At a New Delhi summit, five key emerging nations forge a platform at odds with the West on Iran and Syria.
By Jason Overdorf--NEW DELHI
GlobalPost (March 29, 2012)
As Indian business leaders pushed for measures to double trade between and among the so-called BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to $500 billion over the next few years, a host of mostly western naysayers stepped forward to claim that the BRICS are too deeply divided to emerge as a coherent negotiating bloc.
Wishful thinking? Perhaps.
“That's always been said, but they're actually moving forward,” said Raja Mohan, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research. “The problem is the supporters and critics. You highlight those who fear it's going to be an anti-western bloc and those who say it can never amount to anything.”
There were arguably no big bang developments at Thursday's BRICS Summit in New Delhi. But several small yet significant steps forward suggest that the BRICS may indeed be a powerful bloc when it comes to issues where they share a common interest – such as increasing their power in economic institutions like the World Bank, protecting themselves from costly measures to deal with climate change, and fighting trade barriers in the US and Europe.
“In economic matters, alliance is possible since there is still a strong developed/developing country divide,” said Jabin Jacob, assistant director of the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, an independent think tank. “Overall, however, if groupings such as BRICS aim to do more than economic cooperation, then ideological divisions will come to the fore.”
The nations were not able to agree on a candidate for the top job at the World Bank – which some claimed was needed to signal that the grouping had arrived as a new force in global economic relations. But they reasserted their call for reforming the World Bank and International Monetary Fund “to better reflect economic weights and enhance the voice and representation of emerging market and developing countries by January 2013,” according to a joint statement issued Thursday.
They laid some groundwork for an alternative financing agency of their own along the lines of the Asian Development Bank, directing their respective finance ministers to set up a working group to study the plan and report back at the next meeting. And they reached an agreement to allow members to extend loans to each other in local currencies that will send a clear-enough message on the grouping's dim view of the continued dominance of the dollar and the euro.
Perhaps most significantly, at least for those who fear that the BRICS may become an anti-western block, they also came together to resist US and European sanctions on trading with Iran, and they termed interference in the conflict in Syria “unacceptable.” On Iran, too, the BRICS explicitly opposed a military strike. Moreover, they asserted Iran's right to maintain a civilian nuclear program, and stated that any measures to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons should be imposed through the International Atomic Energy Agency or the UN – a thinly veiled rejection of the present US and European sanctions on oil purchases.
“We respect UN resolutions,” Indian commerce minister Anand Sharma said Wednesday. “None of our [BRICS] countries are in violation of what the UN resolution says. The UN resolution does not forbid countries engaging in trade in essential commodities.”
As various pundits have pointed out, there are as many differences among the BRICS countries as there are similarities. Brazil, India and South Africa are committed to democracy, and, to varying extents, socialist-style programs to lift their peoples out of poverty, while China and Russia are richer, more authoritarian, and more laissez-faire in their economic policies. Similarly, China and Russia are already members of the United Nations Security Council, and, despite public noises to the contrary, appear to be keen to keep Brazil and India out. And China and India, at least, are in direct competition for natural resources and (soon) export markets, even as Beijing props up New Delhi's nemesis in Pakistan.
But while none of those problems are going away, the incremental progress made at the BRICS Summit this week suggests that those issues will not necessarily derail other efforts where there is more common ground. Moreover, as economic problems continue in the US and Europe, the two most significant players in the BRICS grouping – India and China – are coming into closer alignment not only in obvious areas like climate change and emissions caps but also in economics.
“It's a very diverse group,” said Mohan. “It's not constructed in a regional framework, so it will necessarily take a global perspective. The agendas of Russia and China are different. For Russia it will be geopolitics.... China is focused on money, which the Indians are quite happy to accept.”
Apart from their regional competition for political influence and resources ranging from oil to iron to water for irrigation, China and India can seem to be headed on a collision course economically. China's dominance of export markets in the US and Europe is so absolute that it appears to threaten India's bid to build its own manufacturing sector and thus bring its massive population from the farm to the factory. And because those same export markets are already saturated, the massive increase in bilateral trade between India and China over the past five years has been accompanied by an even more severe increase in India's trade deficit.
“There are huge asymmetries between India and China,” said Shrikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at India's Jawaharlal Nehru University. “China is a $6 trillion economy and India is a $1.7 trillion economy. Meanwhile, China is the largest exporting country in the world today, with nearly $1.6 trillion in exports, and India has only $250 billion in exports. There's no comparison.”
For the first eight months of 2011, India-China trade topped $48 billion — growth of about 20 percent over the same period last year. But India's trade deficit also widened to $16.8 billion. As a point of comparison, consider the figures for 2008 — when bilateral trade for the year was about the same as the total for the first eight months of 2011, at $52 billion, but India's trade deficit was only about $10 billion. In other words, assuming that ratio holds true for the full year, India's trade with China has grown some 40 percent over the past three years, but its trade deficit has increased 60 percent.
That leaves India with a huge challenge.
“For the Indian manufacturing sector to increase from 14 percent of GDP to 29 percent of GDP, India needs to cooperate as well as compete with China,” Kondapalli said.
Nevertheless, recent developments suggest that the faltering of the western economies has not only increased the relative might of India and China on the world stage, but also increased their interdependence and equalized them to some extent. Without anyplace else to expand its sales, China now needs India's market, and as it strives for a larger voice in world economic affairs it needs India's greater political legitimacy to temper concerns about its growing dominance.
“The Chinese needed this multilateral grouping,” Kondapalli said. “Their economy is much more dependent on exports than India's. Given the financial crisis, they are more desperate than India, so they need the BRICS position on trade protectionism [in the US and Europe].”
In return, India aims to leverage its trade deficit to complete the process of industrialization. An ever larger portion of its imports from China are capital equipment used to build power plants, roads, railways and other infrastructure that India needs before it can match China's price points in the export market. And a decision this week to allow Indian firms to take yuan-denominated loans will not only help China internationalize its currency but also help India source the trillion dollars it needs for infrastructure investments.
“What India is having to give up in terms of an import deficit it can make up by investing more in infrastructure,” said Amitendu Palit, a researcher at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Institute of South Asian Studies and the author of an upcoming book on India-China economic relations. “If India's infrastructure improves, its cost of production will come down and it will become more competititve with the rest of the world.”
And that would make the BRICS all the more powerful.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/india/india-rivalries-wont-undo-the-brics
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Analysis: Iran sanctions threaten US-India ties
In India, as well as Iran, Obama's sanctions could be more than counterproductive.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (February 4, 2012)
NEW DELHI, India — The West's quest to impose a painful embargo on Iran is slamming into a harsh reality: India is declining to cooperate.
Without the participation of major importing nations like India, the sanctions are far less likely to succeed in forcing Iran back to the nuclear negotiating table. The standoff means that the West's initiative could backfire, harming US-India ties more than it thwarts Iran's apparent nuclear ambitions.
Some experts even contend that, considering regional geopolitics and particularly India's relations with its neighbors, the sanctions' failure has been written in stone from the outset.
As the prospect of war with Iran mounts, the West has resorted to unusual measures to promote the success of its economic offensive. To coerce other nations to comply, the US has issued extra-territorial sanctions against any entity doing business with Iran's central bank, a move that complicates all potential trade with Tehran.
Any bank that engages in a “significant financial transaction” with Iran's central bank — necessary for facilitating the currency conversion in oil purchases — is barred from doing business in the US.
To Washington's dismay, this week, India announced that it wouldn't cut back on oil imports from Iran. When doubts arose over how India would pay for its oil with sanctions in place, Iran said they would allow India to pay in rupees, circumventing Washington's embargo.
And so the deal was done.
“We've been at pains to explain to the US that we have a special problem here,” said Lalit Mansingh, a former Indian ambassador to the US. “On the issue of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, we have a clear stance: We are against it. But we are also dependent on Iran for 12-15 percent of our oil supplies and that can't be wished away.”
Despite the much ballyhooed “strategic partnership” between the US and India, Washington doesn't seem to be listening.
Desirable as it may be to slow Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and however appealing these sanctions might sound to US voters, this is not the way to go about it, many experts say.
Harsh economic sanctions are as likely to drive Tehran to “double down on its quest for the ultimate deterrent” as they are to lure President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the negotiating table, as Brookings Institution fellow Suzanne Maloney argued recently in Foreign Affairs.
“[With the] ratcheting up of sanctions, and clearly now an attempt to wage economic warfare against Iran and force a regime change, plus the continuous threat that all options, including military action, are on the table, any sensible nationalist would say the only protection that Iran has is to develop nuclear capability,” said former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal.
Perhaps more importantly, the banking mechanism that Obama has adopted to impose these sanctions allows countries like Japan, South Korea and China — which consistently opposes US foreign policy interventions — to circumvent the blockade.
And it singles out India — which has supported Washington's call for an end to Iran's nuclear program before the International Atomic Energy Agency — for special punishment.
How so? China and other nations from which Iran makes significant purchases have already set up a barter system of sorts that allows them to pay for oil with goods, rather than cash, thereby cutting out Iran's central bank. But because Iran is not a big customer for India's outsourcing sector, or a significant buyer of any other Indian commodity, India must settle its oil bill in cash.
That means, first of all, it had to convince Iran to accept 45 percent of its money in rupees at a time when the Indian currency is bouncing back from an all-time low against the US dollar — a feat that it reportedly achieved this week, according to the Indian Express.
But it also leaves India's future oil purchases in doubt, as the shaky payment mechanism could break down any time. And it sets up America's newest strategic partner to bear the brunt of US criticism simply for doing what its neighbors are doing in a more direct way.
“It's a bit unfair that you come up with sanctions on the eve of elections and make it appear that it's a matter of great urgency,” said Mansingh. "Work with the United Nations and the IAEA ... is basically what India is saying." Mansingh also emphasized that this was India's stance the last time Washington forged ahead agressively against supposed weapons of mass destruction: the invasion of Iraq.
In calling attention to that debacle, India is being more than a little disingenuous. China or Russia would be almost certain to veto any UN resolution mirroring America's current economic sanctions. But India's position is consistent and pragmatic, as well.
New Delhi has for decades refused to ratify the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) because, it argues, it is designed to help the small club of nations with nuclear weapons retain a dominant say over world affairs, and has no provisions for disarmament.
At the same time, its own history in acquiring nuclear weapons, as well as the contrasting fates of Iraq and Pakistan after Sept. 11, provide strong arguments suggesting that no measure will be sufficient to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program. And, as a result, it is wise to prepare for the day Tehran gets the bomb by establishing some common ground.
“For the US to singlemindely focus on one single aspect of the problem Iran presents in terms of its nuclear ambitions is narrowing the larger strategic geopolitical considerations that must go into any decision making involving such a volatile region,” said Sibal.
India is already hedging its position and moving to scale back its dependence on Iran's oil, according to a report by the US Congressional Research Service.
But that will take time. And India still hopes to use those “larger strategic geopolitical considerations” to angle for a temporary waiver or an exemption for its oil imports.
Scuttling its relationship with Iran, the argument runs, would cut off India's access to Afghanistan. Therefore, an end to the oil trade might also spell an end to India's aid in the post-war reconstruction effort — where, despite Pakistan's objections, India's functional-if-chaotic democracy may offer the best hope for creating effective civil institutions.
Moreover, weakening New Delhi's influence in Tehran will increase Beijing's, not Washington's.
But Obama should be looking further toward the horizon — beyond the upcoming election or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The US strategic partnership with India could be very important for the US' future in Asia, if Washington treats India as an ally and not a vassal.
“Washington must not take a litmus test approach, in the sense that if you don't get a fighter contract or nuclear liability law then the relationship is doomed,” said Mansingh.
“As I see it, we've had the strategic partnership for about a decade now, and it's doing quite well. But if you take each of these high profile cases as a test, it's not going to work.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120203/iran-sanctions-us-india-ties
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (February 4, 2012)
NEW DELHI, India — The West's quest to impose a painful embargo on Iran is slamming into a harsh reality: India is declining to cooperate.
Without the participation of major importing nations like India, the sanctions are far less likely to succeed in forcing Iran back to the nuclear negotiating table. The standoff means that the West's initiative could backfire, harming US-India ties more than it thwarts Iran's apparent nuclear ambitions.
Some experts even contend that, considering regional geopolitics and particularly India's relations with its neighbors, the sanctions' failure has been written in stone from the outset.
As the prospect of war with Iran mounts, the West has resorted to unusual measures to promote the success of its economic offensive. To coerce other nations to comply, the US has issued extra-territorial sanctions against any entity doing business with Iran's central bank, a move that complicates all potential trade with Tehran.
Any bank that engages in a “significant financial transaction” with Iran's central bank — necessary for facilitating the currency conversion in oil purchases — is barred from doing business in the US.
To Washington's dismay, this week, India announced that it wouldn't cut back on oil imports from Iran. When doubts arose over how India would pay for its oil with sanctions in place, Iran said they would allow India to pay in rupees, circumventing Washington's embargo.
And so the deal was done.
“We've been at pains to explain to the US that we have a special problem here,” said Lalit Mansingh, a former Indian ambassador to the US. “On the issue of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, we have a clear stance: We are against it. But we are also dependent on Iran for 12-15 percent of our oil supplies and that can't be wished away.”
Despite the much ballyhooed “strategic partnership” between the US and India, Washington doesn't seem to be listening.
Desirable as it may be to slow Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and however appealing these sanctions might sound to US voters, this is not the way to go about it, many experts say.
Harsh economic sanctions are as likely to drive Tehran to “double down on its quest for the ultimate deterrent” as they are to lure President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the negotiating table, as Brookings Institution fellow Suzanne Maloney argued recently in Foreign Affairs.
“[With the] ratcheting up of sanctions, and clearly now an attempt to wage economic warfare against Iran and force a regime change, plus the continuous threat that all options, including military action, are on the table, any sensible nationalist would say the only protection that Iran has is to develop nuclear capability,” said former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal.
Perhaps more importantly, the banking mechanism that Obama has adopted to impose these sanctions allows countries like Japan, South Korea and China — which consistently opposes US foreign policy interventions — to circumvent the blockade.
And it singles out India — which has supported Washington's call for an end to Iran's nuclear program before the International Atomic Energy Agency — for special punishment.
How so? China and other nations from which Iran makes significant purchases have already set up a barter system of sorts that allows them to pay for oil with goods, rather than cash, thereby cutting out Iran's central bank. But because Iran is not a big customer for India's outsourcing sector, or a significant buyer of any other Indian commodity, India must settle its oil bill in cash.
That means, first of all, it had to convince Iran to accept 45 percent of its money in rupees at a time when the Indian currency is bouncing back from an all-time low against the US dollar — a feat that it reportedly achieved this week, according to the Indian Express.
But it also leaves India's future oil purchases in doubt, as the shaky payment mechanism could break down any time. And it sets up America's newest strategic partner to bear the brunt of US criticism simply for doing what its neighbors are doing in a more direct way.
“It's a bit unfair that you come up with sanctions on the eve of elections and make it appear that it's a matter of great urgency,” said Mansingh. "Work with the United Nations and the IAEA ... is basically what India is saying." Mansingh also emphasized that this was India's stance the last time Washington forged ahead agressively against supposed weapons of mass destruction: the invasion of Iraq.
In calling attention to that debacle, India is being more than a little disingenuous. China or Russia would be almost certain to veto any UN resolution mirroring America's current economic sanctions. But India's position is consistent and pragmatic, as well.
New Delhi has for decades refused to ratify the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) because, it argues, it is designed to help the small club of nations with nuclear weapons retain a dominant say over world affairs, and has no provisions for disarmament.
At the same time, its own history in acquiring nuclear weapons, as well as the contrasting fates of Iraq and Pakistan after Sept. 11, provide strong arguments suggesting that no measure will be sufficient to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program. And, as a result, it is wise to prepare for the day Tehran gets the bomb by establishing some common ground.
“For the US to singlemindely focus on one single aspect of the problem Iran presents in terms of its nuclear ambitions is narrowing the larger strategic geopolitical considerations that must go into any decision making involving such a volatile region,” said Sibal.
India is already hedging its position and moving to scale back its dependence on Iran's oil, according to a report by the US Congressional Research Service.
But that will take time. And India still hopes to use those “larger strategic geopolitical considerations” to angle for a temporary waiver or an exemption for its oil imports.
Scuttling its relationship with Iran, the argument runs, would cut off India's access to Afghanistan. Therefore, an end to the oil trade might also spell an end to India's aid in the post-war reconstruction effort — where, despite Pakistan's objections, India's functional-if-chaotic democracy may offer the best hope for creating effective civil institutions.
Moreover, weakening New Delhi's influence in Tehran will increase Beijing's, not Washington's.
But Obama should be looking further toward the horizon — beyond the upcoming election or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The US strategic partnership with India could be very important for the US' future in Asia, if Washington treats India as an ally and not a vassal.
“Washington must not take a litmus test approach, in the sense that if you don't get a fighter contract or nuclear liability law then the relationship is doomed,” said Mansingh.
“As I see it, we've had the strategic partnership for about a decade now, and it's doing quite well. But if you take each of these high profile cases as a test, it's not going to work.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120203/iran-sanctions-us-india-ties
Thursday, January 19, 2012
China vs. India: the battle for Buddha
China and India seek to leverage their ties to Buddhism for soft power in the region.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (January 19, 2012)
LUMBINI, Nepal — For a few short hours, as dancers imported from Kathmandu leapt and twirled for the bemused president of this tiny Himalayan republic, the sleepy, provincial town of Lumbini, in western Nepal, became the focus of the great chess game underway between India and China.
After a sudden, unannounced, and brief visit from Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in Kathmandu, Nepalese President Ram Baran Yadav had flown in to take the stage here — at the birthplace of Buddha — to inaugurate “Visit Lumbini Year 2012” on behalf of Nepal tourism.
But as he set fire to a symbolic, Olympic-style “peace flame,” more than a few observers were wondering about the fortuitous timing of the event, which coincided, like the flourish of a magician's cape, with the preventive detention of hundreds of Nepalese Tibetans in the capital.
The detention of Tibetans is nothing new, of course. And Nepal is always rife with rumors and conspiracy theories. But for the past several months a curious mystery has unfolded around Lumbini — the latest beachhead in the quiet battle for Buddha underway between China and India.
With competing conferences, organizations, and cultural tours, both China and India have sought to leverage their historical ties with Buddhism for so-called soft power in the region.
India seeks to use its common cultural heritage to overcome China's ethnic ties to the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and China seeks to limit the damage from its repression of religious freedom in Tibet and its incessant sparring with the Dalai Lama.
“This is part of China's effort to use Buddhism to gain an entry into Nepal, [and] to show to their Buddhists that they're showing equal attention to Buddhism outside the country,” Jayaveda Ranade, formerly additional secretary for East Asia with the Indian government, said of a Chinese proposal for the development of Lumbini.
Yadav, Nepal's president, made no mention of China before the crowd gathered at Buddha's birthplace, though in Kathmandu Wen pledged more than $140 million in aid for the building of infrastructure and other projects. Wen also agreed to consider Nepal's request to extend the 1,200 mile Qinghai-Tibet railway onward to Kathmandu and Lumbini.
“Both sides started worrying about this once the Dalai Lama started giving intimations of mortality, shall we say,” said Jabin Jacob, assistant director of the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, an independent think tank.
“If the Dalai Lama is disappearing from the scene or he is going to be stepping back from the political scene, as he already has, then there is this huge resource lying out there untapped,” he said.
India and China: their claims to Buddhism
Born Prince Gautama Siddhartha in what is today Nepal, the Buddha achieved enlightenment, gained his spiritual following, and died (or achieved final nirvana) in India. As a result, Bodhgaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar, located in the north Indian state of Bihar, remain major pilgrimage centers for believers from around the world.
But in India Buddhism was subsumed by Hinduism, and New Delhi has done little to spread the wealth from tourism to Lumbini — which most view as less significant than the three pilgrimage sites in India. So as Nepal's tourism ministry seeks to lure 500,000 visitors to Lumbini in 2012, expectations of Indian support are not too high — though India claims to be “more than happy” to contribute.
“Most of the inter-governmental bodies are dysfunctional,” said Aditya Baral, director of the publicity department of the Nepal Tourism Board.
At the same time, even though China is notorious for its suppression of Tibetan Buddhism, and India is home to the exiled Dalai Lama, in its other forms Buddhism is reportedly the fastest-growing religion in China and accounts for only a tiny, neglected minority in the land where it originated.
And China's largesse, at least on paper, or in rumor, appears to know no bounds.
“Nearly 40 percent of Chinese believe in Buddhism. Several of the Chinese leaders themselves are practicing Buddhists, despite being members of the Communist Party,” said Shrikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“So from that point of view it's quite natural for China to be interested in Buddhist projects,” he said.
According to Ranade, China held its first World Buddhist Forum in 2006 in an effort to project its handpicked candidate, Gyaltsen Norbu, as the legitimate Panchen Lama, after secret police allegedly kidnapped and spirited away the boy chosen by the Tibetans in 1995.
A second conference in 2009, for which the concluding ceremony was held in Taiwan, was aimed at convincing neighboring Buddhist nations that China had embraced the religion, despite its continued opposition to the Dalai Lama.
Similarly, Beijing has undertaken other cultural intiatives, such as the displaying of tooth and hair relics of the Buddha in a traveling exhibition in Myanmar.
“All of this is to keep the Dalai Lama in his place,” said Jacob. “It's to ensure that they have a handle on his succession, an influence on his succession, and that they will be seen as legitimately intervening in that succession.”
At the same time, India has sought to build on the goodwill it receives naturally as home to the exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism and reach out to other sects.
In 2007, for instance, the loan of an extensive collection of Buddhist art and artifacts from India's National Museum subtly reinforced the message that the religion traveled from India to China and beyond in conjunction with an East Asia Summit where Beijing had sought to shoulder out New Delhi.
Together with representatives from Singapore, China, Japan and Thailand, India has undertaken a $1 billion project to develop a modern university in the ancient Buddhist learning center of Nalanda, in modern day Bihar, under the leadership of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen.
Beginning this summer, however, the struggle for soft power has begun to seem as though it were scripted by John Le Carré.
The plot thickens in Lumbini
For Lumbini, the story begins in July, when China's state-run People's Daily reported that a peculiar Hong Kong-based outfit called the Asia Pacific Exchange & Cooperation Foundation (APECF) had signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to create a “special cultural zone” in Lumbini.
Touting a planned investment of $3 billion, APECF claimed to have the full support of the Nepal government for its scheme to build roads, telecommunications networks and tourist facilities in the area.
The dusty, one-horse town of Lumbini could certainly use the money. But at nearly one-tenth of Nepal's entire gross domestic product, $3 billion was a stupendous sum — and, some suspect, a wholly fictional one: a carnival barker's cry, crude propaganda, or a “trial balloon” to gauge how Nepal might react.
The answer was swift.
Soon afterward UNIDO and Nepal, by turns, disavowed the project. It surfaced that both Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoist leader popularly known by his nomme de guerre Prachanda, or “Fearless,” and the controversial Paras Bir Bikram Shah Dev, Nepal's former crown prince, held positions on APECF's board of directors.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) blasted APECF's scheme as a threat to Lumbini's status as a World Heritage site. And Culture Secretary Modraj Dotel resigned in protest over alleged pressure to approve the project.
“What to me was worrying was the wheeling and dealing through which they had managed to get both Prince Paras and Prachanda, an unholy alliance from opposite ends of the spectrum,” said Kul Chandra Gautam, a former assistant secretary general of the UN who has publicly criticized the project.
“All kinds of shady deals happen in Nepal, and for our most influential political leader to be made part of this venture to me sounded very fishy.” (Prince Paras is no longer listed as a board member by APECF's website).
For Indian foreign policy think tanks, APECF — nominally a non-governmental organization (NGO) — was an obvious clandestine arm of the Chinese government.
Its Lumbini project was a transparent attempt to leverage Buddhism to station platoons of People's Liberation Army engineers within a stone's throw of the Indian border. And the bizarre snafu of the fake agreement with UNIDO was simply another example, apparently, of the inscrutability of Chinese espionage.
So, too, it goes in New Delhi.
This week, Beijing's special representative Dai Bingguo is in New Delhi hoping to flag off a “golden period” for India-China relations. But it's lucky he made it at all, in the wake of the latest Indian salvo in the battle for Buddha.
In November, Beijing scrapped Dai's planned visit to discuss an outstanding dispute over China's borders with Arunachal Pradesh and Kashmir in protest over an Indian rival to its own World Buddhism Conference. Organized by the Asoka Mission, another NGO that receives government funding, the meeting brought Buddhist leaders from around the world together with the Dalai Lama the same week that Dai was to arrive for talks.
“Clubbed with the South China Sea dispute, clubbed with the Yellow Sea incident where the Chinese opposed the USS George Washington into that region and a host of other problems that China had with the US and their neighbors, including even with India, it did cost [Beijing] some soft power,” said professor Kondapalli.
“The convention decided to set up an international Buddhist institution somewhere in India, to codify the Buddhist scriptures and so forth,” he said.
Coincidence? Representatives of the Indian government say so. But just as in Lumbini, there are plenty of people ready to concoct a master plan behind the chaos.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120118/nepal-buddhism-dalai-lama-china-tibet
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (January 19, 2012)
LUMBINI, Nepal — For a few short hours, as dancers imported from Kathmandu leapt and twirled for the bemused president of this tiny Himalayan republic, the sleepy, provincial town of Lumbini, in western Nepal, became the focus of the great chess game underway between India and China.
After a sudden, unannounced, and brief visit from Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in Kathmandu, Nepalese President Ram Baran Yadav had flown in to take the stage here — at the birthplace of Buddha — to inaugurate “Visit Lumbini Year 2012” on behalf of Nepal tourism.
But as he set fire to a symbolic, Olympic-style “peace flame,” more than a few observers were wondering about the fortuitous timing of the event, which coincided, like the flourish of a magician's cape, with the preventive detention of hundreds of Nepalese Tibetans in the capital.
The detention of Tibetans is nothing new, of course. And Nepal is always rife with rumors and conspiracy theories. But for the past several months a curious mystery has unfolded around Lumbini — the latest beachhead in the quiet battle for Buddha underway between China and India.
With competing conferences, organizations, and cultural tours, both China and India have sought to leverage their historical ties with Buddhism for so-called soft power in the region.
India seeks to use its common cultural heritage to overcome China's ethnic ties to the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and China seeks to limit the damage from its repression of religious freedom in Tibet and its incessant sparring with the Dalai Lama.
“This is part of China's effort to use Buddhism to gain an entry into Nepal, [and] to show to their Buddhists that they're showing equal attention to Buddhism outside the country,” Jayaveda Ranade, formerly additional secretary for East Asia with the Indian government, said of a Chinese proposal for the development of Lumbini.
Yadav, Nepal's president, made no mention of China before the crowd gathered at Buddha's birthplace, though in Kathmandu Wen pledged more than $140 million in aid for the building of infrastructure and other projects. Wen also agreed to consider Nepal's request to extend the 1,200 mile Qinghai-Tibet railway onward to Kathmandu and Lumbini.
“Both sides started worrying about this once the Dalai Lama started giving intimations of mortality, shall we say,” said Jabin Jacob, assistant director of the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, an independent think tank.
“If the Dalai Lama is disappearing from the scene or he is going to be stepping back from the political scene, as he already has, then there is this huge resource lying out there untapped,” he said.
India and China: their claims to Buddhism
Born Prince Gautama Siddhartha in what is today Nepal, the Buddha achieved enlightenment, gained his spiritual following, and died (or achieved final nirvana) in India. As a result, Bodhgaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar, located in the north Indian state of Bihar, remain major pilgrimage centers for believers from around the world.
But in India Buddhism was subsumed by Hinduism, and New Delhi has done little to spread the wealth from tourism to Lumbini — which most view as less significant than the three pilgrimage sites in India. So as Nepal's tourism ministry seeks to lure 500,000 visitors to Lumbini in 2012, expectations of Indian support are not too high — though India claims to be “more than happy” to contribute.
“Most of the inter-governmental bodies are dysfunctional,” said Aditya Baral, director of the publicity department of the Nepal Tourism Board.
At the same time, even though China is notorious for its suppression of Tibetan Buddhism, and India is home to the exiled Dalai Lama, in its other forms Buddhism is reportedly the fastest-growing religion in China and accounts for only a tiny, neglected minority in the land where it originated.
And China's largesse, at least on paper, or in rumor, appears to know no bounds.
“Nearly 40 percent of Chinese believe in Buddhism. Several of the Chinese leaders themselves are practicing Buddhists, despite being members of the Communist Party,” said Shrikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“So from that point of view it's quite natural for China to be interested in Buddhist projects,” he said.
According to Ranade, China held its first World Buddhist Forum in 2006 in an effort to project its handpicked candidate, Gyaltsen Norbu, as the legitimate Panchen Lama, after secret police allegedly kidnapped and spirited away the boy chosen by the Tibetans in 1995.
A second conference in 2009, for which the concluding ceremony was held in Taiwan, was aimed at convincing neighboring Buddhist nations that China had embraced the religion, despite its continued opposition to the Dalai Lama.
Similarly, Beijing has undertaken other cultural intiatives, such as the displaying of tooth and hair relics of the Buddha in a traveling exhibition in Myanmar.
“All of this is to keep the Dalai Lama in his place,” said Jacob. “It's to ensure that they have a handle on his succession, an influence on his succession, and that they will be seen as legitimately intervening in that succession.”
At the same time, India has sought to build on the goodwill it receives naturally as home to the exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism and reach out to other sects.
In 2007, for instance, the loan of an extensive collection of Buddhist art and artifacts from India's National Museum subtly reinforced the message that the religion traveled from India to China and beyond in conjunction with an East Asia Summit where Beijing had sought to shoulder out New Delhi.
Together with representatives from Singapore, China, Japan and Thailand, India has undertaken a $1 billion project to develop a modern university in the ancient Buddhist learning center of Nalanda, in modern day Bihar, under the leadership of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen.
Beginning this summer, however, the struggle for soft power has begun to seem as though it were scripted by John Le Carré.
The plot thickens in Lumbini
For Lumbini, the story begins in July, when China's state-run People's Daily reported that a peculiar Hong Kong-based outfit called the Asia Pacific Exchange & Cooperation Foundation (APECF) had signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to create a “special cultural zone” in Lumbini.
Touting a planned investment of $3 billion, APECF claimed to have the full support of the Nepal government for its scheme to build roads, telecommunications networks and tourist facilities in the area.
The dusty, one-horse town of Lumbini could certainly use the money. But at nearly one-tenth of Nepal's entire gross domestic product, $3 billion was a stupendous sum — and, some suspect, a wholly fictional one: a carnival barker's cry, crude propaganda, or a “trial balloon” to gauge how Nepal might react.
The answer was swift.
Soon afterward UNIDO and Nepal, by turns, disavowed the project. It surfaced that both Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoist leader popularly known by his nomme de guerre Prachanda, or “Fearless,” and the controversial Paras Bir Bikram Shah Dev, Nepal's former crown prince, held positions on APECF's board of directors.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) blasted APECF's scheme as a threat to Lumbini's status as a World Heritage site. And Culture Secretary Modraj Dotel resigned in protest over alleged pressure to approve the project.
“What to me was worrying was the wheeling and dealing through which they had managed to get both Prince Paras and Prachanda, an unholy alliance from opposite ends of the spectrum,” said Kul Chandra Gautam, a former assistant secretary general of the UN who has publicly criticized the project.
“All kinds of shady deals happen in Nepal, and for our most influential political leader to be made part of this venture to me sounded very fishy.” (Prince Paras is no longer listed as a board member by APECF's website).
For Indian foreign policy think tanks, APECF — nominally a non-governmental organization (NGO) — was an obvious clandestine arm of the Chinese government.
Its Lumbini project was a transparent attempt to leverage Buddhism to station platoons of People's Liberation Army engineers within a stone's throw of the Indian border. And the bizarre snafu of the fake agreement with UNIDO was simply another example, apparently, of the inscrutability of Chinese espionage.
So, too, it goes in New Delhi.
This week, Beijing's special representative Dai Bingguo is in New Delhi hoping to flag off a “golden period” for India-China relations. But it's lucky he made it at all, in the wake of the latest Indian salvo in the battle for Buddha.
In November, Beijing scrapped Dai's planned visit to discuss an outstanding dispute over China's borders with Arunachal Pradesh and Kashmir in protest over an Indian rival to its own World Buddhism Conference. Organized by the Asoka Mission, another NGO that receives government funding, the meeting brought Buddhist leaders from around the world together with the Dalai Lama the same week that Dai was to arrive for talks.
“Clubbed with the South China Sea dispute, clubbed with the Yellow Sea incident where the Chinese opposed the USS George Washington into that region and a host of other problems that China had with the US and their neighbors, including even with India, it did cost [Beijing] some soft power,” said professor Kondapalli.
“The convention decided to set up an international Buddhist institution somewhere in India, to codify the Buddhist scriptures and so forth,” he said.
Coincidence? Representatives of the Indian government say so. But just as in Lumbini, there are plenty of people ready to concoct a master plan behind the chaos.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120118/nepal-buddhism-dalai-lama-china-tibet
Saturday, December 31, 2011
The Shiva Rules: Is growth enough?
India's economic boom has widened the gap between rich and poor – and now it's slowing down.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 31, 2011)
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost series that examines India in the 21st century. Correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
NEW DELHI, India — For the past two decades, policymakers have been banking on rapid economic growth to lift millions of Indians out of poverty.
But even as the boom has made it easier for the country's poorest people to afford refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, the spending power of the rich has grown many times faster.
Now, the widening gulf between those at the top and those at the bottom is steadily increasing the pressure on the many fissures in this highly fractured society — and a looming slowdown could hit the poor harder than anybody.
“We have to see this in the context of a country that already bears a huge burden of stratification, but also caste and gender and all these things compounding each other,” said development economist Jean Dreze, who played a key role in designing and implementing India's largest social welfare scheme.
“The fact that there's a new, rising dimension of inequality, that is income inequality, reinforces something that's already a big issue for Indian society and the Indian economy,” Dreze said.
Despite boasting the world's second-fastest economic growth, India has made little progress in eradicating poverty since it began liberalizing its economy in 1991, according to a new study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Instead, the gap between the incomes of the rich and poor has doubled, so the top 10 percent of workers now earn 12 times the amount earned by the bottom 10 percent — while 42 percent of the country's 1.21 billion people survive on less than a dollar a day.
Consider 36-year-old Indu Devi. Only semi-employed, she works from home sewing dupattas — the scarf-like complement to a woman's salwar kameez, or loose pajama-like trousers — for a local factory.
In a good month, she earns $30; in a bad one, only $10. In the past 10 years, she's acquired luxuries like a television and a mobile phone — partly because she “owns” her tiny room in an illegal structure in one of New Delhi's many “unauthorized colonies.”
Devi shares a space the size of an American bathroom with a man and four children. There's no bathroom or sink. Water comes from a hand pump outside, shared with the neighborhood. The stove is a burner attached to a gas cylinder, and everything the family owns is hanging from half-a-dozen hooks on the wall: two sets of clothes for the adults, one to wash and one to wear; four sets for the kids, along with their school uniforms.
Her thoughts about India's economic boom?
“Sometimes I feel frustrated, as I can cannot meet the demands of my kids all the time."
Nobody will be surprised to hear that India's new wealth has been slow to trickle down. But as debate rages over government programs designed to provide more equal opportunities to the poor — or simply to ease their suffering — the bald facts beg the question: Is growth enough?
Many economists point out that an increase in inequality is inevitable with rapid economic growth — though the OECD found this was not the case for Argentina, Brazil or Indonesia over the past decade or so. In those three countries, the economists found, income growth of the bottom and middle groups outpaced that of the highest earners. And at least in Brazil — where inequality remains much higher than in India in absolute terms — higher taxes and a new focus on social programs seems to have been a factor in making the difference.
Some argue, as well, that rising inequality is not an evil in itself, so long as life also improves for the country's poor. The real problem is absolute, not relative poverty, they say. And the best way to address that is to make the pie larger, not to change the way you slice it up — especially where government programs are hampered by corruption and inefficiency.
“This is inequality in outcomes, either in terms of consumption expenditure or in terms of income,” said economist Bibek Debroy, a professor at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.
“If you are talking about inequality in terms of access to health services, education, financial products, technology, the law and order system, then I'm prepared to buy the argument that we should be concerned. But that's not what this inequality is about.”
It's not that the benefits of economic growth don't trickle down at all. Debroy believes, for instance, that the biggest reason for the increase in inequality is geography, not class or caste.
While the trickle has missed some parts of India altogether, he would argue, poor people like Indu Devi have seen marked improvements in their lives over the past 20 years. The trouble is that rapid growth and runaway consumption by the burgeoning middle class has simultaneously increased the aspirations of the poor and driven up prices.
“If I perceive that inequality is increasing, but I also perceive that over a period of time the prospects of my standard of living improving are getting enhanced, then I think I'm less concerned about inequality,” said Debroy. “But if I perceive that inequality is increasing, but my standard of living is not improving, then I tend to be more concerned.”
Right or wrong, many of those at the bottom see the glass as half empty.
Despite a shortage of skilled labor, for instance, 25-year-old machinist Rajesh Kumar, who lives a few houses away from Devi, earns only about $150 a month. Based on India's erstwhile economic forecasts, he should be poised for great changes. Yet he's pessimistic about his prospects.
"Even if the number of companies are rising, unemployment is also on the rise,” Kumar said. "If the country progresses, the poor will only become poorer, as things will get more expensive. We can never progress."
Now, India's booming economy is slowing down, perhaps dramatically.
With inflation hovering around 10 percent, the central bank has raised interest rates 13 times since March 2010. But today India Inc. faces a drop in foreign investment and skyrocketing fuel costs resulting from a 20 percent plunge in the value of the rupee.
As a result, a manufacturing sector that had only just begun to take off is gearing down — as signaled by a 5 percent drop in industrial output for October, the last month for which data is available. And, at least in private, investors and entrepreneurs are beginning to think the unthinkable: That GDP growth might just dip below 6 percent.
Inequality problem solved, you might be tempted to say. But it looks like the poor will likely bear the brunt of the slowdown, too. They lack savings to carry them through bad times, of course, and they fight for work where competition is the toughest.
But the downturn has also resulted in new criticism for the current government's social welfare programs, such as a planned expansion of the distribution of subsidized grain to cover two-thirds of the population.
“If I am able-bodied and in the working age group, I am not voluntarily poor,” said Debroy. “I am poor because I don't have access to the roads, I don't have access to health [care], I don't have access to education. So the right public policy intervention to me is the provision of those goods and services.”
In terms of access, too, however, the vast gulf between India's rich and poor appears to be acting as a multiplier, worsening the country's long-standing problems while preventing action from being taken against them.
The rapid growth of high-quality, private hospitals in India's cities means that the most vocal and influential citizens no longer complain about public facilities. All but the poorest Indians have abandoned the government's free schools, even as the current administration strives to make education a basic right.
And though wealthy and middle-class Indians carp about “leakages” in the welfare system that distributes subsidized grain to the destitute, they do so primarily to argue against spending increases, without taking much interest in fixing the problem — even amid Anna Hazare's anti-corruption fervor.
This vast difference in perspective, incidentally, may also explain why none of the many Indian papers that reported on the OECD study mentioned its conclusion about the main reason for the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past 20 years: A widening gap between the regular, salaried workers protected by the country's labor laws and the so-called “contract workers” outside the system.
So, too, that difference in outlook may explain the silence on the OECD's recommended course of action: more flexible labor policies and higher spending on education and social welfare — funded by progressive taxes.
“There's a pervasive problem in public policy of lack of attention to the underprivileged and insensitivity to their needs, which is not necessarily out of hostility to them,” said Dreze. “It's just that the people who run the show don't relate very closely to these people.”
The result of India's gross inequity, therefore, is a vicious cycle. India spends less on social programs than the world's other large emerging economies, according to the OECD study.
Brazil and Russia spend nearly three-fourths as much on social programs, as a percentage of GDP, as OECD member countries like the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom, for instance. India spends only a fourth as much as the OECD average.
The biggest reason for the discrepancy is that it has virtually no safety net for the aged or unemployed, apart from the recently created National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a program that is often criticized locally as expensive and corrupt, and yet one that the OECD recommends expanding.
“It could go either way. Depending on the politics, you could see India moving toward more extensive welfare provisions and reconstructing the health-care system,” said Dreze.
“You could also see the schooling system being privatized. There's a huge lobby of insurance companies that would like to see the health-care system go in the direction of health insurance. Nothing can be taken for granted.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111230/india-economy-wealth-gap-poverty-shivas-rules
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 31, 2011)
Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost series that examines India in the 21st century. Correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.
NEW DELHI, India — For the past two decades, policymakers have been banking on rapid economic growth to lift millions of Indians out of poverty.
But even as the boom has made it easier for the country's poorest people to afford refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, the spending power of the rich has grown many times faster.
Now, the widening gulf between those at the top and those at the bottom is steadily increasing the pressure on the many fissures in this highly fractured society — and a looming slowdown could hit the poor harder than anybody.
“We have to see this in the context of a country that already bears a huge burden of stratification, but also caste and gender and all these things compounding each other,” said development economist Jean Dreze, who played a key role in designing and implementing India's largest social welfare scheme.
“The fact that there's a new, rising dimension of inequality, that is income inequality, reinforces something that's already a big issue for Indian society and the Indian economy,” Dreze said.
Despite boasting the world's second-fastest economic growth, India has made little progress in eradicating poverty since it began liberalizing its economy in 1991, according to a new study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Instead, the gap between the incomes of the rich and poor has doubled, so the top 10 percent of workers now earn 12 times the amount earned by the bottom 10 percent — while 42 percent of the country's 1.21 billion people survive on less than a dollar a day.
Consider 36-year-old Indu Devi. Only semi-employed, she works from home sewing dupattas — the scarf-like complement to a woman's salwar kameez, or loose pajama-like trousers — for a local factory.
In a good month, she earns $30; in a bad one, only $10. In the past 10 years, she's acquired luxuries like a television and a mobile phone — partly because she “owns” her tiny room in an illegal structure in one of New Delhi's many “unauthorized colonies.”
Devi shares a space the size of an American bathroom with a man and four children. There's no bathroom or sink. Water comes from a hand pump outside, shared with the neighborhood. The stove is a burner attached to a gas cylinder, and everything the family owns is hanging from half-a-dozen hooks on the wall: two sets of clothes for the adults, one to wash and one to wear; four sets for the kids, along with their school uniforms.
Her thoughts about India's economic boom?
“Sometimes I feel frustrated, as I can cannot meet the demands of my kids all the time."
Nobody will be surprised to hear that India's new wealth has been slow to trickle down. But as debate rages over government programs designed to provide more equal opportunities to the poor — or simply to ease their suffering — the bald facts beg the question: Is growth enough?
Many economists point out that an increase in inequality is inevitable with rapid economic growth — though the OECD found this was not the case for Argentina, Brazil or Indonesia over the past decade or so. In those three countries, the economists found, income growth of the bottom and middle groups outpaced that of the highest earners. And at least in Brazil — where inequality remains much higher than in India in absolute terms — higher taxes and a new focus on social programs seems to have been a factor in making the difference.
Some argue, as well, that rising inequality is not an evil in itself, so long as life also improves for the country's poor. The real problem is absolute, not relative poverty, they say. And the best way to address that is to make the pie larger, not to change the way you slice it up — especially where government programs are hampered by corruption and inefficiency.
“This is inequality in outcomes, either in terms of consumption expenditure or in terms of income,” said economist Bibek Debroy, a professor at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.
“If you are talking about inequality in terms of access to health services, education, financial products, technology, the law and order system, then I'm prepared to buy the argument that we should be concerned. But that's not what this inequality is about.”
It's not that the benefits of economic growth don't trickle down at all. Debroy believes, for instance, that the biggest reason for the increase in inequality is geography, not class or caste.
While the trickle has missed some parts of India altogether, he would argue, poor people like Indu Devi have seen marked improvements in their lives over the past 20 years. The trouble is that rapid growth and runaway consumption by the burgeoning middle class has simultaneously increased the aspirations of the poor and driven up prices.
“If I perceive that inequality is increasing, but I also perceive that over a period of time the prospects of my standard of living improving are getting enhanced, then I think I'm less concerned about inequality,” said Debroy. “But if I perceive that inequality is increasing, but my standard of living is not improving, then I tend to be more concerned.”
Right or wrong, many of those at the bottom see the glass as half empty.
Despite a shortage of skilled labor, for instance, 25-year-old machinist Rajesh Kumar, who lives a few houses away from Devi, earns only about $150 a month. Based on India's erstwhile economic forecasts, he should be poised for great changes. Yet he's pessimistic about his prospects.
"Even if the number of companies are rising, unemployment is also on the rise,” Kumar said. "If the country progresses, the poor will only become poorer, as things will get more expensive. We can never progress."
Now, India's booming economy is slowing down, perhaps dramatically.
With inflation hovering around 10 percent, the central bank has raised interest rates 13 times since March 2010. But today India Inc. faces a drop in foreign investment and skyrocketing fuel costs resulting from a 20 percent plunge in the value of the rupee.
As a result, a manufacturing sector that had only just begun to take off is gearing down — as signaled by a 5 percent drop in industrial output for October, the last month for which data is available. And, at least in private, investors and entrepreneurs are beginning to think the unthinkable: That GDP growth might just dip below 6 percent.
Inequality problem solved, you might be tempted to say. But it looks like the poor will likely bear the brunt of the slowdown, too. They lack savings to carry them through bad times, of course, and they fight for work where competition is the toughest.
But the downturn has also resulted in new criticism for the current government's social welfare programs, such as a planned expansion of the distribution of subsidized grain to cover two-thirds of the population.
“If I am able-bodied and in the working age group, I am not voluntarily poor,” said Debroy. “I am poor because I don't have access to the roads, I don't have access to health [care], I don't have access to education. So the right public policy intervention to me is the provision of those goods and services.”
In terms of access, too, however, the vast gulf between India's rich and poor appears to be acting as a multiplier, worsening the country's long-standing problems while preventing action from being taken against them.
The rapid growth of high-quality, private hospitals in India's cities means that the most vocal and influential citizens no longer complain about public facilities. All but the poorest Indians have abandoned the government's free schools, even as the current administration strives to make education a basic right.
And though wealthy and middle-class Indians carp about “leakages” in the welfare system that distributes subsidized grain to the destitute, they do so primarily to argue against spending increases, without taking much interest in fixing the problem — even amid Anna Hazare's anti-corruption fervor.
This vast difference in perspective, incidentally, may also explain why none of the many Indian papers that reported on the OECD study mentioned its conclusion about the main reason for the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past 20 years: A widening gap between the regular, salaried workers protected by the country's labor laws and the so-called “contract workers” outside the system.
So, too, that difference in outlook may explain the silence on the OECD's recommended course of action: more flexible labor policies and higher spending on education and social welfare — funded by progressive taxes.
“There's a pervasive problem in public policy of lack of attention to the underprivileged and insensitivity to their needs, which is not necessarily out of hostility to them,” said Dreze. “It's just that the people who run the show don't relate very closely to these people.”
The result of India's gross inequity, therefore, is a vicious cycle. India spends less on social programs than the world's other large emerging economies, according to the OECD study.
Brazil and Russia spend nearly three-fourths as much on social programs, as a percentage of GDP, as OECD member countries like the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom, for instance. India spends only a fourth as much as the OECD average.
The biggest reason for the discrepancy is that it has virtually no safety net for the aged or unemployed, apart from the recently created National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a program that is often criticized locally as expensive and corrupt, and yet one that the OECD recommends expanding.
“It could go either way. Depending on the politics, you could see India moving toward more extensive welfare provisions and reconstructing the health-care system,” said Dreze.
“You could also see the schooling system being privatized. There's a huge lobby of insurance companies that would like to see the health-care system go in the direction of health insurance. Nothing can be taken for granted.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111230/india-economy-wealth-gap-poverty-shivas-rules
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Analysis: India's anti-corruption crusade far from over
India's anti-corruption bill passed the lower house, but exposes the limitations of street protest politics.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 28, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — The Indian government pushed a bill designed to fight corruption through the lower house of the parliament late Tuesday, in a move that has exposed the limitations of street-protest politics.
Demonstrators can demand that a law be passed and vow to vote out politicians who oppose it. But they still cannot draft bills themselves.
The government's so-called Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill would set up a powerful ombudsman to investigate and prosecute government officials for corruption, as the anti-corruption movement led by social activist Anna Hazare has been demanding since he first lauched a hunger strike this summer.
But the proposed law does not allow the ombudsman to initiate investigations independent of a complaint. It does not put low-level officers of the bureaucracy under the ombudsman's direct supervision, and it does not grant the office control over the Central Bureau of Investigation, India's chief law enforcement agency, or allow it to constitute its own investigation wing.
Moreover, the law gives the ruling government significant control over the selection of the members of the ombudsman's office.
All these supposed shortcomings — which Hazare's team has called “non-negotiable” — have prompted the activist to embark on yet another a hunger strike, this one three days long, in protest. And he has called on his supporters to force police to arrest them through mass acts of civil disobedience, beginning Jan. 1.
Team Hazare is hoping for a repeat of the massive, nationwide agitation that shook India's politicians out of complacency this August. At that time, tens of thousands of protesters — disgusted by corruption scandals surrounding the Commonwealth Games and the distribution of 2G telecom spectrum licenses — took to the streets in support of the activist's hunger strike.
But at least some experts argue that the government's anti-corruption law could have a salutary effect.
“We have to see how it plays out,” said M.R. Madhavan, a researcher at PRS Legislative Research. “A lot of it will depend on the personalities involved in the first few years. Many institutions at the end of the day are shaped by the people running them.”
“The Election Commission had largely been a somnolent body which was basically going through the motions of holding elections,” said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University.
“But under a man called T.N. Seshan in the late 1980s, early 1990s it became a much more formidable body, and a body that decided to take the statutory powers it possessed and genuinely implement them to make elections fair, open, honest and transparent.”
The niceties of the law notwithstanding, the Lokpal could accomplish the same transformation.
“I genuinely think that if you get a group of individuals in the Lokpal who are serious about this endeavor ... the Lokpal could become a similar institution,” Ganguly said, citing similar successes achieved by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
“A number of institutions in India do work, and do carry out the tasks they're expected to perform,” he said.
Before its proposal becomes a law, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government will also need to get the Lokpal bill through the upper house of the parliament — where the coalition does not have a majority. Debate is underway there as this article goes to press, but there are only several possible outcomes.
With the tacit support of two opposition parties that abstained from voting in the lower house, the bill could go through unchanged. It might be amended and returned to the lower house for reconsideration. It might be voted down, then later approved by a vote by the combined houses. Or it might be rejected and put off indefinitely, like a bill to set up a quota for women in the legislature that has theoretically been pending since it was passed by the upper house in March 2010.
Whether its Lokpal bill works or not, however, the government's success in pushing it through the lower house — where Singh's UPA enjoys a slim majority — has stolen much of Hazare's thunder.
It's easy to mobilize people who are angry because nothing is being done about all-pervasive corruption. It's far more difficult to rally the masses around a difference of opinion about the finer points of a piece of legislation — just imagine if the Occupy Wall Street movement hinged on the nuances of banking reforms.
Perhaps that's why, according to some estimates, only around 4,000 people showed up for the hunger striker's Mumbai demonstration Tuesday — compared with a daily turnout of 30,000 to 40,000 people in Delhi this summer.
But confusion and protest fatigue aren't Team Hazare's only problems.
At the beginning of the anti-corruption movement, Hazare succeeded in mobilizing people against an amorphous lot of dirty politicians he portrayed as opposing the Lokpal bill. Now, his team is attempting to shift that anger onto the government and, more particularly, the Congress party — announcing that he will campaign against the Congress during state elections in Uttar Pradesh this February.
Hazare and company maintain that the anti-corruption movement can no longer stand outside and above electoral politics. But now that Hazare has joined the fray, what will he argue? And, more importantly, who will he campaign for?
Even if the Congress-led UPA has failed to meet all Team Hazare's demands for the Lokpal bill, it can hardly be said that the Congress has taken no action against corruption — though belatedly, perhaps.
Along with its version of the ombudsman law, the government on Tuesday pushed through the lower house a law to protect whistleblowers and on Wednesday it also introduced a judicial accountability bill designed to set up a credible mechanism for investigating corruption complaints against judges.
Moreover, only some of Team Hazare's objections to the Lokpal bill, such as the decision not to grant it control over the Central Bureau of Investigation can be traced to the Congress. Other dilutions, such as the rejection of a proposed amendment to grant the Lokpal constitutional authority and a decision not to compel the individual states to create their own anti-corruption watchdogs, were concessions to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Singh's allies in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Trinamool Congress.
And both of the Congress party's main rivals in Uttar Pradesh — the caste-affiliated Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party — abstained from voting on the Lokpal bill at all.
Two things are certain. The war against corruption is far from over. And street protests will have limited usefulness in the next stage of the battle.
“At the end of the day you cannot get at something as nuanced as this with a few hundred people screaming,” said Madhavan. “The nuances have to be discussed in a civilized place, with people listening to each other. It doesn't always happen, but in some sense, parliament is supposed to do that.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111228/anti-corruption-bill-anna-hazare
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 28, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — The Indian government pushed a bill designed to fight corruption through the lower house of the parliament late Tuesday, in a move that has exposed the limitations of street-protest politics.
Demonstrators can demand that a law be passed and vow to vote out politicians who oppose it. But they still cannot draft bills themselves.
The government's so-called Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill would set up a powerful ombudsman to investigate and prosecute government officials for corruption, as the anti-corruption movement led by social activist Anna Hazare has been demanding since he first lauched a hunger strike this summer.
But the proposed law does not allow the ombudsman to initiate investigations independent of a complaint. It does not put low-level officers of the bureaucracy under the ombudsman's direct supervision, and it does not grant the office control over the Central Bureau of Investigation, India's chief law enforcement agency, or allow it to constitute its own investigation wing.
Moreover, the law gives the ruling government significant control over the selection of the members of the ombudsman's office.
All these supposed shortcomings — which Hazare's team has called “non-negotiable” — have prompted the activist to embark on yet another a hunger strike, this one three days long, in protest. And he has called on his supporters to force police to arrest them through mass acts of civil disobedience, beginning Jan. 1.
Team Hazare is hoping for a repeat of the massive, nationwide agitation that shook India's politicians out of complacency this August. At that time, tens of thousands of protesters — disgusted by corruption scandals surrounding the Commonwealth Games and the distribution of 2G telecom spectrum licenses — took to the streets in support of the activist's hunger strike.
But at least some experts argue that the government's anti-corruption law could have a salutary effect.
“We have to see how it plays out,” said M.R. Madhavan, a researcher at PRS Legislative Research. “A lot of it will depend on the personalities involved in the first few years. Many institutions at the end of the day are shaped by the people running them.”
“The Election Commission had largely been a somnolent body which was basically going through the motions of holding elections,” said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University.
“But under a man called T.N. Seshan in the late 1980s, early 1990s it became a much more formidable body, and a body that decided to take the statutory powers it possessed and genuinely implement them to make elections fair, open, honest and transparent.”
The niceties of the law notwithstanding, the Lokpal could accomplish the same transformation.
“I genuinely think that if you get a group of individuals in the Lokpal who are serious about this endeavor ... the Lokpal could become a similar institution,” Ganguly said, citing similar successes achieved by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
“A number of institutions in India do work, and do carry out the tasks they're expected to perform,” he said.
Before its proposal becomes a law, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government will also need to get the Lokpal bill through the upper house of the parliament — where the coalition does not have a majority. Debate is underway there as this article goes to press, but there are only several possible outcomes.
With the tacit support of two opposition parties that abstained from voting in the lower house, the bill could go through unchanged. It might be amended and returned to the lower house for reconsideration. It might be voted down, then later approved by a vote by the combined houses. Or it might be rejected and put off indefinitely, like a bill to set up a quota for women in the legislature that has theoretically been pending since it was passed by the upper house in March 2010.
Whether its Lokpal bill works or not, however, the government's success in pushing it through the lower house — where Singh's UPA enjoys a slim majority — has stolen much of Hazare's thunder.
It's easy to mobilize people who are angry because nothing is being done about all-pervasive corruption. It's far more difficult to rally the masses around a difference of opinion about the finer points of a piece of legislation — just imagine if the Occupy Wall Street movement hinged on the nuances of banking reforms.
Perhaps that's why, according to some estimates, only around 4,000 people showed up for the hunger striker's Mumbai demonstration Tuesday — compared with a daily turnout of 30,000 to 40,000 people in Delhi this summer.
But confusion and protest fatigue aren't Team Hazare's only problems.
At the beginning of the anti-corruption movement, Hazare succeeded in mobilizing people against an amorphous lot of dirty politicians he portrayed as opposing the Lokpal bill. Now, his team is attempting to shift that anger onto the government and, more particularly, the Congress party — announcing that he will campaign against the Congress during state elections in Uttar Pradesh this February.
Hazare and company maintain that the anti-corruption movement can no longer stand outside and above electoral politics. But now that Hazare has joined the fray, what will he argue? And, more importantly, who will he campaign for?
Even if the Congress-led UPA has failed to meet all Team Hazare's demands for the Lokpal bill, it can hardly be said that the Congress has taken no action against corruption — though belatedly, perhaps.
Along with its version of the ombudsman law, the government on Tuesday pushed through the lower house a law to protect whistleblowers and on Wednesday it also introduced a judicial accountability bill designed to set up a credible mechanism for investigating corruption complaints against judges.
Moreover, only some of Team Hazare's objections to the Lokpal bill, such as the decision not to grant it control over the Central Bureau of Investigation can be traced to the Congress. Other dilutions, such as the rejection of a proposed amendment to grant the Lokpal constitutional authority and a decision not to compel the individual states to create their own anti-corruption watchdogs, were concessions to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Singh's allies in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Trinamool Congress.
And both of the Congress party's main rivals in Uttar Pradesh — the caste-affiliated Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party — abstained from voting on the Lokpal bill at all.
Two things are certain. The war against corruption is far from over. And street protests will have limited usefulness in the next stage of the battle.
“At the end of the day you cannot get at something as nuanced as this with a few hundred people screaming,” said Madhavan. “The nuances have to be discussed in a civilized place, with people listening to each other. It doesn't always happen, but in some sense, parliament is supposed to do that.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111228/anti-corruption-bill-anna-hazare
Friday, December 09, 2011
The Futurists: Turning India's farms into factories
Super-bureaucrat Amitabh Kant aims to reverse 60 years of history with the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 9, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Don't bother looking for a bigger dream. Nobody has tried anything this crazy in India since George Everest set out to measure the British colony with trigonometry and a very, very long chain back in 1830.
Over the next 20 years, India will spend $90 billion to lay the foundations for 24 new cities, creating an industrial corridor stretching across the country from Delhi to Mumbai. And, for practically the first time since the 1950s, these new urban centers won't mushroom haphazardly, with roadways and drainage systems crammed in as an afterthought.
Their development will be carefully orchestrated by super-bureaucrat Amitabh Kant — an Indian every bit as ambitious as the Brit who surveyed the height of the world's tallest mountain.
“This in many ways marks a paradigm shift in India's thinking on infrastructure,” Kant said in an interview with GlobalPost. “It marks a paradigm shift in India's thinking on manufacturing. It marks a paradigm shift in India's thinking on urbanization.”
Since Mohandas Gandhi first said that India lives in its villages, this country has shunned big manufacturing and resisted urbanization, pushing farmer cooperatives and cottage industries as an alternative model for development.
As a result, cities have never been planned — at least not anyplace but on paper. Slums have mushroomed as migrants streamed in. And metropolises have morphed into megalopolises.
But if Kant's paradigm shift takes, that's about to change.
India needs 30 years or so of near-10 percent economic growth if it is to bring its massive population out of poverty. Industrialization and urbanization is the only way to do it.
According to Mckinsey & Co., 70 percent of GDP will come from cities by 2030. And Kant — a suave, erudite bureaucrat best known for developing the tourism ministry's “Incredible India” ad campaign — is in the driver's seat.
The lynchpin is a high-capacity railway dedicated to freight transport. Connecting Delhi to Mumbai, the 1500-kilometer, high-speed rail network would convert the cheap labor centers of India's hinterland into viable manufacturing hubs, by slashing the time needed to move goods to India's ports and major metros.
In the process, the so-called Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) would curb the disastrous, unplanned sprawl of India's two largest cities. It would check the daily migration of hundreds of thousands of destitute farm workers by transforming India from the world's back office into the world's manufacturing hub and creating millions of jobs. And it would solve some of the worst problems of existing Indian cities by providing green energy, clean water and affordable housing.
That is, if it materializes.
“The challenge is that since India has been a very reluctant urbanizer, how can we use good technology to make a quantum jump?” Kant said.
That's putting it mildly. The real trouble is that India is great at making plans, and terrible at executing them.
To anybody who has seen the situation on the ground, the Delhi Development Authority's (DDA) Master Plan 2021 reads like science fiction. And if the DDA's track record on its the master plans of 1962 and 2001 is any indicator, it's not likely to deliver on its new vision unless Mars attacks.
Other Indian city planners have proven just as impotent. So what gives Kant hope for this project, which is even bigger, and will depend on the goodwill of no less than seven different states?
Partly, it's blind faith. But there's method to Kant's madness, too.
Today, almost 65 percent of India's freight moves by truck, trundling down potholed, two-lane highways. It can take 12 to 14 days for a shipment from Delhi to reach Mumbai, which makes the cost of logistics ridiculously high. In contrast, his high-capacity train will put goods from the DMIC into India's ports within 24 hours.
At the same time, through the DMIC Development Corporation that Kant heads, the central government will fund and build what he calls the trunk infrastructure of the 24 manufacturing hubs along the railway.
“When that happens, you open up new areas on either side [of the tracks] which can be developed for manufacturing and feed this dedicated freight corridor,” he said.
That means Kant's team will lay out and build the roadways, drainage and sewers for the new cities, setting the framework before real-estate developers can lumber in and convert everything into residential high rises, as happened with many of India's ballyhooed Special Economic Zones.
It also means that the toughest pieces of the puzzle — low-cost housing, for instance — will be bought, paid for, and built by the central government before the industrial boom begins.
To make it happen, India has partnered with Japan to build the freight line, tapped the expertise of some of the world's biggest infrastructure, technology and architecture companies to plan the cities and sought funding and advice from international agencies.
“The important thing is to bring in a big vision, in terms of taking detailed designing and engineering to another level, and then ensuring that the project is implemented according to that detailed design,” said Kant.
Consider the first phase. By 2018, the freight line will be in place and the first seven manufacturing cities will be developed. Today, they don't even have names. They're still known as mouthfuls like Dadri-Noida-Ghaziabad and Pithampur-Dhar-Mhow, reflecting how they will merge smaller existing cities into large industrial metropolises.
But the plans already detail early-bird projects for items like a 1,000-acre integrated logistics hub in Greater Noida, outside New Delhi, an exhibition and convention center near Manesar, in Haryana, and an “aerotropolis” comprising a cargo terminal, warehouses and other facilities near Neemrana, in Rajasthan.
Map overlays depict a “Knowledge City” reminiscent of North Carolina's Research Triangle in the midst of farmland along the Delhi-Jaipur highway and skill development centers to provide technical training in places like provincial Madhya Pradesh.
Aquifer recharge systems and desalination plants, gas-fired power plants and solar-energy farms are slated for the deserts of Gujarat and Rajasthan. And so-called “smart communities” — utilizing urban planning and green technology to reduce the environmental impact of cities — have been drawn up for key locations along the corridor.
Science fiction? Maybe. Or maybe it's India's version of “If you build it, they will come.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 9, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Don't bother looking for a bigger dream. Nobody has tried anything this crazy in India since George Everest set out to measure the British colony with trigonometry and a very, very long chain back in 1830.
Over the next 20 years, India will spend $90 billion to lay the foundations for 24 new cities, creating an industrial corridor stretching across the country from Delhi to Mumbai. And, for practically the first time since the 1950s, these new urban centers won't mushroom haphazardly, with roadways and drainage systems crammed in as an afterthought.
Their development will be carefully orchestrated by super-bureaucrat Amitabh Kant — an Indian every bit as ambitious as the Brit who surveyed the height of the world's tallest mountain.
“This in many ways marks a paradigm shift in India's thinking on infrastructure,” Kant said in an interview with GlobalPost. “It marks a paradigm shift in India's thinking on manufacturing. It marks a paradigm shift in India's thinking on urbanization.”
Since Mohandas Gandhi first said that India lives in its villages, this country has shunned big manufacturing and resisted urbanization, pushing farmer cooperatives and cottage industries as an alternative model for development.
As a result, cities have never been planned — at least not anyplace but on paper. Slums have mushroomed as migrants streamed in. And metropolises have morphed into megalopolises.
But if Kant's paradigm shift takes, that's about to change.
India needs 30 years or so of near-10 percent economic growth if it is to bring its massive population out of poverty. Industrialization and urbanization is the only way to do it.
According to Mckinsey & Co., 70 percent of GDP will come from cities by 2030. And Kant — a suave, erudite bureaucrat best known for developing the tourism ministry's “Incredible India” ad campaign — is in the driver's seat.
The lynchpin is a high-capacity railway dedicated to freight transport. Connecting Delhi to Mumbai, the 1500-kilometer, high-speed rail network would convert the cheap labor centers of India's hinterland into viable manufacturing hubs, by slashing the time needed to move goods to India's ports and major metros.
In the process, the so-called Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) would curb the disastrous, unplanned sprawl of India's two largest cities. It would check the daily migration of hundreds of thousands of destitute farm workers by transforming India from the world's back office into the world's manufacturing hub and creating millions of jobs. And it would solve some of the worst problems of existing Indian cities by providing green energy, clean water and affordable housing.
That is, if it materializes.
“The challenge is that since India has been a very reluctant urbanizer, how can we use good technology to make a quantum jump?” Kant said.
That's putting it mildly. The real trouble is that India is great at making plans, and terrible at executing them.
To anybody who has seen the situation on the ground, the Delhi Development Authority's (DDA) Master Plan 2021 reads like science fiction. And if the DDA's track record on its the master plans of 1962 and 2001 is any indicator, it's not likely to deliver on its new vision unless Mars attacks.
Other Indian city planners have proven just as impotent. So what gives Kant hope for this project, which is even bigger, and will depend on the goodwill of no less than seven different states?
Partly, it's blind faith. But there's method to Kant's madness, too.
Today, almost 65 percent of India's freight moves by truck, trundling down potholed, two-lane highways. It can take 12 to 14 days for a shipment from Delhi to reach Mumbai, which makes the cost of logistics ridiculously high. In contrast, his high-capacity train will put goods from the DMIC into India's ports within 24 hours.
At the same time, through the DMIC Development Corporation that Kant heads, the central government will fund and build what he calls the trunk infrastructure of the 24 manufacturing hubs along the railway.
“When that happens, you open up new areas on either side [of the tracks] which can be developed for manufacturing and feed this dedicated freight corridor,” he said.
That means Kant's team will lay out and build the roadways, drainage and sewers for the new cities, setting the framework before real-estate developers can lumber in and convert everything into residential high rises, as happened with many of India's ballyhooed Special Economic Zones.
It also means that the toughest pieces of the puzzle — low-cost housing, for instance — will be bought, paid for, and built by the central government before the industrial boom begins.
To make it happen, India has partnered with Japan to build the freight line, tapped the expertise of some of the world's biggest infrastructure, technology and architecture companies to plan the cities and sought funding and advice from international agencies.
“The important thing is to bring in a big vision, in terms of taking detailed designing and engineering to another level, and then ensuring that the project is implemented according to that detailed design,” said Kant.
Consider the first phase. By 2018, the freight line will be in place and the first seven manufacturing cities will be developed. Today, they don't even have names. They're still known as mouthfuls like Dadri-Noida-Ghaziabad and Pithampur-Dhar-Mhow, reflecting how they will merge smaller existing cities into large industrial metropolises.
But the plans already detail early-bird projects for items like a 1,000-acre integrated logistics hub in Greater Noida, outside New Delhi, an exhibition and convention center near Manesar, in Haryana, and an “aerotropolis” comprising a cargo terminal, warehouses and other facilities near Neemrana, in Rajasthan.
Map overlays depict a “Knowledge City” reminiscent of North Carolina's Research Triangle in the midst of farmland along the Delhi-Jaipur highway and skill development centers to provide technical training in places like provincial Madhya Pradesh.
Aquifer recharge systems and desalination plants, gas-fired power plants and solar-energy farms are slated for the deserts of Gujarat and Rajasthan. And so-called “smart communities” — utilizing urban planning and green technology to reduce the environmental impact of cities — have been drawn up for key locations along the corridor.
Science fiction? Maybe. Or maybe it's India's version of “If you build it, they will come.”
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
India: The end of Manmohanomics?
Singh's legacy could depend on drawing a line in the sand on economic reforms.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 6, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Earlier this month, India's beleaguered prime minister drew a line in the sand. This weekend, he erased it. His legacy could well be determined by what happens next.
Here's what's on the scoreboard:
With his government seemingly paralyzed by corruption allegations, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tried to set the stage for a bold winter season, betting that the country's future depends on the government's ability to push through economic reforms. But now it looks as though he will have to backtrack on his first big ticket play since the 2008 nuclear pact with the United States, putting a plan to open up the retail sector to foreign direct investment (FDI) in a deep freeze.
That could be a big blow for the country, according to India Inc.
“The next stage of our growth cannot take place without a huge influx of capital from across the globe,” said Vijayan Krishnmurthy, who headed JP Morgan Asset Management in India before moving to social investment firm Mi-India. But that capital won't come if it looks like India is regressing to the policies of 1962, he said.
With that same line of thinking, earlier this month, Singh moved to raise the cap on FDI in multi-brand retail stores like Walmart to 51 percent and to allow wholly owned single-brand stores like Ikea or Reebok — which proponents say will both create jobs and lower prices.
But to block the new FDI policy, legislators from the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) partners from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Trinamool Congress prevented the parliament from conducting any business through the first week of the month-long session. And now it appears that Singh will admit defeat.
An official announcement from the government is expected Wednesday. But Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee already told reporters over the weekend that Singh had agreed to suspend the issue “until a consensus is evolved.”
And Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee reportedly told the leadership of the BJP on Monday that the policy has been put on hold, only to have it thrown back at him that the Opposition will accept nothing less than a full reversal.
That's the score. Now, for the sake of establishing his legacy in what will doubtless be his last term, Singh needs to hit a buzzer beater.
Entering his second term with a near majority, Singh raised high hopes among Indian business leaders that “Manmohanomics” — combining economic liberalization with social welfare spending for the poor — would set the stage for the decade or so of 10 percent economic growth the country needs to pull its people out of poverty. But corruption scandals have prevented his government from making any significant progress, at least on the liberalization part of the formula.
Desperate, on Nov. 22 Singh pleaded with his political rivals to ignore the smell of blood in the water at the beginning of the winter session of parliament. Investor sentiment was plunging, economic growth was slowing and, just like the European Union, India could “also go down” if gridlock continued, he warned.
Indeed, a lot more than the future of Walmart is at stake.
India's economic growth dropped to 6.9 percent for the quarter that ended in September, marking its lowest clip in two years, and there was virtually no growth in FDI. Manufacturing projects have been stalled by land acquisition problems and environmental concerns. Infrastructure projects have been delayed by government sloth. And India continues to rank poorly in international surveys like the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Report — where it comes in at 132 out of 183 countries ranging from Singapore to Chad.
“Investor sentiment is low. There's no doubt about it,” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poors. “If you take macroeconomic scenario outside India and in India, there's hardly any good news”
Meanwhile, several more key reforms are slated for the docket before the session ends.
In addition to opening up the retail sector, Singh reportedly hopes to push through reforms in India's laws governing land acquisition and the mining sector, for example.
Both issues are at least as contentious as FDI in retail. A bloody battle in 2007 over the acquisition of land effectively ended the 30-year reign of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal last term. And rapacious mining practices lie at the root of the Maoist rebellion simmering in the jungles of central and eastern India. Yet India's industrialization cannot proceed without land for factories or the iron and coal needed to build and fuel them.
“[These issues] are actually becoming binding on growth now,” said Joshi. “The mining issue needs to be sorted out, or it will lead to constraints for the steel sector and power sector. Then you need land acquisition issues to be made more transparent and accountable.”
Before the retail FDI debacle, the word was that Singh would also push forward on reforms ranging from allowing foreign investment in India's airlines and pension funds, as well. But at present, all the signs seem pointed in the wrong direction.
Political analysts say Singh and his colleagues miscalculated foolishly in introducing the FDI measure without first selling the policy to the broader Congress Party and negotiating for the support of its allies in the UPA. So some opposition emerged simply out of resentment of perceived unilateralism. And the subsequent climbdown only confirmed that Singh and company had blundered forward with the move without first playing out all the possible contingencies.
Whether it's good for the country or not, that doesn't augur well for Singh's economic agenda. And it leaves his opponents with the upper hand.
“They feel that if they paralyze the government and paralyze parliament, they will gain,” said a political analyst who asked not to be named. “Congress needs to confront them. But they're not willing to do that. For that, you have to be confident in yourself.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111205/india-manmohan-singh-economic-reforms-liberalization
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 6, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Earlier this month, India's beleaguered prime minister drew a line in the sand. This weekend, he erased it. His legacy could well be determined by what happens next.
Here's what's on the scoreboard:
With his government seemingly paralyzed by corruption allegations, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tried to set the stage for a bold winter season, betting that the country's future depends on the government's ability to push through economic reforms. But now it looks as though he will have to backtrack on his first big ticket play since the 2008 nuclear pact with the United States, putting a plan to open up the retail sector to foreign direct investment (FDI) in a deep freeze.
That could be a big blow for the country, according to India Inc.
“The next stage of our growth cannot take place without a huge influx of capital from across the globe,” said Vijayan Krishnmurthy, who headed JP Morgan Asset Management in India before moving to social investment firm Mi-India. But that capital won't come if it looks like India is regressing to the policies of 1962, he said.
With that same line of thinking, earlier this month, Singh moved to raise the cap on FDI in multi-brand retail stores like Walmart to 51 percent and to allow wholly owned single-brand stores like Ikea or Reebok — which proponents say will both create jobs and lower prices.
But to block the new FDI policy, legislators from the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) partners from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Trinamool Congress prevented the parliament from conducting any business through the first week of the month-long session. And now it appears that Singh will admit defeat.
An official announcement from the government is expected Wednesday. But Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee already told reporters over the weekend that Singh had agreed to suspend the issue “until a consensus is evolved.”
And Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee reportedly told the leadership of the BJP on Monday that the policy has been put on hold, only to have it thrown back at him that the Opposition will accept nothing less than a full reversal.
That's the score. Now, for the sake of establishing his legacy in what will doubtless be his last term, Singh needs to hit a buzzer beater.
Entering his second term with a near majority, Singh raised high hopes among Indian business leaders that “Manmohanomics” — combining economic liberalization with social welfare spending for the poor — would set the stage for the decade or so of 10 percent economic growth the country needs to pull its people out of poverty. But corruption scandals have prevented his government from making any significant progress, at least on the liberalization part of the formula.
Desperate, on Nov. 22 Singh pleaded with his political rivals to ignore the smell of blood in the water at the beginning of the winter session of parliament. Investor sentiment was plunging, economic growth was slowing and, just like the European Union, India could “also go down” if gridlock continued, he warned.
Indeed, a lot more than the future of Walmart is at stake.
India's economic growth dropped to 6.9 percent for the quarter that ended in September, marking its lowest clip in two years, and there was virtually no growth in FDI. Manufacturing projects have been stalled by land acquisition problems and environmental concerns. Infrastructure projects have been delayed by government sloth. And India continues to rank poorly in international surveys like the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Report — where it comes in at 132 out of 183 countries ranging from Singapore to Chad.
“Investor sentiment is low. There's no doubt about it,” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poors. “If you take macroeconomic scenario outside India and in India, there's hardly any good news”
Meanwhile, several more key reforms are slated for the docket before the session ends.
In addition to opening up the retail sector, Singh reportedly hopes to push through reforms in India's laws governing land acquisition and the mining sector, for example.
Both issues are at least as contentious as FDI in retail. A bloody battle in 2007 over the acquisition of land effectively ended the 30-year reign of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal last term. And rapacious mining practices lie at the root of the Maoist rebellion simmering in the jungles of central and eastern India. Yet India's industrialization cannot proceed without land for factories or the iron and coal needed to build and fuel them.
“[These issues] are actually becoming binding on growth now,” said Joshi. “The mining issue needs to be sorted out, or it will lead to constraints for the steel sector and power sector. Then you need land acquisition issues to be made more transparent and accountable.”
Before the retail FDI debacle, the word was that Singh would also push forward on reforms ranging from allowing foreign investment in India's airlines and pension funds, as well. But at present, all the signs seem pointed in the wrong direction.
Political analysts say Singh and his colleagues miscalculated foolishly in introducing the FDI measure without first selling the policy to the broader Congress Party and negotiating for the support of its allies in the UPA. So some opposition emerged simply out of resentment of perceived unilateralism. And the subsequent climbdown only confirmed that Singh and company had blundered forward with the move without first playing out all the possible contingencies.
Whether it's good for the country or not, that doesn't augur well for Singh's economic agenda. And it leaves his opponents with the upper hand.
“They feel that if they paralyze the government and paralyze parliament, they will gain,” said a political analyst who asked not to be named. “Congress needs to confront them. But they're not willing to do that. For that, you have to be confident in yourself.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111205/india-manmohan-singh-economic-reforms-liberalization
Monday, December 05, 2011
India: an army of ethical hackers
For the coming cyber war, an army of geeks offers India its services.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 5, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — To paraphrase an old saw: It takes a geek to catch a geek. That's the logic behind a new Indian response to the growing threat of cyber war, anyway.
Indian authorities were stunned by the impact of the Stuxnet virus on Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz last year. Now, in the wake of repeated assaults on Indian company and government web sites, an organization of self-professed "white hat" hackers is recruiting its own army.
“If you see the statistics, less than 15 percent of Indians use the internet, but we are already No. 1 when it comes to virus infections and we are No. 2 in cyber crimes,” said Rajshekhar Murthy, an Indian hacker and entrepreneur.
Last month, at Malcon — the malware conference Murthy founded in 2010 — the security expert's nonprofit Information Security and Analysis Center (ISAC) unveiled plans to create a national registry of hackers with the training to protect the country's critical electronic infrastructure.
Called the National Security Database (NSD), the body will accredit and train hackers who pass an exam that will cost about $500 a whack.
“The NSD is a project to address the broader need, not just to identify the best security professionals in India,” said Murthy. The idea is to identify “where these professionals can assist the country not only in solving cyber crimes but in addressing policy issues and assisting in reforms to create better governance of IT security across critical infrastructure projects.”
Not a moment too soon, either.
“As the government is trying to spread its reach through financial inclusion and e-governance projects, it's crucial that we are able to handle cyber crime,” said Murthy.
At a curtain raiser for next year's Global Cyber Security Summit in New Delhi, Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal called for just such a community of ethical hackers last week.
And for good reason. Already, a drive to eliminate corruption and increase efficiency through e-governance had made many government services vulnerable to attack, and Sibal aims to introduce a bill in parliament this session mandating that all government services be automated.
"To combat cyber crimes and make the cyberspace secure, there is a need for greater government-to-government collaboration on sharing of information, global vision to deal with hackers, legal framework that addresses the requirements at the global, and wider public-private collaboration," Sibal told reporters last month.
Last year, state-owned ONGC found some of its oil rigs had been infected by Stuxnet — and only narrowly escaped catastrophe because they operate on ABB, not Siemens, systems, according to a recent report in India's Tehelka magazine. Similar virus problems were detected at a power generation facility in Gujarat and a communications satellite providing the feed to state-owned Doordarshan television and several DTH broadcasters.
And researchers from the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto claimed in 2010 that Chinese hackers had cracked Indian government computers to dig out sensitive information related to defence, foreign affairs and the Dalai Lama, according to another report.
But can a team of rogue operators compete with state-sponsored cyber espionage?
When Stuxnet hit Iran, experts immediately fingered Mossad and the CIA because the man-hours needed to create the complex worm more or less guaranteed it was a state-sponsored project. And one of the biggest failures of India's intelligence agencies is that they rarely listen to each other — much less to outsiders who literally speak in code.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111204/india-hackers-technology-computers
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 5, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — To paraphrase an old saw: It takes a geek to catch a geek. That's the logic behind a new Indian response to the growing threat of cyber war, anyway.
Indian authorities were stunned by the impact of the Stuxnet virus on Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz last year. Now, in the wake of repeated assaults on Indian company and government web sites, an organization of self-professed "white hat" hackers is recruiting its own army.
“If you see the statistics, less than 15 percent of Indians use the internet, but we are already No. 1 when it comes to virus infections and we are No. 2 in cyber crimes,” said Rajshekhar Murthy, an Indian hacker and entrepreneur.
Last month, at Malcon — the malware conference Murthy founded in 2010 — the security expert's nonprofit Information Security and Analysis Center (ISAC) unveiled plans to create a national registry of hackers with the training to protect the country's critical electronic infrastructure.
Called the National Security Database (NSD), the body will accredit and train hackers who pass an exam that will cost about $500 a whack.
“The NSD is a project to address the broader need, not just to identify the best security professionals in India,” said Murthy. The idea is to identify “where these professionals can assist the country not only in solving cyber crimes but in addressing policy issues and assisting in reforms to create better governance of IT security across critical infrastructure projects.”
Not a moment too soon, either.
“As the government is trying to spread its reach through financial inclusion and e-governance projects, it's crucial that we are able to handle cyber crime,” said Murthy.
At a curtain raiser for next year's Global Cyber Security Summit in New Delhi, Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal called for just such a community of ethical hackers last week.
And for good reason. Already, a drive to eliminate corruption and increase efficiency through e-governance had made many government services vulnerable to attack, and Sibal aims to introduce a bill in parliament this session mandating that all government services be automated.
"To combat cyber crimes and make the cyberspace secure, there is a need for greater government-to-government collaboration on sharing of information, global vision to deal with hackers, legal framework that addresses the requirements at the global, and wider public-private collaboration," Sibal told reporters last month.
Last year, state-owned ONGC found some of its oil rigs had been infected by Stuxnet — and only narrowly escaped catastrophe because they operate on ABB, not Siemens, systems, according to a recent report in India's Tehelka magazine. Similar virus problems were detected at a power generation facility in Gujarat and a communications satellite providing the feed to state-owned Doordarshan television and several DTH broadcasters.
And researchers from the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto claimed in 2010 that Chinese hackers had cracked Indian government computers to dig out sensitive information related to defence, foreign affairs and the Dalai Lama, according to another report.
But can a team of rogue operators compete with state-sponsored cyber espionage?
When Stuxnet hit Iran, experts immediately fingered Mossad and the CIA because the man-hours needed to create the complex worm more or less guaranteed it was a state-sponsored project. And one of the biggest failures of India's intelligence agencies is that they rarely listen to each other — much less to outsiders who literally speak in code.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111204/india-hackers-technology-computers
Friday, December 02, 2011
India and China: Commence "cold peace"
China says muzzle the Dalai Lama. India says no. China calls off talks.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 2, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — The deal George W. Bush offered the world at the beginning of the Iraq war sounded tough. But the choice Beijing has offered New Delhi is even tougher: You're either against us or ... you're against us.
Beijing called off talks with Delhi this week that were meant to address their long-running border dispute. The decision followed a spat over the Dalai Lama's planned speaking engagement at a meeting of Buddhist leaders in the Indian capital.
Despite US President Barack Obama's emphatic statements about America retaining preeminence in Asia — most recently in the form of an address at a gathering in Indonesia of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — New Delhi has held out hope that it can remain non-aligned amid China and the US' struggle for dominance.
But, according to analysts, Beijing's decision to pull out of talks with Delhi may wind up pushing India closer to Washington after all, ratcheting up tensions between Asia's largest military powers.
“The soap opera [of India-China relations] just got a little interesting,” said Jabin Jacob, assistant director at the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies. “It's not really a cold war, but sort of a cold peace.”
According to Indian media, China was unhappy that the border talks were to coincide with the conclave of Buddhist leaders, where the Dalai Lama was set to deliver the valedictory address.
Beijing views the Dalai Lama as a figure intent on undermining China's power and pushing for Tibetan independence, although the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader has repeatedly said he wishes for autonomy for Tibetan people rather than independence.
Beijing pressured New Delhi to cancel the conference or bar the Dalai Lama from speaking. When India refused, it cancelled special representative Dai Bingguo's planned meeting with Indian national security advisor Shivshankar Menon.
According to India's former national security advisor, America's responses to China's growing economic and military might have only made Beijing more anxious about perceived attempts at containment. “Now that there is talk of Japan, US and India sitting down and talking about [how to react to China's growing power], and perhaps getting Australia, the Chinese dream of becoming No. 1 in the world [has been] shaken,” said Brajesh Mishra, who was national security advisor to India's prime minister from 1998 to 2004. As a result, he said, “the relationship between India and China becomes very strained.”
China's claim to parts of Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh — which Beijing likes to call “South Tibet” — have fueled the long-running border dispute between the two countries. But the cancellation of the high-level diplomatic talks had as much to do with the East Asia Summit as it did with border issues or the Dalai Lama.
“Many people in China — policy makers and analysts — are indeed concerned about Indian involvement in the South China Sea,” said Li Mingjiang, a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.
“Some Chinese analysts believe that ... India wants to play the South China Sea card against China in order to complicate China's strategic environment in East Asia and gain some leverage in India-China relations.”
By demanding that India muzzle the Dalai Lama, Beijing established that it aims to continue to worry and provoke New Delhi under the guise of protecting itself from meddling in its internal affairs. Beijing believes a good offense is the best defense, Indian foreign policy experts say. And such protestations against purported wrongs keep India too busy parrying to make its own thrusts on issues like the reported massing of Chinese soldiers in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and alleged incursions across the disputed borders in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh.
At the same time, India's once-conciliatory Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has shown a new willingness to push back.
“The Indians finally discovered that they have a spine,” said Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly. “Supineness before the PRC had not really paid off. The demands simply escalated.”
So far, statements from both sides have been carefully calibrated. Though New Delhi refused to interfere with the international Buddhist conference — which hosted some 800 Buddhist spiritual leaders Nov. 27 to 30 — India's president and prime minister avoided the event in deference to Chinese concerns. However, when China subsequently sought to compel the governor and chief minister of West Bengal to steer clear of a public appearance by the Dalai Lama in Kolkata on Thursday, the two officials refused to allow Beijing to dictate their itineraries. Moreover, New Delhi reportedly plans to register a protest with Beijing over its breach of protocol in writing directly to officials in West Bengal instead of going through the central government.
Similarly, even as Beijing blasted the Dalai Lama as a separatist and insisted it would not tolerate any nation providing a platform for his “anti-China” activities, a foreign ministry spokesman told a gathering of Indian reporters that work was already underway to reschedule the postponed border talks.
Yet, only a day or two later, Chinese officials wrote to the chief secretary of West Bengal saying that any official presence at the Dalai Lama's speech implied an endorsement of those self-same "anti-China" activities.
The postponement of the border talks itself may come at a cost to India-China relations, said Shrikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Though progress on the border dispute was unlikely, Dai's discussions with Menon were meant to lay the groundwork for a subsequent visit by Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping, whom observers expect will succeed Hu Jintao as the general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012 and as China's president in 2013.
China bristles at US troop build up in Australia
“Xi Jinping's visit could have been useful and crucial,” Kondapalli said. “[And] if Dai Bingguo doesn't make it over the next one month or so, it would be difficult for Xi Jinping to visit.”
Meanwhile, China and India continue to jockey for influence in multilateral regional bodies like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The two nations are edging ever closer to becoming direct economic competitors.
Mutual distrust has mounted as both sides shore up their defenses. Each interprets the other's manuevers as an offensive threat. In recent months, India has declared it will raise 100,000 troops for stationing along its border with China, including a regiment equipped with cruise missiles.
“All this has led to a very uneasy situation between the two countries,” said Mishra, former national security advisor.
And there's no sign yet of an early thaw.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (December 2, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — The deal George W. Bush offered the world at the beginning of the Iraq war sounded tough. But the choice Beijing has offered New Delhi is even tougher: You're either against us or ... you're against us.
Beijing called off talks with Delhi this week that were meant to address their long-running border dispute. The decision followed a spat over the Dalai Lama's planned speaking engagement at a meeting of Buddhist leaders in the Indian capital.
Despite US President Barack Obama's emphatic statements about America retaining preeminence in Asia — most recently in the form of an address at a gathering in Indonesia of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — New Delhi has held out hope that it can remain non-aligned amid China and the US' struggle for dominance.
But, according to analysts, Beijing's decision to pull out of talks with Delhi may wind up pushing India closer to Washington after all, ratcheting up tensions between Asia's largest military powers.
“The soap opera [of India-China relations] just got a little interesting,” said Jabin Jacob, assistant director at the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies. “It's not really a cold war, but sort of a cold peace.”
According to Indian media, China was unhappy that the border talks were to coincide with the conclave of Buddhist leaders, where the Dalai Lama was set to deliver the valedictory address.
Beijing views the Dalai Lama as a figure intent on undermining China's power and pushing for Tibetan independence, although the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader has repeatedly said he wishes for autonomy for Tibetan people rather than independence.
Beijing pressured New Delhi to cancel the conference or bar the Dalai Lama from speaking. When India refused, it cancelled special representative Dai Bingguo's planned meeting with Indian national security advisor Shivshankar Menon.
According to India's former national security advisor, America's responses to China's growing economic and military might have only made Beijing more anxious about perceived attempts at containment. “Now that there is talk of Japan, US and India sitting down and talking about [how to react to China's growing power], and perhaps getting Australia, the Chinese dream of becoming No. 1 in the world [has been] shaken,” said Brajesh Mishra, who was national security advisor to India's prime minister from 1998 to 2004. As a result, he said, “the relationship between India and China becomes very strained.”
China's claim to parts of Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh — which Beijing likes to call “South Tibet” — have fueled the long-running border dispute between the two countries. But the cancellation of the high-level diplomatic talks had as much to do with the East Asia Summit as it did with border issues or the Dalai Lama.
“Many people in China — policy makers and analysts — are indeed concerned about Indian involvement in the South China Sea,” said Li Mingjiang, a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.
“Some Chinese analysts believe that ... India wants to play the South China Sea card against China in order to complicate China's strategic environment in East Asia and gain some leverage in India-China relations.”
By demanding that India muzzle the Dalai Lama, Beijing established that it aims to continue to worry and provoke New Delhi under the guise of protecting itself from meddling in its internal affairs. Beijing believes a good offense is the best defense, Indian foreign policy experts say. And such protestations against purported wrongs keep India too busy parrying to make its own thrusts on issues like the reported massing of Chinese soldiers in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and alleged incursions across the disputed borders in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh.
At the same time, India's once-conciliatory Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has shown a new willingness to push back.
“The Indians finally discovered that they have a spine,” said Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly. “Supineness before the PRC had not really paid off. The demands simply escalated.”
So far, statements from both sides have been carefully calibrated. Though New Delhi refused to interfere with the international Buddhist conference — which hosted some 800 Buddhist spiritual leaders Nov. 27 to 30 — India's president and prime minister avoided the event in deference to Chinese concerns. However, when China subsequently sought to compel the governor and chief minister of West Bengal to steer clear of a public appearance by the Dalai Lama in Kolkata on Thursday, the two officials refused to allow Beijing to dictate their itineraries. Moreover, New Delhi reportedly plans to register a protest with Beijing over its breach of protocol in writing directly to officials in West Bengal instead of going through the central government.
Similarly, even as Beijing blasted the Dalai Lama as a separatist and insisted it would not tolerate any nation providing a platform for his “anti-China” activities, a foreign ministry spokesman told a gathering of Indian reporters that work was already underway to reschedule the postponed border talks.
Yet, only a day or two later, Chinese officials wrote to the chief secretary of West Bengal saying that any official presence at the Dalai Lama's speech implied an endorsement of those self-same "anti-China" activities.
The postponement of the border talks itself may come at a cost to India-China relations, said Shrikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Though progress on the border dispute was unlikely, Dai's discussions with Menon were meant to lay the groundwork for a subsequent visit by Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping, whom observers expect will succeed Hu Jintao as the general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012 and as China's president in 2013.
China bristles at US troop build up in Australia
“Xi Jinping's visit could have been useful and crucial,” Kondapalli said. “[And] if Dai Bingguo doesn't make it over the next one month or so, it would be difficult for Xi Jinping to visit.”
Meanwhile, China and India continue to jockey for influence in multilateral regional bodies like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The two nations are edging ever closer to becoming direct economic competitors.
Mutual distrust has mounted as both sides shore up their defenses. Each interprets the other's manuevers as an offensive threat. In recent months, India has declared it will raise 100,000 troops for stationing along its border with China, including a regiment equipped with cruise missiles.
“All this has led to a very uneasy situation between the two countries,” said Mishra, former national security advisor.
And there's no sign yet of an early thaw.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Rice 2.0: Golden rice a golden opportunity?
Genetically modified golden rice could save millions of lives, but in India it may never get into the ground.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 28, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — When Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer unveiled genetically modified golden rice a decade ago, they promised to save millions of lives across India and other developing countries by providing the poor and malnourished a ready source of betacarotene.
But in India, opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMO) may well kill the initiative before it takes off.
“I have no hesitation in saying that we will make all efforts to stop it,” said Devinder Sharma, an agricultural researcher and farmers' advocate based in the Punjab.
In many respects, golden rice represents the fantastic potential of GM foods. But because of the method used to create it — piggybacking genes from maize on a kind of bacteria found in the soil to induce the plant to produce betacarotene in the rice kernel — opposition remains fierce.
Environmentalists fear the new variety might spread and overwhelm other native crops. Anti-globalization activists fear that the new technology represents the thin end of the wedge for multinational corporations seeking to make slaves of the small farmer. And advocates of organic farming fear that “tampering with nature” may result in unknown health costs.
“Sensible people should be aware that this [opposition] is not scientifically justified at all,” said Adrian Dubock, executive secretary of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board and the architect of the project designed to distribute golden rice to the world's poor.
And those fears could be costly, according to Dubock. While the vision problems associated with Vitamin A deficiency are better known, it also causes immune system problems that are especially vicious among pregnant women and newborn children.
“The latest WHO figures [from 2005] have shown that between 23 and 34 percent of child mortality could be prevented by having a universal source of vitamin A,” Dubock said. “Similarly, with mothers about 40 percent of maternal mortality could be prevented.”
Proponents of technological solutions to the world's food and nutrition problems believe golden rice could be the answer.
After some tweaks to the original strain, the latest generation of the genetic modification — known as the r event — promises to provide as much as 50 percent of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin A for poor people who consume as little as 40 grams of golden rice a day. At least one study of a theoretical plan to give the modified rice to poor farmers claims that it would be 50 percent more efficient than the current efforts to provide dietary supplements.
And the technology's inventors compelled the owners of the patent, a biotechnology company called Syngenta, to allow poor farmers around the world free access to the new variety as long as they earn less than $10,000 a year — ostensibly eliminating fears about industrialized agriculture that have plagued other GMO crops like Monsanto's Bt Cotton.
“All the normal arguments don't apply here,” said Dubock. “This is a gift from the inventors.”
Here in India, however, farmer advocates and environmental activists view that gift as a Trojan Horse.
“They are using the humanitarian window to actually push for GM acceptance. This is a PR exercise, nothing beyond that,” said Sharma. “Once you accept golden rice, you're accepting all kinds of GM crops. That's their agenda.”
How paranoid that sounds depends on your faith in the world's multinational corporations and multilateral aid agencies. According to a Golden Rice Project backgrounder, “If golden rice is successfully introduced, it will additionally facilitate similar projects in the future.”
Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, research is already underway on genetically modified bananas, cassava and sorghum — as well as another version of golden rice that incorporates iron, zinc, protein and Vitamin E. And Bayer, Mogen, Monsanto, Novartis and Zeneca all waived patents to allow golden rice to be given away free to poor farmers. That was not the case for Bt Brinjal or Bt Cotton.
Researchers in the Philippines are optimistic that they will submit all the necessary safety information to the government as early as 2013 and many believe that the introduction of golden rice as a staple crop will follow in short order.
But in India — where the problem of Vitamin A deficiency is much larger in scale — it promises to take much longer.
India has already introduced the golden rice gene into locally grown varieties in isolated greenhouses, as mandated by law. But before it can be distributed to farmers, researchers must conduct additional trials in real-world conditions in isolated fields and satisfy additional safety regulations.
Assuming that goes well, then planners must work out a strategy for introducing the crop without damaging India's lucrative export trade in Basmati rice — since contamination of a single shipment with a few grains of GMO rice could scare off importers in the European Union, where consumer anxiety over GM food is high.
“Currently we can say we are in the product development phase,” said S.R. Rao, who in his former role as director of India's Department of Biotechnology first pushed for introducing golden rice in India.
“The future of golden rice will depend on how we address regulatory concerns, how we communicate to the public and how we generate public acceptance. That is the challenge.”
In India, opposition to GMOs has never been stronger. Despite three years of research that cleared a GM variety of eggplant as safe for cultivation and consumption, last year activists succeeded in blocking the introduction of Bt Brinjal — a pesticide-resistant strain developed by Monsanto and Maharastra-based Mahyco.
Opposition to Bt Cotton — which now accounts for more than 40 percent of the cotton grown in India — has also gathered steam as activists link corporate control over seeds to debt-related farmer suicides that have killed upwards of 5,000 farmers in the cotton-growing region of Maharashtra since 2005, though researchers have attributed the problem to various other causes as well.
As New York Times columnist David Rieff argued recently, advocates of organic farming are gaining sway over the technology-friendly agriculturalists bred by the green revolution with the ascendency of India's right to food movement.
“Because of the Bt Brinjal fiasco, there is a lot of demoralization in the scientific community,” said Rao. “While the regulatory system is working to an extent and the guidelines are getting slowly, slowly built up, at the end of the tunnel there is no light.”
For golden rice, that leaves a complex web of opposition that goes beyond health and safety concerns that GMO proponents argue have no foundation in science.
For example, initially Indian opponents of GMOs used some cocktail-napkin math to claim poor women would have to eat seven to nine kilograms of rice per day to get the benefits that golden rice advocates promised. When researchers created new varieties to deliver more betacarotene, their opponents moved the goalposts, introducing the problem of too much Vitamin A — which can reach toxic levels through supplements, but not from the body's conversion of betacarotene.
Simultaneously, critics question whether the poor people targeted by the program have the reserves of body fat needed to absorb and process a micronutrient like betacarotene into Vitamin A. Moreover, they argue that pushing a “monoculture” that would reduce the biodiversity of rice might put India at risk of an ecological disaster like the Irish potato famine — in which a potato blight killed around a million people dependent on a single staple crop for food.
“We are faced with what happened during the potato famine at any time,” said Sharma, in a characteristic example of the activist reaction to technology-based solutions. “It can happen in the case of rice. The narrower the genetic base, the greater the problems you are facing.”
That's an alarmist view. Despite decades of industrialized agriculture around the world, there has been no event similar to the potato famine since the 19th century.
However, some farmers and health workers in India and other countries have noted detrimental effects from the so-called monocultures brought about by the introduction of high-yield hybrids — particularly during India's green revolution.
In the Garwhal region of the Himalayas, for instance, activists from Beej Bachao Andolan (Seed Savers) re-introduced indigenous strains of rice after a drought decimated the green revolution's high-yield hybrids. And in the breadbasket region of Haryana and Punjab, environmental groups allege that high rates of certain cancers are the result of the massive doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides required for green revolution crops.
That means that, at least in India, golden rice could face a long wait.
“It's still in the advanced research stage,” said Rao. “We want to determine by the end of the year whether we are ready to enter the regulatory approval phase, through field trials. So we are scheduled for a major review in the next month.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111122/rice-20-golden-rice-genetically-modified-organisms-vitamin-A
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 28, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — When Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer unveiled genetically modified golden rice a decade ago, they promised to save millions of lives across India and other developing countries by providing the poor and malnourished a ready source of betacarotene.
But in India, opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMO) may well kill the initiative before it takes off.
“I have no hesitation in saying that we will make all efforts to stop it,” said Devinder Sharma, an agricultural researcher and farmers' advocate based in the Punjab.
In many respects, golden rice represents the fantastic potential of GM foods. But because of the method used to create it — piggybacking genes from maize on a kind of bacteria found in the soil to induce the plant to produce betacarotene in the rice kernel — opposition remains fierce.
Environmentalists fear the new variety might spread and overwhelm other native crops. Anti-globalization activists fear that the new technology represents the thin end of the wedge for multinational corporations seeking to make slaves of the small farmer. And advocates of organic farming fear that “tampering with nature” may result in unknown health costs.
“Sensible people should be aware that this [opposition] is not scientifically justified at all,” said Adrian Dubock, executive secretary of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board and the architect of the project designed to distribute golden rice to the world's poor.
And those fears could be costly, according to Dubock. While the vision problems associated with Vitamin A deficiency are better known, it also causes immune system problems that are especially vicious among pregnant women and newborn children.
“The latest WHO figures [from 2005] have shown that between 23 and 34 percent of child mortality could be prevented by having a universal source of vitamin A,” Dubock said. “Similarly, with mothers about 40 percent of maternal mortality could be prevented.”
Proponents of technological solutions to the world's food and nutrition problems believe golden rice could be the answer.
After some tweaks to the original strain, the latest generation of the genetic modification — known as the r event — promises to provide as much as 50 percent of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin A for poor people who consume as little as 40 grams of golden rice a day. At least one study of a theoretical plan to give the modified rice to poor farmers claims that it would be 50 percent more efficient than the current efforts to provide dietary supplements.
And the technology's inventors compelled the owners of the patent, a biotechnology company called Syngenta, to allow poor farmers around the world free access to the new variety as long as they earn less than $10,000 a year — ostensibly eliminating fears about industrialized agriculture that have plagued other GMO crops like Monsanto's Bt Cotton.
“All the normal arguments don't apply here,” said Dubock. “This is a gift from the inventors.”
Here in India, however, farmer advocates and environmental activists view that gift as a Trojan Horse.
“They are using the humanitarian window to actually push for GM acceptance. This is a PR exercise, nothing beyond that,” said Sharma. “Once you accept golden rice, you're accepting all kinds of GM crops. That's their agenda.”
How paranoid that sounds depends on your faith in the world's multinational corporations and multilateral aid agencies. According to a Golden Rice Project backgrounder, “If golden rice is successfully introduced, it will additionally facilitate similar projects in the future.”
Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, research is already underway on genetically modified bananas, cassava and sorghum — as well as another version of golden rice that incorporates iron, zinc, protein and Vitamin E. And Bayer, Mogen, Monsanto, Novartis and Zeneca all waived patents to allow golden rice to be given away free to poor farmers. That was not the case for Bt Brinjal or Bt Cotton.
Researchers in the Philippines are optimistic that they will submit all the necessary safety information to the government as early as 2013 and many believe that the introduction of golden rice as a staple crop will follow in short order.
But in India — where the problem of Vitamin A deficiency is much larger in scale — it promises to take much longer.
India has already introduced the golden rice gene into locally grown varieties in isolated greenhouses, as mandated by law. But before it can be distributed to farmers, researchers must conduct additional trials in real-world conditions in isolated fields and satisfy additional safety regulations.
Assuming that goes well, then planners must work out a strategy for introducing the crop without damaging India's lucrative export trade in Basmati rice — since contamination of a single shipment with a few grains of GMO rice could scare off importers in the European Union, where consumer anxiety over GM food is high.
“Currently we can say we are in the product development phase,” said S.R. Rao, who in his former role as director of India's Department of Biotechnology first pushed for introducing golden rice in India.
“The future of golden rice will depend on how we address regulatory concerns, how we communicate to the public and how we generate public acceptance. That is the challenge.”
In India, opposition to GMOs has never been stronger. Despite three years of research that cleared a GM variety of eggplant as safe for cultivation and consumption, last year activists succeeded in blocking the introduction of Bt Brinjal — a pesticide-resistant strain developed by Monsanto and Maharastra-based Mahyco.
Opposition to Bt Cotton — which now accounts for more than 40 percent of the cotton grown in India — has also gathered steam as activists link corporate control over seeds to debt-related farmer suicides that have killed upwards of 5,000 farmers in the cotton-growing region of Maharashtra since 2005, though researchers have attributed the problem to various other causes as well.
As New York Times columnist David Rieff argued recently, advocates of organic farming are gaining sway over the technology-friendly agriculturalists bred by the green revolution with the ascendency of India's right to food movement.
“Because of the Bt Brinjal fiasco, there is a lot of demoralization in the scientific community,” said Rao. “While the regulatory system is working to an extent and the guidelines are getting slowly, slowly built up, at the end of the tunnel there is no light.”
For golden rice, that leaves a complex web of opposition that goes beyond health and safety concerns that GMO proponents argue have no foundation in science.
For example, initially Indian opponents of GMOs used some cocktail-napkin math to claim poor women would have to eat seven to nine kilograms of rice per day to get the benefits that golden rice advocates promised. When researchers created new varieties to deliver more betacarotene, their opponents moved the goalposts, introducing the problem of too much Vitamin A — which can reach toxic levels through supplements, but not from the body's conversion of betacarotene.
Simultaneously, critics question whether the poor people targeted by the program have the reserves of body fat needed to absorb and process a micronutrient like betacarotene into Vitamin A. Moreover, they argue that pushing a “monoculture” that would reduce the biodiversity of rice might put India at risk of an ecological disaster like the Irish potato famine — in which a potato blight killed around a million people dependent on a single staple crop for food.
“We are faced with what happened during the potato famine at any time,” said Sharma, in a characteristic example of the activist reaction to technology-based solutions. “It can happen in the case of rice. The narrower the genetic base, the greater the problems you are facing.”
That's an alarmist view. Despite decades of industrialized agriculture around the world, there has been no event similar to the potato famine since the 19th century.
However, some farmers and health workers in India and other countries have noted detrimental effects from the so-called monocultures brought about by the introduction of high-yield hybrids — particularly during India's green revolution.
In the Garwhal region of the Himalayas, for instance, activists from Beej Bachao Andolan (Seed Savers) re-introduced indigenous strains of rice after a drought decimated the green revolution's high-yield hybrids. And in the breadbasket region of Haryana and Punjab, environmental groups allege that high rates of certain cancers are the result of the massive doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides required for green revolution crops.
That means that, at least in India, golden rice could face a long wait.
“It's still in the advanced research stage,” said Rao. “We want to determine by the end of the year whether we are ready to enter the regulatory approval phase, through field trials. So we are scheduled for a major review in the next month.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111122/rice-20-golden-rice-genetically-modified-organisms-vitamin-A
Saturday, November 19, 2011
East Asian Summit: Obama's Asia reboot puts India in pivotal, but risky position
For India, with great power comes great responsibility, and risk.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 19, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — America's renewed focus on Asia puts India in a pivotal position to increase its influence in the region and around the world. But that increased stature also comes fraught with risk.
This week, U.S. President Barack Obama reversed two decades of policy drift, marking an “emphatic return of the United States to Asia's center stage,” according to C. Raja Mohan, a senior fellow at New Delhi's Center for Policy Research. And the stakes could be even higher than during the Cold War.
“As the U.S. begins to deal with this challenge, there's bound to be an arms race and more militarization of the region, and China is bound to respond,” Mohan said. “This is going to produce a whole different set of alignments, new confrontations and new tests for the entire region.”
Following an announcement that the U.S. would open a new military base in Australia and the forceful claim that America is “here to stay” as a “Pacific power,” Obama landed in Indonesia to join the East Asian Summit for the first time on Friday.
At the invitation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the U.S., along with Russia, implicitly enters the multilateral forum to add some much-needed muscle in the wake of China's efforts to enforce its claims on the disputed South China Sea.
“The fact that they invited the US itself was a recognition that if you are in a cage with an 800-pound gorilla, you should at least invite another one into it to provide a balance,” said Mohan.
Meanwhile, along with Australia, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam, Washington is backing the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership as an alternative to the China-led “ASEAN Plus Three” scheme for regional economic integration.
The resulting shakeup in alignments could offer a tremendous opportunity for India, which is seeking to expand its influence in Asia through its so-called “Look East Policy.” But that opportunity is not without risk.
America's shift from Afghanistan to Asia will make India an even more attractive “strategic partner” for the U.S. The other Asian nations' rising fears of Chinese aggression offers a new role for New Delhi as a hedge against Beijing as Singh tries to push forward with a free-trade agreement with the countries of ASEAN.
However, India cannot afford to embrace the American agenda so fully that it aggravates growing fears in China that it is part of a U.S.-led containment strategy, or present the impression that it is ganging up with Asia's smaller nations to close China out. Already, India has gone nose-to-nose with China over an oil-drilling pact with Vietnam in the disputed South China Sea, and deployed three Brahmos cruise-missile regiments along its border with China following a number of Chinese incursions and provocations. Soon, New Delhi will recruit 100,000 new soldiers for posting along the same frontier.
In that context, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's consecutive meetings with Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Friday morning gave some indication of the tightrope that New Delhi will have to walk.
“As we saw in meetings with Obama and Wen Jiabao, India is going to engage both the powers,” Mohan said. “While it strengthens relationship with the US, it will try to normalize its relationship with China.”
Thus, following weeks of heightened tensions over India's move to pursue joint oil projects with Vietnam in parts of the South China Sea, to which Beijing lays claim, Singh was careful to emphasize that India's nascent engagement with ASEAN would not come at China's expense. Singh told Wen that India wanted to pursue “the best of relations” and pointed out how, on issues like climate change, the two nations had cooperated to their mutual benefit on the global stage.
Yet just a few minutes before, the Indian leader was endeavoring to tighten the U.S. embrace. Meeting with Obama, he offered concessions on a nuclear liability law that U.S. firms say will prevent them from capitalizing on the landmark civilian nuclear pact that kicked off the strategic partnership in 2008. In other words, Singh pushed forward the very deal that first convinced Beijing that he was signing on to a secret containment pact.
Call it the new non-alignment.
Just as during the Cold War, when India was a leading figure in the Non-Aligned Movement of countries that tried to avoid joining the U.S. or the Soviet Union, New Delhi will try to steer a middle path between the world's new superpowers. But even during the Cold War, when India could do little but sit back and watch, being non-aligned never meant total neutrality. The U.S. moves to back Pakistan in the 1950s propeled India to "non-align" itself toward Russia — which supplied the bulk of its weapons for decades. And the new non-alignment could be just as tricky.
“India's relationship with the Soviet Union was driven by the Sino-Soviet split and Sino-Indian differences, so there was a balance of power element to India's relationship with Russia,” said Mohan. “If China continues to be hostile to India's interests in the subcontinent, or is unwilling to make reasonable approaches to settling the border dispute, then you can visualize a scenario where India may be non-aligned, but it does more things with the U.S.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111118/east-asian-summit-obamas-asia-reboot-puts-india-pivo
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 19, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — America's renewed focus on Asia puts India in a pivotal position to increase its influence in the region and around the world. But that increased stature also comes fraught with risk.
This week, U.S. President Barack Obama reversed two decades of policy drift, marking an “emphatic return of the United States to Asia's center stage,” according to C. Raja Mohan, a senior fellow at New Delhi's Center for Policy Research. And the stakes could be even higher than during the Cold War.
“As the U.S. begins to deal with this challenge, there's bound to be an arms race and more militarization of the region, and China is bound to respond,” Mohan said. “This is going to produce a whole different set of alignments, new confrontations and new tests for the entire region.”
Following an announcement that the U.S. would open a new military base in Australia and the forceful claim that America is “here to stay” as a “Pacific power,” Obama landed in Indonesia to join the East Asian Summit for the first time on Friday.
At the invitation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the U.S., along with Russia, implicitly enters the multilateral forum to add some much-needed muscle in the wake of China's efforts to enforce its claims on the disputed South China Sea.
“The fact that they invited the US itself was a recognition that if you are in a cage with an 800-pound gorilla, you should at least invite another one into it to provide a balance,” said Mohan.
Meanwhile, along with Australia, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam, Washington is backing the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership as an alternative to the China-led “ASEAN Plus Three” scheme for regional economic integration.
The resulting shakeup in alignments could offer a tremendous opportunity for India, which is seeking to expand its influence in Asia through its so-called “Look East Policy.” But that opportunity is not without risk.
America's shift from Afghanistan to Asia will make India an even more attractive “strategic partner” for the U.S. The other Asian nations' rising fears of Chinese aggression offers a new role for New Delhi as a hedge against Beijing as Singh tries to push forward with a free-trade agreement with the countries of ASEAN.
However, India cannot afford to embrace the American agenda so fully that it aggravates growing fears in China that it is part of a U.S.-led containment strategy, or present the impression that it is ganging up with Asia's smaller nations to close China out. Already, India has gone nose-to-nose with China over an oil-drilling pact with Vietnam in the disputed South China Sea, and deployed three Brahmos cruise-missile regiments along its border with China following a number of Chinese incursions and provocations. Soon, New Delhi will recruit 100,000 new soldiers for posting along the same frontier.
In that context, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's consecutive meetings with Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Friday morning gave some indication of the tightrope that New Delhi will have to walk.
“As we saw in meetings with Obama and Wen Jiabao, India is going to engage both the powers,” Mohan said. “While it strengthens relationship with the US, it will try to normalize its relationship with China.”
Thus, following weeks of heightened tensions over India's move to pursue joint oil projects with Vietnam in parts of the South China Sea, to which Beijing lays claim, Singh was careful to emphasize that India's nascent engagement with ASEAN would not come at China's expense. Singh told Wen that India wanted to pursue “the best of relations” and pointed out how, on issues like climate change, the two nations had cooperated to their mutual benefit on the global stage.
Yet just a few minutes before, the Indian leader was endeavoring to tighten the U.S. embrace. Meeting with Obama, he offered concessions on a nuclear liability law that U.S. firms say will prevent them from capitalizing on the landmark civilian nuclear pact that kicked off the strategic partnership in 2008. In other words, Singh pushed forward the very deal that first convinced Beijing that he was signing on to a secret containment pact.
Call it the new non-alignment.
Just as during the Cold War, when India was a leading figure in the Non-Aligned Movement of countries that tried to avoid joining the U.S. or the Soviet Union, New Delhi will try to steer a middle path between the world's new superpowers. But even during the Cold War, when India could do little but sit back and watch, being non-aligned never meant total neutrality. The U.S. moves to back Pakistan in the 1950s propeled India to "non-align" itself toward Russia — which supplied the bulk of its weapons for decades. And the new non-alignment could be just as tricky.
“India's relationship with the Soviet Union was driven by the Sino-Soviet split and Sino-Indian differences, so there was a balance of power element to India's relationship with Russia,” said Mohan. “If China continues to be hostile to India's interests in the subcontinent, or is unwilling to make reasonable approaches to settling the border dispute, then you can visualize a scenario where India may be non-aligned, but it does more things with the U.S.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111118/east-asian-summit-obamas-asia-reboot-puts-india-pivo
Monday, November 14, 2011
Self-immolations spread from Tibet to the diaspora
China's rising economic might is making the plight of the Tibetans look more desperate than ever.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 14, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — A week ago, Migmer Tenzin, a 26-year-old Tibetan exile, set himself on fire outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi.
He wanted to show his solidarity with the monks and nuns burning themselves to death in protest against China's suppression of religious freedom in Tibet, he explains.
“I just tried to show to every nation and every human being what is happening,” Tenzin told GlobalPost, speaking in broken English from his hospital bed in New Delhi.
“If I die in this action, it is OK. Our brothers and sisters in Tibet have also died in self-immolations. Unfortunately, the policeman was so fast that they stopped the fire and I am still alive.”
Tenzin, who doctors expect to make a full recovery after receiving skin grafts for serious burns on his legs, is not alone in those feelings of desperation.
As nearly a dozen religious leaders inside Tibet have tried to burn themselves to death this autumn, an uncomfortable realization is beginning to strike home in the diaspora. There's a grim reason for the mounting tide of self-immolations in the homeland they may never see. Now, perhaps more than ever before, China is winning the battle for Tibet.
“The power that China is getting right now, nobody can stop them,” said Norbu Lodoe, a 32-year-old exile living in New Delhi.
Tensions have been escalating over the past year, according to Srikanth Kondipalli, a specialist in Chinese affairs at Jawaharlal Nehru University. First the Dalai Lama relinquished his political powers. Then the exile community elected a new democratic government, implicitly challenging the legitimacy of China's autocratic rule. And finally, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly hinted that he may break from tradition in choosing his successor — perhaps going so far as to reincarnate himself before he dies — to cheat Beijing of an opportunity to put forward a hand-picked rival.
Yet China has not shown the slightest willingness to give ground on the religious leader's demands for greater religious freedom and legitimate autonomy for Tibet.
“All these things put together, the elections, the self-immolations, the Dalai Lama's observations on reincarnation and the developments in Tibet, as well as no talks so far between Tibetans and Chinese, all these indicate that the tension is growing,” said Kondipalli.
So far, nine Tibetan monks or former monks and two Tibetan nuns in Sichuan province have set themselves on fire since March, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Six of them are believed to have died. In the most recent case, on Nov. 3, Palden Choetso, a 35-year old nun from Tawu, died after she set herself on fire.
The Chinese government has responded to the protests with mass arrests, imprisonment, and possible killings by the security forces, the human rights watchdogs said in a press release. Those arrested included 300 monks from Kirti monastery, who the authorities said were taken away for “patriotic education.”
“Years of restrictions on Tibetans’ rights have led to further unrest and acts of desperation,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in the statement. “It is clearly time for the Chinese government to fundamentally rethink its approach by listening to and addressing Tibetans’ grievances.”
Unfortunately, Beijing is doing just the opposite.
“For a long time, we have been following His Holiness the Dalai Lama's advice of nonviolence,” said Pema Tsering, a 65-year-old India resident who escaped Tibet in 1959.
“Since 1979, the Dalai Lama has proposed a middle path whereby we go back to Tibet with an autonomous government under the People's Republic of China. But the communist government has not shown any recognition or willingness to talk.”
Since the mid-1990s — when the United States abandoned efforts to make China's most-favored-nation trading status contingent on its human rights record — Beijing has rebuffed every effort of the Dalai Lama to open negotiations for increasing religious freedom in Tibet.
Moreover, as its economic might has continued to increase, China has taken the battle further, successfully exporting its repression of dissent to its neighbors in South and Southeast Asia, where Vietnam recently cracked down on members of the Falun Gong religious sect.
Despite pledging to improve its track record on human rights in its bid to host the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, for example, in the leadup to the games China stepped up the crackdown.
Chinese authorities crushed protests in Tibet — allegedly killing more than 150 people, according to the Tibetan government-in-exile. As calls for a boycott of the opening ceremony faded, Beijing prevailed upon neighboring Nepal to arrest hundreds of Tibetan exiles to prevent them from demonstrating in solidarity. And when the protests cost them nothing, the Chinese sought to up the ante.
In June 2010, Nepal sent at least three escaping Tibetan refugees back to China, violating a United Nations-brokered “gentleman's agreement” under which Kathmandu pledged in 1989 to allow fleeing Tibetans safe passage to India. Similarly, in June of this year, Washington was compelled to urge Kathmandu to register Tibetan exiles born after 1990 — the last time a census of Nepal's Tibetan refugees was conducted.
“Since some time ago, the Nepal government has stopped renewing or issuing fresh refugee cards, so the community is facing very, very tough times in Kathmandu,” a Tibetan exile in Nepal told GlobalPost.
In October 2010, the Nepalese authorities blocked local efforts to participate in elections for the Tibetan government-in-exile, seizing ballot boxes to prevent local refugees from voting for the exiles' first prime minister.
On Nov. 1, the Nepalese government once again arrested dozens of protesters in an effort to scuttle what Beijing calls “anti-China activities” — only to face renewed protests and an attempt at self-immolation by an as yet unidentified Tibetan exile chanting “Long live Tibet.”
“There is immense pressure from the Chinese on the Nepal government in the recent days,” said Siddartha Gautam, chairman of Nepal's Lumbini Foundation, a Buddhist non-profit that works with the local Tibetan community.
Indeed, according to a spokesman for Nepal's home ministry, Kathmandu may crack down further on the Tibetan community if protests continue as a likely visit by the Chinese premier approaches on Dec. 21.
“This will lead to a situation where the government may have to slash all the facilities being granted to the Tibetans residing in Nepal, such as that of their freedom to move even,” said spokesman Sudhir Kumar Saha. Saha specified that the government may decide to put a ban on Tibetan exiles' business activities and their freedom of movement within the country if protests continue.
Chinese affairs specialist Kondipalli says there's no sign, so far, that India will follow suit.
As a condition of providing refuge for the Dalai Lama and other Tibetans who escaped the Chinese invastion of Tibet in 1959, India agreed that it would not provide a base for exiles to engage in political mobilization. But unlike Kathmandu, New Delhi allowed the elections of the government-in-exile to proceed without interference last year, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently met with the Dalai Lama against Chinese objections.
Still, the suppression of protests, and even arrests, are not unknown in India, either. And in some regards, at least, China has succeeded in converting the Tibetans into a bargaining chip for India, rather than a humanitarian cause.
Recently, the censors ordered a Bollywood film to cut a scene that depicted protesters waving Tibetan flags, even as the Indian media questioned the Chinese ambassador over maps that depicted parts of Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh as belonging to China.
Similarly, Beijing has used India's suppression of separatists in the disputed territory of Kashmir to prevent New Delhi from pushing too hard on Tibet.
In 2009, the Chinese embassy in India began issuing stapled visas to Indians from Kashmir, implicitly rejecting the validity of their Indian passports. Soon after, India's foreign minister was compelled to plead with his Chinese counterpart to be "sensitive to our concerns on this very vital issue for India, just as we have been sensitive to Chinese concerns, for instance on the Tibet Autonomous region and Taiwan," India's Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told journalists in 2010.
“India has its own problems with human rights in Kashmir, so it doesn't want the finger pointed at itself,” said Abanti Bhattacharya, a professor of Chinese studies at Delhi University. “India is rather in a dilemma at supporting such a cause.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111114/tibet-self-immolations-dalai-lama-china
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 14, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — A week ago, Migmer Tenzin, a 26-year-old Tibetan exile, set himself on fire outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi.
He wanted to show his solidarity with the monks and nuns burning themselves to death in protest against China's suppression of religious freedom in Tibet, he explains.
“I just tried to show to every nation and every human being what is happening,” Tenzin told GlobalPost, speaking in broken English from his hospital bed in New Delhi.
“If I die in this action, it is OK. Our brothers and sisters in Tibet have also died in self-immolations. Unfortunately, the policeman was so fast that they stopped the fire and I am still alive.”
Tenzin, who doctors expect to make a full recovery after receiving skin grafts for serious burns on his legs, is not alone in those feelings of desperation.
As nearly a dozen religious leaders inside Tibet have tried to burn themselves to death this autumn, an uncomfortable realization is beginning to strike home in the diaspora. There's a grim reason for the mounting tide of self-immolations in the homeland they may never see. Now, perhaps more than ever before, China is winning the battle for Tibet.
“The power that China is getting right now, nobody can stop them,” said Norbu Lodoe, a 32-year-old exile living in New Delhi.
Tensions have been escalating over the past year, according to Srikanth Kondipalli, a specialist in Chinese affairs at Jawaharlal Nehru University. First the Dalai Lama relinquished his political powers. Then the exile community elected a new democratic government, implicitly challenging the legitimacy of China's autocratic rule. And finally, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly hinted that he may break from tradition in choosing his successor — perhaps going so far as to reincarnate himself before he dies — to cheat Beijing of an opportunity to put forward a hand-picked rival.
Yet China has not shown the slightest willingness to give ground on the religious leader's demands for greater religious freedom and legitimate autonomy for Tibet.
“All these things put together, the elections, the self-immolations, the Dalai Lama's observations on reincarnation and the developments in Tibet, as well as no talks so far between Tibetans and Chinese, all these indicate that the tension is growing,” said Kondipalli.
So far, nine Tibetan monks or former monks and two Tibetan nuns in Sichuan province have set themselves on fire since March, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Six of them are believed to have died. In the most recent case, on Nov. 3, Palden Choetso, a 35-year old nun from Tawu, died after she set herself on fire.
The Chinese government has responded to the protests with mass arrests, imprisonment, and possible killings by the security forces, the human rights watchdogs said in a press release. Those arrested included 300 monks from Kirti monastery, who the authorities said were taken away for “patriotic education.”
“Years of restrictions on Tibetans’ rights have led to further unrest and acts of desperation,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in the statement. “It is clearly time for the Chinese government to fundamentally rethink its approach by listening to and addressing Tibetans’ grievances.”
Unfortunately, Beijing is doing just the opposite.
“For a long time, we have been following His Holiness the Dalai Lama's advice of nonviolence,” said Pema Tsering, a 65-year-old India resident who escaped Tibet in 1959.
“Since 1979, the Dalai Lama has proposed a middle path whereby we go back to Tibet with an autonomous government under the People's Republic of China. But the communist government has not shown any recognition or willingness to talk.”
Since the mid-1990s — when the United States abandoned efforts to make China's most-favored-nation trading status contingent on its human rights record — Beijing has rebuffed every effort of the Dalai Lama to open negotiations for increasing religious freedom in Tibet.
Moreover, as its economic might has continued to increase, China has taken the battle further, successfully exporting its repression of dissent to its neighbors in South and Southeast Asia, where Vietnam recently cracked down on members of the Falun Gong religious sect.
Despite pledging to improve its track record on human rights in its bid to host the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, for example, in the leadup to the games China stepped up the crackdown.
Chinese authorities crushed protests in Tibet — allegedly killing more than 150 people, according to the Tibetan government-in-exile. As calls for a boycott of the opening ceremony faded, Beijing prevailed upon neighboring Nepal to arrest hundreds of Tibetan exiles to prevent them from demonstrating in solidarity. And when the protests cost them nothing, the Chinese sought to up the ante.
In June 2010, Nepal sent at least three escaping Tibetan refugees back to China, violating a United Nations-brokered “gentleman's agreement” under which Kathmandu pledged in 1989 to allow fleeing Tibetans safe passage to India. Similarly, in June of this year, Washington was compelled to urge Kathmandu to register Tibetan exiles born after 1990 — the last time a census of Nepal's Tibetan refugees was conducted.
“Since some time ago, the Nepal government has stopped renewing or issuing fresh refugee cards, so the community is facing very, very tough times in Kathmandu,” a Tibetan exile in Nepal told GlobalPost.
In October 2010, the Nepalese authorities blocked local efforts to participate in elections for the Tibetan government-in-exile, seizing ballot boxes to prevent local refugees from voting for the exiles' first prime minister.
On Nov. 1, the Nepalese government once again arrested dozens of protesters in an effort to scuttle what Beijing calls “anti-China activities” — only to face renewed protests and an attempt at self-immolation by an as yet unidentified Tibetan exile chanting “Long live Tibet.”
“There is immense pressure from the Chinese on the Nepal government in the recent days,” said Siddartha Gautam, chairman of Nepal's Lumbini Foundation, a Buddhist non-profit that works with the local Tibetan community.
Indeed, according to a spokesman for Nepal's home ministry, Kathmandu may crack down further on the Tibetan community if protests continue as a likely visit by the Chinese premier approaches on Dec. 21.
“This will lead to a situation where the government may have to slash all the facilities being granted to the Tibetans residing in Nepal, such as that of their freedom to move even,” said spokesman Sudhir Kumar Saha. Saha specified that the government may decide to put a ban on Tibetan exiles' business activities and their freedom of movement within the country if protests continue.
Chinese affairs specialist Kondipalli says there's no sign, so far, that India will follow suit.
As a condition of providing refuge for the Dalai Lama and other Tibetans who escaped the Chinese invastion of Tibet in 1959, India agreed that it would not provide a base for exiles to engage in political mobilization. But unlike Kathmandu, New Delhi allowed the elections of the government-in-exile to proceed without interference last year, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently met with the Dalai Lama against Chinese objections.
Still, the suppression of protests, and even arrests, are not unknown in India, either. And in some regards, at least, China has succeeded in converting the Tibetans into a bargaining chip for India, rather than a humanitarian cause.
Recently, the censors ordered a Bollywood film to cut a scene that depicted protesters waving Tibetan flags, even as the Indian media questioned the Chinese ambassador over maps that depicted parts of Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh as belonging to China.
Similarly, Beijing has used India's suppression of separatists in the disputed territory of Kashmir to prevent New Delhi from pushing too hard on Tibet.
In 2009, the Chinese embassy in India began issuing stapled visas to Indians from Kashmir, implicitly rejecting the validity of their Indian passports. Soon after, India's foreign minister was compelled to plead with his Chinese counterpart to be "sensitive to our concerns on this very vital issue for India, just as we have been sensitive to Chinese concerns, for instance on the Tibet Autonomous region and Taiwan," India's Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told journalists in 2010.
“India has its own problems with human rights in Kashmir, so it doesn't want the finger pointed at itself,” said Abanti Bhattacharya, a professor of Chinese studies at Delhi University. “India is rather in a dilemma at supporting such a cause.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111114/tibet-self-immolations-dalai-lama-china
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Nepal's other revolution: Red turns to pink
Thanks (unexpectedly) to Maoist rebels, Nepal is emerging as Asia's pioneer for sexual minority rights.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - November 9, 2011
KATHMANDU, Nepal — In the quiet courtyard of Dechenling Garden, a Bhutanese restaurant on the fringes of the capital’s bustling backpacker ghetto, Nepal's first openly gay member of parliament sips on a lime soda during a short break in his busy political schedule.
His name is Sunil Babu Pant. A young, maverick politician with dark, wavy hair and a close-trimmed goatee, Pant has already emerged as a leader reminiscent of Harvey Milk in his San Francisco heyday, pushing tiny, conservative Nepal into the forefront of the battle for gay rights.
"Nepal is going through tremendous transformation — politically, socially, economically, legally — so a lot of communities who had no space or voice before have emerged," Pant told GlobalPost.
Thanks, unexpectedly, to a Maoist rebellion and subsequent decade-long civil war, Pant and other activists have already made some big strides — and they're inching closer to making Nepal the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage. But the struggle for the rights of sexual minorities is intensifying here as lawmakers haggle over a new constitution nearly five years after the peace deal that transformed the tiny Himalayan kingdom into a democratic republic in 2007. On one side is a patchwork coalition that supports a more progressive platform, including gay rights, and on the other is a conservative alignment that believes gay marriage would threaten the religious fabric of Nepal's traditional Hindu society.
“A strong attack is going on against Hindu culture, Hindu religion and Hindu society,” said Shankar Pandey, a former legislator and central coordinator of National Religion Awareness Campaign, which urges its followers to adhere to the Hindu way of life. Like many conservatives, Pandey believes that homosexuality is an affront to the country's Hindu heritage.
Strangely, the new social and political space for sexual minorities has sprouted from the seeds of Nepal's attempted Maoist revolution. The Maoists — guerilla fighters who draw their support from the rural poor — were hardly liberals when it came to sexuality. Still, their hard-fought insurgency shook the establishment enough that no one political party has been able to achieve a clear majority in post-war elections, and that has increased the power and influence of small parties and tightly knit constituencies.
But after Nepal's major political parties reached a pivotal agreement to demobilize the former soldiers of the Maoist army Nov. 1 — paving the way for the drafting of a new constitution — it's not yet clear if all of those groups will be able to capitalize on those gains as the period of political turmoil comes to an end.
“It is not liberality, it is just unruliness,” said Pandey. “When there are no rules, no system set, whatever the environment or pressure groups want is what goes.”
In Pandey's view, Pant's entry to the legislature is a perfect example.
The founder of a non-profit advocacy group called the Blue Diamond Society and a gay-oriented travel agency called Pink Mountain Travel & Tours, Pant worked for the rights of gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities at the grassroots level for 11 years before entering electoral politics.
But when rules favoring Nepal's long-established political parties — and the conservative elites of Kathmandu — were suspended for the post-war Constituent Assembly elections, Pant saw a window of opportunity. For the first time, as a concession to the Maoist argument that past elections had not addressed Nepal's ethnic diversity and vast economic inequalities, more than half of the 601 legislators would be chosen through “proportional representation” — which allots seats to parties based on the proportion of votes they receive rather than granting seats only to candidates who win a plurality in their constituencies. Suddenly, there would be a host of new players.
"During the Constituent Assembly election we thought it was a good opportunity to lobby the political parties," Pant said. "We went from party office to party office and said we are a significant population, and if you include our cause in your party manifesto we can vote for your candidates. We took it lightly, just hoping that they would buy that idea."
To Pant's surprise, not only did the Maoist party take him seriously — it led the way in adopting resolutions related to gay rights. Meanwhile, the tiny Communist Party of Nepal-Unified (CPN-U), unrelated to the Maoists, asked him to stand for election himself.
"We had no expectations, no resources, no experience, nothing," he said.
*****
The CPN-U didn't win an assembly seat in the formal election, but the party won enough votes to earn five seats under the rules for proportional representation. And because the party had carefully monitored the districts where it had done well, the tireless work of Pant's team of gay rights activists paid off. The party rewarded him by allotting him a seat in the new assembly.
As it turned out, the CPN-U's most votes came “exactly from those 15 districts where Blue Diamond Society has branches and we did the election campaign," Pant said, explaining his success.
Pant and other activists have already accomplished a great deal for Nepal's sexual minorities —people who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, transgender and intersex (those born with physical characteristics of both genders). With the conservatives' cherished rules in flux, the gay rights lobby succeeded in convincing Nepal's Supreme Court to instruct the new government to repeal age-old laws that made homosexuality a crime in 2007. A year later, the court directed legislators to draft new laws guaranteeing equal rights for sexual minorities and convene a committee to consider the implications of legalizing gay marriage in the new constitution. And this year, the Central Bureau of Statistics officially allowed transgender and intersex citizens to classify themselves as "third gender" for the purposes of the census.
"Previously, people thought [homosexuality] was an unnatural condition," said 25-year-old Durga, a student activist at Tribhuvan University. "But after 2007, people are changing. Now they are able to accept people from the LGBTI community in their villages and even in their families."
But despite progressive court rulings and nascent social transformation, homosexuals and transgenders continue to face discrimination and harassment. Even in Kathmandu, which thanks to higher incomes and the thriving tourist industry is Nepal's most cosmopolitan city, the absence of any real gay scene compels many young men to cruise the local Ratna Park for sexual partners. That leaves them vulnerable to police persecution. And though the police deny the charge, gay activists allege that the authorities have also recently begun "investigating" young men staying together in local hotels, according to Roshan Mahato, the 29-year-old president of the Nepal Sexual and Gender Minorities Student Forum.
“We only take action when these people are seen [engaging in sexual activity] in a public place. If they are doing anything openly,” said Nepal police spokesman Binod Singh. “Otherwise, the police doesn't interfere in their personal activities.”
The threat that this essentially conservative, traditional society will backslide on its reforms remains ever present, especially with a new constitution slated to take shape over the next few months. The issue of demobilizing the Maoist army settled, negotiations will now focus on the structure of a new, federalist government. As a result, loyalties will likely solidify around ethnic and regional identities, perhaps robbing smaller minority groups of the influence they have enjoyed during the interim. It is also unlikely the new system will incorporate as much proportional representation as the interim elections.
Even during the negotiations for the new constitution, some roadblocks have have emerged to the Supreme Court's progressive instructions on equal rights for sexual minorities.
In June, for instance, Nepal burst onto the radar of the world's gay community when an American lesbian couple was married in a Hindu ceremony that Pant's Pink Mountain travel agency helped to organize at a local temple. But that same month, the Ministry of Law and Justice submitted an updated penal code that specifically limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman and again defined homosexual acts as "unnatural sex offenses.” Similarly, in July, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to issue a passport to a transgender person, citing a limitation of their software system.
*****
Pant says that despite those bumps in the road, Nepal will not reverse gears. Several legislators immediately objected to the law ministry's proposed recriminalization of homosexuality. Pant believes that indicates the political parties that he convinced to include rights for sexual minorities in their manifestos before the Constituent Assembly elections in 2008 will stay the course in 2012. Moreover, even the National Religion Awareness Campaign's Pandey agrees that sexual minorities' rights should be protected. And he says his insistence that marriage should not be considered among those rights cost him his position with the Nepali Congress.
“We believe everyone must have the right of protection. But where the word of marriage is concerned, that is different,” said Pandey. “Hindus believe marriage is only for procreation, not just for relation. Marriage is for the production or creation. Where there is no creation possible, there marriage cannot be imagined.”
Pant insists that narrow vision of Hinduism — which has no definitive text like the Bible or the Koran — radically oversimplifies the relationship that the religion, and Nepal, have had with sexuality for centuries. During Gaijatra, for instance, young men dress as women as part of a religious procession. Similarly, the Lakhe dance, performed during Indrajatra by masked dancers wearing lavish hairdos and colorful frocks, is “very much a reflection of gender non-conformity.”
“It's a small country, but there's a lot of diversity living in harmony and the indigenous culture has always been much more liberal in terms of rights, expression, sexualities,” Pant said. “Also, the Hinduism, Buddhism and mix of Tantrism has always been pretty liberal in terms of sexuality and gender roles.”
The young legislator is trying to prove that with his travel agency, Pink Mountain. Following the successful public relations effort of Nepal's first lesbian wedding — which generated headlines around the world in June — Pant aims to bring thousands of gay, lesbian and transgender travelers to Nepal by promoting the country as a gay-friendly tourist destination.
Pink Mountain offers a weeklong wedding and honeymoon package — Hindu or Buddhist — for around $10,000, as well as opportunities to do volunteer work related to sexual minorities. And this summer Pant's travel agency endeavored to turn Gaijatra, a traditional Nepali Hindu holiday that involves cross dressing, into “Gay Jatra” — an international gay pride event on Aug. 14. Tourist turnout wasn't so hot, as it happened, but more than 500 local gays and lesbians danced and chanted slogans in Narayanghat, a town about 160 kilometers south of Kathmandu, local press reported, noting that this was the first time that a large number of gay activists have demonstrated for their rights outside the capital.
“He completely screwed our annual Gaijatra festival, which he turned into Gay Jatra. It's actually a festival devoted to families who've lost their near and dear ones over the past year,” said Kunal Tej Bir Lama, a local restaurateur from the gay community. “But it turned into a spectacle of very badly overdressed drag queens.”
Lama worries that Pant's public relations campaigns — while they generate headlines and support from the plethora of international non-profit organizations based in Kathmandu — have made the LGBTI community seem more radical and more exotic than necessary.
“Because of his actions and campaigns, yes, a lot of people are aware of who the gay people are and what they do, but a lot of them also have very, very, very skewed perception of the whole thing,” said Lama said. “They think that most of us are just guys who dress up as girls, who put on a lot of heavy makeup, bad fashion, and basically work as prostitutes.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - November 9, 2011
KATHMANDU, Nepal — In the quiet courtyard of Dechenling Garden, a Bhutanese restaurant on the fringes of the capital’s bustling backpacker ghetto, Nepal's first openly gay member of parliament sips on a lime soda during a short break in his busy political schedule.
His name is Sunil Babu Pant. A young, maverick politician with dark, wavy hair and a close-trimmed goatee, Pant has already emerged as a leader reminiscent of Harvey Milk in his San Francisco heyday, pushing tiny, conservative Nepal into the forefront of the battle for gay rights.
"Nepal is going through tremendous transformation — politically, socially, economically, legally — so a lot of communities who had no space or voice before have emerged," Pant told GlobalPost.
Thanks, unexpectedly, to a Maoist rebellion and subsequent decade-long civil war, Pant and other activists have already made some big strides — and they're inching closer to making Nepal the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage. But the struggle for the rights of sexual minorities is intensifying here as lawmakers haggle over a new constitution nearly five years after the peace deal that transformed the tiny Himalayan kingdom into a democratic republic in 2007. On one side is a patchwork coalition that supports a more progressive platform, including gay rights, and on the other is a conservative alignment that believes gay marriage would threaten the religious fabric of Nepal's traditional Hindu society.
“A strong attack is going on against Hindu culture, Hindu religion and Hindu society,” said Shankar Pandey, a former legislator and central coordinator of National Religion Awareness Campaign, which urges its followers to adhere to the Hindu way of life. Like many conservatives, Pandey believes that homosexuality is an affront to the country's Hindu heritage.
Strangely, the new social and political space for sexual minorities has sprouted from the seeds of Nepal's attempted Maoist revolution. The Maoists — guerilla fighters who draw their support from the rural poor — were hardly liberals when it came to sexuality. Still, their hard-fought insurgency shook the establishment enough that no one political party has been able to achieve a clear majority in post-war elections, and that has increased the power and influence of small parties and tightly knit constituencies.
But after Nepal's major political parties reached a pivotal agreement to demobilize the former soldiers of the Maoist army Nov. 1 — paving the way for the drafting of a new constitution — it's not yet clear if all of those groups will be able to capitalize on those gains as the period of political turmoil comes to an end.
“It is not liberality, it is just unruliness,” said Pandey. “When there are no rules, no system set, whatever the environment or pressure groups want is what goes.”
In Pandey's view, Pant's entry to the legislature is a perfect example.
The founder of a non-profit advocacy group called the Blue Diamond Society and a gay-oriented travel agency called Pink Mountain Travel & Tours, Pant worked for the rights of gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities at the grassroots level for 11 years before entering electoral politics.
But when rules favoring Nepal's long-established political parties — and the conservative elites of Kathmandu — were suspended for the post-war Constituent Assembly elections, Pant saw a window of opportunity. For the first time, as a concession to the Maoist argument that past elections had not addressed Nepal's ethnic diversity and vast economic inequalities, more than half of the 601 legislators would be chosen through “proportional representation” — which allots seats to parties based on the proportion of votes they receive rather than granting seats only to candidates who win a plurality in their constituencies. Suddenly, there would be a host of new players.
"During the Constituent Assembly election we thought it was a good opportunity to lobby the political parties," Pant said. "We went from party office to party office and said we are a significant population, and if you include our cause in your party manifesto we can vote for your candidates. We took it lightly, just hoping that they would buy that idea."
To Pant's surprise, not only did the Maoist party take him seriously — it led the way in adopting resolutions related to gay rights. Meanwhile, the tiny Communist Party of Nepal-Unified (CPN-U), unrelated to the Maoists, asked him to stand for election himself.
"We had no expectations, no resources, no experience, nothing," he said.
*****
The CPN-U didn't win an assembly seat in the formal election, but the party won enough votes to earn five seats under the rules for proportional representation. And because the party had carefully monitored the districts where it had done well, the tireless work of Pant's team of gay rights activists paid off. The party rewarded him by allotting him a seat in the new assembly.
As it turned out, the CPN-U's most votes came “exactly from those 15 districts where Blue Diamond Society has branches and we did the election campaign," Pant said, explaining his success.
Pant and other activists have already accomplished a great deal for Nepal's sexual minorities —people who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, transgender and intersex (those born with physical characteristics of both genders). With the conservatives' cherished rules in flux, the gay rights lobby succeeded in convincing Nepal's Supreme Court to instruct the new government to repeal age-old laws that made homosexuality a crime in 2007. A year later, the court directed legislators to draft new laws guaranteeing equal rights for sexual minorities and convene a committee to consider the implications of legalizing gay marriage in the new constitution. And this year, the Central Bureau of Statistics officially allowed transgender and intersex citizens to classify themselves as "third gender" for the purposes of the census.
"Previously, people thought [homosexuality] was an unnatural condition," said 25-year-old Durga, a student activist at Tribhuvan University. "But after 2007, people are changing. Now they are able to accept people from the LGBTI community in their villages and even in their families."
But despite progressive court rulings and nascent social transformation, homosexuals and transgenders continue to face discrimination and harassment. Even in Kathmandu, which thanks to higher incomes and the thriving tourist industry is Nepal's most cosmopolitan city, the absence of any real gay scene compels many young men to cruise the local Ratna Park for sexual partners. That leaves them vulnerable to police persecution. And though the police deny the charge, gay activists allege that the authorities have also recently begun "investigating" young men staying together in local hotels, according to Roshan Mahato, the 29-year-old president of the Nepal Sexual and Gender Minorities Student Forum.
“We only take action when these people are seen [engaging in sexual activity] in a public place. If they are doing anything openly,” said Nepal police spokesman Binod Singh. “Otherwise, the police doesn't interfere in their personal activities.”
The threat that this essentially conservative, traditional society will backslide on its reforms remains ever present, especially with a new constitution slated to take shape over the next few months. The issue of demobilizing the Maoist army settled, negotiations will now focus on the structure of a new, federalist government. As a result, loyalties will likely solidify around ethnic and regional identities, perhaps robbing smaller minority groups of the influence they have enjoyed during the interim. It is also unlikely the new system will incorporate as much proportional representation as the interim elections.
Even during the negotiations for the new constitution, some roadblocks have have emerged to the Supreme Court's progressive instructions on equal rights for sexual minorities.
In June, for instance, Nepal burst onto the radar of the world's gay community when an American lesbian couple was married in a Hindu ceremony that Pant's Pink Mountain travel agency helped to organize at a local temple. But that same month, the Ministry of Law and Justice submitted an updated penal code that specifically limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman and again defined homosexual acts as "unnatural sex offenses.” Similarly, in July, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to issue a passport to a transgender person, citing a limitation of their software system.
*****
Pant says that despite those bumps in the road, Nepal will not reverse gears. Several legislators immediately objected to the law ministry's proposed recriminalization of homosexuality. Pant believes that indicates the political parties that he convinced to include rights for sexual minorities in their manifestos before the Constituent Assembly elections in 2008 will stay the course in 2012. Moreover, even the National Religion Awareness Campaign's Pandey agrees that sexual minorities' rights should be protected. And he says his insistence that marriage should not be considered among those rights cost him his position with the Nepali Congress.
“We believe everyone must have the right of protection. But where the word of marriage is concerned, that is different,” said Pandey. “Hindus believe marriage is only for procreation, not just for relation. Marriage is for the production or creation. Where there is no creation possible, there marriage cannot be imagined.”
Pant insists that narrow vision of Hinduism — which has no definitive text like the Bible or the Koran — radically oversimplifies the relationship that the religion, and Nepal, have had with sexuality for centuries. During Gaijatra, for instance, young men dress as women as part of a religious procession. Similarly, the Lakhe dance, performed during Indrajatra by masked dancers wearing lavish hairdos and colorful frocks, is “very much a reflection of gender non-conformity.”
“It's a small country, but there's a lot of diversity living in harmony and the indigenous culture has always been much more liberal in terms of rights, expression, sexualities,” Pant said. “Also, the Hinduism, Buddhism and mix of Tantrism has always been pretty liberal in terms of sexuality and gender roles.”
The young legislator is trying to prove that with his travel agency, Pink Mountain. Following the successful public relations effort of Nepal's first lesbian wedding — which generated headlines around the world in June — Pant aims to bring thousands of gay, lesbian and transgender travelers to Nepal by promoting the country as a gay-friendly tourist destination.
Pink Mountain offers a weeklong wedding and honeymoon package — Hindu or Buddhist — for around $10,000, as well as opportunities to do volunteer work related to sexual minorities. And this summer Pant's travel agency endeavored to turn Gaijatra, a traditional Nepali Hindu holiday that involves cross dressing, into “Gay Jatra” — an international gay pride event on Aug. 14. Tourist turnout wasn't so hot, as it happened, but more than 500 local gays and lesbians danced and chanted slogans in Narayanghat, a town about 160 kilometers south of Kathmandu, local press reported, noting that this was the first time that a large number of gay activists have demonstrated for their rights outside the capital.
“He completely screwed our annual Gaijatra festival, which he turned into Gay Jatra. It's actually a festival devoted to families who've lost their near and dear ones over the past year,” said Kunal Tej Bir Lama, a local restaurateur from the gay community. “But it turned into a spectacle of very badly overdressed drag queens.”
Lama worries that Pant's public relations campaigns — while they generate headlines and support from the plethora of international non-profit organizations based in Kathmandu — have made the LGBTI community seem more radical and more exotic than necessary.
“Because of his actions and campaigns, yes, a lot of people are aware of who the gay people are and what they do, but a lot of them also have very, very, very skewed perception of the whole thing,” said Lama said. “They think that most of us are just guys who dress up as girls, who put on a lot of heavy makeup, bad fashion, and basically work as prostitutes.”
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