India: Is China right about the Internet?

India's crackdown on social networks to stop rumor-mongering is fast morphing into an assault of free speech.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - August 25, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — Is China right about the internet? The government of India seems to think so.

This week, New Delhi cracked down on social networking sites and blocked mobile phone users from sending text messages, Beijing-style. The controversial move originated as a bid to stop web-based rumor-mongering and hate speech that caused as many as 30,000 people, panicked by the threat of ethnic violence, to flee India's major cities.

But with one draconian internet law already implemented in April, and a knee-jerk Telecom Security Policy swiftly being drafted, the effort threatens to morph into a full-on assault on this country's cherished freedom of speech.

“While I agree that the government must have the right to intervene when things on social media and on SMS are inciteful, hateful, inflammatory or in areas like pornography, the problem is the exercise of that right is being done today in a very, very ad hoc manner, without any oversight,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an independent member of parliament who has criticized the government's efforts to police the web.

“What is happening today can be interpreted as using the opportunity to fix a lot of things that the government doesn't like.”

On Aug. 11, troublemakers spread doctored images from Myanmar and elsewhere to encourage Indian Muslims to attack ethnically distinct Indians from the country's northeast — sparking a riot in Mumbai in which two people were killed and more than 50 injured. And subsequently, the irresponsible or ill-intentioned disseminated false reports of more violence against northeasterners to cause mass panic in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and other major Indian cities over recent weeks.

On Wednesday, the Indian government asked social media sites including Facebook and Twitter to remove what it deemed inflammatory content. It issued a statement that it had already blocked nearly 250 websites that allegedly included videos and images that could spur violence between communities, and claimed that much of the material originated on sites based in Pakistan.

But critics claim that the control measures did not stop there.

Though the government maintains that it only asked Google, Twitter and Facebook to block links to the websites hosting inflammatory content, not individual user accounts, Twitter users allege that the authorities have sought to block 16 Twitter handles (or nicknamed accounts). The handles in question allegedly include several that resemble the official account of the prime minister's office, including obvious parody accounts, as well as the handles of at least two journalists and right-wing opponents of the ruling Congress Party, such as Pravin Togadia of the far right Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), according to local reports.

“The Prime Minister's Office had requested Twitter to take appropriate action against six persons impersonating the PMO,” the PMO said in a statement issued Friday. “When they did not reply for a long time the Government Cyber Security Cell was requested to initiate action. Twitter has now conveyed to us that action has been taken stating 'we have removed the reported profiles from circulation due to violation of our Terms of Service regarding impersonation.'”

Others say the government's actions went further.

The Economic Times, for instance, posted a series of letters from the Ministry of Communications & IT Department of Telecommunications to all internet service licensees that called for them to block access not only to Togadia's handle and various Facebook pages, but also Twitter handles like @PM0India and the accounts of right-leaning journalist Kanchan Gupta and numerous other right-wing bloggers and commentators. NDTV and Gupta himself also possess copies of the letters. 

“I don't think that the government has been particularly happy with the fact that somebody who [does not] endorse this government's policies, its performance, and the manner in which this government has carried out its constitutional responsibilities [has gained an internet following], and they were just looking for an opportunity to sort of try and shut my voice down,” said Gupta in an interview with NDTV. 

“Some ISPs did try to block me,” Gupta said. “In some cities, access was blocked, and that is how I got to know of it. People started sending me messages that my handle had been blocked.”

Togadia, who has repeatedly come under fire for speeches like one last year, in which he reportedly called for a revision to the constitution toallow “anyone who converts Hindus to be beheaded,” was still tweeting hours after he claimed the government was out to block him — though his account shows no new tweets since 3 p.m. Thursday. Kanchan Gupta, still going strong on the Delhi area Tata WiMax ISP, tweeted to followers thanking them for their support in the face of attempted censorship on Friday. And many of the other blacklisted accounts also still appeared to be active, at least on that service provider.

“We are only taking strict action against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumors,” said a statement issued by the home ministry on Friday. “We are not taking action against other accounts, be it on Facebook, Twitter or even SMSes. There is no censorship at all.”

But there is nevertheless some convincing evidence that lawmakers in New Delhi may be starting to believe, like their counterparts in Beijing, that “the mass of information flowing through the internet still presents a challenge to governance,” as an editorial in China's Global Times asserted on Thursday. 

More from GlobalPost: For India's censorship bid, it's especially bad timing

Shifting sands of regulation

Already, controversial new rules for the internet implemented in April allow anyone to demand that internet sites and service providers remove supposedly objectionable content based on a sweeping list of criteria. And this week, legislators proposed a new Telecom Security Policy that would force overseas enterprises, including content providers, to allow the government a so-called “master switch” to turn off the internet in times of crisis, the Financial Express cited a draft note for the Cabinet Committee on Security as saying.

Both provisions have serious flaws, according to critics like Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. The IT rules notified in April, for example, allow the government to censor speech without informing the public or the person in question of its action. There is no way for someone who is censored to appeal or question the blocking of content and no protocol for the reinstatement of censored speech. And there is no penalty for abusing the law to block speech that is not dangerous.

“Exceptional circumstances such as these, when censorship is legitimate, cannot be used to defend censorship of the internet that is not legitimate, when only the egos of politicians and bureaucrats and public personalities are at stake,” Abraham said.

“This time public order was disrupted and there was serious harm caused by speech. But this occasion cannot be used in retrospect to justify attempts to censor the internet previously that were not legitimate. This occasion cannot be used to justify draconian internet regulation.”

Inflammatory statements like Togadia's call for proselytizers to be beheaded no doubt played some role in encouraging members of the VHP's youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, to burn Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons to death in 1999. And rumors and false or inflammatory media reports about the burning of a train compartment carrying Hindu pilgrims in the city of Godhra played an important role in spurring the Gujarat riots of 2002 to a deadly pitch, all without the aid of the internet.

But there are already clear guidelines for how both problems should be handled. And there is plenty of clear evidence that the willingness of political parties to encourage and exploit the tensions among different ethnic and religious groups — not rumors or hate speech in itself — is the root cause of the country's most serious riots.

Academics like Ashutosh Varshney and Steven I Wilkinson have argued convincingly that India's riots are rarely, if ever, the spontaneous eruptions of rage they may appear to be from outside. Rather, “parties that represent elites within ethnic groups” use anti-minority protests, demonstrations and physical attacks that precipitate riots in order to “encourage members of their wider ethnic category to identify with their party and the ‘majority’ identity to rather than a party that is identified with economic redistribution or some ideological agenda,” as Wilkinson once put it in an essay for The Economic and Political Weekly.

“[The authorities] have soft pedaled a lot of these issues,” said Geeta Sethu, consulting editor at TheHoot.org, an Indian media watchdog. “We have political leaders who go out onto the streets and give speeches which are inflammatory, and they're not picked up immediately. There is absolutely no action taken against them.”

Varshney's and Wilkinson's research related more directly to activities of Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians and associated groups during the Gujarat riots of 2002. But the same argument can be made about the political parties that stirred the pot before July's anti-Muslim violence in Assam, the organizations that mobilized Muslims against northeasterners in Mumbai this month, or the ruling Congress Party itself — which encouraged a pogrom against Sikhs in New Delhi following Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984.

Hate speech calls out for government intervention, not when it is published on Facebook or sent out by text message, but when there is clear reason to worry that it threatens to spark actual violence — whether because it specifically exhorts people to take up arms, or because, as in the current climate, tensions are already dangerously high.

Similarly, spreading falsehoods does not merit a suspension of freedom of speech unless — as applies, again, to some of the recent text messages and doctored web images — there is a genuine risk that those falsehoods will cause real harm. That's why it's illegal to shout out “bomb” in a crowded movie theater, and shouting out “acting, Boss, acting!” in admiration of Shah Rukh Khan's scenery chewing is merely annoying.

Rioting and violence, on the other hand, is always against the law. The reason for India's troubles is that — unlike when they are confronted by offensive, inflammatory, and, maybe, merely politically aggravating speech on the internet — the authorities too often protect the perpetrators instead of prosecuting them. 

Little Cuba: India's boxing Mecca

How a dedicated boxing coach in a small town outside New Delhi boosted India's chances of an Olympic medal.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - July 20, 2012)

BHIWANI, Haryana — In a bleak desert town three hours from New Delhi, India's future boxing champions square off for a Friday sparring session.

To make the best use of the club's limited space, three pairs of fighters touch gloves in each of the club's two rings. And at the end of each three-minute round, Coach Jagdish Singh turns his attention to a crowd of 11- to 15-year-old boys, watching in rapt attention from the floor in front of the rings.

“Shadow!” Jagdish calls out, following a shrill blast of a police whistle that signals the youngsters to begin shadowboxing.

Since Jagdish started the Bhiwani Boxing Club (or BBC, as he likes to call it) in 2003, he has flagged off a revolution in the sport. Training thousands of boxers in this dusty Haryana backwater — a farming community with only around 200,000 residents — he's taken home 150 medals in international competitions.

BBC has produced nine out of India's 16 Olympic qualifiers since 2004. And in a sport where coaches once despaired that India had no chance at the victors' podium, Jagdish sent three boxers to the quarter finals in Beijing, with his longtime student Vijender Singh bringing home India's first medal (a bronze) in the 75 kilogram weight class.

More from GlobalPost: Olympics: Judge allows missiles on London rooftops

This year, Jagdish has two boxers in the Olympics (there are three others from the state of Haryana) including Vijender and Vikas Krishnan (69 kg). But the coach says two more of his male fighters and one female boxer from his club, who had all won international accolades, might have qualified as well if Indian amateur boxing authority had given them the chance.

Moreover, it's part of his legacy that India is sending its largest boxing team ever to London — seven men and one woman. And he deserves a large part of the credit for the fact that all of them believe they can bring home a medal, a feat that he swore to achieve way back in 2000 at a meeting where none of the country's other coaches were willing to claim India had a chance.

“I know of very few coaches in India who are really dedicated. ... But when it comes to Jagdish, there was something which you could call an obsession,” said Shamya Dasgupta, the author of a new book about Indian boxing called “Bhiwani Junction.”

“When you look at the cream of Indian boxing ... they are all from Bhiwani, or they have all trained in Bhiwani,” Dasgupta said.

Today known as “Little Cuba,” a reference to that country's dominance of Olympic boxing, Bhiwani, like its famous coach, is obsessed with the sweet science.

“Since the last 16 years, I have had no personal life,” says Jagdish, who received India's highest honor for a coach, the Dronacharya Award, in 2007. Providing room and board for 40 to 50 boxers at a time, keeping them out of trouble and sending them to school, he makes sure BBC is open seven days a week, 365 days a year.

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“Out of 24 hours, I go to my house sometimes 10 o'clock, sometimes nine o'clock, and early in the morning, five o'clock [I come to the gym],” Jagdish says. “I never go on leave. I never go on any tour. I never go to any marriage or family function. I am totally cut off from my family life, from my relatives. My main motivation, my main work is boxing, boxing, boxing.”

Along with 70 elite prospects, 40 of whom live in a dormitory on the premises, Jagdish says walk-ins from the town and nearby villages are common — with around 100 on-and-off pupils from Beijing Olympic hero Vijender's neighborhood alone.

Others, like 16-year-old Prince Rana, have traveled from as far away as Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh — some 300 miles, across three state borders — to train with the best.

“This training is world class. The best in all India. In Gwalior there is no boxing,” said Rana, whose parents pay around $100 a month for him to live and train at BBC. “In 2008, I saw Vijender Singh fight, and I learned that he'd practiced here for eight years. That's why I came here.”

It's a remarkable change for Indian sports, which until recently, apart from cricket, had not inspired much enthusiasm or generated much success.

Since it sent its first athlete to the Olympics in 1900, the country has won just 20 medals — five fewer than little Japan won in 2008 alone. Not long ago, parents across the nation discouraged children from wasting time on sports instead of studying. And those athletes who did manage to excel often had to drum up their own sponsors to fund their training.

Now, however, thanks in large part to Jagdish and Beijing bronze medalist Vijender — whose Olympic medal and moviestar looks have landed modeling gigs, commercials and reality TV appearances — the lower-middle-class families of Haryana have begun to believe in boxing. And it's not just about putting in a few years to earn a sinecure as a constable in the state police or a ticket agent with the Indian Railways.

These days, like many of the 81 athletes competing for India at the London games, Jagdish's fighters are aiming for gold.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120717/boxing-sports-olympics-london-2012-bhiwani-boxing-club

India: Food rots as people starve

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - July 16, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — Never mind that a fifth of India's population remains undernourished and some 3,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. By all appearances, India, or at least the Indian government, has too much food.

Last week, after the revelation that millions of tons of improperly stored grain would be ruined by monsoon rains, India lifted a four-year ban on wheat exports and cleared the way for the state-owned Food Corporation of India to send 2 million tons overseas. It also approved the release some 8 million tons of grain into the domestic market.

Shipping grain abroad while millions starve in India has elicited a strong response from critics.

“This is unpardonable. I see no reason why it is happening,” said farm policy analyst Devinder Sharma. “It is because there is no political will to feed the hungry that people are dying, not because there is no food.”

On paper, that hardly seems to be the case. India spends about $14 billion a year, or 1 percent of its gross domestic product, to provide subsidized grain to a third of its people — at least theoretically. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration is considering a move to enshrine the “right to food” in law and double the number of people eligible for subsidized grain.

But everywhere except on paper, the system can seem irretrievably broken. And India's mounting deficit has caused many right-leaning economists to question whether now is the time to spend even more money on a broken system.

Hunger, malnutrition and starvation are different, though related problems, so more calories isn't a cure all – particularly if all those calories come from wheat and rice. But even when everyone knows that people are dying because they have nothing to eat, the government appears incapable of making the welfare system function at its most basic level.

“The shocking thing is that many of these [starvation] cases have been followed up on by the media, many times,” said Ashwin Parulkar, a researcher with the New Delhi-based Center for Equity Studies who recently investigated the government response to starvation cases. “But the simple administrative tasks that are supposed to prevent these things aren't even enforced when these calamities have already happened.”

In rural Jharkhand, for instance, a woman whose husband starved to death two years ago was still waiting for a card certifying her as eligible for subsidized grain. When Parulkar confronted local administrators, they told him they would get her the card. They even gave him a specific date. But even after Parulkar published his findings in a thoughtful, six-part series for the Wall Street Journal's India Real Time blog, the woman still hasn't received it.

They have "no shame in admitting it hasn't been done,” Parulkar said. And "no shame in promising something they know they're not going to do.”

For several years now, India has complained of a so-called “paradox of plenty.” As higher yields have produced more and more rice and wheat, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) has snapped up ever larger amounts to prop up prices for the country's millions of farmers — until all the warehouses were full, and towering stacks of wheat and rice had to be abandoned to rot under the open skies.

But as much as the talk has centered around building more warehouses, or allowing retailers like Walmart into the market to whip the supply chain into shape, the problem was never about plenty, and it was never about storage. The problem was, and is, distribution.

India's food subsidy system was designed for two purposes. FCI buys grain at a so-called “minimum support price” to protect farmers from a crash when the monsoon delivers a bumper harvest. And it is supposed to sell or give away that grain at below market rates to protect the poor from starvation.

But no matter how much grain the government buys, no matter how many tons lie rotting in its possession, and no matter how many people go to bed hungry each night, the amount of grain it disperses to the poor never gets much larger.

“The refusal of the government to let go of these food grains is at the heart of [the problem],” said Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the Supreme Court on the proposed right to food law.

Since 2003, the government's “buffer stock” of food grains has rarely been less than double the prescribed norm, according to Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the prime minister, writing in Economic & Political Weekly. Over the same period, as Indians continued to go hungry, wheat prices in India soared. They rose as much as 30 percent higher than international rates in the summer of 2010. Meanwhile time after time the FCI sold off its so-called excess on the international market for less than the price it could have earned at home.

“I see no justification for a hungry nation to be exporting food grains,” said Sharma. “How can you be so criminal in your thought process?”

The usual explanation is corruption. It's not that the government doesn't want to release its stockpiled grain to the poor, the argument runs. But there's little point to the exercise, since as much as 18 percent of rice and 67 percent of wheat intended for the poor is diverted before it reaches the target, according to a frequently cited study. And if that's not bad enough, corrupt traders sell a healthy portion of that diverted grain right back to the FCI for a minimum price — scamming the government into paying a subsidy for the same grain again and again.

But that's not the whole story. Theft of the grain intended for the poor has dropped significantly, according to economist Reetika Khera. And the most marked improvements have been achieved in states that have simultaneously reduced grain prices and expanded the system's coverage, Khera argues, citing moves by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to offer rice to everyone at the subsidized price of one rupee per kilogram. In other words, the closer the system comes to a universal subsidy for all, the better it seems to work.

Moreover, corruption isn't the only reason India stockpiles food while its people starve. India's economic liberalization, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), have also played a role, according to Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jayati Ghosh.

Since 1991, when, as finance minister, Manmohan Singh initiated the dismantling of India's planned economy, India has dramatically reduced public investments in agriculture and rural areas. Meanwhile, the WTO-related removal of trade restrictions forced Indian farmers to compete with “highly subsidized large producers in the developed countries, whose average level of subsidy amounted to many times the total domestic cost of production for many crops,” Ghosh wrote in a 2005 background paper for the United Nations' Human Development Report. The result was a “very pronounced” reduction in food grain consumption.

India's economic liberalization also resulted in deep cuts to the public distribution system. On the insistence of the World Bank (which had backed the loans that bailed India out of a financial crisis in 1991), the government scrapped its near universal food grain subsidy in favor of a system that targeted only below poverty line families in 1997.

Since then, millions of people have slipped through the cracks, unable to secure ration cards testifying to their poverty. The effort to separate the absolutely destitute from the very poor has added new complexity to a system already plagued by bureaucratic inefficiency, and, presumably, offered new opportunities for graft.

But the biggest embarrassment has been the government's effort to reduce costs by charging more for grain sold to above-poverty-line families. That effort has backfired miserably.

Between 1997 and 2000, FCI increased grain prices by 80 percent for below-poverty-line families, while the rates that above-poverty-line families had to pay doubled. But the prices were too high for the poor to afford, so the only result was that people bought less grain — and ate less. Instead of selling grain at a loss, the government wasn't selling it at all. The stocks mounted, increasing from some 18 million tons in 1998 to more than 50 million tons in 2003.

Over the past decade, the amount of grain purchased by below-poverty-line families has increased — mostly because states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have expanded coverage and offered additional subsidies over and above the FCI discount. But offtake at the above poverty line rate has remained low, even as market rates soared and states clamored for more, simply because the central government refused to sell, said Ghosh.

As a result, at last count the government had 82 million tons of grain in hand, hoarded for the emergency it never acknowledges has already arrived.

A cynic might well suggest that no real change is likely anytime soon. The proposed national food security bill aims to make the food distribution system work better by adding new enforcement mechanisms, as well as setting up soup kitchens, school meal programs and direct cash transfers to complement the existing subsidies.

But despite all the furor about its cost, the new and improved targeted system still relies on the broken method of trying to identify the poor – whose numbers rise and fall much more rapidly than the government can conduct economic surveys. It ignores evidence from the states that suggests universal subsidies work best.

And even after the expansion it will still cover a lot fewer people than the near universal food program India had until the 1990s.

India: Video Volunteers highlight fate of 'untouchables'

Activists from India's marginalized groups are becoming community journalists armed with handheld cameras.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - July 1, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — A crowd shouts in panic as men pull a limp sanitation worker out of the burbling sewer. He does not regain consciousness, and the worker's arms flop loosely as a paramedic rolls him over and pumps his chest in a vain effort to resuscitate him.

A second man is pulled from the manhole and roughly hosed down before anyone will help him. The casual brutality of the rescue effort is irrelevant. Both sewer workers are already dead — killed by an “untouchable” job.

The scene is a gruesome one, but not uncommon. Like nearly all of India's sewer workers, these men were Dalits, or members of the group once known as “untouchable.” Untouchables were dubbed such because it was thought their bad karma condemned them to filthy jobs. Mere contact with them was thought to pollute to the soul.

Discriminating against Dalits has been ruled officially illegal. But the 2,000-year-old prejudice quietly continues, with Dalits often confined to their historical occupations, as well as barred from accessing community wells and temples. In extreme cases, they are paraded naked, forced to eat excrement or murdered when they object.

What is more remarkable than the nature of the disturbing scene described above is the fact that it was captured on video.

If people are confronted with the harsh realities of Dalit life, will they fight for change? A relatively new nonprofit called Video Volunteers is hoping so.

By training activists from India's marginalized groups to become community journalists, and arming them with cameras to document various abuses, they are hoping to push for more equality among India's notoriously striated society and shame authorities into action.

In April, Video Volunteers launched an innovative documentary project called “Article 17,” after the law that rendered the practice of untouchability technically illegal in 1949 The project aims to document offenses, mobilize communities and generative more nuanced coverage in the mainstream media.

So far, Video Volunteers correspondents have produced 22 two- to three-minute spots documenting the continued practice of untouchability across India, adding to a library of more than 500 short films made by the outfit's 100-odd full-time community producers.

Television networks CNN/IBN and NewsX have broadcast some of the videos on TV, while mainstream media outlets like Tehelka magazine and Youth Ki Awaaz have featured the videos on their websites. And in two months, the Article 17 campaign has generated more than 1,000 signatures for a petition urging the National Commission for Scheduled Castes to begin prosecuting offenses.

Not surprisingly, though, so far they've gotten the usual bureaucratic runaround, as a funny YouTube video demonstrates. And activists who are familiar with the workings of the system say that's about all they should expect.

“The effect will be limited,” said Anoop Kumar, national coordinator of the Insight Foundation, another organization that fights for Dalit rights. “I have been dealing with the Scheduled Caste commission [the government body designated to protect Dalits] for the past decade. They always say they are serious. But they don't have the political will to take action.”

That said, Video Volunteers docs have beaten the odds in the past, and their activist-journalists aren't banking on the bureaucrats to make an impact. With the knowledge that documenting abuses is itself empowering, correspondents arrange community screenings, spread their stories by cell phone and use them to confront local authorities.

In many previous campaigns, they've made a difference. The organization's community journalists have produced more than 500 videos on topics ranging from child marriage to sexual harrassment to government corruption since it was founded by American Jessica Mayberry in 2003. Through outdoor screenings in slums and villages, they've reached an audience of more than 300,000 viewers. And more than 17,000 villagers and slumdwellers been spurred to action, helping more than 600,000 people, according to the non-profit's internal records.

For instance, a Video Volunteers film on India's Right to Information law encouraged slum dwellers in Mumbai to file a request for information about the amount of money spent on garbage collection in their area — an act that itself was enough to ensure a speedy cleanup. Another video documenting evidence that a government school was demanding bribes from parents in addition to the official fees resulted in the removal of the erring headmaster.

A village hotel was forced to rebuild its sewage system so that it didn’t empty into the village’s drinking water. The government re-opened a water treatment
plant and brought clean water to 3,000 people of one district after Video Volunteers' filmmakers exposed a high level of fluorine content in the local water supply.

“Just saying untouchability is bad, or these people should be punished, is not going to help, because this problem is huge,” said the Insight Foundation's Kumar. “But once a Dalit becomes a little assertive politically, he is able to fight it back.”

In the video of the men who died in the sewer beneath the bustling streets of Ludhiana, Punjab, the next man down the manhole tells a Video Volunteers community correspondent.

“I feel bad, but I have to do this dirty work to earn a living. What can I do? I have to educate my children.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120627/india-video-volunteers-film-untouchables

India: Meet the Internet Hindus

Decried by more liberal Indians as anonymous trolls and serial abusers, Hindu nationalists and other right wingers are making a serious play to dominate social media.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - June 18, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — “Internet Hindus are like swarms of bees,” Indian television anchor Sagarika Ghose tweeted in 2010. “They come swarming after you."

The "Internet Hindus" Ghose refers to — actually, she coined the term — are right-wing bloggers and tweeters who seem to follow her every move, pouncing on any mention of hot-button issues like Muslims or Pakistan.

Liberal journalists and netizens sympathized with Ghose's exasperation. But for right-wingers, it was like throwing gasoline on the fire. Since Ghose's tweet, Hindu nationalists and other conservatives opposed to the Congress Party of Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have, if anything, multiplied and grown more organized — embracing Ghose's derogatory term and making it their own.

Today there are perhaps as many as 20,000 so-called “Internet Hindus,” many tweeting as often as 300 times a day, according to a rough estimate by one of the community's most active members.

“You will find thousands with similar sounding IDs [to mine],” a Twitter user who goes by the handle @internet_hindus said in an anonymous chat interview. “Some [others] prefer to openly do it with their own personal IDs."

Freedom of speech

Internet Hindus, largely because of their numbers and influence, find themselves smack in the middle of India's censorship debate. There are signs the country's growing problem with controversial online content has already eroded legislators' commitment to free speech.

In April 2011, India added new rules to the 2000 Information Technology Act that required websites to remove content authorities deemed objectionable within 36 hours of being told do so. The amendment specifically targeted allegedly defamatory content and hate speech, but it was less than crystal clear how either could be identified reliably without an arduous trip through India's notoriously slow court system.

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Some say the new rules simply bend to Congress Party officials' sway. In December, for example, Kapil Sibal, acting telecommunications minister, was reported to have met privately with top executives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to ask them to pre-screen and censorsuch content before it appears online. According to theTimes of India, 255 out of the 358 requests that Google received to remove content cited criticism of the government as the reason it should be censored.

Offline, Hindu nationalist groups have used threats and violence to prevent people like artist M.F. Hussain and filmmaker Deepa Mehta from speaking or exhibiting works they deemed insulting to Hinduism. But in the online world, many Internet Hindus believe that Sibal has attempted to blur the line between statements that are slanderous or dangerously inflammatory and those that are only politically incorrect.

Journalists, too, are starting to question the value of certain online content.

In a recent article for the Hindustan Times, journalist Namita Bhandare argued that “when Twitter dwindles to a platform for abuse it loses its sheen,” citing tweets that questioned the moral character of an alleged victim of sexual assault, or the patriotism of a tweeter who criticized anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare and happens to be a Muslim.

More from GlobalPost: India's economy, how bad is it?

Television anchor Barkha Dutt has expressed the similar sentiment that “lurking online — usually behind anonymity or names that suggest an evangelical religiosity — are many propagators of hate and violence.”

Though neither of these journalists has openly advocated censorship, their comments are evidence that trolls, or cyber bullies, and others who abuse the freedoms of the web stand to force a cultural shift.

“The government is scared of us,” said Suvendu Huddar, a 33-year-old Mumbai entrepreneur who calls himself "Internet Hindu" online. “That's the reason they want to knock down the internet freedoms through some biased tools, which seem to be coming up very soon.”

When good Hindus go bad

The Internet Hindus don't have a monopoly on trolling, of course — some, like aspiring right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party politician Jits Gajaria, say they've had their own run-ins with abusive stalkers. But because they are so numerous, so committed, and can appear so organized — whether or not they are part of a formal network — it's the Hindu nationalist tweeters who have drawn the most flak.

“[Congress party] supporters tend to shout 'Troll' early and leave,” said Samit, a 37-year-old marketing consultant based in Mumbai. “The reason, in my opinion, is simple. Nationalists tend to have stronger views and are more assured about their 'identity.' This is generally miscontrued as 'stubborn' and ego-driven by the guilt driven/anxious liberals.”

Still, the trolls are out there.

Harini Calamur, for instance, a media professional and self-described “old-fashioned liberal,” frequently attracts online abusers — whether it's for her advocacy of due legal process for alleged terrorists or her support of free speech for controversial figures like Salman Rushdie. In one episode, a particularly odious tweeter from the Hindu right kept her Twitter feed busy with a relentless rant for more than 12 hours.

Similarly, Priyanka Chaturvedi, who holds an elected position with the youth wing of the Congress in Mumbai, has been targeted for attack for her statements on the anti-corruption movement's Hazare and Gujarat's chief minister Narendra Modi — who is vying to become BJP's prime minister candidate, though liberals still hold him responsible for what they call a deadly pogrom against Muslims in Ahmedabad in 2002. Modi is the principal hero of most Internet Hindus, along with Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy.

“I heard things like I'm a paid Congress agent,” Chaturvedi said. “[They said] I'm a Sonia Gandhi agent. I was called a bitch. I was called a whore. Any time I tweet about Narendra Modi, they say I'm paid to tweet.”

Committed Internet Hindus argue that it's easy to block abusive users on Twitter, so there's no need to complain. And all of the people who agreed to talk with GlobalPost — whether openly or anonymously — said that the community discourages tweets that are simply abusive, if for no other reason than that they do nothing for the cause.

“I have always maintained that disagreements have full space in democracy but abuse does not,” said Gajaria. “I have called up abusive tweeple [Twitter users] more than a few times for crossing the line. I feel abuse weakens your argument and chance to win a debate.”

Who are the Hindus?

Many Internet Hindus say they don't have any political affiliation — apart from a deep-rooted disdain for the Congress Party. But broadly speaking, most of them seem to sympathize with an ethnic nationalist doctrine called “Hindutva,” or “Hinduness,” which is the unifying ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or “National Organization of Volunteers” (RSS), a paramilitary organization with as many as 5 million members, and the BJP, its political wing.

Hindutva developed in opposition to the idea of secularism promoted by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress Party. It proposes that India is first and foremost a Hindu nation, and rather than “appeasing” Muslims and other minorities with special privileges, the government should promote Hindu culture.

“I want the Hindu dignity of India to be restored,” said another 23-year-old Internet Hindu who has yet to join any political organization, in a representative comment. “We've had a glorious past but the Muslim invaders, the Mughals and the Brits destroyed our sense of pride. After independence, the [Congress] continued with that policy. It continued with laws and acts drafted by the British and never bothered to frame new laws which incorporated the spirit of Bharat [India]. It continued with blatant Muslims appeasement while Hindus were reduced to second-grade citizens in their own land.”

At various points in history, Hindutva and the RSS — sort of like Boy Scouts of America crossed with the Ku Klux Klan — have proven problematic. One of RSS's chief ideologues, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, expressed open admiration for Adolf Hitler's ideas of racial (or in this case, ethnic) purity in “We or Our Nation Defined,” one of the founding texts of Hindutva, in 1938.

More from GlobalPost: "Lust and love" murders on the rise in India

“Kar sevaks” or “volunteers” inspired by the ideology tore down the 16th Century Babri Mosque in 1992, sparking nationwide Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of the Bajrang Dal — an organization affiliated with the RSS and known for beating up couples on Valentine's Day — burned to death an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons in 1999. And breakaway Hindutva extremists have been accused of perpetrating terrorist attacks on Indian mosques and Muslim shrines in 2007 and 2008.

That said, however, few, if any, of today's Internet Hindus profess support for such extreme manifestations of the dogma.

“[Muslims] are equal citizens of this country. This country belongs as much to them as much to me and everyone else. As long as they don't indulge in terrorism and/or forced conversions, I have nothing against them,” said Suresh Nakhua, a BJP member who attends RSS functions.

According to an informal online survey, the Internet Hindus are mostly young, educated professionals — as one might expect in a medium that requires a computer and a strong command of English. More than half of them are under 30 years old, 80 percent have undergraduate or graduate degrees, and two-thirds of them earn more than $10,000 a year — putting them on the high end of India's middle class.

Moreover, in branding them as fanatics and trolls, more liberal or “secular” Indians risk missing just how mainstream their anger has become.

“Why is it if there's such vocal Hindutva anger among the middle class, English-speaking classes, why don't we get to know it?” said Shivam Vij, a blogger with a left-wing political commentary site called Kafila.org. “In our English mainstream media, the right wing has very little voice.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120615/internet-hindus-hindu-nationalists-right-wing-politics

India economy: How bad is it?

Stagflation looms for the middle class, but higher prices will hit the poor hardest.

By Jason Overdorf / NEW DELHI

GlobalPost - June 6, 2012

NEW DELHI, India — A 52-year-old handyman who has lived in New Delhi for 30 years, Ram Samujh has seen bad times before. But these days, as India faces an economic slowdown amid double-digit inflation, the future looks especially bleak.

“There's no more cutting back for me,” says Samujh, a soft-spoken, gray-haired man who carefully takes out a pair of rimless reading glasses. “I'm already down to only the absolute necessities.”

“I'm a daily worker,” said Samujh, whose skills give him a leg up on most Indian laborers. “One day I might get three jobs. But then I might go a week without any.”

Over the past three years, as prices for food and other essentials soared, Sadmujh was also able to charge more for odd jobs like installing new electrical outlets, repairing small appliances and fixing clogged drains. But with India's economic growth slowing to a nine-year low of 5.3 percent for the quarter ended March 31 and 6.5 percent for the fiscal year, Samujh's middle-class employers are also beginning to feel the pain — even as economists predict that prices will continue to skyrocket.

“Things are getting very expensive,” said Bharat Singh, who, as a sub-inspector with the Delhi Police, falls smack in the middle of the $4,000-$10,000 income bracket that economists here define as the middle class.

“Vegetable prices have gone up 25 percent. They are going to increase school fees 20 percent next term. We're no longer able to save any money,” Singh said.

“I'm afraid. I'm really afraid. How will I arrange all the things in the coming months, or coming years. I am afraid to see the future.”

How bad is it?

The short answer may well be yes. Or as Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley in New York, puts it: India now has only a 50-50 chance of making it to the ranks of developed nations by 2050.Many middle-class Indians like Singh — who has three sons, two in private schools and one in college — have already eliminated luxuries like going to the movies and adopted simple economies like eating vegetarian five or six days a week. As car owners getting by on relatively modest salaries, the middle class was hit hardest by the government's move to hike petrol prices nearly 10 percent last month. And though India's labor laws protect them from layoffs, they now face ever greater competition for a stagnating number of jobs, hiring freezes and, possibly, wage cuts — prompting a leading national news weekly to ask: “Was it just a mirage then?”

Though 6.5 percent growth no doubt looks pretty good to countries where a full-on recession is looming, India's economy slowed steadily throughout the fiscal year. And the nature of the growth was not too encouraging, either.

“A lot of the income growth is coming from people selling their land,” said Bibek Debroy, an economist at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research. “That's part of the India story, for better or for worse. Parts of India are getting urbanized. So I have a plot of land that is valuable, and I sell it off.”

Real estate gains — which don't create jobs — accounted for an unhealthy part of India's economic growth in the fourth quarter, when it slipped to 5.3 percent. Worse still, India needs to grow at nearly twice that rate to keep its head above water. Because of its expanding population, it needs to create about 12 million new jobs a year to employ the young people entering the work force — which might just be possible at a 9 percent clip, according to Debroy.

But even that's only the tip of the iceberg. To lift some 600 million farm laborers out of poverty, or near to it, India needs more than simple industrialization, it needs a complete metamorphosis. And over the past three months, its nascent manufacturing sector contracted instead of growing.

“The question is not whether we're growing faster than the rest,” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the India arm of the credit agency, Standard & Poor's. “The question is whether we're growing fast enough to solve our problems. Clearly, we are not.”

That means that the only thing trickling down these days is belt-tightening.

“The poor man's wages have risen quite swiftly until last year. That cushioned them against inflation,” Joshi said. “The high growth we saw allowed people to pay more for household services, more for their drivers, more to farm laborers. But can wages keep rising at the same rate if the economy slows to 6 percent? I don't think so.”

On Monday, Crisil lowered its growth forecast for this year to 6.5 percent from 7 percent. And that could well drop further, if the troubles in the euro zone get worse, oil prices climb back up, or India's government continues to falter.

And wages?

“There's no point in asking for more money now, because nobody will give it,” Samujh said. “It's better to concentrate on keeping my clients happy.”

What's next?

India's business leaders have called for stimulus measures, beginning with an interest-rate cut. And economists like Crisil's Joshi have predicted that some such moves are in the offing — such as fatter tax breaks for export- and labor-intensive industries, and a deep cut to interest rates if growth continues to lag below 6.5 percent.

But it will take more than rearranging the deck chairs to stop the ship from sinking.

“Reform is a generic word,” said Joshi. “You can't ignore the governance and execution aspect of things, which has led to some pessimissm about India right now.”

The conventional wisdom is that India's economic woes stem from “policy paralysis,” a catchphrase that refers to the current government's failure to push through business-friendly economic reforms like loosening the rules on foreign investment for big retailers like Walmart. And, indeed, as the caretaker of a weak coalition government, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hasn't achieved any big bang reforms, like deregulating fuel prices or selling off beleaguered Air India to end a depressing cycle of multibillion dollar bailouts.

The recent move to hike petrol prices may signal that the economist PM is now ready to rock. And Joshi points out that every Indian government has typically taken a “firefighting approach” to the business of running the country.

“I would not lose hope completely,” Joshi said. “Now there is enough fire, so I would expect some action.”

But the paralysis runs much deeper than policy. And, ironically, the root of the problem may not lie with Singh's recalcitrant partners in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) — who stopped him from throwing open the doors to Walmart. It may have originated with the very same middle-class Indians who are now complaining the loudest about the slowdown.

The reason? It was the normally apathetic middle class that first fueled the anti-corruption campaign led by social activist Anna Hazare, which brought tens of thousands of Indians onto the streets last summer. Now, as the mass movement takes on the character of a witch hunt, the calls for blood just keep getting louder. And the fear of being targeted in a Central Bureau of Investigation probe has brought the already sluggish bureaucracy grinding to a halt.

Here's why.

Leaving corruption aside for a moment, India normally functions less by policy than by edict. Sure, there's a law at the root of every government activity. But it translates into action only when, say, the minister of education or rural development issues instructions to the secretaries and joint secretaries who actually make things happen.

By “moving a file,” the bureaucrats clear the actual projects, choose the contractors, and so on. In the current climate of fear, however, these bureaucrats are demanding their instructions in writing, and their ministers are afraid to comply, say insiders.

“The damn problem is not coalition politics and FDI in retail and petroleum product prices,” said Debroy. “The issue is that no one takes decisions, full stop.”