India: 'Scarface'-style shootout showcases gangland democracy

Uttar Pradesh liquor baron's death shakes the shadowy corridors of power.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - November 23, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — A hail of bullets cut down one of India's most powerful businessmen last weekend, turning the country's rough-and-tumble liquor trade upside down and bringing new scrutiny to one of the oldest ties binding crime and politics.

Liquor baron Gurdeep Singh Chadha, known as “Ponty” Chadha, was killed in New Delhi in a “Scarface”-style shootout involving his brother and the two tycoons' security personnel.

The best touchstone for outsiders to use to understand the carnage may be Showtime's prohibition-era gangster series “Boardwalk Empire.” India's own Nucky Thompson — the fictional character, based on New Jersey political boss Enoch Johnson, played by Steve Buscemi — Chadha had built a vast fortune.

His billion-dollar business empire spanned real estate, film production and electricity generation, but his power remained firmly rooted in the liquor business, where political manuevering won him a monopoly over distribution in India's most populous and arguably most lawless state, Uttar Pradesh.

“Before Ponty Chadha got all these big contracts, they were distributed district-wise in each state,” said Rajinder Singh, a Delhi high court lawyer who represents several large clients in the liquor business.

“Ponty Chadha changed the entire scenario. He somehow managed to bag the contract for the entire state of Uttar Pradesh. And earlier Punjab also.”

Chadha — who was riddled by 12 shots to the back, abdomen and chest — was killed as part of a family dispute with his brother Hardeep, who was also killed. His death highlights the deep roots of India's gangland democracy, as graft, “black money” and the so-called criminalization of politics emerge as the biggest talking points for the upcoming national election in 2014. 

The inner workings of the liquor trade that built his empire illustrate how systemic flaws, rather than a simple lack of policing, have created and entrenched corruption in the world's largest democracy.

“A liquor baron has power over politicians, he has power over industry, he has power over many things. It's the power of loose cash,” said Harish Damodaran, author of “India's New Capitalists,” a book about India's new entrepreneurs.

Recent, high-profile corruption cases in the allotment of telecom licenses and coal mining blocks, together with the hammer-and-tongs campaign against graft led by activist Arvind Kejriwal, have created the impression that India has never been so crooked. But that is not really the case — even though the dollar amounts involved are much larger due to the growth of India's economy.

In a sense, Chadha's liquor empire represents a throwback to the days before India's economic liberalization in 1991, when the so-called “License-Permit Raj” gave the nation's politicians and bureaucrats a free hand to extort bribes from any business that wanted to do something as innocuous as step up production.

Economic reforms dismantled most of those regulations, making Indian business, though still flawed, fairer than it has ever been. But not in areas like mining or telecommunications, where the government is responsible for allotting a public resource. And not in the liquor business, thanks to a hangover of the temperance movement and the grim reality of alcoholism — especially among the destitute.

Championing a prudishness about alcohol to avoid awkward questions from the public, political parties of every hue use arcane excise laws to limit the sale of alcohol to a handful of licensed shops. The artificial scarcity guarantees that the business remains profitable. And the doling out of licenses as patronage ensures that politicians have a ready source of money and muscle power when it comes time to campaign.

“Liquor is a highly controlled industry, and that itself [creates these conditions],” said Damodaran. By its very nature, since everything is controlled or prohibited, it suits the political class. When you declare something as sinful, everybody takes their eyes from it, and everybody can earn something on the side.”

But as the weekend shootout suggests, India's prohibition-like restrictions have spawned prohibition-like thuggery in the booze business.

“This level of violence is very rare. In the liquor business you have gang wars between various factions to control the liquor vends or for getting the licenses for selling the liquor,” said Singh.

Chadha's influence on policy was extraordinary, to say the least. Prior to his death, Chadha enjoyed a monopoly over Uttar Pradesh's $2.5 billion liquor trade, controlling nearly every warehouse and booze shop in the state, thanks to a 2008 government ruling that created a special excise zone on his behalf.

In the past, he'd held a similar stranglehold over liquor distribution in Punjab. And he'd ruled the trade in the so-called “millennium city” of Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi in the state of Haryana, for eight years before the state began allotting liquor licenses through a lottery system in 2006.

The liquor baron was no stranger to the legal system. In 2011, for instance, opposition parties called for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into his purchase of five state-owned sugar mills, alleging that then-Chief Minister Mayawati had sold them to him for one-tenth of their nearly $400 million worth.

Tax authorities accused Chadha of squirreling away some $32 million in unrecorded income after a raid on one of his cinema complexes earlier this year. And in 2009 rival firms accused him of rigging the bid system to ensure that one of his firms received a lucrative government contract for a supplementary nutrition program for the poor — a bid he secured once again this year in a deal worth $1.85 billion. 

Though the situation may be particularly bad in Uttar Pradesh, which grows most of India's sugar cane, self-serving policies govern the trade across the country, Singh argues. In the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for instance, the government has itself taken over liquor distribution, and imposes a stiff luxury tax, in the name of curbing alcoholism.

But in the state capital of Chennai, the filthy government-owned shops allow patrons to drink on the pavement outside — sometimes from bargain-priced plastic bags of off-brand hooch — so there is nearly always a derelict passed out in the gutter with his pants around his ankles. Meanwhile, even in Delhi, where the taxes on liquor are among India's lowest, anybody with the slightest social status has a bootlegger on speed dial.

“The problem is the excise laws in India are very tough,” said Singh. “Some states have now been changing their policies to avoid these kind of people getting into the trade, but most of the states have the same kind of policy.”

The reason is that the politicians who make the laws have a vested interest in maintaining control over the liquor trade — as well as the rough characters who run it.

“Whatever you're selling is all cash ... that makes it more amenable to fund elections and those kind of things,” said Damodaran. “That is what attracts politicians to this. Cash is easier to spend in elections. It doesn't leave any trail.”

“If you want to have a political rally and get people, you have to pay people in cash. That's why politics and the liquor business go together very well, and not politics and say, software.”

As Delhi state police continue to investigate the circumstances of the shootout — which occurred Nov. 17 at Chadha's sprawling estate on the outskirts of the capital — the exact number and type of weapons used in the gun battle remains a mystery, according to the Times of India. Investigators have allegedly recovered spent shells and bullets from banned weapons and confirmed that the entourages of both Chadha and his brother included serving members of the Punjab state police — information that hints at a disturbing blurring of official and unofficial power.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121121/indian-gangster-ponty-chadha-liquor-al-capone-scarface

Just outside India's Camelot: Character assassination by gossip

An excerpt from Tavleen Singh's new book hammers Sonia Gandhi for being human, rakes up "foreign-born" charge with 40-year-old evidence

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - November 21, 2012)

An excerpt from columnist Tavleen Singh's new book, Durbar, in this week's Open reads exactly like what it is: Character assassination by gossip.

In a much-belated portrait of life just-outside India's Camelot, Singh rehashes ancient slams on Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi--depicting her as a frivolous and aloof socialite who was "as foreign as any foreigner I had ever met." (Note: Sonia was rejected as a potential prime minister, and subsequently bowed out of the contest, when the Congress Party won power in 2004).

According to Singh, who is sometimes called "the Saffron Sikh" for her apparent enthusiasm for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party or its positions, as the young wife of Rajiv Gandhi and daughter-in-law of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Sonia was both ignorant and "terrified of India in a deep, deep way." 

How so? She was so concerned that her babies would contract malaria that she burned mosquito coils under their cribs until a doctor advised her that the smoke was unhealthy. And she was shocked and appalled by the poverty and filth of an Indian village where she observed a baby playing with a piece of cow dung and giving it a few sample chews.

More serious, in Singh's transparent slam-piece, are the charges that India's Camelot was infested with "foreigners," whom the Indians treated with so much deference that even Sonia's inability to speak proper English -- after all, she was Italian -- was excused.  ("We were deeply impressed by all things foreign not just because we had been ruled by White men for so long but because secretly we believed that Western culture and civilization was superior to ours," Singh writes, in a transparent effort to make her charges more credible through the form of the confessional).

The trouble here is not that Sonia Gandhi is a great figure or sincere person, though some Indians would certainly argue that point. Rather, it's Singh's refusal to allow for the possibility of her personal development, and her implied insistence that what someone once was determines who she will always be. (That's leaving aside the implied suggestion that Sonia must have had some involvement in the Bofors defense scandal, because she and Rajiv seemed so cosy with arms dealer Ottavio Quattrocchi and his wife, Maria).

On the one hand, Singh would have readers decry a past when "we were deeply impressed by all things foreign," while on the other hand she invests foreign-ness with undue importance -- as if India still has much to fear and simply by associating with foreigners one might lose one's way. Moreover, rather than laud Sonia for her subsequent embrace of the country -- whether founded in a sense of opportunity or a debt to her assassinated husband -- at least in this excerpt Singh chooses to rake up observations from a handful of 40-year-old parties to imply that her current avatar is some kind of false posture.

Clearly, that is not the case. Regardless of your views on Sonia's rights, as an Italian-born citizen of India, to the prime minister's chair, you can hardly deny her credit for her work in India since the assassination of her husband, Rajiv, in 1991. Not all of it was done out of a disinterested love for the country, of course: She was also fighting for her family's legacy and the personal power associated with heading India's oldest political party. And it's trivializing to home in on "foreignness" she displayed in the distant past.

Sonia was aloof, Singh concludes, essentially, because she and Singh herself didn't become fast friends, and Singh was unable to overhear many soul-bearing comments when she was lurking in the background at these socialites' parties. But surely one is aloof with people one hardly knows, when one's English is halting and Hindi non-existent, and when one's every utterance has implications for the serving prime minister.

The twofold argument seems to be obvious: Sonia is an Italian and the Gandhi family is a form of democratic royalty. But those are things nobody needed socialites' gossip to confirm.

India's secret shame: Owl sacrifice mars Hinduism's biggest holiday

On Diwali, tantriks kill threatened species for the promise of future wealth.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - November 10, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — As the rest of India celebrates Hinduism's festival of lights on Tuesday, unscrupulous witch doctors known as “tantriks” will sneak into the country's dark corners to kill some of its rarest and most majestic birds of prey. 

It's India's secret shame — unknown even to most devout Hindus. But the religion's most important holiday, Diwali, marks a supposedly auspicious time for the sacrifices of threatened and even critically endangered owls — a rite that some believe can win favor from the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi.

“You take the leading newspapers of today itself, there will be 50, 20, 30 ads from tantriks advertising remedies of almost all kinds,” said Abrar Ahmed, an expert on the trafficking of birds.

“When people can be milked out, these tantriks will prescribe something which is difficult to get — they'll say an owl of 5 kgs or a certain weight or certain size. There is where they make money.... They are the ones creating a demand.”

India is home to 32 species of owls, 13 of which Ahmed discovered being sold as part of the illegal trade in wild birds. Most, if not all, are included on International Union for Conservation of Nature's “Red List” of threatened species, while at least one, the forest owlet, is critically endangered, according to “Imperilled Custodians of the Night,” a report Abrar wrote for Traffic in 2010.

The most common species sold is the spotted owlet, which has adapted to living in cities and is therefore in little danger of dying out. But threatened species like the brown fish owl can also be found for sale, and the threatened rock eagle owl is the “most preferred” by witch doctors — a bad omen for its future survival.

According to Ahmed, trafficked owls and their body parts are primarily used for supposed black magic — which still claims several lives for human sacrifice each year, if newspaper reports from the hinterland are to be believed. There is a regular, organized trade in live owls. In tribal areas, where the majority of people believe that owls can ward off evil spirits, feathers and talons are placed in amulets, and owls can be found piled up for sale at local fairs. And in cities and towns, even the country's wealthiest industrialists and politicians visit tantriks — in the hope of having a son, curing illness or infertility, or amassing a magic-assisted fortune.

For most Hindus, Diwali is a joyous festival. Families festoon their homes with electric lights and burn small candles or oil lamps, called diyas, to commemorate the victory of the god Ram over the demon Ravana and Ram's return home with his stolen wife, Sita — a foundation myth told in the Ramayana, one of Hinduism's most important epics. Friends get together to gamble. The markets overflow with “Diwali hampers” filled with chocolates, nuts, and traditional Indian sweets — gifts to be exchanged, Christmas-style.

But even if the Diwali lights are meant to represent the victory of good over evil, as well as a welcoming beacon for Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, the five day festival is the most deadly time of all for the owls.

The reason: The amavasya, or new moon night, of Diwali is claimed to be the most auspicious time for owl sacrifices, Ahmed found after nearly two years of research he conducted for Traffic — a joint body that monitors the illegal wildlife trade for the World Wildlife Fund and International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“The practice happens throughout the year, but the kalratri [the eve of Diwali] is considered auspicious,” said Ahmed. “That makes the tantrik very rich in terms of hoodwinking people to pay their price. If they don't have a deadline, if they don't have a reason for the practice to happen at a particular moment of the year, people will be casual in their attitude.”

Indians who are free of superstition remain ignorant of the illegal trade. But the trafficking of thousands of species of wild birds — including owls intended for these sacrifices — happens just out of sight, even in the bird market of Old Delhi. Though the traders are smart enough not to display their owls alongside the hundreds of parakeets and wild song birds for sale, all it takes is a few whispered queries and a seller will offer not only to procure the owl but perhaps even to perform the sacrifice. A one-stop shop, poaching and black magic for as little as $150, according to a recent investigation by the Sunday Guardian's Abhimanyu Singh.

“People will say, we will deliver the owl on Thursday morning — whenever you need it for that matter — because it's a bird that has to be fed on a crow or a parrot,” said Ahmed. “It was made to be delivered on our doorstep.”

More from GlobalPost: "Serial killer" leopard may just crave salty snacks

There are at least 50 hubs for the selling of wild birds, including owls, across India, according to Traffic. And 21 of them are major trafficking centers, with an estimated turnover of 20,000 to 50,000 wild birds per year.

Worse, the Diwali sacrifices are only the most visible part of the owl trade — at least for urban India.

Traveling through the tribal regions of states like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh — where indigenous peoples from the Damora, Bhil, Munda and countless other groups still live in the forest much as they have for thousands of years — Ahmed found piles of owl carcasses at local fairs. He witnessed local shamans performing rites with live owls. And he learned from tribal bird trappers how owls are captured and reared to catch other birds — which will “mob” the captured owl when the trapper mimics the desired species' distress call.

So, too, the superstitions surrounding owls go much beyond Diwali sacrifices.

In a survey of bookstores selling religious texts, Ahmed found prescriptions for telling the future using a live owl, hypnotizing an enemy by feeding him an owl's feather or blood, making yourself invisible using an owl's heart and other body parts, cursing an enemy's family with an owl's skull, and countless others.

But perhaps the darkest revelation of all was not the depth and prevalence of these superstitions among India's poor and illiterate, but their prominence even among the educated urban elite.

“Last week, a big horned owl was stolen from Chatbir Zoo [in Chandigarh, Punjab],” said Ahmed. “Do you see the correlation of the time? Even in a very big zoo — and this has happened in two other zoos also — the owl is not safe.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121109/india-diwali-hinduism-tantrik-owl-sacrifice

The man hundreds of Indian children call Papa

American Paul Wilkes has transformed poorly funded orphanages into “Homes of Hope.”

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - November 4, 2012)

HYDERABAD, India — Blinded in one eye by the so-called “beggar mafia” so she'd be a better earner, 6-year-old Reena was used to wearing sunglasses. 

But when American Paul Wilkes and his wife, Tracy, came to visit Reena in the Home of Hope orphanage in Kerala, India, she took off her shades and smiled up at them beatifically.

Wilkes, a contemplative Catholic and author of several books on religious faith, knew then and there that it was time to stop writing about faith and start doing something about it.

He had his work cut out for him.

Across the country, as many as 400,000 Indian children live on the streets. Some of them have no families. Others are the victims of traffickers who buy and sell them for sex or slavery. Some ran away from drunk and abusive fathers. Others were cast out or fled because their families had nothing for them to eat.

They all have one thing in common: They are grave and imminent danger living on the streets, as Reena's missing eye attests.

The local chapter of the Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco — a Catholic order of nuns that has been offering refuge to street children since the 19th Century — took Reena in off the streets and provided refuge at the Home of Hope orphanage.

“If they are left on the street, by the age of 10 they are already raped,” said Sister Annakutty, mother superior at the Maria Ausilatrice orphanage in Hyderabad's Mahendra Hills. “They will be misused by someone. At that early stage itself they'll have one or two babies. ... And those children will go on to the same life.”

Since 2006, Wilkes, who used to regularly contribute to the New Yorker magazine, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the orphanages and schools run by the Salesian Sisters in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala.

At a cost of around $300,000 apiece, his charity “Homes of Hope” has built two orphanages from the ground up in Kochi and Maradiyur (in Karnataka) — and laid the foundation stone for a third one in Hyderabad.

By supplementing the Salesian Sisters' dedication with new ideas and added funds, they've dug wells, bought jeeps, and provided books, computers and other educational materials for 20,000 students — as well as provided safe, caring homes for more than 400 orphans and neglected girls.

On a recent afternoon at the Navajeevana Home for Street Girl Children in Hyderabad, some 50 girls, ranging from 5 to 15 years old, crowded the driveway to greet Wilkes when his jeep arrived from a neighboring school.

“Good afternoon, Papa!” “Hi, Papa!” “Good afternoon, Uncle!” their piping voices called out. Joy, and a kind of heartbreaking desperation, was plain to see on their faces.

“The children really care for him,” said Sister Crocetta Thomas, mother superior at the Navajeevana orphanage. “Since they have no parents, they call him Papa.”

Wilkes has done his best to play father to hundreds.

“We don't run anything,” said Wilkes, walking through the Auxilium school in Hyderabad. “We're the add-on. We're the pure water. We're the generator that's going to go right there.”

Tapping funds from local US Rotary clubs, for instance, Homes of Hope has supplied 15 schools and orphanages with solar-powered water purification systems — addressing one of the leading causes of disease in India. The charity has provided 18 library-deprived schools with more than 250,000 books.

“We don't open the doors every day,” Wilkes added. “But I can come and see what's going on and see what they need.”

More from GlobalPost: Cambodia tries to solve its baby-stealing problem

When a dentist from Wilkes' native North Carolina announced that he was retiring, they packed up the entire office and shipped it to India, where it now operates as a free clinic inBangalore. When a group of North Carolina surfers offered to pitch in, the charity pioneered “surfing safaris” on the Indian Ocean as a confidence builder for orphan girls — and nuns (how's that for a mental image?) 

And in the charity's latest venture, Wilkes is working with Dr. David Paige, an assistant professor of education at Louisville, Ky.-based Bellarmine University, to design a training program for teachers to help transform India's rote learning oriented schools to encourage creative and analytical thinking.

“I consider our little organization very entrepreneurial,” Wilkes said. “It isn't just buying a bag of rice. You really want to push the envelope.”

Before and after pictures attest to the impact the Salesian Sisters and Homes of Hope has had on the children rescued from the streets. "Graduates" are constantly calling the mother superior at one of the orphanages to report that their marriages are going well — perhaps a new baby was born, or their family has moved into a larger home.

The success stories never get old. Take Pinky, who came to the Homes of Hope after she was cast out by her family. The oldest of three daughters, she was taught early how well India values women, when her mother suffocated her fourth daughter shortly after birth and forced Pinky to help her bury the body.

This May, Pinky will graduate with a degree in nursing, ensuring that she'll never face poverty, or question how much she's worth, ever again.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121102/india-street-children-wilkes-aid

Metal heads in India

They might not have long hair or head bang, but they love Iron Maiden all the same.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - October 3, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — An hour before the Metallica concert in Bangalore last year, the event's organizers came to 26-year-old Chintan Chinnappa, a lawyer at Dua Associates, with some bad news. The program — running, naturally, on Indian Stretchable Time (IST) — was behind schedule. Chinnappa's all-Indian band,Inner Sanctum, would not be opening for his thrash metal heroes after all. 

“That really killed us,” Chinnappa said. “You dream about this, and then your dreams are shattered.”

Then, a few minutes before Metallica was supposed to take the stage, Inner Sanctum was back on the program.

“I don't know how it happened exactly,” Chinnappa said. “The guy doing sound had heard us before, and he recommended us to the organizer. He said, 'Listen, they're a band that Bangalore loves, and you must get them on stage.'”

“After the event, the management of Metallica spoke to us, and they were so thankful, because otherwise the crowd was so frustrated, because there was rain and all of that and they were waiting for bands to perform. After we performed, the response was massive.”

Surprised? Don't be. It may be better known for saccharine Bollywood love songs and Hindu devotional tunes, but India has an enduring love for rock-metal acts that have fallen off the radar in the United States — if they're even still alive.

For college graduates from 22 to 45 years old, forgotten bands like Deep Purple, Dire Straits and, yes, Iron Maiden remain immortal — thanks largely to the country's legion of engineers.

More from GlobalPost: India's Other Bollywood

“Engineering college computer servers have been crucial to the propagation of heavy metal in India,” music critic and concert promoter Arjun Ravi wrote recently in India's Sunday Guardian.

As a result, metal heads here — weaned on math homework and raised with an eye to the software industry — can look radically different from the headbangers of the American heartland or the costumed nihilists of Swedish death metal.

Hard rock and heavy metal is associated (rightly or wrongly) with working class anger in the United States and Europe. But in India, love for thrash, doom, speed and death almost always requires a college degree.

Headbangers still live with their parents, who tolerate music they call “noise” as long as it doesn't interfere with their kids' jobs or marriage prospects. And many rockers like Chinnappa, a buttoned-down lawyer, look and dress accordingly.

“There are two types of fans,” said Vibhas Venkatram, the 24-year-old drummer for Eccentric Pendulum. “There are these guys who believe metal heads are supposed to be some [certain] way. Even if they're working in a software company or a bank they have long hair and they come on stage with that long hair and head bang.”

“But there are these other guys who are short-haired, with glasses, completely geeky looking yuppies, I guess you could call them,” added Venkatram, a graduate student with a modest ponytail and a goatee who until recently was working with the Indian Institute of Astrophysics.

“At the end of the day, we're all just metal heads.”

More from GlobalPost: India's new license to rock

At the same time, metal acts like Chinnappa's are pushing beyond classic thrash, even as Indian electronica thrives on the club scene. And while this year's concert program features geriatric rockers like Megadeth, Slayer, Guns-N-Roses and even Carlos Santana, there are signs of change on the horizon.

Earlier this year, contemporary metal headliner Korn played Bangalore and New Delhi. Along with the Slayer-Santana “Rock 'n India” concert in Bangalore later this month, the “Bacardi NH7 Weekender” will bring rock-metal fans together with fans of folk and fusion music, as well as dubstep, drum and bass and reggae in a massive, six-stage event that will hit Delhi, Bangalore and Pune, Maharashtra. And trance-haven Goa's 5-year-old Sunburn Festival will this year bring its signature mix of Indian and international electronica to Delhi and Mumbai.

“I used to call it 'Third World Rock,'” said Ravi, who also runs a music website calledindiecision. “You had bands like Deep Purple, the Scorpions, Aerosmith, all these bands [that were well past their prime] coming to India. But now, over the last four or five years, there has been an influx of more contemporary popular acts.”

Along with Korn, contemporary metal acts like Australian rockers Karnivool, French death metal band Gojira and the Prodigy are now hitting Indian shores, Ravi said. And in the world of electronic music, India is already a regular feature on the concert circuit, with David Guetta, Afrojack, Armin van Buuren and Avicii performing over the past year or two.

“This year, for example, it's such a great year for metal, because so many more contemporary acts are coming to India,” Ravi said. “And it's all because of these kids. None of this stuff is available in stores.”

“You're not going to go to Planet M [Indian music store chain] and get a Gojira album or a Karnivool album,” he added. “[They're coming here] because these kids have discovered these bands over the internet. And they're obsessive about these micro-niches — doom metal, black metal, and all the other many forms of metal that exist now have audiences in India.”

Blame the nerds. Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus festivals from Mumbai to Madras were the first to feature international acts like Finland's Ensiferum, Sweden's Katatonia, Opeth and Hammerfall, according to Ravi. And the metal heads have never looked back.

Indian bands like Bangalore's Inner Sanctum, Kryptos, Eccentric Pendulum and Slain, or New Delhi's Undying Inc, Skyharbor and IAFWAY are starting to make a splash, too. After opening for Metallica, Inner Sanctum is dotting the i's on a deal to play a major European metal festival later this year. Skyharbor's Keshav Dhar has drawn praise from industry heavyweights like ex-Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman by uploading his tracks to sites like Soundcloud, resulting in collaborations with Ex-Tesseract vocalist Daniel Tompkins and a contract with UK-based Basick Records, according to Ravi.

“Within the domestic metal scene the shape and sound of metal is changing,” said Ravi. It's not just that dated, budget version of Iron Maiden or budget version of Mettallica anymore.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121002/heavy-metal-rock-music-iron-maiden

India's new Muslim baby boom

A thriving domestic market for in vitro fertilization has made India the go-to spot for patients from Africa, Afghanistan and beyond.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - September 13, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — Business is booming at Dheerendra Singh's New Delhi-based medical tourism outfit, CureMax. But his biggest client base — Afghanistan — might come as something of a surprise.

“Every month, we do IVF [in vitro fertilization] for around 50 patients from Afghanistan,” Singh said. “They also come for other infertility-related procedures. And in the peak [winter] season [when the weather is more comfortable], we have 60-70 patients a month.”

Afghanistan isn't the half of it. Though infertility is commonly associated with the changing lifestyles of the West — where more and more women are putting off childbirth until their late 30s — India's IVF clinics are testimony that the trend is growing in developing countries and conservative societies as well.

Along with the much-talked-about medical tourist trade from the US and Europe, India is seeing an influx of patients from Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East, thanks to a thriving, low-cost domestic fertility industry and cultural connections that make India a comfortable place for conservative Muslims, medical tourism professionals say.

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Statistics aren't readily available on the total number of patients coming to India for fertility treatments from predominantly Muslim countries. But anecdotal evidence from various doctors and other agents like Singh — as well as a thriving business in the Afghan refugee colony in New Delhi — suggests that the phenomenon is significant.

According to India's Outlook magazine, for instance, fertility experts like Dr. Kaberi Banerjee number their patients from places like Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan and Tanzania in the hundreds. Meanwhile, companies like Care Medical say they see 10-15 foreign patients from Islamic countries every month, according to managing director D. Mahendran.

“Overall, we see [medical tourism] growth of about 15-20 percent annually, and I believe roughty the same kind of number holds for IVF,” said P.R. Ramesh, the chief executive of Aaarex Medical Services, another medical tourism firm. “But we're seeing a larger number of Muslim people than previously, including Muslims from Arabic countries and Muslims from countries like Nigeria and Tanzania and so on.”

Various factors help explain the baby boom. Because of India's massive population, and the cultural importance of bearing children here, private fertility clinics have mushroomed in recent years — until there's an IVF signboard on virtually every street in the upscale neighborhoods of New Delhi.

Reputable clinics offer a high standard of care for a small fraction of the cost of IVF in the West. A typical IVF procedure, for instance, runs to $3,000 in India, compared with $8,000 in the US or Europe, said CureMax's Singh. And patients receive more attention from doctors.

More from GlobalPost: Infertile Indian couples demand high-caste 'Brahmin' sperm

To regulate fly-by-night outfits that have begun sprouting up, the Indian Council of Medical Research recently drafted regulations and began to crack down.

“Here in India, people take IVF very serious, and they give personalized care,” said Mahendran.

But there are other reasons India is attracting patients from Muslim countries.

Proximity and historical ties link India with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries of Central Asia in ways that are impossible for other medical tourism hotspots, like Thailand, to match. Standards of dress and behavior are similar, for instance. And the long dominance ofBollywood movies in the target region means that patients there are comfortable with Indian culture, and, especially in Afghanistan, can often already speak Hindi.

Because fertility treatments can be time consuming, the low cost of living, and the ease of blending in and finding halal meat and other familiar foods, is also a factor. In New Delhi, for instance, CureMax and other medical tourism outfits connect IVF patients with landlords operating serviced apartments in neighborhoods in Lajpat Nagar and Jangpura, which are already home to Afghan refugees who migrated here to escape the fighting at home. By cooking their own meals — and buying Afghani naan from the local shop — they avoid exorbitant hotel costs.

More from India: First comes fraud, then comes marriage

Similarly, certain Iranian and African communities have ties with India that make it a more familiar destination than its competitors.

“India has got a large Muslim population, and there are many communities in Africa which relate very closely to their counterparts in India,” said Aaarex's Ramesh.

“For example, there is a community called the Ithna Asheri community in Tanzania, with strong connections to the same community in India. Many of these communities are Indian in origin. To some extent there are also family links.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120911/IVF-in-vitro-fertilization-muslim-baby-boom-medical-tourism

India: First comes fraud, then comes marriage

In Punjab, a humble passport officer strikes back against “holiday marriages.”

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - September 9, 2012)

JALANDHAR, Punjab — Seated in the regional passport office in Jalandhar, a provincial city at the heart of India's breadbasket, 39-year-old Sarabjit Kaur tells a harrowing story.

For more than a decade, she has endured a miserable sham marriage. Soon after she married, her husband fled to the UK. To force her parents to pay an illegal dowry, her in-laws have allegedly beaten her, forced her to do menial chores, denied her food, and cut off the electricity to her room.

At first, Kaur's in-laws refused to acknowledge the birth of their granddaughter at all. Today, having nominally disowned their son, they force Kaur and her daughter, now 10, to live as unwelcome guests in a tiny room, sequestered from the rest of the house.

“I'm not allowed to put my clothes on the wire for drying,” Kaur said. “I'm not allowed to use the water pump. My daughter is not allowed inside the garden for cycling. I'm not allowed to wash my clothes in the washing machine — which has been given by my parents!”

Kaur is one of thousands of women in Punjab who have fallen victim to such marriage scams.

Armed with a passport and a plane ticket, unscrupulous men and their families exploit the value of a green card or foreign work permit to extort exorbitant dowries from their brides. They marry and then flee.

More from India: Is China right about the internet?

They may take on second wives to obtain a virtual slave. Or they may simply make a trip to India for a so-called “holiday marriage” — complete with a big party, lavish gifts, and a week of free sex.

According to India's National Commission for Women, as many as 20,000 brides have not even seen their husbands since their supposed honeymoon.

Recently, however, these women have received a lifeline from an unlikely hero: Passport officer Parneet Singh.

Using an obscure footnote in Indian law, Singh has begun canceling the passports of runaway husbands — forcing them to face the music or go into hiding abroad as illegal aliens. And it's already working.

“We have been able to solve about 60 or 70 cases with this experiment,” said Singh.

More from India: The story of a highway

For decades, the Doaba region of the Punjab — the fertile lands between the Beas and Sutlej rivers — has been known for offering its daughters in marriage to “non-resident Indians” or “NRIs” working in Canada, the UK and the US. Fraud seems nearly as common as love in these arranged unions.

“We have a real problem here in our region. There are 30,000 women [with problem NRI marriages] in Punjab,” said Singh. “NRIs come here, they marry those innocent girls, and they leave for abroad. The girls are mostly from poor backgrounds, and the guys are rich. When they leave this country, they are not bothered. And the girls are left to their fate.”

Out of those 30,000, Singh says some 15,000 come from his region, which comprises four districts: Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and SBS Nagar.

For women like Kaur, who is still fighting in court to force her husband to take financial responsibility for their daughter, there was virtually nowhere to go for help. Due to the low status afforded to women in most Indian communities, the police generally side with the husband's family.

India's courts are notoriously slow, and extradition from the US or Canada for murder — much less a marital dispute — is virtually out of the question. And the social stigma associated with being divorced, or even returning home to live with their parents, leaves many women with no choice but to endure.

As Officer Singh discovered, however, where the NRIs' ability to run for foreign shores helped husbands to cheat with impunity, unless they'd been granted foreign citizenship, their freedom and their livelihood depended on their ability to get and maintain a valid Indian passport.

“When the passport is canceled, what are the problems they have? First, if they are in this country, they'll not be able to leave,” Singh said. “Second, if people come to visit their relatives here in India, when they land at the airport their passport is taken by the immigration authorities. Third, suppose a person is staying in Chicago. His passport gets expired. If we have already canceled this passport, he will not be able to get it renewed. He has two choices: either to stay illegally in that country or to come back.”

For most men, that creates a huge incentive to resolve their marital disputes as swiftly as possible.

Navdeep, a 29-year-old doctor from Jalandhar, had been married to a marine engineer for nine months before he and his family started to insult her and demand money — even going so far as to throw her from a speeding car and attempt to strangle her on two separate occasions.

“This is not a good country for women,” Navdeep told GlobalPost in Singh's office. “You can beat her like an animal, and she won't be able to do anything.”

Today, Navdeep is divorced. But that's thanks to Singh's passport office, rather than the court system.

“If a husband [involved in a dowry or divorce case] holds a passport with a foreign visa, he's supposed to surrender it in court,” Navdeep said. “But none of the courts, not the high court, not the civil court, asked him to surrender his passport.”

Her husband was on his way out of the country when Navdeep rushed to Singh's office to lodge a complaint that he was trying to flee from a merchant ship leaving one of India's dozens of ports. Soon, though, he was back in Jalandhar.

“Because his passport was impounded, I got justice," said Navdeep. "I got divorced.”

Kaur's husband is still abroad. But she's confident that Singh's move to cancel the man's passport has turned the tide in her fight, too. Because of Singh, her husband has not been able to renew his visa, so he has been living illegally in the UK since 2010 — unable to work as a university professor.

And just the day before she met with GlobalPost, she won a court judgment saying that she had the right to live in the matrimonial home, regardless of whether the deed says it belongs to her husband or to his parents.

She believes that a financial settlement for her daughter can't be far down the road.

“Parneet Singh has totally changed the scenario of the case,” Kaur said. “I was begging shelter and maintenance for me and my daughter. Now, they are begging in front of me — 'Please, do not do this to our son.'”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120907/marriage-scam-fraud-womens-rights

In a country plagued by woefully inadequate infrastructure, the Yamuna Expressway could well transform the economy of the capital region.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - September 5, 2012)

PATTA, Uttar Pradesh — This August, India's multibillion dollar Jaypee Group flagged off a sparkling, six-lane expressway.

The new roadway cuts in half the travel time from New Delhi to Agra, the city that is home to India's top tourist attraction, the Taj Mahal.

The company responsible for bringing Formula One racing to India last year, the Jaypee Group has never been short of ambition. Far more than a simple highway, the Yamuna Expressway project — which extends the suburbs of New Delhi deep into Uttar Pradesh — encompasses high-rise condominiums, universities and technical institutes, an exhibition center, a “sports city” of golf courses, cricket grounds and other facilities surrounding the Formula One speedway, as well as a second international airport to serve the capital area (yet to be built).

Moreover, its planners project that the promise of speedy travel will draw multinational firms like Honda, Daewoo, and Samsung — which already have factories in a township outside New Delhi called Greater Noida — deeper into Uttar Pradesh.

“The economic impact is going to be huge in the coming years,” said Sachin Gaur, chief financial officer of Jaypee Infratech, the unit that built the expressway.

“Uttar Pradesh, till now, was not developing as fast as it could. Today, with Agra just an hour-and-a-half away, slowly this entire area between Greater Noida and Agra will work like a satellite city for [the capital region].”

In a country plagued by woefully inadequate infrastructure, the project could well transform the economy of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and one of its least developed.

But despite the project's powerful potential, it took more than a decade to bring local stakeholders on board, acquire the land for the highway from farmers, and complete construction — illustrating both the challenges and the opportunities behind India's notorious infrastructure deficit.

More from GlobalPost: India's economic boom widens gap between rich and poor

First announced by then-Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kumari Mayawati in 2001, the expressway was derailed when her government fell in 2003, resurrected when she regained power in 2007, and only came to fruition shortly after she was again ousted by elections this May. In the early stages, land acquisition proceeded smoothly — accomplished by the government on Jaypee's behalf, using India's laws of eminent domain.

But as the state sought to capitalize on the project by acquiring more farmland for development alongside the highway, the Yamuna Expressway became a flashpoint.

In May 2011, farmers from the village of Bhatta-Parsaul, about 50 miles from New Delhi along the planned highway, kidnapped three officials from the Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation in the area to conduct a land survey. A three-hour gun battle ensued when police moved in to rescue the hostages, and two villagers and two policemen were killed. After a number of farmers were arrested, the protest swelled. Violence continued, and the state deployed as many as 2,000 police to restore order.

Remarkably, the expressway was not derailed — though Jaypee was unfairly tarred for the conflict, which involves real estate acquisitions by the state-owned Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority.

More from GlobalPost: 5 solutions to India's biggest problems

“Bhatta-Parsaul is probably two to three kilometers from where the expressway was built up,” said Gaur, whose father, Jaiprakash Gaur, is the founder and chairman of the Jaypee Group. “When [the protest and police firing] happened, the entire land acquisition of the expressway was over two years before that. Just because the area was near the Yamuna Expressway, people linked it with Jaypee.”

Even today, farmers continue to demand a renegotiation of land prices, toll-free travel on the expressway, the construction of new underpasses to make it easier to pass from one village to another, and on and on.

The struggle for land

Land acquisition remains the largest hurdle to industrial development in densely populated India.

Over the past decade, opposition has mounted to government drives to create special economic zones for industry — which critics say netted billions of dollars for politicians and business tycoons at the expense of small farmers. But despite a bloody conflict in Nandigram and Singur, West Bengal — which was the catalyst for the end of the 30-year reign of the Communist Party of India-Marxist in that state — the government has yet to push through aland acquisition bill intended to streamline the process and ensure fairness.

On a recent afternoon in Bhatta-Parsaul, 60-year-old Saukin, a wizened farm laborer, was bathing in a vacant lot near the rutted village road. Shot in the shin bone by police during last year's altercation, he still wears a painful-looking steel brace on his withered leg, screws twisted into his tibia.

Pouring a bucket of water over his head, he propped his injured leg on a lawn chair in an attempt to prevent his bandage from getting soaked.

“I can't work any more, so the village people are supporting me, and my wife and daughters are working,” he said.

After he was shot, the government awarded Saukin with 50,000 rupees (about $1,000) in compensation, he says. But the operation to repair his leg cost double that amount, and the doctor is asking another 80,000 rupees to finish the job. A wealthier villager has floated him a loan, but it will accrue 3 percent in interest every month until Saukin gets back on his feet. And by that time, there may not be many farms left in Bhatta-Parsaul.

Along with more than 100 villages and towns, Patta has already sacrificed acres and acres of farmland to the state government. And though the ensuing residential and commercial developments are projected to create an economic boom, locals like 61-year-old Maumchand, a farmer who was forced to give up his 2.5 acre farm, fear their lives will never be the same.

“Many people will lose everything due to this expressway,” says Maumchand, who was once Saukin's employer.

The successful completion of the toll road could be an important milestone in India's long battle to improve its woefully inadequate transport infrastructure — the key to jumpstarting the country's moribund manufacturing sector and putting millions of people to work. But just as the opening of the highway promises hope for investors and developers keen to cash in on India's massive domestic market and the super cheap labor available outside its major cities, the story of Saukin and other villagers like him illustrates the tremendous challenge involved in transforming a country of farms into a country of factories.

“The big people and the government have taken this land by an emergency clause for industrial purposes, but they're selling it to builders for residential projects,” says another villager, who refuses to give his name, noting that several others who were involved in last year's protests are still behind bars.

“The economic boom will help rich people, not us. We will have to leave this place.”

Villagers say that the government paid land owners 880 rupees (about $16) per square meter in compensation for any land that was acquired for the project, which was arguably a fair price for isolated farm plots. But once those plots were lumped together, and the expressway neared completion, prices skyrocketed to 6200 rupees per square meter for residential property and 22,000 rupees for commercial plots, displaced locals say.

The promise of infrastructure

Across the expressway in Atta Gujran, though, villagers have already built two- and three-story homes with money they received for their farmland. Satellite dishes festoon the rooftops, and nearly every compound has an expensive new car parked out front. Farther down the highway, in the town of Tappal, a group of locals gathered outside a bank, are excited about the promise of new economic opportunities that comes with modern infrastructure.

“This area was totally undeveloped, really rural,” said Rang Lal Attari, a bald retiree dressed in a white kurta pajama and seated on a rope bed by the roadside. “Now some development will come here.”

According to a 2009 report on India's infrastructure problems by the consultancy McKinsey & Co., India then boasted one of the world's largest road networks, but only a quarter of its supposed “national highways” had even two lanes, and nearly 90 percent of India's highways are “structurally inadequate” to support the 11.2 ton per axle that trucks are allowed to carry.

Nothing much has changed in three years. A typical highway journey means plunging through yawning potholes and weaving around bullock carts, not to mention school children, working elephants and the odd farmer chasing a herd of rawboned cattle to market. So it's not surprising that transport delays cost Indian industry an estimated $725 million per year, according to a new report from the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways.

“Before, traveling from here to New Delhi took six hours one way,” said Neeraj Sharma, a property dealer who has profited from escalating land prices. “Now, it takes four hours roundtrip. Property values have increased by more than 10 times.”

Because of the infrastructure deficit elsewhere, the impact here — and all along the expressway to Agra — could indeed be dramatic, according to experts like Parvesh Minocha, group managing director of Feedback Infrastructure, a consulting firm.

The expressway slashes travel time from New Delhi to Agra — where leather factories and other industries will benefit from the faster connection to one of the country's most lucrative markets. But, more importantly, it passes through one of India's richest agricultural zones and links area towns and villages to the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor — a $90 billion, dedicated freight corridor comprising 24 planned cities.

“Because of the corridor, the growth will probably be far more than it would be for a general road anywhere else,” said Minocha.

“I'm not only depending on the tourist traffic to Agra. That's only going to be a small component. Industry, freight, logistics — the connectivity for the rest of western Uttar Pradesh could actually grow very drastically, and therefore it could have a much bigger impact than one would have imagined even a few years ago.”