BJP was roundly criticized for raising tensions. Senior government sources also admit that India can't behave like America did after 9/11 because India is "not a superpower and does not have that kind of capability," says a senior government official.
Out of necessity, then, New Delhi has turned to realpolitik. That's taken the form of "maintaining the pressure, getting the U.S. and other allies to put equal pressure on Pakistan without actually ratcheting up tension and weakening [Pakistani President Asif Ali] Zardari's position too much," says a top official who asked to remain nameless because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press.
In eschewing militarism, India is placing tremendous faith in the United States and the international community. Pundits, for example, have called on India to make its case against Pakistan at the U.N. Security Council. But this strategy is risky, for India will feel betrayed if the international or U.S. response remains tepid. And so far, the signals from Washington haven't been promising. Rice, on her visit to New Delhi, said that "there has to be direct and tough action," but she seemed—at least to Indians—to water down that message when she visited Islamabad.
Indians are already frustrated with Pakistan's behavior and its rejection of India's call to extradite the suspects. "What is disquieting is that the Pakistanis are resorting to a technical response by saying, 'Give us evidence and we will respond'," says former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "They're resorting to the old, stock responses, and that is sending a negative message and raising demands on the Indian side to hurt Pakistan."
Should this continue, domestic pressure will mount from the public, as well as the BJP and the radical Hindu nationalist right—especially with a national vote looming next year. The BJP will begin hammering Congress for its failure to stop terror, and if there is no action in Pakistan that, too, will come into play. "The BJP pitches its whole propaganda on that terrain," says Delhi-based political analyst Praful Bidwai.
For the time being, though, Indians are watching and waiting. The details of Rice's visit remain unclear. But unless she asked for and received quiet assurances that Islamabad intends to take some immediate, concrete steps, conditions could worsen for all parties, America included—after all, the terrorists who strike at India also work on Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan. As for India, if it feels that its forbearance has yielded nothing, this sense of betrayal could cause events to spiral out of control, bringing India and Pakistan—nuclear-armed nemeses—back to the brink once more.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/172610
Friday, December 05, 2008
a jolt to the middle classes
Rage over the Mumbai attacks is changing the nation's politics.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
When Adlai Stevenson remarked that in a democracy, people get the government they deserve, he could have been talking about India. This country's middle class is reknowned for its apathy at the polls. By ceding the electoral process to the uneducated, poverty-stricken masses, they have allowed opportunistic politicians—many of whom face criminal charges—to thrive by encouraging riots and distributing booze. The crisis in Mumbai may have jolted middle-class voters out of their torpor. As Condoleezza Rice made a lightning trip to the subcontinent this week to keep tensions between India and Pakistan from spiraling out of control, thousands of middle-class Indians in Mumbai, Delhi and other major Indian cities took to the streets to protest against India's politicians, regardless of the party they belong to or whether they were in or out of power. The movement was spontaneous and amorphous, but the anger was palpable. Milind Deora, who at 32 years old is among the youngest members of the Indian Parliament, was the only politician who dared show his face among the throng. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jason Overdorf about how the middle class anger against politicians—which included calls to vote "none of the above" in the next election and to stop paying taxes—could become a real force for change. Excerpts:
Newsweek: What do you think about the protests in Mumbai and other Indian cities against the country's politicians?
Milind Deora: In Mumbai, at least, it was a welcome step to see India's urban middle class out on the street protesting and demanding accountability from the government. I, too, took part in the protests at the Gateway of India. I went there as someone who has lived in the city, who was born in the city, and not as a member of Parliament or a politician. I think that anger and frustration and perhaps that feeling of being violated and let down by the government is definitely justified. But there has to be some solutions in place, and people have to be much more constructive. The kind of messages going around, which were all politicians are bad, and governments are bad, won't do anything to help the situation. If this is not channeled in the right way, we'll lose an opportunity.
Did the people there perceive you as the enemy, because you are a politician, or were you spared because of your youth?
There were some people who were saying, "You are a politician, and you guys have failed us." There was this anti-politician rage, for sure. But the majority of people were happy to see me. They were shaking my hand and saying, "Milind, get us out of this."
At some level, there are many things that only the government can do, and the government, by nature is made up of politicians. How do you think the protesters can take their enthusiasm for action and make it matter?
The solution is to have more powers given to local governances; a devolution of powers from the state government to Mumbai. This is an opportune moment to demand that. If there's one thing that people should demand of the government, it's that, because tomorrow this anger could be about a collapse in terms of civic infrastructure, not a terrorist attack necessarily. We need to fix the governance system and use this as an opportunity to do that.
Some politicians tried to use the attacks to gain political mileage, but they were greeted with disgust by the people. Is it possible that a politician who focuses on these administrative issues you're talking about could capitalize on this anger?
I think they could, and I'm trying to do that. But it is unfortunate. If people were disgusted by [the blatant political opportunism] then they should give these politicians and their parties a befitting reply in elections. The sad thing is, I think that once this is over and the dust settles, not only will politicians get back to their politics, but so will the electorate.
The kind of action that needs to be taken to improve security is complex, so it's difficult to sell as an election platform. Has there been talk about how to boil these complex reforms down into a campaign message?
Right now the focus is not on our communications strategy. Right now the aim is to focus on what the government is trying to do—to overhaul the entire system. The political communication part of this will come much, much later.
Your party, the Congress, sacked the home minister, as well as the chief minister and deputy chief minister of Maharashtra. Does that kind of action send a message that politicians will be held accountable, or is it just a game of musical chairs?
I think that removing chief ministers and home ministers who failed to reassure the people and failed to lead from the front can help. But 90 percent of the difference will come from re-looking at the security establishment, and that means much more than just the home minister. That means the entire bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, the policing capability, all of that needs to be looked at and realigned.
Were you encouraged that this protest was directed at all politicians, rather than the ruling Congress party?
I didn't go there and think of it as what is the political mileage for the Congress and what is the political mileage for me. I still haven't got down to thinking of it in that sense. Even if I had not been an MP, I would have been there. I felt it was my duty to be there and show solidarity with what is happening. For me it was encouraging to see the middle class out on the street protesting, but it was also saddening to see their blind rage against politicians and the government.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/172352
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
When Adlai Stevenson remarked that in a democracy, people get the government they deserve, he could have been talking about India. This country's middle class is reknowned for its apathy at the polls. By ceding the electoral process to the uneducated, poverty-stricken masses, they have allowed opportunistic politicians—many of whom face criminal charges—to thrive by encouraging riots and distributing booze. The crisis in Mumbai may have jolted middle-class voters out of their torpor. As Condoleezza Rice made a lightning trip to the subcontinent this week to keep tensions between India and Pakistan from spiraling out of control, thousands of middle-class Indians in Mumbai, Delhi and other major Indian cities took to the streets to protest against India's politicians, regardless of the party they belong to or whether they were in or out of power. The movement was spontaneous and amorphous, but the anger was palpable. Milind Deora, who at 32 years old is among the youngest members of the Indian Parliament, was the only politician who dared show his face among the throng. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jason Overdorf about how the middle class anger against politicians—which included calls to vote "none of the above" in the next election and to stop paying taxes—could become a real force for change. Excerpts:
Newsweek: What do you think about the protests in Mumbai and other Indian cities against the country's politicians?
Milind Deora: In Mumbai, at least, it was a welcome step to see India's urban middle class out on the street protesting and demanding accountability from the government. I, too, took part in the protests at the Gateway of India. I went there as someone who has lived in the city, who was born in the city, and not as a member of Parliament or a politician. I think that anger and frustration and perhaps that feeling of being violated and let down by the government is definitely justified. But there has to be some solutions in place, and people have to be much more constructive. The kind of messages going around, which were all politicians are bad, and governments are bad, won't do anything to help the situation. If this is not channeled in the right way, we'll lose an opportunity.
Did the people there perceive you as the enemy, because you are a politician, or were you spared because of your youth?
There were some people who were saying, "You are a politician, and you guys have failed us." There was this anti-politician rage, for sure. But the majority of people were happy to see me. They were shaking my hand and saying, "Milind, get us out of this."
At some level, there are many things that only the government can do, and the government, by nature is made up of politicians. How do you think the protesters can take their enthusiasm for action and make it matter?
The solution is to have more powers given to local governances; a devolution of powers from the state government to Mumbai. This is an opportune moment to demand that. If there's one thing that people should demand of the government, it's that, because tomorrow this anger could be about a collapse in terms of civic infrastructure, not a terrorist attack necessarily. We need to fix the governance system and use this as an opportunity to do that.
Some politicians tried to use the attacks to gain political mileage, but they were greeted with disgust by the people. Is it possible that a politician who focuses on these administrative issues you're talking about could capitalize on this anger?
I think they could, and I'm trying to do that. But it is unfortunate. If people were disgusted by [the blatant political opportunism] then they should give these politicians and their parties a befitting reply in elections. The sad thing is, I think that once this is over and the dust settles, not only will politicians get back to their politics, but so will the electorate.
The kind of action that needs to be taken to improve security is complex, so it's difficult to sell as an election platform. Has there been talk about how to boil these complex reforms down into a campaign message?
Right now the focus is not on our communications strategy. Right now the aim is to focus on what the government is trying to do—to overhaul the entire system. The political communication part of this will come much, much later.
Your party, the Congress, sacked the home minister, as well as the chief minister and deputy chief minister of Maharashtra. Does that kind of action send a message that politicians will be held accountable, or is it just a game of musical chairs?
I think that removing chief ministers and home ministers who failed to reassure the people and failed to lead from the front can help. But 90 percent of the difference will come from re-looking at the security establishment, and that means much more than just the home minister. That means the entire bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, the policing capability, all of that needs to be looked at and realigned.
Were you encouraged that this protest was directed at all politicians, rather than the ruling Congress party?
I didn't go there and think of it as what is the political mileage for the Congress and what is the political mileage for me. I still haven't got down to thinking of it in that sense. Even if I had not been an MP, I would have been there. I felt it was my duty to be there and show solidarity with what is happening. For me it was encouraging to see the middle class out on the street protesting, but it was also saddening to see their blind rage against politicians and the government.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/172352
Friday, November 28, 2008
down but not out
Despite the bloodshed, India's confidence is already shining through.
Jason Overdorf and George Wehrfritz
NEWSWEEK (November 28, 2008)
You couldn't strike a blow closer to the heart of Indian finance. Mumbai's downtown waterfront—the setting of the terror attacks—has been the national economic gateway since the days of the British Raj; its stock exchange sits between the two hotels besieged by gunmen, and the country's largest business groups are all headquartered nearby. So one might imagine that the gunmen who killed at least 155 people had done grave damage to one of the world's fastest growing major economies—and they'd be wrong. "There are far more important things going on in the global economy at the moment than terrorism in India," says Daniel Melser, senior economist with Moody's Economy.com in Sidney. As horrific as the attacks were, he adds, "the economic impact will be secondary."
In the coming days and weeks, India's resilience will be on full display. The show of confidence actually began Friday, when Mumbai's main stock exchange—open even as Indian commandoes were still clearing the area of terrorists—rose slightly on the day, in contrast to the NYSE post 9/11, or London markets after the 2005 bombings, which fell sharply. It may well fall further as the full impact of the worst terror attacks to hit Mumbai since a coordinated bombing campaign destroyed the stock exchange, targeted the main railway station and killed some 250 people in a single day back in 1993, but most experts agree that the jitters will eventually subside. "In the short term I'd expect that the effect will be completely negative," said Saumitra Chaudhuri, a member of the prime minister's economic advisory council. "People who do business with India will think twice about visiting, and they'll also think twice about taking any Indian exposure. But all this will pass in a month or two, [and] I don't think in the medium to longer term there will be any lasting damage."
The attacks, in short, haven't changed the India "story" that investors find so alluring. The country remains a standout among emerging markets for its large middle class, thriving service sector and low export dependency. Unlike much of the rest of Asia, its economy is driven mainly by household consumption, which makes it uniquely resilient in today's global downturn. And with growth centers in a variety of industries and geographic locations across the country, the economy isn't vulnerable to a knockout strike of the sort any terror group could deliver. All of which should keep domestic growth relatively robust and prevent foreign investors from growing too skittish—provided Indian authorities quickly reestablish order. The latest attacks "obviously escalated things … so threat perceptions [will] go up dramatically," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the India arm of Standard & Poor's. "One could take New York, which despite 9/11 got back on its feet, as an example. I think Mumbai will do the same, provided the system responds strongly. That's where the uncertainty is now."
India's tourism industry is unlikely to escape a major shock. "Incredible India"—the government's flashy tourism promotion campaign—is now virtually certain to fall short of its goal of doubling arrivals from last year's five million by 2010. It may even move backwards, as did Bali's tourism trade after the 2002 nightclub bombings, losing more than a third of its traffic overnight. Yet in truth, Indian tourism is anything but incredible in a numerical sense, so all the specter of terrorism can do is erode its already small base. By comparison, Bali alone will garner 2 million foreign visitors this year, and China is expected to improve upon the 137 million it attracted in 2007. With India's GDP at about $1 trillion and tourism contributing just more than $10 billion of that, the impact of even a major slowdown would be minor.
Experts are focused on two real risks. One is that India's counterterrorism preparedness won't improve. The challenge is to remake a tiny national police force comprised mainly of high-school graduates trained to do little but wield sticks to keep unruly crowds in order. The second risk is that terrorists like the ones who paralyzed Mumbai will incite sectarian unrest between India's Hindu majority and their Muslim neighbors, who make up just 14 percent of the country's 1 billion people. Indeed, with national elections due next year, the incentive is there for leaders of political parties divided along religious and geographic lines to ramp up the extremist rhetoric to rally their core supporters—regardless of what it does to India's business climate.
So far most politicians seem to be taking the high road. L.K. Advani, leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has toned down his oft-vitriolic Hindu nationalism and called for a unified response to the terror attacks from all political parties. Gokarn says the accommodating tone is "very encouraging" but adds that, to be effective, bipartisanship must beget "an institutional framework that the next government can very quickly act on, regardless of who is in office." If not, and additional terror attacks create the impression that India's security situation is deteriorating, the gloss that its economy emits could start to come off the India story.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/171141
Jason Overdorf and George Wehrfritz
NEWSWEEK (November 28, 2008)
You couldn't strike a blow closer to the heart of Indian finance. Mumbai's downtown waterfront—the setting of the terror attacks—has been the national economic gateway since the days of the British Raj; its stock exchange sits between the two hotels besieged by gunmen, and the country's largest business groups are all headquartered nearby. So one might imagine that the gunmen who killed at least 155 people had done grave damage to one of the world's fastest growing major economies—and they'd be wrong. "There are far more important things going on in the global economy at the moment than terrorism in India," says Daniel Melser, senior economist with Moody's Economy.com in Sidney. As horrific as the attacks were, he adds, "the economic impact will be secondary."
In the coming days and weeks, India's resilience will be on full display. The show of confidence actually began Friday, when Mumbai's main stock exchange—open even as Indian commandoes were still clearing the area of terrorists—rose slightly on the day, in contrast to the NYSE post 9/11, or London markets after the 2005 bombings, which fell sharply. It may well fall further as the full impact of the worst terror attacks to hit Mumbai since a coordinated bombing campaign destroyed the stock exchange, targeted the main railway station and killed some 250 people in a single day back in 1993, but most experts agree that the jitters will eventually subside. "In the short term I'd expect that the effect will be completely negative," said Saumitra Chaudhuri, a member of the prime minister's economic advisory council. "People who do business with India will think twice about visiting, and they'll also think twice about taking any Indian exposure. But all this will pass in a month or two, [and] I don't think in the medium to longer term there will be any lasting damage."
The attacks, in short, haven't changed the India "story" that investors find so alluring. The country remains a standout among emerging markets for its large middle class, thriving service sector and low export dependency. Unlike much of the rest of Asia, its economy is driven mainly by household consumption, which makes it uniquely resilient in today's global downturn. And with growth centers in a variety of industries and geographic locations across the country, the economy isn't vulnerable to a knockout strike of the sort any terror group could deliver. All of which should keep domestic growth relatively robust and prevent foreign investors from growing too skittish—provided Indian authorities quickly reestablish order. The latest attacks "obviously escalated things … so threat perceptions [will] go up dramatically," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the India arm of Standard & Poor's. "One could take New York, which despite 9/11 got back on its feet, as an example. I think Mumbai will do the same, provided the system responds strongly. That's where the uncertainty is now."
India's tourism industry is unlikely to escape a major shock. "Incredible India"—the government's flashy tourism promotion campaign—is now virtually certain to fall short of its goal of doubling arrivals from last year's five million by 2010. It may even move backwards, as did Bali's tourism trade after the 2002 nightclub bombings, losing more than a third of its traffic overnight. Yet in truth, Indian tourism is anything but incredible in a numerical sense, so all the specter of terrorism can do is erode its already small base. By comparison, Bali alone will garner 2 million foreign visitors this year, and China is expected to improve upon the 137 million it attracted in 2007. With India's GDP at about $1 trillion and tourism contributing just more than $10 billion of that, the impact of even a major slowdown would be minor.
Experts are focused on two real risks. One is that India's counterterrorism preparedness won't improve. The challenge is to remake a tiny national police force comprised mainly of high-school graduates trained to do little but wield sticks to keep unruly crowds in order. The second risk is that terrorists like the ones who paralyzed Mumbai will incite sectarian unrest between India's Hindu majority and their Muslim neighbors, who make up just 14 percent of the country's 1 billion people. Indeed, with national elections due next year, the incentive is there for leaders of political parties divided along religious and geographic lines to ramp up the extremist rhetoric to rally their core supporters—regardless of what it does to India's business climate.
So far most politicians seem to be taking the high road. L.K. Advani, leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has toned down his oft-vitriolic Hindu nationalism and called for a unified response to the terror attacks from all political parties. Gokarn says the accommodating tone is "very encouraging" but adds that, to be effective, bipartisanship must beget "an institutional framework that the next government can very quickly act on, regardless of who is in office." If not, and additional terror attacks create the impression that India's security situation is deteriorating, the gloss that its economy emits could start to come off the India story.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/171141
the rise of the hindu right
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008
It's election season in India, and that's bad news for the hapless Congress party. Six states go to the polls in the coming month, in what some experts are calling a bellwether for next year's general election. And though the races are too close to call, some pundits say Congress is likely to fare poorly. But that's not the worst of it. The slack in four of the contests may be taken up by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—a Hindu nationalist organization that's surging in strength in a new, more aggressive form. In an especially worrisome twist, police say they recently uncovered possible links between BJP-associated Hindu nationalist organizations and suspected Hindu terrorists—a first for a mainstream Indian party.
The BJP's renewed appeal can be explained, at least in part, by timing. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is not known for his political acumen, Congress has lost the last eight state elections in a row. Now the worldwide financial crisis has sent inflation spiraling and slowed growth, further damaging the government's chances. The BJP hopes to capitalize on the bad economic conditions when voters head to the polls in Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram and Rajasthan this month. While nothing's guaranteed, many observers expect Congress to get trounced. "Their machine is in tatters," says Mahesh Rangarajan, a Delhi University political analyst.
While that's bad for Congress, it wouldn't necessarily be a problem for India—but for two things. First, the state elections could well forecast the fate of the Congress-led ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), in next nationwide poll, which must take place before May 2009. (The UPA's own rural-development minister recently said the state votes represented a "mini general election.") And second, the BJP has taken a nastier turn since it last led the country in 2004.
To get a sense of the shift, consider the BJP's candidate for prime minister this time around. Lal Krishna Advani is an aging rabble-rouser who in the mid-1990s helped gather a huge Hindu mob that tore down the 16th-century Babri Mosque, leading to riots that killed more than 2,000 people (Advani was later cleared of criminal charges). He is far more radical than his predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who served as prime minister from 1998 to 2004. And Advani's heir apparent is Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi—who has been denied entry to the United States for his alleged role in the 2002 riots in Gujarat that killed more than 1,000. Not long after the riots, Modi warned a crowd that Muslims were trying to erode India's Hindu majority by having many children. "We have to teach a lesson to those who are increasing the population at an alarming rate," he said.
Then there's the alleged terror link. Since Oct. 24, the state of Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad has arrested 10 Hindu nationalists—including a lieutenant colonel in Army intelligence, a prominent Hindu spiritual leader and a former party worker from the BJP's student wing—for suspected involvement in a 2006 attack previously blamed on Muslim extremists. The case has yet to come to trial and the suspects maintain they are innocent. But the news, if true, would mark the first known terrorist bombing in India's history involving Hindu extremists—rather than Muslim radicals, separatists or Maoist revolutionaries—and the story has shocked the country. Rather than disown the suspects, however, BJP grandees have leapt to their defense. On Nov. 10, party president Rajnath Singh said that "whosoever believes in nationalism cannot be a terrorist," and on Nov. 12 he complained that "this government is targeting Hindu spiritual leaders without evidence … We find this investigation very suspicious."
The explanation for the BJP's rightward tilt lies with its increased reliance on its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). During the Vajpayee years and in the run-up to the 2004 national elections, the BJP generally tried to divorce itself from anti-Muslim vitriol and the RSS. But the debacle of that campaign—in which Congress won a stunning victory despite the consensus that the BJP had presided over an economic boom—gave nationalists the upper hand. The BJP's defeat reminded its leadership that it remains a cadre-based party united by its ideology, not a charismatic leader. And the bulk of those cadres come from the 4.5 million-member RSS. The RSS advocates a philosophy known as Hindutva and favors turning India into a Hindu state (the country's population is 80 percent Hindu) and designating religious minorities as second-class citizens. Without its nationalist ideology it wouldn't be clear what the BJP stood for. On most issues, the party's positions are actually very similar to Congress's (both parties advocate further economic reform and increased ties to the United States, for example).
The RSS is now suspected of connections to terrorism. Some of the current suspects belong to a heretofore-unknown group called the Abhinav Bharat, which is not officially linked to the RSS but espouses an identical Hindutva ideology. And the Anti-Terrorism Squad claims to have established links between the suspects and official RSS outfits. "You actually have for the first time evidence linking all kinds of front organizations of the [RSS family]," says political analyst Praful Bidwai. Since the '90s there have been several incidents of "accidental explosions at bomb-making operations run by [Hindu] fanatics," Bidwai says. "But this is the first time … the RSS has been linked to a conspiracy."
You might assume that such ties, unless repudiated, would hurt the RSS's popularity and the BJP's electoral chances in India, which is the world's largest democracy and a secular one at that. Unfortunately, that's not how things have transpired in the past. In fact, some of the BJP's prior electoral victories followed bouts of incendiary anti-Muslim hatred and actual violence. Vajpayee was first elected prime minister following the Babri Mosque riots, for example, and the mayhem in Gujarat in 2002 helped Modi win a thumping victory in that state, even though—or because—he was blamed for delaying police action to protect Muslims. Now, by casting the government's terror investigation as an anti-Hindu conspiracy, the BJP hopes to repeat this formula today and unite the faithful. "The various wings of the [RSS]—and it's a vast organization—will rally together," says Rangarajan.
If the electorate follows suit, it could lead to another big victory for the BJP—but a big step backward for India as a whole.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/170301
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008
It's election season in India, and that's bad news for the hapless Congress party. Six states go to the polls in the coming month, in what some experts are calling a bellwether for next year's general election. And though the races are too close to call, some pundits say Congress is likely to fare poorly. But that's not the worst of it. The slack in four of the contests may be taken up by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—a Hindu nationalist organization that's surging in strength in a new, more aggressive form. In an especially worrisome twist, police say they recently uncovered possible links between BJP-associated Hindu nationalist organizations and suspected Hindu terrorists—a first for a mainstream Indian party.
The BJP's renewed appeal can be explained, at least in part, by timing. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is not known for his political acumen, Congress has lost the last eight state elections in a row. Now the worldwide financial crisis has sent inflation spiraling and slowed growth, further damaging the government's chances. The BJP hopes to capitalize on the bad economic conditions when voters head to the polls in Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram and Rajasthan this month. While nothing's guaranteed, many observers expect Congress to get trounced. "Their machine is in tatters," says Mahesh Rangarajan, a Delhi University political analyst.
While that's bad for Congress, it wouldn't necessarily be a problem for India—but for two things. First, the state elections could well forecast the fate of the Congress-led ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), in next nationwide poll, which must take place before May 2009. (The UPA's own rural-development minister recently said the state votes represented a "mini general election.") And second, the BJP has taken a nastier turn since it last led the country in 2004.
To get a sense of the shift, consider the BJP's candidate for prime minister this time around. Lal Krishna Advani is an aging rabble-rouser who in the mid-1990s helped gather a huge Hindu mob that tore down the 16th-century Babri Mosque, leading to riots that killed more than 2,000 people (Advani was later cleared of criminal charges). He is far more radical than his predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who served as prime minister from 1998 to 2004. And Advani's heir apparent is Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi—who has been denied entry to the United States for his alleged role in the 2002 riots in Gujarat that killed more than 1,000. Not long after the riots, Modi warned a crowd that Muslims were trying to erode India's Hindu majority by having many children. "We have to teach a lesson to those who are increasing the population at an alarming rate," he said.
Then there's the alleged terror link. Since Oct. 24, the state of Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad has arrested 10 Hindu nationalists—including a lieutenant colonel in Army intelligence, a prominent Hindu spiritual leader and a former party worker from the BJP's student wing—for suspected involvement in a 2006 attack previously blamed on Muslim extremists. The case has yet to come to trial and the suspects maintain they are innocent. But the news, if true, would mark the first known terrorist bombing in India's history involving Hindu extremists—rather than Muslim radicals, separatists or Maoist revolutionaries—and the story has shocked the country. Rather than disown the suspects, however, BJP grandees have leapt to their defense. On Nov. 10, party president Rajnath Singh said that "whosoever believes in nationalism cannot be a terrorist," and on Nov. 12 he complained that "this government is targeting Hindu spiritual leaders without evidence … We find this investigation very suspicious."
The explanation for the BJP's rightward tilt lies with its increased reliance on its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). During the Vajpayee years and in the run-up to the 2004 national elections, the BJP generally tried to divorce itself from anti-Muslim vitriol and the RSS. But the debacle of that campaign—in which Congress won a stunning victory despite the consensus that the BJP had presided over an economic boom—gave nationalists the upper hand. The BJP's defeat reminded its leadership that it remains a cadre-based party united by its ideology, not a charismatic leader. And the bulk of those cadres come from the 4.5 million-member RSS. The RSS advocates a philosophy known as Hindutva and favors turning India into a Hindu state (the country's population is 80 percent Hindu) and designating religious minorities as second-class citizens. Without its nationalist ideology it wouldn't be clear what the BJP stood for. On most issues, the party's positions are actually very similar to Congress's (both parties advocate further economic reform and increased ties to the United States, for example).
The RSS is now suspected of connections to terrorism. Some of the current suspects belong to a heretofore-unknown group called the Abhinav Bharat, which is not officially linked to the RSS but espouses an identical Hindutva ideology. And the Anti-Terrorism Squad claims to have established links between the suspects and official RSS outfits. "You actually have for the first time evidence linking all kinds of front organizations of the [RSS family]," says political analyst Praful Bidwai. Since the '90s there have been several incidents of "accidental explosions at bomb-making operations run by [Hindu] fanatics," Bidwai says. "But this is the first time … the RSS has been linked to a conspiracy."
You might assume that such ties, unless repudiated, would hurt the RSS's popularity and the BJP's electoral chances in India, which is the world's largest democracy and a secular one at that. Unfortunately, that's not how things have transpired in the past. In fact, some of the BJP's prior electoral victories followed bouts of incendiary anti-Muslim hatred and actual violence. Vajpayee was first elected prime minister following the Babri Mosque riots, for example, and the mayhem in Gujarat in 2002 helped Modi win a thumping victory in that state, even though—or because—he was blamed for delaying police action to protect Muslims. Now, by casting the government's terror investigation as an anti-Hindu conspiracy, the BJP hopes to repeat this formula today and unite the faithful. "The various wings of the [RSS]—and it's a vast organization—will rally together," says Rangarajan.
If the electorate follows suit, it could lead to another big victory for the BJP—but a big step backward for India as a whole.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/170301
an underpoliced society
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
In a terrifying attack that held India riveted for the past 48 hours, a group of highly trained and deeply committed terrorists seized top Mumbai hotels and a prominent downtown building Wednesday, holding more than 200 people hostage for the better part of two days. As special-forces operations to rescue hostages and flush out terrorists wind down, investigators are only now beginning to piece together how the attackers got into the city and took over the properties. India's foreign minister and others within the government are beginning to point the finger of blame at Pakistan—whose intelligence service India believes is a habitual sponsor of terrorist activities on Indian soil.
NEWSWEEK's Jason Overdorf spoke with Ajai Sahni, editor of the South Asia Intelligence Review and executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi-based think tank that studies terrorism, about the implications.
Newsweek: How are these attacks different from previous terrorist attacks on Indian soil?
Ajai Ajai Sahni: First is the fact that the sheer scale of attacks is unique. We've had similar kinds of attacks in Jammu and Kashmir fairly regularly, commando-terrorist attacks. We've also seen something comparable in terms of the type of attack in Delhi and the attack on Parliament in 2001. So the pattern is not completely new to certain areas. But it is certainly new in Mumbai, and the sheer scale is unprecedented.
Moreover most attacks outside Jammu and KASHMIR—with the exception of the Parliament attack—have been bomb attacks, usually improvised explosive devices variously placed in soft targets. This is the first time we've seen something like this in a major urban center with quite as many participants. We're certainly looking at between 40 and 50 terrorists who appeared to have landed and launched the attack on Mumbai.
I saw a quote from intelligence sources that an attack of this nature would take 2-3 months to plan. Does that sound like a reasonable assessment?
It's not only a question of a plan. I would like to suggest that [the attack] would have taken a much larger time to mount because the kind of training that is evident and the degrees of motivation that are evident in these terrorists would take literally years to generate.
So this is probably the most organized attack we've seen in India?
You see there are different types of organizations. In the Mumbai blasts in 1993, you had extremely meticulous planning required. What I'm talking about here is a much longer gestation in terms of preparation of manpower—compared with what would be required for the mere placement of bombs.
What conclusions do you draw from that if any?
Well, you've had fedayeen-type attacks in other theaters in India—certainly in Jammu and KASHMIR and in the Parliament attack in Delhi. But this represents a simple escalation of scale in such attacks that will create definitive problems. And what it has also demonstrated is the enveloping vulnerabilities of the Indian system; we do not really appear to have the necessary defenses in place to quickly contain the impact. Even if we are not able to prevent such attacks (and no country can expect to completely exclude the possibility of such strikes), certainly the capacity for containment of the attack is extremely wanting.
News reports suggest that Israelis, Americans and Brits were singled out, segregated and held—possibly for hostage negotiations. What is the significance of this focus on foreigners?
The significance of this focus on foreigners is these are regarded as the prime enemy group, so to speak, by people who are engineering these attacks. Beyond that there does not seem to be any intention on the part of the terrorists to negotiate for any kind of deals or concessions, or the release of prisoners. No such thing has been discussed. It appears that they seem to have come here simply to kill and to die. So we do not see any meaningful kind of effort to initiate negotiations during these attacks.
At this point does there seem to be any kind of signature that could link these attacks to any group that Indian intelligence is already tracking?
There are several little factors that tell you [the perpetrators are] among a certain limited group of suspects. But there are no hard signatures. Fedayeen attacks of this nature on a much smaller scale have been often witnessed in Jammu and KASHMIR and the groups responsible have mainly been Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. If you look at the Parliament attack case, it was principally JEM involved there. What we are seeing is that the possibility of a large number of Indian citizens may also have been involved. There is no definitive identification at this juncture, although several people have been arrested and several of the terrorists have been killed. So we are looking at the usual group of suspects but we are still not definitively clear about their identity.
An outfit called Deccan Mujahedeen is taking responsibility.
That does not exist. That's a red herring intended to divert attention, an effort to project that this is an internal Indian problem, that this has nothing to do with outside forces. Whether Indians were involved in this or not, this could not have been executed without outside assistance or backing.
What are the major repercussions of this attack? The head of Mumbai's antiterrorism squad and several other top cops were killed. Is that a major foul up by law enforcement, to have such key figures exposed on the front lines?
The difficulty here is that once again we have a force that is barely learning how to cope with these things. This is, as far as Mumbai is concerned, an unprecedented pattern of attack. They haven't had something like this before. And the problem in India is that we do not have any systems in which large proportions of force and force leaderships are trained to respond to terrorist attacks. You've basically got a system where you learn on the job. And regrettably the price for that kind of extremely inefficient system is usually paid in blood.
Intelligence sources are saying the attacks bear the hallmarks of an international conspiracy. Do you read that as a precursor to claims that Al Qaeda or Pakistani intelligence may be involved in these attacks?
It would be one or other. I don't know if it would be Al Qaeda per se. But it could be Al Qaeda-related groups, certainly. Even Lashkar-e-Toiba is under the umbrella of Al Qaeda. All these groups we are speaking of as suspects are in some sense linked historically to Al Qaeda. All these groups are also linked to the Pakistan intelligence establishment. So we don't see the possibility of an operation of this scale being mounted without the backing of groups that either currently or historically have links with Al Qaeda or Pakistan intelligence.
In last couple of years, the scope of domestic involvement in terrorism has come as a wake-up call to Indian intelligence. Do you think there is always a reluctance to look inside India's borders first?
I think there is a problem of perception over here with Indian media rather than any problem with the intelligence or law enforcement agencies. Because they have been identifying and neutralizing Indian groups for certainly the past two decades, including Islamist groups in India. So there is no suggestion that they only look for outsiders. It is clearly recognized that even where outside agencies are involved, there are Indian facilitators … as partners or participants in terror attacks. And now we find Indian initiators. But I don't see any proclivity to try to brush this under the carpet in enforcement agencies. They follow what they find as leads. Yes, in certain cases you might find there is a tendency to start looking at groups that have international linkages at the very outset, but that's because of precedent rather than bias. If groups that have been involved in the past have been Pakistan-backed or Pakistan-based, then when a new attack of a certain pattern occurs, it is natural to look in that direction. That becomes the principle line of your investigation, but it doesn't necessarily dictate your conclusion.
What is significance of the timing? Elections are underway.
No significance whatsoever. Because if you take a look at the pattern of attacks, you will always find something or the other happening—elections, big international meetings, etc. These are post facto linkages that we try to establish in trying to determine unique motives. There are no unique motives. The motives of these attacks is basically to inflict the most harm on the system as is possible. And to propagate the extremist cause to the widest possible audience. That's it. This is a long war. Every time a new sort of bullet is fired you don't ask why these people are shooting at us. It's basically part of that long war.
A hostage situation like this is relatively unusual for India. Are there any precedents or policies in place about whether or how to negotiate?
Hostage situations are per se not new. But unfortunately there seems to be no clarity or consistency in the actual policies adopted. After such an event, there is usually a great deal of posturing, and declarations that there will be "no negotiation with terrorists" are made. But the particular government or particular negotiators on the ground and their perceptions determine the direction and outcome of any particular hostage crisis. So I'm afraid even if there are policy declarations, they have never been consistently followed.
In 1993 India saw terror attacks that were a response to anti-Muslim rioting. Do you think the opposite could happen now—i.e., community unrest because of these attacks?
Mumbai has been seeing many such attacks. Ever since 1993, there have been attacks of varying magnitudes every year or two—more than one a year. In each case … there has not been [major] rioting. If there has been rioting at all, it has been occasionally by the community that has lost a lot of people. For example, after the Malegaon bombing [an attack on the predominately Muslim town of Malegaon last September], there were Muslims rioting against the police or rioting in general against public property or private property. There have been no riots targeting the other community. So I would like to suggest that a certain measure of maturity has been visible in the popular response to this. I cannot say the same for certain elements of the extremist fringe groups who seem to be rather eager to prove their machismo and aggression.
Is an investigation into alleged Hindu terrorists a political powder keg, or are most people still relatively even-keeled about the situation?
I personally think people are still relatively even-keeled. If anything, this should impose a greater measure of restraint on the political parties that have been going a bit overboard in politicizing the issue of terrorism, whether it is perpetrated by Hindu extremists or Muslim extremists. As far as mainstream parties are concerned, I think there will be pressure for moderation after these attacks. There has been a very, very slow inching towards a consensual understanding of terrorism. Unfortunately it has not yielded a consensual policy as yet. But I suspect this will build greater public pressure on political parties to stop playing partisan politics, and get down to the fundamental issue of how best to respond …
The fact of the matter is you have Hindus who are terrorists. You have Muslims who are terrorists. You also have Christians who are terrorists. And you will find several other denominations that have proven their capacity for terrorism. We must realize that terrorism is simply a method by which civilians are intentionally targeted. That's it.
This is the sixth attack this year and the political party BJP is claiming the government is soft on terror. But the media is also wondering if India has become a soft target. Is India vulnerable to terror attacks because of any particular failure in the police system? Or is that because it is such a huge place it is difficult to police?
I think India is extremely vulnerable. And the fundamental reason for that is that this is a state that has neglected security for decades. Investment in policing was considered a nondevelopmental—and consequently wasteful—expenditure. We are one of the most under-policed societies in the world. We have a ratio of 126 police per 100,000, whereas the Western ratio is 250-500 plus per 100,000.
Also, our police are under-equipped and under-resourced across the board. There is no really hard counterterrorism core to policing in India, despite our decades of experience as a target of terrorism. Consequently there is absolutely no doubt that India is vulnerable to terrorism and will remain so in the coming years.
I think this government as well as its predecessor has been equally inept and equally neglectful on the issue of terrorism …The principle task of law enforcement and law-and-order management and counterterrorism is the state's under the Indian constitution. It is the responsibility of the state governments that are run by various parties in the country. All major parties have some states under their control. With very rare exceptions, the quality of counterterrorism has been abysmal.
This is one of the first times in recent years that such high-profile places have been attacked. Will that have an impact in drawing more attention to the issue?
This is not first time. There have been several attacks that have targeted the elite. The most significant of these was the Parliament attack, where the core of system of governance, the democratic polity itself, was attacked. And that did see a much higher quantum and quality of response than any preceding attack. So it is correct to believe that attacks on elite targets tend to provoke a greater and more effective response on government's part.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/171113
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
In a terrifying attack that held India riveted for the past 48 hours, a group of highly trained and deeply committed terrorists seized top Mumbai hotels and a prominent downtown building Wednesday, holding more than 200 people hostage for the better part of two days. As special-forces operations to rescue hostages and flush out terrorists wind down, investigators are only now beginning to piece together how the attackers got into the city and took over the properties. India's foreign minister and others within the government are beginning to point the finger of blame at Pakistan—whose intelligence service India believes is a habitual sponsor of terrorist activities on Indian soil.
NEWSWEEK's Jason Overdorf spoke with Ajai Sahni, editor of the South Asia Intelligence Review and executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi-based think tank that studies terrorism, about the implications.
Newsweek: How are these attacks different from previous terrorist attacks on Indian soil?
Ajai Ajai Sahni: First is the fact that the sheer scale of attacks is unique. We've had similar kinds of attacks in Jammu and Kashmir fairly regularly, commando-terrorist attacks. We've also seen something comparable in terms of the type of attack in Delhi and the attack on Parliament in 2001. So the pattern is not completely new to certain areas. But it is certainly new in Mumbai, and the sheer scale is unprecedented.
Moreover most attacks outside Jammu and KASHMIR—with the exception of the Parliament attack—have been bomb attacks, usually improvised explosive devices variously placed in soft targets. This is the first time we've seen something like this in a major urban center with quite as many participants. We're certainly looking at between 40 and 50 terrorists who appeared to have landed and launched the attack on Mumbai.
I saw a quote from intelligence sources that an attack of this nature would take 2-3 months to plan. Does that sound like a reasonable assessment?
It's not only a question of a plan. I would like to suggest that [the attack] would have taken a much larger time to mount because the kind of training that is evident and the degrees of motivation that are evident in these terrorists would take literally years to generate.
So this is probably the most organized attack we've seen in India?
You see there are different types of organizations. In the Mumbai blasts in 1993, you had extremely meticulous planning required. What I'm talking about here is a much longer gestation in terms of preparation of manpower—compared with what would be required for the mere placement of bombs.
What conclusions do you draw from that if any?
Well, you've had fedayeen-type attacks in other theaters in India—certainly in Jammu and KASHMIR and in the Parliament attack in Delhi. But this represents a simple escalation of scale in such attacks that will create definitive problems. And what it has also demonstrated is the enveloping vulnerabilities of the Indian system; we do not really appear to have the necessary defenses in place to quickly contain the impact. Even if we are not able to prevent such attacks (and no country can expect to completely exclude the possibility of such strikes), certainly the capacity for containment of the attack is extremely wanting.
News reports suggest that Israelis, Americans and Brits were singled out, segregated and held—possibly for hostage negotiations. What is the significance of this focus on foreigners?
The significance of this focus on foreigners is these are regarded as the prime enemy group, so to speak, by people who are engineering these attacks. Beyond that there does not seem to be any intention on the part of the terrorists to negotiate for any kind of deals or concessions, or the release of prisoners. No such thing has been discussed. It appears that they seem to have come here simply to kill and to die. So we do not see any meaningful kind of effort to initiate negotiations during these attacks.
At this point does there seem to be any kind of signature that could link these attacks to any group that Indian intelligence is already tracking?
There are several little factors that tell you [the perpetrators are] among a certain limited group of suspects. But there are no hard signatures. Fedayeen attacks of this nature on a much smaller scale have been often witnessed in Jammu and KASHMIR and the groups responsible have mainly been Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. If you look at the Parliament attack case, it was principally JEM involved there. What we are seeing is that the possibility of a large number of Indian citizens may also have been involved. There is no definitive identification at this juncture, although several people have been arrested and several of the terrorists have been killed. So we are looking at the usual group of suspects but we are still not definitively clear about their identity.
An outfit called Deccan Mujahedeen is taking responsibility.
That does not exist. That's a red herring intended to divert attention, an effort to project that this is an internal Indian problem, that this has nothing to do with outside forces. Whether Indians were involved in this or not, this could not have been executed without outside assistance or backing.
What are the major repercussions of this attack? The head of Mumbai's antiterrorism squad and several other top cops were killed. Is that a major foul up by law enforcement, to have such key figures exposed on the front lines?
The difficulty here is that once again we have a force that is barely learning how to cope with these things. This is, as far as Mumbai is concerned, an unprecedented pattern of attack. They haven't had something like this before. And the problem in India is that we do not have any systems in which large proportions of force and force leaderships are trained to respond to terrorist attacks. You've basically got a system where you learn on the job. And regrettably the price for that kind of extremely inefficient system is usually paid in blood.
Intelligence sources are saying the attacks bear the hallmarks of an international conspiracy. Do you read that as a precursor to claims that Al Qaeda or Pakistani intelligence may be involved in these attacks?
It would be one or other. I don't know if it would be Al Qaeda per se. But it could be Al Qaeda-related groups, certainly. Even Lashkar-e-Toiba is under the umbrella of Al Qaeda. All these groups we are speaking of as suspects are in some sense linked historically to Al Qaeda. All these groups are also linked to the Pakistan intelligence establishment. So we don't see the possibility of an operation of this scale being mounted without the backing of groups that either currently or historically have links with Al Qaeda or Pakistan intelligence.
In last couple of years, the scope of domestic involvement in terrorism has come as a wake-up call to Indian intelligence. Do you think there is always a reluctance to look inside India's borders first?
I think there is a problem of perception over here with Indian media rather than any problem with the intelligence or law enforcement agencies. Because they have been identifying and neutralizing Indian groups for certainly the past two decades, including Islamist groups in India. So there is no suggestion that they only look for outsiders. It is clearly recognized that even where outside agencies are involved, there are Indian facilitators … as partners or participants in terror attacks. And now we find Indian initiators. But I don't see any proclivity to try to brush this under the carpet in enforcement agencies. They follow what they find as leads. Yes, in certain cases you might find there is a tendency to start looking at groups that have international linkages at the very outset, but that's because of precedent rather than bias. If groups that have been involved in the past have been Pakistan-backed or Pakistan-based, then when a new attack of a certain pattern occurs, it is natural to look in that direction. That becomes the principle line of your investigation, but it doesn't necessarily dictate your conclusion.
What is significance of the timing? Elections are underway.
No significance whatsoever. Because if you take a look at the pattern of attacks, you will always find something or the other happening—elections, big international meetings, etc. These are post facto linkages that we try to establish in trying to determine unique motives. There are no unique motives. The motives of these attacks is basically to inflict the most harm on the system as is possible. And to propagate the extremist cause to the widest possible audience. That's it. This is a long war. Every time a new sort of bullet is fired you don't ask why these people are shooting at us. It's basically part of that long war.
A hostage situation like this is relatively unusual for India. Are there any precedents or policies in place about whether or how to negotiate?
Hostage situations are per se not new. But unfortunately there seems to be no clarity or consistency in the actual policies adopted. After such an event, there is usually a great deal of posturing, and declarations that there will be "no negotiation with terrorists" are made. But the particular government or particular negotiators on the ground and their perceptions determine the direction and outcome of any particular hostage crisis. So I'm afraid even if there are policy declarations, they have never been consistently followed.
In 1993 India saw terror attacks that were a response to anti-Muslim rioting. Do you think the opposite could happen now—i.e., community unrest because of these attacks?
Mumbai has been seeing many such attacks. Ever since 1993, there have been attacks of varying magnitudes every year or two—more than one a year. In each case … there has not been [major] rioting. If there has been rioting at all, it has been occasionally by the community that has lost a lot of people. For example, after the Malegaon bombing [an attack on the predominately Muslim town of Malegaon last September], there were Muslims rioting against the police or rioting in general against public property or private property. There have been no riots targeting the other community. So I would like to suggest that a certain measure of maturity has been visible in the popular response to this. I cannot say the same for certain elements of the extremist fringe groups who seem to be rather eager to prove their machismo and aggression.
Is an investigation into alleged Hindu terrorists a political powder keg, or are most people still relatively even-keeled about the situation?
I personally think people are still relatively even-keeled. If anything, this should impose a greater measure of restraint on the political parties that have been going a bit overboard in politicizing the issue of terrorism, whether it is perpetrated by Hindu extremists or Muslim extremists. As far as mainstream parties are concerned, I think there will be pressure for moderation after these attacks. There has been a very, very slow inching towards a consensual understanding of terrorism. Unfortunately it has not yielded a consensual policy as yet. But I suspect this will build greater public pressure on political parties to stop playing partisan politics, and get down to the fundamental issue of how best to respond …
The fact of the matter is you have Hindus who are terrorists. You have Muslims who are terrorists. You also have Christians who are terrorists. And you will find several other denominations that have proven their capacity for terrorism. We must realize that terrorism is simply a method by which civilians are intentionally targeted. That's it.
This is the sixth attack this year and the political party BJP is claiming the government is soft on terror. But the media is also wondering if India has become a soft target. Is India vulnerable to terror attacks because of any particular failure in the police system? Or is that because it is such a huge place it is difficult to police?
I think India is extremely vulnerable. And the fundamental reason for that is that this is a state that has neglected security for decades. Investment in policing was considered a nondevelopmental—and consequently wasteful—expenditure. We are one of the most under-policed societies in the world. We have a ratio of 126 police per 100,000, whereas the Western ratio is 250-500 plus per 100,000.
Also, our police are under-equipped and under-resourced across the board. There is no really hard counterterrorism core to policing in India, despite our decades of experience as a target of terrorism. Consequently there is absolutely no doubt that India is vulnerable to terrorism and will remain so in the coming years.
I think this government as well as its predecessor has been equally inept and equally neglectful on the issue of terrorism …The principle task of law enforcement and law-and-order management and counterterrorism is the state's under the Indian constitution. It is the responsibility of the state governments that are run by various parties in the country. All major parties have some states under their control. With very rare exceptions, the quality of counterterrorism has been abysmal.
This is one of the first times in recent years that such high-profile places have been attacked. Will that have an impact in drawing more attention to the issue?
This is not first time. There have been several attacks that have targeted the elite. The most significant of these was the Parliament attack, where the core of system of governance, the democratic polity itself, was attacked. And that did see a much higher quantum and quality of response than any preceding attack. So it is correct to believe that attacks on elite targets tend to provoke a greater and more effective response on government's part.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/171113
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