Inside baseball: Why Nandy's mistake matters

An Indian sociologist's remarks on caste and corruption should shine a light on stereotypes

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - February 2, 2013)

When the inside baseball of Indian politics makes it to the pages of the New York Times and the website of the New Yorker, it's time to weigh in. Leaving the background to the hyperlinks, here's my take:

Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy's remarks at Jaipur, and his later clarification, are not important simply because the attempt to prosecute him for insulting Indians from lower castes represents yet another attack on freedom of speech in the name of “sensitivity,” as Manu Joseph aptly lampoons in the New York Times andBasharat Peer ably explains for the New Yorker.

The main issue is the content of his statement, which sneakily confirms as “fact” a widely held public perception for which there is no hard evidence, and, in truth, seems patently false based on common sense.

The statement in question?

“It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes and as long as this is the case, Indian republic will survive.”

Much has been made of the context for that statement, which you can read in full here. But in my reading of it nothing undercuts the essential assertion.

Nandy is sincere and sympathetic. He is saying that the corruption of India's lower castes is justified, even desirable. And Nandy admits that corruption of a kind is common among the elites. But it's interesting, to say the least, that he compares the assistance of an old boys' network in getting into Oxford or Harvard to the “millions of rupees” amassed by “the only unrecognized billionaire in India today” Madhu Koda – which were allegedly earned through illegal manipulation of the mining laws and perhaps selling his support, by turns, to the Bharatiya Janata Party and later the Congress. (So much for the context).

Nevertheless, whether Nandy means well or not is immaterial. So is whether or not he suffers from some unwitting prejudices, even as he thinks he is being radical. The most important thing here is that he claims something as “fact” for which he offers no evidence and that he cannot support. Namely, he says that most of the corruption in India can now be attributed to the lower castes, which comprise the mid-level Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the formerly untouchable Dalits or Scheduled Castes. (Yes, there's also the Scheduled Tribes, but only so much inside baseball for one blog post).

This is a widely held perception that I suggest is based solely on a handful of high-profile prosecutions: the notorious “fodder scam” case against Bihar's Lalu Prasad Yadav, the “Taj corridor scam” case against Uttar Pradesh's Kumari Mayawati and, more recently, the “2G telecom spectrum scam” case against former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja.

That's called “believing is seeing” – you only process the evidence that suits your preconceptions, if you bother with evidence at all.  Surely there were corruption cases against high-caste Indians as well.  And if they didn't generate as much heat, one might say with equal authority that Mayawati & co were targeted for serious criminal investigations, and the others ignored, precisely because of their respective castes.

As far as I know, there has never been any effort to cross-reference caste and corruption scientifically. Meanwhile, it is also commonly believed that all politicians are corrupt, so the premise that the lower castes are the “most corrupt” seems to based on the perception that they steal in higher amounts, or have fewer concerns about actually doing their jobs – which I suggest would be even more difficult to prove.

Another unproven but widely accepted belief is that India's large industrial houses – Mukesh and Anil Ambani's Reliance Group, ,Shashi and Ravi Ruia's Essar Group, Ratan Tata's Tata Group, and so on and so on – routinely make payoffs to politicians and bureaucrats so that they can skirt environmental laws and the like. I'm not suggesting that's true or false here. But if, as many Indians do, you hold that belief, then what are the castes of the Ambanis, Ruias, Tatas, and so on? And who are they supposedly paying? Only the low-caste leaders and bureaucrats? That would be a mysterious bit of selectivism. And how would the low-caste leaders get away with this corruption if their high-caste counterparts were so scrupulously honest?

Yes, you say (Manu Joseph), but India's lower castes make up 59 percent of the population, so it is imminently logical that they account for 59 percent of its corruption. Professor Nandy was simply delivering a lesson in demographics. Really?

They say power corrupts, and that may be true. But what is definitely a fact is that you have to have power to indulge in corruption. Nobody will pay you a bribe if you can't do him any favors. And you can't extort money to do your duty as a government representative if those duties are confined to fetching tea and coffee. So how corrupt are the Dalits and OBCs? I suggest that they can only be corrupt in proportion to their representation in positions of power.

It's notable that it isn't easy to find a breakdown of the Indian parliament by caste, even though caste-and-creed mathematics is the key to winning elections here. But accounting for some margin of error, there's likely 300+ upper caste Hindus, 200- lower caste Hindus, 20-odd Muslims and a dozen or so Christians and Sikhs. So, if every member has equal power and is equally dishonest, the lower castes don't account for 59 percent of India's parliamentary corruption, they account for 37 percent, compared with the upper castes' 59 percent. And I'd wager if we look at the real power of the members, in terms of the committees they chair, ministries they control, and so on, then that percentage would have to be tweaked even further.

Yes, but most of the corruption happens at the bureaucratic level....?

Okay: What's the power breakdown in the bureaucracy? I invite you to help me update these figures, but the only numbers that I was able to turn up in a rather painstaking searchare from 1995, and limited to the Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and not the Other Backward Classes. Here goes:

In Class I positions – in other words top decision makers – the percentage of Dalits holding the seats has increased from less than 1 percent in 1953 to a little more than 10 percent in 1995. Let's say OBCs have down three times as well – for 30 percent of the positions. That still means two-thirds of the positions of real power, where you can really line pockets, are held by the upper castes.

In Class II positions, the percentage of Dalits has increased from 1.3 percent to 13 percent. So by my liberal guess, OBCs might account for 39 percent, leaving half of the wealth-generating posts to the upper castes.

In Class III positions, where you might turn up a few earning opportunities, Dalits have gone from 4.5 percent to 15.5 percent. So here Dalits and OBCs might account for a two-thirds majority.

And in the lowly Class IV positions, where the only corruption you can indulge in is deciding who gets tea first, or how clean the toilets might be? Dalits' share of the posts remained static at about 21 percent. So maybe 80 percent of the posts can be attributed to Dalits and OBCs.

What other numbers can we tap?

The only real information we have about corruption is the voluntary declarations of financial assets that India's politicians must make before contesting elections. They don't necessarily provide a smoking gun: A politician is allowed to get rich through legal means, as well as corrupt ones. But for the sake of argument, let's accept the commonly held perception that all Indian politicians are dirty, and look at some of the only numbers we have at our disposal. Unfortunately, we're also constrained because the candidates don't declare their castes when they file their affidavits, so we'll make some assumptions based on party affiliation: For the sake of argument, we'll assume all Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidates to be Dalits, all Samajwadi Party (SP) candidates to be OBC, and all BJP and Congress candidates to be upper caste Hindus – though in fact only the majority of the candidates fielded by those parties would fit the bill.

Upper caste:
Among the BJP candidates who contested for Lok Sabha seats in both 2004 and 2009, the listed increases in assets include one MP with a whopping 6000% increase in his net worth, another with a 2000% increase, and a third with a 1500% increase – among a lot where a brief scan suggests the average increase in assets is in the realm of 300-400%. (I wasn't able to convert the file to the right format to do the math).

Among the Congress candidates, there are MPs whose assets increased 1200%, 1700% and 3000%, and the average looks to be in the realm of 200-300%.

Lower caste:
Among the SP candidates there are MPs whose assets increased 1500% and 1000%, but the average increase looks to be substantially lower – perhaps only 100-150%.

Among the BSP candidates there are MPs whose assets increased 9000%, 1000% and 800%, but again the average appears to be lower (especially if you throw out the guy who boosted his wealth 90 times over).

So is it a “fact” that the lower castes are the most corrupt? The truth of the matter is that nobody knows. But it's irresponsible to make such claims based on prejudices and assumptions. 

Crime and punishment for India's youth

Last month’s gang-rape in New Delhi drew attention to India’s rising juvenile crime rates. But experts fear stiffening punishment will make matters worse.

By Jason Overdorf(GlobalPost - January 20, 2013)

NEW DELHI, India — With his teenager's wispy mustache and a mullet, 19 year-old Muhammed may seem guilty of failing to keep up with current style, but you’d never guess he’s a convicted murder.

“Three of us were out of our minds on smack,” he said of his crime of two years ago. “We saw a guy walking down the road who looked like he had a little cash, so we tried to snatch his mobile and wallet. He fought back, so we stabbed him. We thought he'd be able to identify us to the police if we left him alive.”

Poor, addicted to drugs, and living on the street, Muhammad (not his real name) exemplified a disturbing dark side of India's so-called demographic dividend — an increasingly youthful population economists predict will help this country surpass China as the world's manufacturing hub by 2020.

Although the economic boom is making more people rich, rising inequality, poor education and persistent unemployment have helped prompt a spike in juvenile crime.

But Muhammed is lucky. Since he was 17 at the time of his crime, the maximum sentence he faced was a three-year stint in a so-called observation home. He served his time in a progressive pilot program that focuses on de-addiction and rehabilitation.

Less than two years later, he’s free and eager to put his life back together thanks to his rare chance from India's generally troubled juvenile justice system.

But such breaks may become even rarer, thanks to a furious campaign now underway to allow Indian courts to try young offenders as adults.

That worries children’s rights activists, who believe the global attention to last month’s vicious gang-rape of a 23-year-old Delhi physical therapy student — in which a 17-year-old boy is alleged to have taken part — is prompting knee-jerk reactions that threaten to hasten the change.

Juvenile crime rose 40 percent between 2001 and 2010, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The spike in violence and crimes against women by young offenders has been even more dramatic. Rapes by juveniles have more than doubled in the same period, murder is up by a third and kidnappings of women and girls has grown nearly five times.

Those figures have prompted a drive to give trial judges the discretion to try juveniles as adults, or to define youths over 16 years old as adults when it comes to serious crimes.

In what may prove to be a landmark case, the Supreme Court on Friday admitted a pleaarguing that the mental age rather than physical age of the juvenile suspect in the gang rape case should be used to determine whether or not to try him as an adult.

That contravenes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which sets the age at 18.

India's women and child development minister has spoken out against lowering the bar.

But newspapers, television channels and tough-talking politicians continue to demand a crackdown on juvenile offenders even as experts insist the juvenile system is already broken and brutal.

“It's already very custodial, very hostile, very abusive, very violent, because of state apathy,” said Anant Asthana, a child rights lawyer who works with the New Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network. “[Juvenile offenders routinely suffer] physical abuse, sexual abuse and emotional abuse within the system itself.”

Activists say officials routinely violate laws aimed at protecting children. Instead of obtaining written orders to send underage offenders to observation homes, overworked police sometimes pretend not to know children's age in order to put them in jail.

The law guarantees juveniles speedy trials, but they often spend maximum three-year sentences in observation homes, denied bail until they’re essentially compelled to plead guilty in order to be released.

Sociologists argue that reducing the threshold age to 16 wouldn’t lower juvenile crime rates. They say it would deny thousands of young offenders a chance at rehabilitation instead — and exacerbate age-old prejudices and new fears resulting from rapid social change by targeting poor youths.

“We’re a society based on hierarchies,” says sociologist Khushboo Jain, who spent three years doing field work with street children. “These young people [on the streets] are dynamic. They've taken control of their lives. But we don't want people to come up. And if they do, we try to subjugate them in any way possible.”

Bharti Ali of the Haq Center for Child Rights blames the rise in juvenile crime rates on government policies he says are prompting cycles of poverty.

“Some 80 percent of the family budget is spent on health care,” he says. “The government education system has failed, so children run away from the schools. There's a lot of domestic violence, so children leave home or they kill their fathers.”

He also points to the stark and growing contrast between rich and poor. “You have luxury malls on one side, and on the other side you have a slum,” he says.

More than half of the children in trouble with the law come from families with households income of less than $500 a year, according to NCRB data. Critics say that trend would surely deepen if trial judges were given discretion to treat some juvenile offenders as adults.

Experts point to the United States as a warning case. Nine out of 10 juveniles who run afoul of the law worldwide never commit another crime, according to an International Save the Children Alliance report. However, in America — where more juveniles are tried as adults than in any other country — research by the Justice Department shows stricter punishment fails to deter youth crime in general or reduce the likelihood that juveniles sentenced as adults will commit crimes in the future.

That’s something 19-year-old Muhammad doesn’t question.

“If I'd been sent to jail,” he says, “I'd have come out worse than when I went in.” 

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130118/india-juvenile-crime-broken-system

India: Has 'mediocracy' already convicted Gang Rape 5?

India's high-profile gang rape case has parallels with New York's Central Park jogger case
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 9, 2013)

Can the five adults and one juvenile suspects in the notorious Delhi gang rape case expect a fair trial? Probably not.

On paper, the men accused of the vicious assault will enjoy all the advantages of India's liberal justice system, apart from the high-priced, influential lawyers that only the wealthy can afford. But cases are not tried on paper, and this one exhibits every sign that it will not be tried in the Saket district court where they made their first appearance on Monday. Instead, like so many court cases, government policies, and bureaucratic actions, it will be decided by the country's real rulers: The Mediocracy.

"This is a media trial," senior Delhi High Court advocate Rajinder Singh told me in a Q&A yesterday. "Even the judges who are going to be responsible for these trials are motivated by the media and what is going on in the country."

In almost every story I've reported, whether it's about poor people starving because of government corruption or a city cleaning up its act after an unhealthy dose of the plague, somebody will say it: All this is only happening because of the media attention. And if the media attention goes away too soon, "all this" stops happening, too.  (Consider the Wall Street Journal's neat encapsulation and the Washington Post's history of "high profile" Indian rape cases and the policies they engendered, such as an innovative and effective Delhi Police outreach program called Parivartan, which began in 2006 after a sensational case and then quietly died as the media attention to the issue waned, according to the Economic Times).

Call it the power of the press, and it's a good thing. The government isn't functioning -- it's failing to feed the hungry, or failing to curb corruption (the main cause of the first failure), and the journalists step in.  But the short attention span of the news cycle isn't enough to initiate real change--consider the country's revolving door elections--and as the Delhi gang rape case indicates to some degree, what makes news is often connected with caste- and class-related biases. (Rape and humiliation is a daily reality for women from the castes once known as "untouchable," for instance, yet the media's sporadic coverage of the problem has never gained much traction, as Badri Narayan pointed out for The Hindu). 

On Wednesday, a high-handed New York Times editorial cautioned that "there are disturbing aspects to the way the case is being handled." They're right. But the editors might have a look at the newspaper morgue before they get TOO snippy: There are several parallels (as well as contrasts) here to the brutal New York City rape and beating of the so-called "Central Park jogger" in 1989-- which ignited a similar media frenzy. 

In both cases, the police were under massive pressure to make arrests following the assault, and quickly netted five (or six) suspects. In both cases, graphic descriptions of the assaults captivated the national news media for weeks, opening new debates on public safety, violence against women, and various sociological concerns to do with race and class. And in both cases, most media reports described the assault in a tone that was, appropriately, horrified, but also in ways that played into existing class prejudices.

In India, words like "savage" and "bestial," when combined with descriptions of the slums from which the alleged perpetrators hailed, tapped the barbarians-at-the-gate fears of the city's elite, encouraging their prejudices against the untraceable migrant population (Mea culpa).  Meanwhile, the victim was always described as a "physical therapist" or "physical therapy student" and her companion as a "software engineer," even though the victim had also migrated from a village to the capital.

In the US, the media trumpeted the New York police claim that the five suspects had confessed to going "wilding" in Central Park on the night in question. The phrase reportedly stemmed from Tone Loc's "Wild Thing," popular at the time, in which the wild thing was sex. But for many readers (and writers) it conjured up much more sinister images--of "wild" or savage teenagers from New York's African-American and Latino neighborhoods who had forsworn all vestiges of civilized behavior and were now "on the loose" right across the street from The Ritz. And in direct contradiction of New York policy in cases of juvenile offenders, the names of these and other suspects were released to the media before any of them were formally charged--including one 14-year-old suspect who later did not figure in the charge sheet.

So what happened?

The result in the New York case was the swift conviction in 1990 of all five "wilding" suspects, four of whom signed written confessions and one of whom made a verbal admission of guilt while in custody but refused to sign on the dotted line. But then things went bad. There was no DNA evidence at the scene to link any of the five young men to the crime--only a sample from another, unidentified man. And as a 2012 film called "The Central Park Five" depicts, all five convicted teenagers retracted their confessions within weeks, claiming that they'd been intimidated or coerced into making false admissions of guilt. (For example, one of the boys confessed to being present after detectives told him they'd found his fingerprints on the victim's clothing).

A decade later, a convicted rapist and murderer, doing a life sentence for other crimes, confessed to raping and beating the Central Park jogger, not as part of a gang, but all by himself, and DNA testing confirmed that he was, indeed, the person who had left behind the only physical evidence that police had from the scene of the crime. Though the so-called "Central Park Five" had also confessed to other crimes they allegedly committed that night, and police insisted they still believed the five had participated in the assault, evidence or no, all five men were released from prison and their names were removed from the sex offender registry. A year later, three of them sued the City of New York -- each seeking $50 million in damages.

In India, we must await the verdict--and inevitable appeals.

In the New York case, the Central Park jogger survived her ordeal but was left with no memory of the event, so there was no evidence apart from the DNA sample and the confessions of the five suspects. In India, the victim survived long enough to make a statement, and was allegedly able to identify her attackers. Moreover, her male companion, though beaten badly himself, was allegedly a witness to the entire assault, and also able to identify the attackers and recall the crime in great detail. 

The problem is that in this atmosphere it may prove impossible for anyone to question those alleged facts. How did the victim identify the alleged attackers--without prompting, from an array of photos that included many others from similar backgrounds, with similar dress? For how much of the ordeal was her companion conscious? How did he make his identification of the attackers? (Again, I am not expressing any personal doubt or knowledge of the actual evidence here, only pointing out that the issue is not simply "what happened" but also "are these men, and all of these men, guilty of all of these charges?")

The lynch mob atmosphere, as in the Central Park jogger case, means that it may be very difficult to know beyond a shadow of a doubt, even after the verdict comes in.

As the New York Times pointed out, lawyers initially refused to defend the suspects (and tried to block their fellows from doing so), though the accused now have court-appointed representatives. But where the NYT editors think the judge's decision to try the case in camera (i.e. without allowing the media to observe and report on the proceedings) will make it all the more likely that the proceedings will amount to jumping through hoops before coming to an inevitable conclusion, I'm not necessarily inclined to agree.  

India: To stop rape, start at the top

By choosing candidates facing rape charges, India's political parties have implicitly sanctioned the crime.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - December 28, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — As angry protesters marched on India's symbolic seat of power last week, the nation's august members of parliament raged against the government's failure to stop violence against women.

They blasted the Delhi police for incompetence and insensitivity. And they cried out for the death penalty for six men accused of brutally gang-raping a 23-year-old woman aboard a private bus on Dec. 16. The woman succumbed to her injuries on Friday in Singapore, where she was being treated at a hospital, according to media reports.

In the story of India's battle against sexual assault, the honorable members ignored one important footnote: Every major political party has fielded and continues to field candidates facing criminal charges for rape, harassment and other crimes against women.

“We found that all these parties had given tickets to people of dubious backgrounds, involved in crimes against women,” said Anil Bairwal, national coordinator of the watchdog group National Election Watch. “It's the highest order of hypocrisy.”

According to mandatory self-declarations filed by candidates with the Election Commission and tabulated by National Election Watch, India's leading political parties have offered tickets to 27 candidates accused of rape and a whopping 260 candidates facing charges for crimes against women ranging from assault to harassment over the past five years. As a result, two members of the current parliament and six members of the various state legislative assemblies are facing rape charges, while 36 others face charges for lesser crimes against women.

Not one of India's major parties is innocent of the charge, and by some measure the two largest, national parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are the worst offenders, according to National Election Watch. While most of the rape accused hail from smaller parties, or from the regional Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, both based in Uttar Pradesh, 11 out of 36 legislators facing charges for crimes against women hail from the Congress and BJP. And out of the 260 candidates offered tickets despite facing such charges, the Congress and BJP account for 50.

Even amid the ongoing furor, Congress MP Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of President Pranab Mukherjee, was compelled to make a backhanded offer of resignation on Thursday after he made sexist remarks about women protesting India's failure to stop sexual assault. “If my party high command demands I will do that," he told a TV news channel.

And they're wondering why the people have taken to the streets.

“They don't treat violence against women as a serious issue,” said Rituparna, an activist affiliated with the Citizens' Collective Against Sexual Assault. “Any violence against women should be treated seriously, and not with callousness.”

The impact of that callousness goes far beyond discouraging women from bringing charges against their abusers, as it trickles down more readily than any economic growth. Between 2002 and 2010, as many as 45 women were raped by the police while in custody, according to the Asian Center for Human Rights — while Indian law, which requires prior sanction from the government before law enforcement personnel can be prosecuted, protected the officers responsible.

The same week as the Delhi gang rape, a woman in Uttar Pradesh claimed that a police officer who'd promised to help her prosecute her attacker had instead raped her himself.

A series of horrific stories, known in shorthand as “the Mathura case,” “the Rameezabee case” or “the Suman Rani” case, make it all too clear that Indian women are not safe from sexual assault in the country's police stations themselves. In the Mathura case, for instance, a 16-year-old girl was allegedly raped by two policemen in a Maharashtra police station while her unwitting parents waited patiently outside.

More from GlobalPost: Can rape protests lead to broad social change?

Where it comes to other security forces, such as the Indian army or paramilitary troops, the situation may be even worse. Women of Indian-administered Kashmir and Manipur — where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act grants the army untrammeled powers — have long complained that they are targeted for sexual assault. And in at least one notorious incident, at least 53 Kashmiri women were allegedly gang-raped by army personnel conducting interrogations related to the militant separatist struggle.

Protests against the decay of law and order and the callous treatment of victims of harassment and sexual assault continued this week in New Delhi, and across India. And though the protesters are now fewer in number, and have ceded contentious symbols such as India Gate and the house of the president to the police following a hamfisted crackdown over the weekend, the anger has not dissipated.

On Wednesday, for instance, a group of young women who had been part of protests at Jantar Mantar — a spot designated for expressions of civil disobedience — complained to the media that they had been detained and beaten up by the police the day before, according to theTimes of India. (Police confirmed they had detained 17 women but denied they had been mistreated).

From a spontaneous outpouring of rage — mostly characterized by calls for castration or the death penalty for the rapists — the protests have increasingly turned against the political establishment. After police turned water cannons, tear gas and canes on protesters over the weekend, a tardy and inarticulate statement from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was inadvertently sent to the media unedited, ending with him asking his minders, “Theek hai?” (“That OK?”).

The response, via Twitter and other social media, as well as the people shouting in the street, was a resounding "No."

But the anger is not so much directed at the Congress Party government currently responsible for law and order in the capital, as well as the nation. It's aimed at the corrupt, incompetent and hypocritical political class as a whole — exactly as it should be.

"People are being given a small space in Jantar Mantar that is barricaded on both sides,” a merchant seaman participating in the protest told the Times of India.

“The protest has clearly been hijacked by political groups such as [the BJP's student wing] Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, [the Congress' student wing] National Students Union of India, [the newly formed] Aam Aadmi Party and [yoga guru turned would-be kingmaker] Baba Ramdev.”

The trouble with that kind of hijacking, however, is it's almost certain to backfire.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121226/india-gang-rape-protests

India: Music's new ambassadors

With the death of Ravi Shankar, Indian music lost its most famous ambassador. Here's who will carry the torch.

Jason OverdorfDecember 25, 2012 06:15

NEW DELHI, India — When sitar master Ravi Shankar finally succumbed to time last week, Indian music lost its first and most famous ambassador. But a healthy crop of musicians are carrying the torch — straddling pop, indie, Bollywood and classical genres. Here are some names to follow.

Classical music

Zakir Hussain — a former child prodigy who first toured the US in 1970 — has done for the tabla what Shankar did for the sitar. In 1992 and 2009, he collaborated with Mickey Hart, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo on the Grammy-winning “Planet Drum” and “Global Drum Project” albums to introduce the world to Indian classical's curiously melodious drum. In earlier years, Hussain played with John McLaughlin's Shakti — one of the first efforts to fuse the rhythms and melodies of classical Indian ragas with the improvisations of western jazz — touring extensively in the late 1970s. He worked on the soundtracks of Francis Ford Coppola's “Apocalypse Now” and Bernardo Bertolucci's “Little Buddha.” And he's capitalized on the growing crossover audience for Indian films, and films made by the Indian diaspora, with acting cameos and soundtrack work for movies such as Aparna Sen's “Mr. and Mrs. Iyer” and Ismail Merchant's “The Mystic Masseur.”

“Aside from the fact that [Hussain] works magic on the tabla, I think it's his ability to align himself to various styles, various vocabularies of music [that has made him an important ambassador for Indian music],” said Chennai-based cultural critic Nandini Krishnan.

Other heirs to Shankar's legacy include slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya, whose “Calcutta Chronicles” was nominated for a Grammy in 2009; classical pianist Anil Srinivasan; and Uppalapu “Mandolin” Srinivas, who plays the mandolin (natch). In addition to “Calcutta Chronicles,” Bhattacharya won over Western fans with “Calcutta Slide-Guitar, Vol. 3.” (2005) and “Mahima” (2003) in collaboration with American guitarist Bob Brozman — both of which made Billboard's World Music Top Ten. Srinivas, who dueled with Miles Davis at the West Berlin Jazz Festival in 1983, has in recent years brought South India's Carnatic music to the global audience by collaborating with McLaughlin's Shakti and artists as wide-ranging as King Crimson's Trey Gunn and Chinese yangqin master Liu Yuening. And Srinivasan has brought his unique merger of classical piano and South Indian Carnatic music to audiences at New York's Lincoln Center, the Sydney Opera House and the National Center for the Traditional Performing Arts in Korea.

In other words, Shankar may be gone, but his legacy is bigger than ever.

“Most of us now are getting an opportunity to perform at mainstream venues as part of festivals,” said Srinivasan. “To a large extent this is something that Uday Shankar and Ravi Shankar created for Indian music.”

“[Second], you have Indian music inveigling itself into many different global music forms, starting with AR Rahman and going all the way down to myriad composers and choreographers and other people,” Srinivasan said.

“Rather than one person or group of people who are ambassadors, you have a lot of different influences and influencers. It's a certain philosophy towards composition that has changed worldwide.”

Bollywood

That brings us to Bollywood, where Grammy-winner A.R. Rahman and music directors like Amit Trivedi have introduced sounds from Indian folk and classical music into love songs and dance tracks and taken advantage of Indian film's growing global popularity to gain a wider audience.

“A music director like Amit Trivedi is different from the genius music directors from the '50s, who created a gorgeous sound but also brought in many of the nuances of Indian classical and light classical music, as it's called in India, into their compositions,” said novelist (and classical Hindustani vocalist) Amit Chaudhuri — whose own “This Is Not Fusion” project has created a minor internet sensation since he began it in 2003.

Trivedi's pathbreaking soundtrack to 2010's “Dev. D” in some ways redefined what Bollywood music could be — albeit in one of a new crop of independent films. Songs like "Emosanal Attyachar,” for instance, blend the raucous music of the brass bands that play Indian weddings with western-style rock influences and wordplay worthy of Bob Dylan.

“The singer used to be central for those older music director,” Chaudhuri said. “Now it seems the singer is just one element in a soundscape that these directors are creating.”

Beyond the Grammy-winning soundtrack to “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Jai Ho,” Rahman has won crossover fans with some of modern Bollywood's most memorable songs (think “Chaiya Chaiya”):

He's also collaborated with artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Vanessa Mae — making him the top-of-mind choice for Indian music's new ambassador.

“What Rahman is basing his music on is a few [elements] picked up from Indian folk music, a few picked up from classical and a few picked up from Western music,” said Delhi University music professor Deepti Bhalla. “You cannot say it has a classical base or a folk base. It is a mix of everything.”

Still, not everybody is convinced that Bollywood's role as ambassador of Indian music is a good thing.

“The biggest influence on the West, or what the West understands as Indian music, is the sound of Bollywood,” said Krishnan.

“This amuses me, because several Bollywood composers have stolen popular Western tracks. Try 'Dil Mera Churaya Kyon' from Akele Hum Akele Tum and George Michael's 'Last Christmas', or 'Haseena Gori Gori' and Shaggy's 'In the Summertime.'”

Pop, indie and “new” fusion

The post-Shankar era is also bristling with Indian and Indian-origin pop, indie and fusion artists, who transcend borders and boundaries in ways that the sitar master couldn't have dreamed possible when he was teaching George Harrison to play.

In India, artists like singer-songwriter Raghu Dixit of the Raghu Dixit Project are starting to gain an international audience for Indian “indie” music:

while non-Bollywood popstars like Daler Mehndi have caught the ear of international artists such as the UK's Rajinder Singh Rai (aka Panjabi MC) and Jay-Z — making so-called “bhangra nights” a fixture at clubs in London, New York and beyond.

In the UK, indie artists like Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney have in recent years popularized a sub-genre of electronica known as “Asian Underground” that incorporates Indian instruments and melodies, whileCornershop's Tjinder and Avtar Singh brought Indian instruments and sampling to Britpop in songs like “Brimful of Asha.”

And the late-blooming US diaspora is now getting into the game, with Brooklyn-based Himanshu Suri and Ashok Kondabolu of Das Racist bringing an Indian vibe to hip hop and Brooklyn-based Rudresh Mahan Thapar and Vijay Iyer combining Indian sounds with Western jazz.

“[The UK's] Arun Ghosh, Vijay Iyer, and Rudresh Mahan Thapar all started out as western-style jazz players and they began to explore their cultural origins,” said Chaudhuri, who counts his own “This Is Not Fusion” as part of the same musical movement.

“It's a move away from the kind of Shakti-idea of fusion, where you had western harmonies and Indian instruments and raga and you brought the two together,” Chaudhuri explained. “This new music was done by people who were not looking at either Western or Eastern music from the outside.”

In other words: Maybe Indian music doesn't really need “ambassadors” any more.

India: Cash for the poor, no strings attached

India aims to convert its massive welfare system from subsidies to cash. Here's why that isn't all good news.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - December 23, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — India wants to overhaul its massive, creaking welfare system, replacing subsidies with cash. The idea is to circumvent corruption, streamline the process, and ultimately provide 720 million welfare-recipients with more of the benefit they were originally intended.

At least that's the idea.

Critics from across the political spectrum have voiced their concern. They worry the government is underestimating the challenges involved. Or, worse, simply floating a feel-good policy that promises to please both reform-minded economists and the massive voting block represented by the poor.

“It's made out to be a magic bullet to control corruption, because the money will go directly into bank accounts,” said Reetika Khera, a development economist from the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi).

Currently, most recipients get a reduced price on goods like rice or kerosene if they have a ration card proving their income puts them below the poverty line. And they receive monetary benefits like scholarships and pensions through universities or local government offices, rather than direct payments.

“But there are problems associated with cash,” Khera added.

The stakes are high.

India spends up to 14 percent of its gross domestic product on various welfare programs. As of now, much of that money is wasted on administrative costs or stolen by corrupt officials. Rich and poor alike frequently complain that only one cent out of every dollar that India spends on its poor reaches the target. Though that is an exaggeration, it's not so far off the mark.

“Direct cash transfers, which are now becoming possible through the innovative use of technology and the spread of modern banking across the country, open the doors for eliminating waste, cutting down leakages and targeting beneficiaries better,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said at the end of November.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram clarified recently that the government will convert 34 out of 42 welfare schemes to cash transfers across 43 districts starting Jan. 1.

That said, India's most costly welfare program, and the one where economists and activists are most concerned or excited about the conversion to cash, is the food subsidy – where new “right to food” legislation promises to expand coverage to more than 60 percent of the population. But the only programs that have been mentioned by name for conversion to cash transfers are scholarships, pensions and subsidized cooking gas. And leaders have reportedly decided to hold off on the most important programs — food, fertilizer and kerosene — according to India's Business Standard newspaper.

“I don't think anyone knows what is going on, or what is intended to go on,” said Bibek Debroy, an economist with the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, an independent think-tank.

The power of cash

The experts may be wary, but at least one below-poverty-line couple, Ramesh Kumar and his wife, Amarthi Bhen, is watching the calendar in anticipation.

In 2011, when a nonprofit offered 55-year-old Amarti Bhen and her husband the chance to receive about $20 in cash every month instead of their usual rations of food and kerosene, the couple leapt at the chance.

Slum dwellers who eke out a perilous existence collecting, repairing and then selling second-hand clothes, Bhen and her husband had actually been receiving their allotment of 15 kilograms of wheat, 5 kilograms of sugar and 6 kilograms of rice — unlike millions of destitute families.

But there was no telling when the supplies would arrive, so they wasted hours tramping to the shop to see if the sugar or wheat had come in. And the quality of the grain was so poor that they practically had to thresh it themselves — wasting valuable hours they could otherwise have spent sewing.

Once they began receiving their benefits in cash — as part of a pilot program set up by the nonprofit Self-Employed Women's Association and the Indian government — they saved time by buying their supplies at the local market. They also were able to use part of the money to buy nutrient-rich foods, such as chickpeas and lentils, instead of only wheat and rice.

“When we were getting cash, we got all the money at once and could buy all our supplies at the same time,” said Kumar. “We could also buy other things we needed more than rice and wheat, like daland tea and detergent [which they use for washing the clothes they sell].”

Conditional vs. unconditional

It is that proposal to allow the poor to decide how to spend their welfare benefits that makes the Indian scheme particularly bold — and controversial.

Until now, the largest cash transfer schemes, implemented with dramatic success in Brazil and Mexico, among other countries, were based on so-called conditional payments, issued to encourage the poor to take advantage of government services, rather than grants allowing them to shop on the open market. (Under Brazil's Bolsa Família or “family allowance” program, for instance, poor families receive payments from the government in exchange for enrolling their children in school or getting them vaccinated against contagious diseases).

In contrast, India appears poised to give the poor cash with no strings attached. Many in the development sector — and many of the poor themselves — fear that freedom of choice will allow men to take cash intended for food, cooking gas or school fees from their wives and spend it on liquor.

“Last year we did a survey in nine states where we asked what the people would prefer and why,” said Khera. Two-thirds of the poor opposed the changeover, citing worries about inflation, concerns about the distance to banks and markets, and fears about how they themselves might manage the money.

“Those who argue for cash say we shouldn't be patronizing, we should let the people decide,” Khera said. “But when we went and asked these 1,200 households, they all said they want food ... The men we were talking to [about getting cash instead of rations] said, 'No, no. We'll drink it up.'”

Some say the new scheme only addresses part of the problem.

Consider the food grain program. The government buys massive amounts of rice and wheat from farmers at a minimum support price (usually higher than market rates) to protect them from market fluctuations. Then it sells grain at below-market rates to the poor. So giving the poor cash instead of vouchers could change the dynamics of supply and demand — as happened in one pilot program in which residents of rural Rajasthan were given cash instead of kerosene.

It's also possible that cash transfers could accelerate a tilt toward the idea, already popular with a section of the elite, that privatization is the panacea for all of India's problems. Paying the poor instead of guaranteeing them services, for instance, might speed the wholesale abandonment of public education and health care that is already underway. (The public education system is already so terrible that the state is now compelling private institutions to provide scholarships to the poor — who are fighting desegregation-era-style impediments to entry, seemingly on a daily basis).

“In Brazil, they had public health centers, they had public schools, and people were not using them, so this was a way to get them to come,” said Khera. “Here, they want to say we'll give you money, and you just go and find your own [schools and hospitals].”

Don't believe the hype?

The prime minister may be right about technology opening doors. But walking through them will be easier said than done.

Despite a massive, ongoing government effort, only around 13 percent of rural households are connected to the banking system. A huge project to provide every Indian with a biometric-based ID number, called Aadhar, is progressing at a snail's pace. And the government has made no attempt whatsoever to cross-reference its paltry list of ID numbers with an income survey that would identify those living near or below the poverty line. (Currently, the list is in such a shambles that development economists like Delhi University's Jean Dreze argue that subsidized grain should be made available to anyone who wants it).

“I think they've just got their facts wrong — even on what linking with Aadhar can do and cannot do,” said Khera. “They've been told again and again about the sorts of issues that biometrics can and cannot deal with, and yet somehow the penny doesn't seem to drop.”

More from GlobalPost: Is growth enough for the Indian economy?

For all the hype, nobody has endeavored to figure out how much of the so-called “leakage” from welfare systems stems from fictitious recipients on the below-poverty-line rolls — the area where biometric identification could have an impact. But experts like Khera suspect that accounts for a small part of the losses.

That isn't the only reasons for skepticism. The announcement at the end of November that a sea change in policy will begin in January suggests a plan concocted in the world of fantasy, rather than messy old India. And the vagueness of the scheme — with only three out of a proposed 29 programs announced to the public — give it the distinct whiff of campaign rhetoric or a populist bid for voters' allegiance in 2014.

"The scheme reflects sympathy of [United Progressive Alliance] (UPA), Congress and the Delhi government for the poorest section of people on the issue of food security," Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi said last week.

Meanwhile, her son, Rahul Gandhi, likely candidate for prime minister in the next election, laid out the stakes for Congress Party workers.

“If we get this program right, we will win the next two general elections," Rahul reportedly told a meeting of Congress Party leaders from the districts where benefits are slated to be converted to cash in the first phase.

Booze and blankets have long been a staple of India's get-out-the-vote drives, after all. Direct deposits of cash money, facilitated by the miracle of technology, would save everybody a lot of trouble.

India confronts its own brazen and spectacular violence

As Americans cope with Sandy Hook, Indians soul-search over a gang rape on a public bus, among other horrific crimes.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - December 19, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — As America mourns children and teachers killed by a gunman at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary, India is confronting brazen and horrific acts of violence, too — though the problems here are not as directly tied to guns or mental illness.

Perhaps the most brutal such incident happened Sunday — even as America's tragedy still occupied television stations here — with the horrifying gangrape of a 23-year-old physical therapist in a New Delhi bus. The victim is now fighting for her life.

As the curtained bus floated ominously through the city, the victim, currently in critical condition, was raped repeatedly and sliced with a knife by her seven attackers before being beaten with an iron rod and finally dumped on the roadside. The young man with her, a 28-year-old software engineer, was also beaten within an inch of his life.

The brutality of the assault prompted doctors at New Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital to describe it as “probably the most grievous” rape case they had ever encountered — noting severe injuries to the woman's head, and abdominal wounds so vicious that while they attempted intestine repair surgery, “there was not much that could be done.”

Ostensibly committed to teaching the couple a lesson after the young man objected to comments that “only prostitutes choose to travel with men at night,” the crime prompted street protests and a parliamentary debate on Tuesday.

“The reason it's become such an emotive issue is that the expression of violence, particularly gender violence, is in a way a public event,” said Delhi University sociologist Radhika Chopra. “This is not secret violence. This is not happening in a dark corner of a street or shady corner of a park. It's on a bus. It's in broad daylight. It's on flyovers. It's in the most public spaces of all. And there are always people there.”

But the spectacular act of violence is only the latest in an obscene string of blatant crimes, committed almost casually, apparently without shame or fear of prosecution, that have prompted soul-searching here in India, similar to the kind that is under way in the US.

Last week, a gang of thugs beat up two men with whom they had a dispute over property outside a Haryana courthouse. Then, in broad daylight, the gang stormed the Gurgaon hospital where their victims had been admitted and shot them in their beds — paying no mind to the hospital staff and other witnesses.

Last month, liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his brother were killed in a Scarface-style hail of bullets on the outskirts of Delhi.

In September, a jilted lover in New Delhi went on a shooting spree, killing four people, including his ex-girlfriend, before putting a bullet in himself, while another woman was gunned down by men on a motorcycle after what witnesses described as a heated argument.

Incidents in which a Good Samaritan attempting to stop goons from harassing a woman gets stabbed or beaten to a pulp — as happened to a journalist with India's NDTV network last week — seem too numerous to count.

And rapes and other violence against women (and children) — often in plain sight — are reported at a rate of two per day in the nation's capital.

“Trials take almost eight to nine to 10 years, depending on the situation. Trials don't go to complete fulfilment and the conviction rate itself is fairly low,” said Pinky Anand, a New Delhi lawyer who works frequently on cases involving such violence.

“Given all these factors, the accused feel they can get away with this in society and will not be brought to book.”

The difference between India's tragedies and America's, of course, is that India has some of the world's strictest gun control laws, and these crimes don't have as direct a connection with mental illness.

Though civilians here are prohibited from owning all but the most rudimentary revolvers and shotguns — and licenses for even those weapons are very difficult to obtain — guns feature regularly in India's daylight crimes.

But it is rape, not shootings, that has prompted India's soul-searching. India is not known for quality mental health care, but it is radical socioeconomic change, rather than a public health failure, that underlies India's violence problem, experts say.

More from GlobalPost: Gun culture in India

Sociologists argue that the vicious rapes and other public acts plaguing India's National Capital Region — which includes New Delhi as well as neighboring areas of Haryana and Uttar Praesh — reflect a subconscious struggle for power.

On one hand, globalization and urbanization have brought new opportunities for women and the lower castes, putting pressure on traditional hierarchies. On the other, rampant corruption and the growing nexus between crime and politics — where both money and muscle are needed to win elections — have turned the “goonda” (hired thug) into a figure to cower before, rather than report to the police.

“The goon is, if you will, a very iconic figure of the fear, the anxiety, and the fact of power which cannot be controled, which has a nexus you have no sense of,” said Delhi University's Chopra.

“The exercise of power requires a public display of it and a public acknowlegement of it. These spectacular forms of violence in highly public spaces is part of this notion of power that can be used without any stopgate.”

According to Prem Chowdhry, a sociologist who has worked extensively on the intersection of gender, violence and caste, women of traditionally conservative states like Haryana are now leaving the house for work, attending universities, and asserting their right to property. Meanwhile, in these same areas, the practice of aborting female children has led to a skewed sex ratio. So the number of bachelors and the quantum of sexual frustration and resentment is rivaled only by underemployment as a social force.

When that resentment boils over, “rape is taken as a form of revenge or control,” Chowdhry said.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121218/violence-rape-guns-sandy-hook-newtown-shooting

Archaeologists confirm Indian civilization is 2000 years older than previously believed

Indian archaeologists now believe the ancient Indian civilization at Harappa dates back as far as 7500 BC.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - November 28, 2012)

NEW DEHLI, India — When archaeologist KN Dikshit was a fresh-faced undergraduate, in 1960, a remarkable discovery pushed back the origin of civilization in the Indus River Valley by some 500 years. Now, he claims to have proof that pushes India's origin back even further — making Indian civilization some 2,000 years older than previously believed.

“When Bhirrana [Rajasthan] was excavated, from 2003 to 2006, we [recovered artifacts that provided] 19 radiometric dates,” said Dikshit, who was until recently joint director general of the Archaeological Society of India. “Out of these 19 dates, six dates are from the early levels, and the time bracket is forming from 7500 BC to 6200 BC.”

Since the early excavations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro, in what is today Pakistan, the Indus Civilization has been considered among the world's most ancient civilizations — along with Egypt and Mesopotamia (in what is today Iraq).

In recent times, archaeologists divided the Indus Civilization into the pre-Harappan, mature Harappan and late Harappan periods. The pre-Harappan period was characterized by a primitive, Stone Age culture, while the late Harappan period featured sophisticated brick cities built on a grid system, with granaries, toilets and an as-yet undeciphered written language.

But the six samples discovered at Bhirrana include relatively advanced pottery, known as “hakra ware,” that suggests the ancient Harappan civilization began much earlier than previously believed — and that its epicenter lies in the Indian states of Harayana and Rajasthan, rather than across the border.

As Dikshit and his colleague, BR Mani, current joint director general of the ASI, write in a recent note on their findings:

“The earliest levels at Bhirrana and Kunal yielded ceramics and antiquities ... suggesting a continuity in culture, right from the middle of the eighth millennium BCE onwards ... till about 1800 BCE.”

That suggests the Harappan civilization is nearly as old as sites from West Asia such as Jericho, where evidence of a neolithic city has been found to date from as early as 9000 BC. But it also means that Harappa, with new proof of hakra ware dating to 7500 BC, may have been more technologically advanced — bolstering India's claim to the title of the cradle of civilization.

“When [John] Marshall excavated the Indus Valley Civilization [in 1922], he gave it the date of about 3000 BC,” said Dikshit. “But when [Mortimer] Wheeler came in 1944, he gave a shorter chronology and put the Indus Civilization between 2450 BC and 1900 BC. Those dates were also supported when Carbon-14 dates started to come from other parts of the world.”

More from GlobalPost: Mumbai on high alert with right-wing leader Bal Thackeray in critical condition

“In 1960, in Kalimanga, we were only able to push it back a few hundred years. But with these dates [from Bhirrana] things have entirely changed.”

Both Dikshit and Mani downplayed competition between India and Pakistan for bragging rights over the Indus civilization — where the best archaeological site for tourists is in Mohenjadaro, in Pakistan's Sindh province. But the ancient has a way of bleeding into the modern, as various controversies have shown over the years.

Most prominently, perhaps, the so-called “horse theory,” rooted in N.S. Rajaram's fraudulent claim that he had deciphered the Harappan script, introduced horses into a concocted history of the Harappan period in order to provide a missing link to the Vedic period in which the oldest scriptures of Hinduism were written.

Noted for his ties with the loonier side of Hindu nationalism, Rajaram pieced together a tale that suggested “Babylonian and Greek mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and even Roman numerals flow out to the world from the Indus Valley’s infinitely fertile cultural womb,”according to Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel and comparative historian Steve Farmer.

But for Dikshit and Mani, manufactured controversies of that kind belong in the realm of politics, not archaeology.

“These things should not be raked up,” said Dikshit. “I just don't want to give any statement on this. People are talking. There was an Aryan invasion, then Aryan immigration, then horse theory — this theory, that theory. They are simply wasting their time.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121116/indus-civilization-2000-years-old-archaeologists