Voting begins in India — yes, the world's largest democracy. Here's what you need to know.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
April 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — Half circus, half marathon, India's mammoth general election began Thursday, with some 140 million voters casting their ballots in a free-for-all that has so far defied pundits for a prediction.
After a campaign season that saw candidates climbing trees, hefting dumbbells, and delivering vitriolic speeches to draw attention, on the first day of polling, election officials transported electronic voting machines across mountain creek beds on horseback while candidates rolled up to file their nomination papers in imported luxury cars, rickshaws, horse-drawn carriages — even riding atop a funeral bier shouldered by supporters. It is little wonder that local reporters have taken to calling India's elections “the greatest show on earth.”
Apart from all the tamasha – or hoopla – the sheer scale of the enterprise is daunting. Because India is fighting simmering wars with Maoist rebels, Kashmiri separatists, and a host of other groups that routinely threaten violent retaliation if voters ignore calls to boycott the polls — and to curb the once-widespread practice of “booth capturing” by party strongmen — the election will take place in five phases between April 16 and May 13 so that some 2 million soldiers and police officers can be deployed to protect voters.
More than 700 million voters will eventually cast their ballots, choosing candidates from among more than 30 different political parties, before the results are announced May 16. And with the two main national parties — the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi and current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Lal Krishna Advani — waning in influence, there's a bigger role than ever for bit players and would-be king- and queen-makers of all shapes and sizes.
“What this election is going to decide is the future of coalition politics, and to what extent parties other than the Congress and the BJP can position their own alliance system,” said political analyst Praful Bidwai.
The contest already has dished up some interesting surprises. Varun Gandhi, a descendant of Jawaharlal Nehru, who defected from the family bastion Congress Party, emerged as the poster boy of the BJP's anti-Muslim agenda. Sajjad Gani Lone became the first major Kashmiri separatist leader to enter the electoral fray. And the Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 26-odd Kashmiri separatist parties, for the first time decided not to issue a call to boycott the polls. Nobody knows what happens next.
Burned by the Congress Party's unexpected victory in 2004, few pundits are willing to make any predictions about this contest, which looks to be decided on a bewildering array of local issues in the absence of any galvanizing national debate. But an ear to the ground verifies that most poll watchers tacitly agree with the forecast laid out by local bookies, who have, naturally, been unable to resist laying odds on the outcome, though all forms of gambling are illegal here.
On the eve of phase one, odds makers were offering even money that the Congress will take at least 142 of the 543 parliamentary seats, a tally that would leave them more than 100 seats short of the majority needed to form a government and select the prime minister on their own, but put them in the driver's seat for any coalition that may emerge following the polls.
Despite the economic downturn and the previous government's perceived failures in its response to the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, the odds on the BJP are less favorable, with bookies offering even money that the Hindu nationalist party will win around 120 seats. The other possibility, though it appears remote, is that a so-called “third front” led by a block of communist parties and regional satraps could cobble together a majority piecemeal — something that has only happened once before in Indian history.
“We've only had one such experience in the past, in '96 to '98,” said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan. “Can one look at a coalition where the center of gravity shifts toward the smaller parties? Or will there be a coalition consisting primarily of the smaller, regional parties, supported by one of the larger parties? Either way, I think there is a shift of the center of gravity that is an underlying issue of this election.”
So far, though, it is also difficult to gauge exactly what is at stake. Recent electoral contests between the Congress and BJP have been seen here as a struggle between the model of secularism favored by the Congress — which offers a vision of a multicultural India that protects and supports the religious and ethnic practices of its diverse population — and the BJP's ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, which in its strongest form advocates the suppression of the minority Muslim population and the conversion of India into a Hindu state.
However, this contest has so far suggested that whatever the beliefs of its hard core supporters, the BJP has decided to soft-pedal its more radical policies with an eye to wooing future coalition partners from among regional parties that lack strong ideologies but are uncomfortable with the open espousal of anti-minority policies.
Similarly — though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has accused the BJP's Advani of “weeping in a corner” while the mob he whipped into a frenzy destroyed a historic mosque and Sonia Gandhi has accused him of taking orders from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a proto-fascist Hindu outfit with millions of members — the voters have heard this material so many times they know the script by heart.
As a result, the real battle will be fought at the ground level, on myriad local issues ranging from the suicides of debt-laden farmers to what road or bridge gets built where. And the result could throw up one of the most fractured and diverse coalitions ever to govern this limitlessly complex country.
“I think in some ways it is one of the most unpredictable elections that India has ever seen,” Bidwai said. "The regional parties and the state-level and sub-state parties now have something like 36 percent of the vote, whereas 25 years ago they had just about 10 or 11 percent. They have emerged as far more important, and that introduces a new kind of uncertainty.”
Some worry that a weak coalition government could be disastrous for India, coming in the midst of an economic crisis that calls for swift and decisive action. Manmohan Singh himself (a trained economist whose primary concern has always been India's rate of economic growth) on Wednesday told members of the Editors Guild of India that growing regionalism — and the weak coalitions it engenders — should be seen as a problem on par with terrorism and Maoist extremism.
But while it is true that past governments formed without a dominant party have crumbled swiftly, making an endless season of polls and repolls a disturbing possibility, experts point out that some short-term governments lacking clear popular mandates have been instrumental in pushing through crucial policies.
The coalition government led by the populist Janata Dal party's VP Singh, for instance, managed to push through a resolution on the demolition of the Babri mosque and a society-defining expansion of the job quota system to include the so-called “other backward classes” as well as the erstwhile untouchables, while Atal Behari Vajpayee's 13-day government of 1998 pushed ahead with India's first nuclear weapons test.
“Of course, that kind of government will be able to focus on only one or two or three tasks,” Rangarajan said. “It can't spread its energy across the board. But I have no doubt that the economy will be right at the top of the agenda [whoever wins]. Whichever government you have, there will have to be a broad stimulus, and I think there you will see some continuity.”
For now, all that is left to do is wait and watch — and place a call to the bookie.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
tigers of india: fearful symmetry
BANDHAVGAR AND PANNA, India — One sunny afternoon in March, officers of the Madhya Pradesh forest department crept up on a majestic Bengal tiger relaxing in the Bandhavgar National Park and shot it with a tranquilizer dart.
The tigress was then loaded into a truck and driven 150 miles — a trip of eight hours or so on India's rough roads — to the Panna Tiger Reserve.
The move was billed as one of the most modern and proactive steps that India's forest department has taken to protect the country's fast disappearing tigers.
But leading conservationists here say the truck might as well have driven the tranquilized beast all the way to China — the final destination of almost all the tigers that are killed by poachers. The Panna Reserve is no great place for tigers: Poachers abound, researchers claim the management there is inept, and the park has lost about 40 tigers the past five years.
Relocations like these aren't inherently disastrous. Wildlife scientists recognize that moving individual animals can be essential to protecting the population. Some experts from the commercial wildlife industry — like Les Carlisle, a conservation manager — think they will have to play an integral part in India's future conservation plans.
“Unless India changes from a passive management system where they sit and record what happens to an active management system where they try and intervene and prevent local extinctions and reintroduce species,” Carlisle said, “I don't believe the future of the tiger is great at all.”
But according to independent wildlife scientists who have studied Panna carefully, that's precisely the problem. Because neither the park management in Panna, nor anything about the way it is run has been changed, there is little reason to hope that the relocated tigress — or any of the others the forest department has committed to moving into Panna — will last much longer.
"Not a single tiger is left in Panna and it is imperative that the reasons for disappearance of tigers in the reserve are identified, and the causes of the tragic decline eliminated, before the re-introduction of any tigers from Bandhavgarh or Kanha," a panel of eight independent tiger experts wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month.
The signatories are still incensed. “This whole sorry incident has proved without doubt that what we need is a dedicated, trained wildlife service,” said Belinda Wright, a former National Geographic photographer who now leads the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “This is playing with fire. Without taking the advice of tiger experts with decades of experience, they [the forest department officers] are just basically doing their own thing.”
It's not news that the tiger is critically endangered around the world. The majestic cat's numbers have declined to only about 3,500, from upwards of 40,000 at the beginning of the century, with subspecies such as the South China Tiger and Sumatran Tiger facing imminent extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
But in recent years, the situation has been revealed to be much more dire than previously believed — in large part due to an apparent crisis plaguing India's “Project Tiger.”
For its last tiger census, India adopted a new way of estimating the surviving population. Instead of a simple method that extrapolated numbers from counting tiger tracks, the new census used satellite remote sensing, geographic information system, and global positioning system technology — in combination with camera trapping and other techniques — to estimate tiger and prey populations.
The results were stunning: Instead of the 3,600 tigers estimated to be living in India's forests in 2002, the more sophisticated census found there are really only about 1,400. In other words, either half of India's tigers (and a quarter of the world's total) were killed over the past five years, or they had never existed anywhere but on paper to begin with.
The unvoiced question became: Was Project Tiger, hailed as one of the world's most successful wildlife conservation programs since it was founded by Indira Gandhi in 1972, just an exercise in inventing numbers?
At first, according to researcher, Raghunandan Chundawat, the program worked. “From 1995 to 2002, in six years, we saw one of the finest recovery of tiger populations in Panna. It was one of the most successful stories in tiger conservation in the last three or four decades,” Chundawat said.
Why did it work? “It was partly due to the management at that time, and partly due to our presence. The guy who was [in charge] there [during those years] provided all the necessary support, and we were providing all the breeding tigers with radio collars and monitored them. We looked at every kill. When you have radio collars and you're watching the tiger 24 hours [a day] you provide a kind of security that's not possible any other way.”
The result was a survival rate of 90 percent for cubs, and, eventually, about seven tigers per square kilometer in the area.
Then, Chundawat alleges, a disaster happened. “In 2001, we had a change in the [park] management,” he said. “They started curtailing our activities, so we were not able to monitor the tigers 24 hours a day the way we should have. We lost a couple of tigers because of that, and when we raised the issue with the management, instead of working with us to determine why these tiger deaths happened and working it out, they canceled our permission [to work in the park altogether.]”
Chundawat was banned from the park for nearly a year, he said, during which time Panna lost more than 20 tigers, and the carnage continued in the absence of the intensive surveillance that his research project provided. But the official numbers — based on the same old method of counting tiger tracks — didn't change.
H.S. Pabla, chief conservator of forests for Madhya Pradesh, makes light of these charges. “There was a depletion in tiger numbers, but the reason was there was no breeding,” he said. “If there are no young ones coming from the bottom then the population is likely to go extinct. So naturally the only solution was to somehow start breeding in that area. We noticed there were some males there, but no females, so the hope was that if we brought in some females that they would start breeding.”
As far as independent tiger experts are concerned, that decision to relocate female tigers from Bandhavgarh to Panna is the proverbial smoking gun. As late as April 2008, the chief wildlife warden claimed in an article in Sanctuary Magazine that Panna had between 20 and 32 tigers and promised, “I would like to assure the world that the tiger density in the park has never been better.”
A month later his department wrote to the national authorities asking for permission to relocate two females. “In a month's time, how can this happen?” Chundawat said. “Now, I believe they have also written a letter to request the transfer of a male tiger. We lost females, we lost males, so what is left there?”
And with the authorities focused on hiding the problem, rather than fixing it, there is little hope that anything will change. “Panna has lost up to 40 tigers,” Wright said. “They've vanished into thin air. Until that is investigated and the reason for their disappearance is addressed, it is pointless to move tigers there. It's downright irresponsible.”
The tigress was then loaded into a truck and driven 150 miles — a trip of eight hours or so on India's rough roads — to the Panna Tiger Reserve.
The move was billed as one of the most modern and proactive steps that India's forest department has taken to protect the country's fast disappearing tigers.
But leading conservationists here say the truck might as well have driven the tranquilized beast all the way to China — the final destination of almost all the tigers that are killed by poachers. The Panna Reserve is no great place for tigers: Poachers abound, researchers claim the management there is inept, and the park has lost about 40 tigers the past five years.
Relocations like these aren't inherently disastrous. Wildlife scientists recognize that moving individual animals can be essential to protecting the population. Some experts from the commercial wildlife industry — like Les Carlisle, a conservation manager — think they will have to play an integral part in India's future conservation plans.
“Unless India changes from a passive management system where they sit and record what happens to an active management system where they try and intervene and prevent local extinctions and reintroduce species,” Carlisle said, “I don't believe the future of the tiger is great at all.”
But according to independent wildlife scientists who have studied Panna carefully, that's precisely the problem. Because neither the park management in Panna, nor anything about the way it is run has been changed, there is little reason to hope that the relocated tigress — or any of the others the forest department has committed to moving into Panna — will last much longer.
"Not a single tiger is left in Panna and it is imperative that the reasons for disappearance of tigers in the reserve are identified, and the causes of the tragic decline eliminated, before the re-introduction of any tigers from Bandhavgarh or Kanha," a panel of eight independent tiger experts wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month.
The signatories are still incensed. “This whole sorry incident has proved without doubt that what we need is a dedicated, trained wildlife service,” said Belinda Wright, a former National Geographic photographer who now leads the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “This is playing with fire. Without taking the advice of tiger experts with decades of experience, they [the forest department officers] are just basically doing their own thing.”
It's not news that the tiger is critically endangered around the world. The majestic cat's numbers have declined to only about 3,500, from upwards of 40,000 at the beginning of the century, with subspecies such as the South China Tiger and Sumatran Tiger facing imminent extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
But in recent years, the situation has been revealed to be much more dire than previously believed — in large part due to an apparent crisis plaguing India's “Project Tiger.”
For its last tiger census, India adopted a new way of estimating the surviving population. Instead of a simple method that extrapolated numbers from counting tiger tracks, the new census used satellite remote sensing, geographic information system, and global positioning system technology — in combination with camera trapping and other techniques — to estimate tiger and prey populations.
The results were stunning: Instead of the 3,600 tigers estimated to be living in India's forests in 2002, the more sophisticated census found there are really only about 1,400. In other words, either half of India's tigers (and a quarter of the world's total) were killed over the past five years, or they had never existed anywhere but on paper to begin with.
The unvoiced question became: Was Project Tiger, hailed as one of the world's most successful wildlife conservation programs since it was founded by Indira Gandhi in 1972, just an exercise in inventing numbers?
At first, according to researcher, Raghunandan Chundawat, the program worked. “From 1995 to 2002, in six years, we saw one of the finest recovery of tiger populations in Panna. It was one of the most successful stories in tiger conservation in the last three or four decades,” Chundawat said.
Why did it work? “It was partly due to the management at that time, and partly due to our presence. The guy who was [in charge] there [during those years] provided all the necessary support, and we were providing all the breeding tigers with radio collars and monitored them. We looked at every kill. When you have radio collars and you're watching the tiger 24 hours [a day] you provide a kind of security that's not possible any other way.”
The result was a survival rate of 90 percent for cubs, and, eventually, about seven tigers per square kilometer in the area.
Then, Chundawat alleges, a disaster happened. “In 2001, we had a change in the [park] management,” he said. “They started curtailing our activities, so we were not able to monitor the tigers 24 hours a day the way we should have. We lost a couple of tigers because of that, and when we raised the issue with the management, instead of working with us to determine why these tiger deaths happened and working it out, they canceled our permission [to work in the park altogether.]”
Chundawat was banned from the park for nearly a year, he said, during which time Panna lost more than 20 tigers, and the carnage continued in the absence of the intensive surveillance that his research project provided. But the official numbers — based on the same old method of counting tiger tracks — didn't change.
H.S. Pabla, chief conservator of forests for Madhya Pradesh, makes light of these charges. “There was a depletion in tiger numbers, but the reason was there was no breeding,” he said. “If there are no young ones coming from the bottom then the population is likely to go extinct. So naturally the only solution was to somehow start breeding in that area. We noticed there were some males there, but no females, so the hope was that if we brought in some females that they would start breeding.”
As far as independent tiger experts are concerned, that decision to relocate female tigers from Bandhavgarh to Panna is the proverbial smoking gun. As late as April 2008, the chief wildlife warden claimed in an article in Sanctuary Magazine that Panna had between 20 and 32 tigers and promised, “I would like to assure the world that the tiger density in the park has never been better.”
A month later his department wrote to the national authorities asking for permission to relocate two females. “In a month's time, how can this happen?” Chundawat said. “Now, I believe they have also written a letter to request the transfer of a male tiger. We lost females, we lost males, so what is left there?”
And with the authorities focused on hiding the problem, rather than fixing it, there is little hope that anything will change. “Panna has lost up to 40 tigers,” Wright said. “They've vanished into thin air. Until that is investigated and the reason for their disappearance is addressed, it is pointless to move tigers there. It's downright irresponsible.”
Friday, March 13, 2009
india: taking a bite out of politics
A host of new nonprofit election watchdogs and citizens' groups are starting to make a dent in middle class apathy.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 13, 2009
DELHI — When Anil Bairwal boots up his computer and scours the newspapers each morning, he may be doing more for the pursuit of justice than any Indian cop.
By training, he's a software engineer, not a police officer. But he and the other members of his team — a network of activists and organizations known as the National Election Watch — have dedicated themselves to making sure criminals don't end up in charge of the government.
Bairwal is at the forefront of a new, and surprising, trend that could have significant implications for the world's largest democracy.
India's middle class — which is still too small to be a decisive voice at the polls — is famous for political apathy.
Campaigns don't come down to issues, but instead often rely on mobilizing party workers to pass out free booze to voters in the slums. In some states, criminal gangs intimidate poor farmers into voting for their leader, while in others party cadres allegedly harass and threaten non-sympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter registration cards. Money and muscle has become so important that every major party relies on candidates charged in criminal cases to deliver the vote.
The situation has become so dismal that nearly a quarter of the legislators in India's recently dissolved parliament had criminal cases pending against them — and not just for white-collar crimes. The charges included 84 cases of murder, along with other violent offenses.
But just as Indian democracy seems to be hitting its lowest ebb, educated Indians are beginning to strike back. Crime and corruption — it turns out — is a strong catalyst.
It all started in 1999 when Trilochan Sastry, then a professor at the respected Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, approached some of his colleagues with a half-baked idea for a guerrilla hit on the nation's unresponsive political parties. Everybody knows that Indian politics is teeming with crooks, he said. But nobody does anything about it.
Sastry suggested filing a lawsuit demanding that candidates divulge their financial assets and criminal records when the parties file their nominations. His friends and fellow professors tried to talk him out of it. After all, they were academics — politics was beneath them. But Sastry recalls that he “didn't see any other way out, any other way to bring about change in the system."
About a year later a Delhi court ruled in their favor. And Sastry and several colleagues — now calling themselves the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) — received the first sign that, despite all evidence to the contrary, common sense might sometimes prevail in Indian politics.
But the feeling was short-lived. Political parties tried to squash the bill, forcing ADR all the way to the Supreme Court before the new rules went into effect in 2003.
Along the way, Sastry's partner in the fight, another business school professor named Jagdeep Chhokar, found time to earn a law degree so they'd be better equipped for the battle. “What shocked us the most was the way the whole process was rationalized by seemingly very decent, upright, law-abiding people in the political establishment,” Chhokar says.
Not surprisingly, therefore, litigation wasn't enough. Even after they were required to disclose their criminal records, all the major parties fielded a host of candidates with pending criminal cases in 2004, with the result that 128 out of 543 members of the last legislature faced ongoing criminal cases while they were in office. At least two were serving life sentences for murder.
“The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability.' Not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues.” explains Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. “In this way, people you would not give a job to — in fact you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization — have become part of the legislature.”
That's where footsoldiers like Bairwal, who gave up a top-level job with a multinational software company to become ADR's national coordinator, come in.
Because requiring politicians to divulge the most dubious facts about themselves didn't stop them from running for office — or winning — ADR set up the National Election Watch to make sure that the press and the voters know exactly how many robberies, kidnappings and murders their honorable member of parliament is alleged to have committed.
The group has mobilized 1,200 organizations and thousands of volunteers to track the activities of dozens of political parties in the run-up to elections, allowing them to spring into action as soon as a candidate is announced. Researchers comb through past affidavits to see whether the candidate has declared criminal cases in the past, and whether there has been any major change in his or her financial assets. Then they name names.
This year they are not only lobbying the press and holding public rallies. Soon they will begin sending weekly text messages with details of politicians' criminal records to voters. “You would think that political parties would do proper background checking of the candidates and then field somebody who would be good for the people, who would be good for the society,” says Bairwal, who over the past two weeks has traveled to nine states and met with more than 100 partner organizations. “But as you can see from the records, that's not the case.”
So far, results have been mixed.
In the last state election that ADR tracked, the number of candidates with alleged criminal pasts dropped to about 12 percent from 25 percent, but the number of alleged criminals who actually won seats remained flat.
The Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government named Shibu Soren coal minister, even though he was on trial for multiple murders (he was later convicted, then acquitted on appeal). And neither of the two party heavyweights have managed to purge alleged (or even convicted) criminals from their ranks. “[BJP leader] L.K. Advani made a statement on the 18th of October that they will not give tickets to people with criminal backgrounds, even if they are winning candidates,” says Chhokar. “And then in the four or five state [subsequent] assembly elections, there were criminals galore.”
But the man who started it all remains optimistic. “The parties have publicly announced that they're not going to put up candidates with criminal records,” Sastry says. “They have not kept that promise, no doubt. But at least they have started reacting.”
The real tipping point will come when voters do the same.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 13, 2009
DELHI — When Anil Bairwal boots up his computer and scours the newspapers each morning, he may be doing more for the pursuit of justice than any Indian cop.
By training, he's a software engineer, not a police officer. But he and the other members of his team — a network of activists and organizations known as the National Election Watch — have dedicated themselves to making sure criminals don't end up in charge of the government.
Bairwal is at the forefront of a new, and surprising, trend that could have significant implications for the world's largest democracy.
India's middle class — which is still too small to be a decisive voice at the polls — is famous for political apathy.
Campaigns don't come down to issues, but instead often rely on mobilizing party workers to pass out free booze to voters in the slums. In some states, criminal gangs intimidate poor farmers into voting for their leader, while in others party cadres allegedly harass and threaten non-sympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter registration cards. Money and muscle has become so important that every major party relies on candidates charged in criminal cases to deliver the vote.
The situation has become so dismal that nearly a quarter of the legislators in India's recently dissolved parliament had criminal cases pending against them — and not just for white-collar crimes. The charges included 84 cases of murder, along with other violent offenses.
But just as Indian democracy seems to be hitting its lowest ebb, educated Indians are beginning to strike back. Crime and corruption — it turns out — is a strong catalyst.
It all started in 1999 when Trilochan Sastry, then a professor at the respected Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, approached some of his colleagues with a half-baked idea for a guerrilla hit on the nation's unresponsive political parties. Everybody knows that Indian politics is teeming with crooks, he said. But nobody does anything about it.
Sastry suggested filing a lawsuit demanding that candidates divulge their financial assets and criminal records when the parties file their nominations. His friends and fellow professors tried to talk him out of it. After all, they were academics — politics was beneath them. But Sastry recalls that he “didn't see any other way out, any other way to bring about change in the system."
About a year later a Delhi court ruled in their favor. And Sastry and several colleagues — now calling themselves the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) — received the first sign that, despite all evidence to the contrary, common sense might sometimes prevail in Indian politics.
But the feeling was short-lived. Political parties tried to squash the bill, forcing ADR all the way to the Supreme Court before the new rules went into effect in 2003.
Along the way, Sastry's partner in the fight, another business school professor named Jagdeep Chhokar, found time to earn a law degree so they'd be better equipped for the battle. “What shocked us the most was the way the whole process was rationalized by seemingly very decent, upright, law-abiding people in the political establishment,” Chhokar says.
Not surprisingly, therefore, litigation wasn't enough. Even after they were required to disclose their criminal records, all the major parties fielded a host of candidates with pending criminal cases in 2004, with the result that 128 out of 543 members of the last legislature faced ongoing criminal cases while they were in office. At least two were serving life sentences for murder.
“The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability.' Not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues.” explains Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. “In this way, people you would not give a job to — in fact you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization — have become part of the legislature.”
That's where footsoldiers like Bairwal, who gave up a top-level job with a multinational software company to become ADR's national coordinator, come in.
Because requiring politicians to divulge the most dubious facts about themselves didn't stop them from running for office — or winning — ADR set up the National Election Watch to make sure that the press and the voters know exactly how many robberies, kidnappings and murders their honorable member of parliament is alleged to have committed.
The group has mobilized 1,200 organizations and thousands of volunteers to track the activities of dozens of political parties in the run-up to elections, allowing them to spring into action as soon as a candidate is announced. Researchers comb through past affidavits to see whether the candidate has declared criminal cases in the past, and whether there has been any major change in his or her financial assets. Then they name names.
This year they are not only lobbying the press and holding public rallies. Soon they will begin sending weekly text messages with details of politicians' criminal records to voters. “You would think that political parties would do proper background checking of the candidates and then field somebody who would be good for the people, who would be good for the society,” says Bairwal, who over the past two weeks has traveled to nine states and met with more than 100 partner organizations. “But as you can see from the records, that's not the case.”
So far, results have been mixed.
In the last state election that ADR tracked, the number of candidates with alleged criminal pasts dropped to about 12 percent from 25 percent, but the number of alleged criminals who actually won seats remained flat.
The Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government named Shibu Soren coal minister, even though he was on trial for multiple murders (he was later convicted, then acquitted on appeal). And neither of the two party heavyweights have managed to purge alleged (or even convicted) criminals from their ranks. “[BJP leader] L.K. Advani made a statement on the 18th of October that they will not give tickets to people with criminal backgrounds, even if they are winning candidates,” says Chhokar. “And then in the four or five state [subsequent] assembly elections, there were criminals galore.”
But the man who started it all remains optimistic. “The parties have publicly announced that they're not going to put up candidates with criminal records,” Sastry says. “They have not kept that promise, no doubt. But at least they have started reacting.”
The real tipping point will come when voters do the same.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
the house in ill repute
New rules have exposed just how many thieves and murderers sit in India's Parliament.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
March 16, 2009
Indian members of Parliament went home last week amid hoots and howls, derided as the sorriest lot ever to disgrace the halls of the world's largest democracy. The 14th Lok Sabha, or People's House, met for only 46 days in the past year—the fewest ever—because of disruptions caused by its many dubious members. One in 10 members didn't participate in a single debate. Eleven M.P.s were expelled for taking bribes. The coal minister was compelled to step down when he was convicted of murder (though he was later acquitted on appeal). And when the opposition called for a confidence vote, several members had to be transported to the People's House from the big house—where two of them are serving life sentences for murder—to participate. As the legislators adjourned last week, House Speaker Somnath Chatterjee wished them good riddance: "You do not deserve one paisa [cent] of public money," he scolded. "I hope all of you are defeated in the next election."
That's not likely. Parties in India have long used allies with shady pasts to influence voters. But as the power of the national parties waned—accelerating in the late 1990s—because of the rise of caste- and ethnicity-based regional players, alleged and convicted criminals began to play a broader role. No single party has won enough parliamentary seats to govern alone since the Congress party did so in 1984, and the number of seats won by India's six national parties—which include the Congress, the BJP and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—fell from 477 in 1991 to 388 in 2004. Now, in many constituencies, there are four or five significant parties, and the share of the vote needed to win a seat has fallen as low as 15 percent. As a result, criminal strongmen no longer need to throw their support behind a leading politician, because the number of votes they need is small enough that they can win elected office themselves. With regional players well positioned for the next general election on April 16, there is some chance that a politician who has undergone a criminal investigation could become the prime minister.
The 14th Lok Sabha was the first in which it was crystal clear just how many members were alleged crooks. Thanks to new rules pushed into law by a group of fed-up college professors after years of resistance from dozens of political parties, candidates for the Lok Sabha for the first time had to disclose their assets and criminal records. The disclosures seemed to have little impact on the 2004 election: 128 of the 543 winners had faced criminal charges, including 84 cases of murder, 17 cases of robbery and 28 cases of theft and extortion. Many face multiple criminal counts—including one M.P. who faces 17 separate murder charges—and no major party is beyond reproach. Because the disclosure requirement is new, it's impossible to plot a trend line, but most experts say the situation is deteriorating. "The general opinion is that the influence of criminals in politics is steadily increasing," says Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition.
Indian law bars convicted criminals, not alleged criminals, from running for office, but a loophole allows even convicts to continue in politics as long as the case is under appeal. In India, that can mean 25 or 30 years, the course of an entire career. And the problem goes well beyond alleged criminals who hold elected office.
Due to a fractured electorate and rampant flouting of campaign-spending limits, gangsters have muscled into positions of influence close to Parliament, and the problem is spreading. While the middle class protests, party workers distribute liquor and cash to woo voters in the slums. In lawless states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, thugs intimidate poor farmers into toeing the line. In riot-torn Gujarat and West Bengal, party cadres are alleged to harass and threaten nonsympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter-registration cards. And elsewhere, aspirants like Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena—known for beating up migrants coming to Mumbai to hunt for jobs—use vandalism masked as street demonstrations to raise their political profiles. "Whether you call them goons or you call them political activists," says Jha, "it is becoming a blurred line."
The havoc created by India's criminal politicians is wide-ranging. Criminals seek political office to enrich themselves and gain protection from prosecution, and they easily pervert the police and the administration to their private purposes. When police officers or magistrates attempt to enforce the law, a powerful M.P. can engineer their transfer; in 2005 M.P. and convicted murderer Mohammed Shahabuddin of Bihar arranged the transfer of a magistrate who had sought to bar Shahabuddin from the district as a threat to public order.
Even on a matter as vital as last year's nuclear pact with the U.S., the alleged criminality of key politicians is believed to have made a crucial difference in the path India chose. When Singh and the Congress party opted to go ahead with the pact, their allies from the left parties withdrew their support for the government, forcing a confidence vote. After some frenzied horse-trading, the legislators of the Samajwadi Party—whose leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was under scrutiny for corruption by the Central Bureau of Investigation—switched positions to support the nuclear pact and volunteered to replace the left parties in the coalition. The government survived, and the pact went through. But soon after, stories of mysterious briefcases full of cash traveling from party offices to the homes of M.P.s began to circulate. The CBI—often criticized for acting as a political tool of the ruling party—dropped its case against the Samajwadi Party leader. And the probe into the "cash for votes" scandal fizzled before it even started.
The major parties are not above all this. In the outgoing Parliament, 26 Congress M.P.s and 29 BJP M.P.s faced criminal charges. About a fifth of the representatives of the two major parties were under investigation. Nor has either party been shy about giving ministerial posts to politicians accused of serious crimes. For example, Congress installed Shibu Soren as coal minister even though he was at the time under trial for the alleged kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary and the alleged massacre of 11 people in sectarian violence. (He was later acquitted in both cases.) "The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability,' not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues," says Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the BJP. "In this way, people you would not give a job to—in fact, you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization—have become part of the legislature."
Come April, experts agree, the list of candidates competing for office is likely once again to be significantly shorter than the list of criminal charges against them. Even the mainstream political parties have resisted change. When the college profs first mobilized as the Association for Democratic Reforms in 1999, filing suit to force candidates to disclose criminal records, it sailed through the Delhi courts. Then the BJP, the Congress and 20 other political parties united to stymie the new rules through legal technicalities, delaying implementation for years. ADR member Jagdish Chhokar says the official resistance proved two things: that "the political establishment can be united" on an issue they care about and "that the government can be efficient," at least in defense of thugs in office.
Standards have indeed fallen so low that neither the BJP nor the Congress have pledged to eliminate even violent offenders from their rosters and instead must rely on the argument that their criminals are cleaner on average than others'.
"Neither the Congress nor the BJP have people with serial, cognizable offenses," says BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy, arguing for a distinction "between crimes of moral turpitude" and "heinous" crimes. Congress spokesman Satyavrat Chaturvedi says, "I can't say there's never been a case where a criminal has been given a ticket, [but] professional criminals, habitual criminals, those people will not get tickets."
It makes one wonder: How many murder charges are required before you're considered unfit to represent the good people of India?
With Sudip Mazumdar in Kolkata
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188166
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
March 16, 2009
Indian members of Parliament went home last week amid hoots and howls, derided as the sorriest lot ever to disgrace the halls of the world's largest democracy. The 14th Lok Sabha, or People's House, met for only 46 days in the past year—the fewest ever—because of disruptions caused by its many dubious members. One in 10 members didn't participate in a single debate. Eleven M.P.s were expelled for taking bribes. The coal minister was compelled to step down when he was convicted of murder (though he was later acquitted on appeal). And when the opposition called for a confidence vote, several members had to be transported to the People's House from the big house—where two of them are serving life sentences for murder—to participate. As the legislators adjourned last week, House Speaker Somnath Chatterjee wished them good riddance: "You do not deserve one paisa [cent] of public money," he scolded. "I hope all of you are defeated in the next election."
That's not likely. Parties in India have long used allies with shady pasts to influence voters. But as the power of the national parties waned—accelerating in the late 1990s—because of the rise of caste- and ethnicity-based regional players, alleged and convicted criminals began to play a broader role. No single party has won enough parliamentary seats to govern alone since the Congress party did so in 1984, and the number of seats won by India's six national parties—which include the Congress, the BJP and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—fell from 477 in 1991 to 388 in 2004. Now, in many constituencies, there are four or five significant parties, and the share of the vote needed to win a seat has fallen as low as 15 percent. As a result, criminal strongmen no longer need to throw their support behind a leading politician, because the number of votes they need is small enough that they can win elected office themselves. With regional players well positioned for the next general election on April 16, there is some chance that a politician who has undergone a criminal investigation could become the prime minister.
The 14th Lok Sabha was the first in which it was crystal clear just how many members were alleged crooks. Thanks to new rules pushed into law by a group of fed-up college professors after years of resistance from dozens of political parties, candidates for the Lok Sabha for the first time had to disclose their assets and criminal records. The disclosures seemed to have little impact on the 2004 election: 128 of the 543 winners had faced criminal charges, including 84 cases of murder, 17 cases of robbery and 28 cases of theft and extortion. Many face multiple criminal counts—including one M.P. who faces 17 separate murder charges—and no major party is beyond reproach. Because the disclosure requirement is new, it's impossible to plot a trend line, but most experts say the situation is deteriorating. "The general opinion is that the influence of criminals in politics is steadily increasing," says Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition.
Indian law bars convicted criminals, not alleged criminals, from running for office, but a loophole allows even convicts to continue in politics as long as the case is under appeal. In India, that can mean 25 or 30 years, the course of an entire career. And the problem goes well beyond alleged criminals who hold elected office.
Due to a fractured electorate and rampant flouting of campaign-spending limits, gangsters have muscled into positions of influence close to Parliament, and the problem is spreading. While the middle class protests, party workers distribute liquor and cash to woo voters in the slums. In lawless states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, thugs intimidate poor farmers into toeing the line. In riot-torn Gujarat and West Bengal, party cadres are alleged to harass and threaten nonsympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter-registration cards. And elsewhere, aspirants like Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena—known for beating up migrants coming to Mumbai to hunt for jobs—use vandalism masked as street demonstrations to raise their political profiles. "Whether you call them goons or you call them political activists," says Jha, "it is becoming a blurred line."
The havoc created by India's criminal politicians is wide-ranging. Criminals seek political office to enrich themselves and gain protection from prosecution, and they easily pervert the police and the administration to their private purposes. When police officers or magistrates attempt to enforce the law, a powerful M.P. can engineer their transfer; in 2005 M.P. and convicted murderer Mohammed Shahabuddin of Bihar arranged the transfer of a magistrate who had sought to bar Shahabuddin from the district as a threat to public order.
Even on a matter as vital as last year's nuclear pact with the U.S., the alleged criminality of key politicians is believed to have made a crucial difference in the path India chose. When Singh and the Congress party opted to go ahead with the pact, their allies from the left parties withdrew their support for the government, forcing a confidence vote. After some frenzied horse-trading, the legislators of the Samajwadi Party—whose leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was under scrutiny for corruption by the Central Bureau of Investigation—switched positions to support the nuclear pact and volunteered to replace the left parties in the coalition. The government survived, and the pact went through. But soon after, stories of mysterious briefcases full of cash traveling from party offices to the homes of M.P.s began to circulate. The CBI—often criticized for acting as a political tool of the ruling party—dropped its case against the Samajwadi Party leader. And the probe into the "cash for votes" scandal fizzled before it even started.
The major parties are not above all this. In the outgoing Parliament, 26 Congress M.P.s and 29 BJP M.P.s faced criminal charges. About a fifth of the representatives of the two major parties were under investigation. Nor has either party been shy about giving ministerial posts to politicians accused of serious crimes. For example, Congress installed Shibu Soren as coal minister even though he was at the time under trial for the alleged kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary and the alleged massacre of 11 people in sectarian violence. (He was later acquitted in both cases.) "The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability,' not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues," says Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the BJP. "In this way, people you would not give a job to—in fact, you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization—have become part of the legislature."
Come April, experts agree, the list of candidates competing for office is likely once again to be significantly shorter than the list of criminal charges against them. Even the mainstream political parties have resisted change. When the college profs first mobilized as the Association for Democratic Reforms in 1999, filing suit to force candidates to disclose criminal records, it sailed through the Delhi courts. Then the BJP, the Congress and 20 other political parties united to stymie the new rules through legal technicalities, delaying implementation for years. ADR member Jagdish Chhokar says the official resistance proved two things: that "the political establishment can be united" on an issue they care about and "that the government can be efficient," at least in defense of thugs in office.
Standards have indeed fallen so low that neither the BJP nor the Congress have pledged to eliminate even violent offenders from their rosters and instead must rely on the argument that their criminals are cleaner on average than others'.
"Neither the Congress nor the BJP have people with serial, cognizable offenses," says BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy, arguing for a distinction "between crimes of moral turpitude" and "heinous" crimes. Congress spokesman Satyavrat Chaturvedi says, "I can't say there's never been a case where a criminal has been given a ticket, [but] professional criminals, habitual criminals, those people will not get tickets."
It makes one wonder: How many murder charges are required before you're considered unfit to represent the good people of India?
With Sudip Mazumdar in Kolkata
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188166
under an indian sun
Can an upstart Indian DVD maker beat Google to the punch in solar energy?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 7, 2009
NEW DELHI — Ratul Puri, the 35-year-old executive director of Moser Baer India, looks like Adrian Brody's kid brother and talks like he swallowed the last four volumes of the Harvard Business Review. But he's no puffed up heir to the throne of daddy's business.
Since Puri returned to India from college in the United States in 1994, he's helped transform Moser Baer from a rinky-dink maker of floppy disks into a $400 million high-tech company that straddles business as diverse as the optical media, home entertainment, consumer electronics and solar energy sectors.
Today, Moser Baer is among the world's top five makers of blank CDs and DVDs, and virtually owns the Indian market for storage media. In 2007, after the company discovered a method of making pre-recorded DVDs at about half the price of existing technologies, Puri spearheaded a move into home entertainment that has already revolutionized the Indian market — where the company has acquired more than 10,000 titles and slashed the retail price of DVD movies to about $1 from $10-$15 before it entered the sector. And in 2008 it began unveiling a range of DVD players, LCD TVs and other consumer electronics products that independent observers have said offer the same features and quality of leading international brands for a tenth of the cost.
But the company's most exciting move is its venture into making thin-film solar energy panels, where its expertise in shaving down costs has the potential to spark a revolution in this power-starved country. “India has a massive opportunity in solar. Five, ten, fifteen years down the road it can be amongst the world's largest markets,” Puri told GlobalPost in a recent interview.
That enthusiasm might seem unrealistic from an Indian company that until a couple of years ago was known exclusively for stamping out blank DVDs, especially now that lower oil prices and financial turmoil have stilled some of the clamor for clean energy. But Puri claims that his enormous CD and DVD volumes actually give him more experience in coating thin-film silicon — the essential technology that Moser Baer's solar cells will employ — than virtually any other company in the world. “We plan to have 600-odd megawatts of capacity by 2010,” he said, “which will get us to the magic $1 a watt [that it will take to compete with conventional power].”
Moser Baer plans investments of nearly $3.2 billion in research, development and manufacturing of solar power products — the "thin film modules" and other silicon bits and pieces that make solar power work.
The key to success, Puri says, will be the company's expertise in lowering manufacturing costs. One of the first Indian manufacturers to successfully compete internationally, Moser Baer entered high-tech manufacturing at a time when the general consensus was that Indian manufacturing was a basket case.
In one of the dustiest places on the planet, the company built a massive “clean room” for disk manufacture that required an air conditioning unit that takes up the entire second floor of the factory, and installed their own diesel-fueled power generation facility, since even a brief electricity outage would spoil the melted silicon. And that was at a time when nobody believed blank CDs could be made cheaply enough to replace floppies. “There isn't one big factor [to cutting costs], it's a lot of little factors,” Puri said. “Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to believe that you could have a DVD that you could sell for 10 cents a disk and make money, but today it's real. So similar to that in the solar space.”
Already, touching $1 a watt would put the Indian firm in some pretty elite company. Only a handful of firms claim to have reached that price point so far, including U.S.-based First Solar and Nanosolar, which has received financial backing from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Nanosolar uses — attention science fans — copper indium gallium diselenide to build its solar cells, while First Solar uses cadmium telluride-based cells. For its part, Moser Baer uses amorphous silicon. All three technologies have their proponents.
But making DVDs has convinced Puri that he can lower the costs of producing amorphous silicon cells again and again. “We're designing new anti-reflective coatings which then impact the light, we've driven the thickness of the glass down, we've tried to design a better system of components around the basic panel to take costs out, we've innovated a lot on the process recipes, which allows much higher throughput for the facilities,” he said. “It's a lot of little things that contribute to that road map to a sub $1 a watt price point.”
If the company gets there by 2010, that could help India leapfrog to clean energy the way it bypassed terrestrial telephone networks and went straight to cellular, which would be good news for the rest of the world. Despite the much-heralded nuclear deal with the United States, even 20 years down the road, nuclear energy will supply only a tiny fraction of India's power needs. “What does that mean for India, or more importantly, what does it mean for the rest of the world? Where will India get its energy from? It will get it from coal,” Puri said. And that means as many as 300 coal-fired power plants spewing a giant brown cloud over Asia.
But if solar gets here first, that could be different. “Maybe instead of 300 coal plants, it will only have to build 150. That might be an acceptable path.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 7, 2009
NEW DELHI — Ratul Puri, the 35-year-old executive director of Moser Baer India, looks like Adrian Brody's kid brother and talks like he swallowed the last four volumes of the Harvard Business Review. But he's no puffed up heir to the throne of daddy's business.
Since Puri returned to India from college in the United States in 1994, he's helped transform Moser Baer from a rinky-dink maker of floppy disks into a $400 million high-tech company that straddles business as diverse as the optical media, home entertainment, consumer electronics and solar energy sectors.
Today, Moser Baer is among the world's top five makers of blank CDs and DVDs, and virtually owns the Indian market for storage media. In 2007, after the company discovered a method of making pre-recorded DVDs at about half the price of existing technologies, Puri spearheaded a move into home entertainment that has already revolutionized the Indian market — where the company has acquired more than 10,000 titles and slashed the retail price of DVD movies to about $1 from $10-$15 before it entered the sector. And in 2008 it began unveiling a range of DVD players, LCD TVs and other consumer electronics products that independent observers have said offer the same features and quality of leading international brands for a tenth of the cost.
But the company's most exciting move is its venture into making thin-film solar energy panels, where its expertise in shaving down costs has the potential to spark a revolution in this power-starved country. “India has a massive opportunity in solar. Five, ten, fifteen years down the road it can be amongst the world's largest markets,” Puri told GlobalPost in a recent interview.
That enthusiasm might seem unrealistic from an Indian company that until a couple of years ago was known exclusively for stamping out blank DVDs, especially now that lower oil prices and financial turmoil have stilled some of the clamor for clean energy. But Puri claims that his enormous CD and DVD volumes actually give him more experience in coating thin-film silicon — the essential technology that Moser Baer's solar cells will employ — than virtually any other company in the world. “We plan to have 600-odd megawatts of capacity by 2010,” he said, “which will get us to the magic $1 a watt [that it will take to compete with conventional power].”
Moser Baer plans investments of nearly $3.2 billion in research, development and manufacturing of solar power products — the "thin film modules" and other silicon bits and pieces that make solar power work.
The key to success, Puri says, will be the company's expertise in lowering manufacturing costs. One of the first Indian manufacturers to successfully compete internationally, Moser Baer entered high-tech manufacturing at a time when the general consensus was that Indian manufacturing was a basket case.
In one of the dustiest places on the planet, the company built a massive “clean room” for disk manufacture that required an air conditioning unit that takes up the entire second floor of the factory, and installed their own diesel-fueled power generation facility, since even a brief electricity outage would spoil the melted silicon. And that was at a time when nobody believed blank CDs could be made cheaply enough to replace floppies. “There isn't one big factor [to cutting costs], it's a lot of little factors,” Puri said. “Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to believe that you could have a DVD that you could sell for 10 cents a disk and make money, but today it's real. So similar to that in the solar space.”
Already, touching $1 a watt would put the Indian firm in some pretty elite company. Only a handful of firms claim to have reached that price point so far, including U.S.-based First Solar and Nanosolar, which has received financial backing from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Nanosolar uses — attention science fans — copper indium gallium diselenide to build its solar cells, while First Solar uses cadmium telluride-based cells. For its part, Moser Baer uses amorphous silicon. All three technologies have their proponents.
But making DVDs has convinced Puri that he can lower the costs of producing amorphous silicon cells again and again. “We're designing new anti-reflective coatings which then impact the light, we've driven the thickness of the glass down, we've tried to design a better system of components around the basic panel to take costs out, we've innovated a lot on the process recipes, which allows much higher throughput for the facilities,” he said. “It's a lot of little things that contribute to that road map to a sub $1 a watt price point.”
If the company gets there by 2010, that could help India leapfrog to clean energy the way it bypassed terrestrial telephone networks and went straight to cellular, which would be good news for the rest of the world. Despite the much-heralded nuclear deal with the United States, even 20 years down the road, nuclear energy will supply only a tiny fraction of India's power needs. “What does that mean for India, or more importantly, what does it mean for the rest of the world? Where will India get its energy from? It will get it from coal,” Puri said. And that means as many as 300 coal-fired power plants spewing a giant brown cloud over Asia.
But if solar gets here first, that could be different. “Maybe instead of 300 coal plants, it will only have to build 150. That might be an acceptable path.”
Monday, March 02, 2009
women on top -- india
By Jason Overdorf
Monocle (March 2009)
For almost 30 years, you couldn’t get married in north India without a Bajaj Chetak scooter. The reason: no dowry was complete without the classic workhorse. But today, India’s scooter business – like the country – is in the throes of a revolution. Stricter laws are slowly wiping out the dowry system. And it is future brides, not grooms, who have become the scooter makers’ target audience.
In the early 1990s, women on scooters were so rare that riding one earned my wife the nickname “scooter walli madam”. Nobody would have predicted that top scooter companies such as TVS Motor, Hero Honda and Kinetic Motors would soon be wooing India’s newly liberated women with snappy jingles, women-only showrooms, and a battery of colours as extensive as any lipstick rack. “At stage one it was establishing the relevance of the product,” says McCann- Erickson’s Dileep Ashoka, who leads the ad team for TVS Scooty. “Then it moved into a more emotional territory of being the girls’ ‘first keys to freedom’ and then into a more assured attitude to appeal to free- spirited girls.”
In one 2006 Scooty ad, a group of roadside Romeos taunt Bollywood actress Preity Zinta’s character on the way to college because she is riding a pink scooter. When they arrive at class, they find that Zinta is the professor. “Never underestimate the power of pink,” she says.
Publicis Ambience raised the stakes in its ad in 2007 for the Kinetic Flyte made by Kinetic Motors in association with Taiwan’s SYM (managing director of Kinetic, Sulajja Firodia Motwani, is pictured above on the right, with executive vice-president of SYM, Harrison Liu). Bollywood actress Bipasha Basu fronted the campaign which spoofed the Scooty with pink-clad Barbies singing, “We’re bubbly like our scooters, we’re girlie like our scooters.” Basu tells viewers: “Today’s women aren’t girlie like dolls, they’re smart and confident.”
Hero Honda’s Pleasure has pushed the envelope even further. The ads for the Pleasure hint at the fact that owning a scooter means freedom from chaperones. For instance, the bride and groom exit their western- style wedding ceremony to find a robin’s-egg blue Pleasure. This time, though, the bride takes the handlebars and the groom straddles the pillion. The message is clear. The days of the dowry are fading fast. And where scooters are concerned, women are on top.
http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Magazine-Articles/Women-on-top/
Monocle (March 2009)
For almost 30 years, you couldn’t get married in north India without a Bajaj Chetak scooter. The reason: no dowry was complete without the classic workhorse. But today, India’s scooter business – like the country – is in the throes of a revolution. Stricter laws are slowly wiping out the dowry system. And it is future brides, not grooms, who have become the scooter makers’ target audience.
In the early 1990s, women on scooters were so rare that riding one earned my wife the nickname “scooter walli madam”. Nobody would have predicted that top scooter companies such as TVS Motor, Hero Honda and Kinetic Motors would soon be wooing India’s newly liberated women with snappy jingles, women-only showrooms, and a battery of colours as extensive as any lipstick rack. “At stage one it was establishing the relevance of the product,” says McCann- Erickson’s Dileep Ashoka, who leads the ad team for TVS Scooty. “Then it moved into a more emotional territory of being the girls’ ‘first keys to freedom’ and then into a more assured attitude to appeal to free- spirited girls.”
In one 2006 Scooty ad, a group of roadside Romeos taunt Bollywood actress Preity Zinta’s character on the way to college because she is riding a pink scooter. When they arrive at class, they find that Zinta is the professor. “Never underestimate the power of pink,” she says.
Publicis Ambience raised the stakes in its ad in 2007 for the Kinetic Flyte made by Kinetic Motors in association with Taiwan’s SYM (managing director of Kinetic, Sulajja Firodia Motwani, is pictured above on the right, with executive vice-president of SYM, Harrison Liu). Bollywood actress Bipasha Basu fronted the campaign which spoofed the Scooty with pink-clad Barbies singing, “We’re bubbly like our scooters, we’re girlie like our scooters.” Basu tells viewers: “Today’s women aren’t girlie like dolls, they’re smart and confident.”
Hero Honda’s Pleasure has pushed the envelope even further. The ads for the Pleasure hint at the fact that owning a scooter means freedom from chaperones. For instance, the bride and groom exit their western- style wedding ceremony to find a robin’s-egg blue Pleasure. This time, though, the bride takes the handlebars and the groom straddles the pillion. The message is clear. The days of the dowry are fading fast. And where scooters are concerned, women are on top.
http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Magazine-Articles/Women-on-top/
Thursday, February 26, 2009
the bhopal disaster: 25 years later
Will the notorious chemical tragedy in India claim a third generation of victims?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 26, 2009
BHOPAL, Madhya Pradesh, India — In the dim light of her two-room shack opposite the site of one of the world's worst industrial disasters, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, Leelabai Ahirwar delivers a quiet account of the event that ruined her life.
“I myself am still affected by the gas,” the 45-year-old mother of four says. “I suffer from chest pains, and I often feel like I'm about to die. But my children are worse off. My daughter is anemic and her body swells up mysteriously, and my son, Jagdish, never grew properly, so he looks like he is only 14 years old, even though he is almost 22.”
A few minutes into our discussion, Ahirwar calls Jagdish, her stunted son, in from the other room. His elfin features and tiny stature make him look more like a nine year old than the 14 or 15 his mother claimed. But he produces a birth certificate that proves he's 21. “We took him to the doctor many times,” says Ahirwar. “But they don't listen.”
That's no surprise. Jagdish isn't the only young person in this Bhopal slum to suffer from an unexplained ailment. Though there has been no official study of the longterm effects of the gas leak and lingering environmental damage, anecdotal evidence suggests that the residents who remain trapped in the disaster zone live in serious peril. A 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women living near the factory. A 2003 survey by the Sambhavan Clinic found that half of the residents of this neighborhood suffer from respiratory problems, anemia, headaches and nausea. The clinic also found a higher than average number of birth defects.
At five minutes past midnight on Dec. 3, 1984, some 30 tons of toxic chemicals spewed into the air from an insecticide factory — then owned by Union Carbide — not a stone's throw from Ahirwar's home. Within minutes, poison gas billowed over this poverty-stricken slum community while residents slept. Ahirwar, then 20 years old, and her husband hid under a blanket, only finding out what had transpired the next morning. Up to 8,000 people died over the next few weeks, and as many as 20,000 more in the subsequent months. And that was only the beginning. Unable to relocate due to poverty, residents have continued to drink contaminated water and breathe acrid-tasting air for two generations — with horrifying consequences.
Subsequent investigations revealed that Union Carbide had not taken adequate safety precautions, and the company cut corners to reduce operation costs. Eventually, in an out-of-court settlement reached in 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million for damages caused in the Bhopal disaster, 15 percent of the original $3 billion claimed in the lawsuit. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200 — a piddling amount that echoed an argument made by a Carbide defense lawyer: "How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?"
And after Union Carbide was sold to Dow Chemical in 2001, the new owners denied they were liable for the site, and have refused to clean up the area or pay additional compensation to the new victims — now in the second and even third generation.
“The contaminated water issue was never part of the settlement, even though Union Carbide knew about it in 1984,” says Rachna Dhingra, a 31-year-old Indian-American activist who works with the Sambhavna Trust. “About 30,000 people living behind the factory are still drinking that water.”
As a visitor, you can't deny that living conditions here are miserable. Union Carbide pumped industrial waste into two solar evaporation ponds just across the street from this overcrowded residential area. Though many years have passed, activists say that the ponds still leak contaminants into the drinking water supply.
And as late as 2005 — 20 years too late — some 340 tons of toxic waste was collected from a locked warehouse on the old factory grounds. I tasted the difference in the air immediately when I stepped out of my taxi from the nicer part of town — where Bhopal surrounds a surprisingly large, clean-looking lake.
Twenty-five years after the gas leak, there may be some hope on the horizon. In November, a New York appeals court reinstated plaintiffs’ claims against Union Carbide Corporation for contaminating water around the Bhopal plant, reversing a lower court’s dismissal of the case. And — pending a new financial settlement — local activists' commitment is paying off. After two marches from Bhopal to Delhi, a distance of some 750 kilometers, the victims of the gas tragedy are seeing some action on items they have been demanding since 1987.
“We got an empowered commission on Bhopal to look into the medical, social and environmental rehabilitation of the area,” says Dhingra. “It will have independent powers and representatives from various service organizations as well as the government.” Dhingra hopes that will mean effective programs instead of feel-good boondoggles. It would be a big change. “Till now, more than 80 crores ($16 million) has been spent on creating jobs, but they've not been able to create even 80 jobs,” says Dhingra.
Today, there's one sign of change that's visible to all: Construction is underway on a network of pipes to provide clean water to the area. “Within three months, the pipeline will be laid,” says Dhingra. “For me, that's a big thing.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090226/the-bhopal-disaster-25-years-later
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 26, 2009
BHOPAL, Madhya Pradesh, India — In the dim light of her two-room shack opposite the site of one of the world's worst industrial disasters, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, Leelabai Ahirwar delivers a quiet account of the event that ruined her life.
“I myself am still affected by the gas,” the 45-year-old mother of four says. “I suffer from chest pains, and I often feel like I'm about to die. But my children are worse off. My daughter is anemic and her body swells up mysteriously, and my son, Jagdish, never grew properly, so he looks like he is only 14 years old, even though he is almost 22.”
A few minutes into our discussion, Ahirwar calls Jagdish, her stunted son, in from the other room. His elfin features and tiny stature make him look more like a nine year old than the 14 or 15 his mother claimed. But he produces a birth certificate that proves he's 21. “We took him to the doctor many times,” says Ahirwar. “But they don't listen.”
That's no surprise. Jagdish isn't the only young person in this Bhopal slum to suffer from an unexplained ailment. Though there has been no official study of the longterm effects of the gas leak and lingering environmental damage, anecdotal evidence suggests that the residents who remain trapped in the disaster zone live in serious peril. A 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women living near the factory. A 2003 survey by the Sambhavan Clinic found that half of the residents of this neighborhood suffer from respiratory problems, anemia, headaches and nausea. The clinic also found a higher than average number of birth defects.
At five minutes past midnight on Dec. 3, 1984, some 30 tons of toxic chemicals spewed into the air from an insecticide factory — then owned by Union Carbide — not a stone's throw from Ahirwar's home. Within minutes, poison gas billowed over this poverty-stricken slum community while residents slept. Ahirwar, then 20 years old, and her husband hid under a blanket, only finding out what had transpired the next morning. Up to 8,000 people died over the next few weeks, and as many as 20,000 more in the subsequent months. And that was only the beginning. Unable to relocate due to poverty, residents have continued to drink contaminated water and breathe acrid-tasting air for two generations — with horrifying consequences.
Subsequent investigations revealed that Union Carbide had not taken adequate safety precautions, and the company cut corners to reduce operation costs. Eventually, in an out-of-court settlement reached in 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million for damages caused in the Bhopal disaster, 15 percent of the original $3 billion claimed in the lawsuit. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200 — a piddling amount that echoed an argument made by a Carbide defense lawyer: "How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?"
And after Union Carbide was sold to Dow Chemical in 2001, the new owners denied they were liable for the site, and have refused to clean up the area or pay additional compensation to the new victims — now in the second and even third generation.
“The contaminated water issue was never part of the settlement, even though Union Carbide knew about it in 1984,” says Rachna Dhingra, a 31-year-old Indian-American activist who works with the Sambhavna Trust. “About 30,000 people living behind the factory are still drinking that water.”
As a visitor, you can't deny that living conditions here are miserable. Union Carbide pumped industrial waste into two solar evaporation ponds just across the street from this overcrowded residential area. Though many years have passed, activists say that the ponds still leak contaminants into the drinking water supply.
And as late as 2005 — 20 years too late — some 340 tons of toxic waste was collected from a locked warehouse on the old factory grounds. I tasted the difference in the air immediately when I stepped out of my taxi from the nicer part of town — where Bhopal surrounds a surprisingly large, clean-looking lake.
Twenty-five years after the gas leak, there may be some hope on the horizon. In November, a New York appeals court reinstated plaintiffs’ claims against Union Carbide Corporation for contaminating water around the Bhopal plant, reversing a lower court’s dismissal of the case. And — pending a new financial settlement — local activists' commitment is paying off. After two marches from Bhopal to Delhi, a distance of some 750 kilometers, the victims of the gas tragedy are seeing some action on items they have been demanding since 1987.
“We got an empowered commission on Bhopal to look into the medical, social and environmental rehabilitation of the area,” says Dhingra. “It will have independent powers and representatives from various service organizations as well as the government.” Dhingra hopes that will mean effective programs instead of feel-good boondoggles. It would be a big change. “Till now, more than 80 crores ($16 million) has been spent on creating jobs, but they've not been able to create even 80 jobs,” says Dhingra.
Today, there's one sign of change that's visible to all: Construction is underway on a network of pipes to provide clean water to the area. “Within three months, the pipeline will be laid,” says Dhingra. “For me, that's a big thing.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090226/the-bhopal-disaster-25-years-later
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
the real slumdogs
According to Indian street kids, charges that "Slumdog Millionaire" is offensive are more hype than substance.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 17, 2009
DELHI — When the cast of the faux-Bollywood hit "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the
red carpet for the Oscars Feb. 22, the film's Indian distributors will have one eye on another contest underway in India, which serves as the movie's backdrop. This one will take place Feb. 25 in Mumbai's Andheri Sessions Court, where Slumdog faces charges that it is offensive.
But try telling that to some of India's real street kids — like 13-year-old Faisal, who lives in a group home for wayward boys near the New Delhi railway station — and you quickly find out that there's more hype than substance to the charges.
"It's a nice film," Faisal told me after I took him and three other "slumdogs" to see the movie. "Some of the things it shows are right, some things are wrong. It's a movie."
As the Andheri court case suggests, Slumdog's optimistic love story has been surprisingly controversial here, where many see it as yet more evidence that the West continues to view India as a land of filth and poverty and incomprehensible religious violence.
But that's not how real street kids see it. At a seedy theater on the outskirts of Old Delhi where director Danny Boyle's Bollywood tribute was showing in Hindi, the four former street kids, now in their teens, laughed with glee when the young Jamal jumped into the open latrine so he wouldn't miss his chance to get an autograph from film star Amitabh Bachchan.
From the grin on his face, it was clear beyond doubt that 17-year-old Sanjay's favorite part of the movie was the sequence shot in and around the Taj Mahal, where Jamal and Salim earn an excellent living as guides, scamming tourists with ludicrous made-up tales about the tomb's historical origins. "There were some funny dialogues," he sheepishly explained later. It was obviously a familiar scenario.
The Andheri case is only one among several that have sought to censor the India-inspired Oscar candidate — which is up for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture.
In addition to the case lodged against the film's title in Andheri, a Bihar slum-dwellers' organization has filed a defamation case against composer A.R. Rahman and star Anil Kapoor in Patna.
Meanwhile, a Gujarat-based non-governmental organization has filed for a stay on the film's release due to its title.
"We have raised a question whether we Indians are dogs," said advocate Meena Jagtap, who is a founding member of the organization. Still another group, the right-wing Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, has petitioned the Indian censor board to ban the film because of its depiction of a pogrom against Muslims by followers of the Hindu god Ram.
But for Faisal and Sanjay — along with 19-year-old Brijesh and 17-year-old Iqbal, my other two guests — "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts a fantasy version of a very real chance to escape dead-end lives of petty crime and mind-numbing jobs. Today, Brijesh and Faisal earn pocket money as tour guides for foreign tourists interested in understanding New Delhi's crowded slums. Far from considering "Slumdog Millionaire" an affront, they're pleased with its simultaneously gritty and glamorous depiction of kids like themselves.
It's easy to see why. As Dickensian as it must seem to movie audiences in the West, the hardscrabble existence that "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts is eerily familiar to these kids.
Brijesh, for example, ran away from his aunt's house when he was just 9 years old. "They used me like a slave," he says. He hopped a passenger train without knowing where it was headed, slept all night seated on the toilet with the bathroom door locked because he didn't have a ticket, and finally jumped off again in the grim industrial town of Kanpur, in Uttar Pradesh. "I was crying under a railway bridge because I was hungry, and this boy came along and asked me if I had run away."
A fellow runaway, the boy taught Brijesh how to earn a living by collecting empty water bottles, refilling them from the railway station's bathroom tap and selling them on the platform for half the price of genuine purified water.
"After one year, I was sniffing glue and smoking cigarettes, and I'd been sent to prison," he says — referring to a juvenile detention center. "The first time, I was locked up for 14 days. The next time, it was 42 days." In India, this meant spending all day locked in a small room with 25 other boys.
Today Brijesh and company aren't exactly millionaires.
But in a sense, they have hit the jackpot — perhaps ironically — due to another film about Indian street kids, called "Salaam Bombay," that also drew criticism when it was released. All four boys were "rescued" from Delhi's streets by a non-governmental organization called the Salaam Balak Trust, which was started by director Mira Nair after she made "Salaam Bombay." The former street kids got counseling, protection and a place to live. And a chance at a better life. Brijesh, for instance, has finished high school and is now studying for a college degree in tourism. And Faisal has already acted in a feature film — a fact that became screamingly obvious when I asked him how "Slumdog" differed from a Bollywood movie.
"An Indian director would only use two or three cameras, at most," he says authoritatively. "Danny Boyle used at least four or five."
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 17, 2009
DELHI — When the cast of the faux-Bollywood hit "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the
red carpet for the Oscars Feb. 22, the film's Indian distributors will have one eye on another contest underway in India, which serves as the movie's backdrop. This one will take place Feb. 25 in Mumbai's Andheri Sessions Court, where Slumdog faces charges that it is offensive.
But try telling that to some of India's real street kids — like 13-year-old Faisal, who lives in a group home for wayward boys near the New Delhi railway station — and you quickly find out that there's more hype than substance to the charges.
"It's a nice film," Faisal told me after I took him and three other "slumdogs" to see the movie. "Some of the things it shows are right, some things are wrong. It's a movie."
As the Andheri court case suggests, Slumdog's optimistic love story has been surprisingly controversial here, where many see it as yet more evidence that the West continues to view India as a land of filth and poverty and incomprehensible religious violence.
But that's not how real street kids see it. At a seedy theater on the outskirts of Old Delhi where director Danny Boyle's Bollywood tribute was showing in Hindi, the four former street kids, now in their teens, laughed with glee when the young Jamal jumped into the open latrine so he wouldn't miss his chance to get an autograph from film star Amitabh Bachchan.
From the grin on his face, it was clear beyond doubt that 17-year-old Sanjay's favorite part of the movie was the sequence shot in and around the Taj Mahal, where Jamal and Salim earn an excellent living as guides, scamming tourists with ludicrous made-up tales about the tomb's historical origins. "There were some funny dialogues," he sheepishly explained later. It was obviously a familiar scenario.
The Andheri case is only one among several that have sought to censor the India-inspired Oscar candidate — which is up for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture.
In addition to the case lodged against the film's title in Andheri, a Bihar slum-dwellers' organization has filed a defamation case against composer A.R. Rahman and star Anil Kapoor in Patna.
Meanwhile, a Gujarat-based non-governmental organization has filed for a stay on the film's release due to its title.
"We have raised a question whether we Indians are dogs," said advocate Meena Jagtap, who is a founding member of the organization. Still another group, the right-wing Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, has petitioned the Indian censor board to ban the film because of its depiction of a pogrom against Muslims by followers of the Hindu god Ram.
But for Faisal and Sanjay — along with 19-year-old Brijesh and 17-year-old Iqbal, my other two guests — "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts a fantasy version of a very real chance to escape dead-end lives of petty crime and mind-numbing jobs. Today, Brijesh and Faisal earn pocket money as tour guides for foreign tourists interested in understanding New Delhi's crowded slums. Far from considering "Slumdog Millionaire" an affront, they're pleased with its simultaneously gritty and glamorous depiction of kids like themselves.
It's easy to see why. As Dickensian as it must seem to movie audiences in the West, the hardscrabble existence that "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts is eerily familiar to these kids.
Brijesh, for example, ran away from his aunt's house when he was just 9 years old. "They used me like a slave," he says. He hopped a passenger train without knowing where it was headed, slept all night seated on the toilet with the bathroom door locked because he didn't have a ticket, and finally jumped off again in the grim industrial town of Kanpur, in Uttar Pradesh. "I was crying under a railway bridge because I was hungry, and this boy came along and asked me if I had run away."
A fellow runaway, the boy taught Brijesh how to earn a living by collecting empty water bottles, refilling them from the railway station's bathroom tap and selling them on the platform for half the price of genuine purified water.
"After one year, I was sniffing glue and smoking cigarettes, and I'd been sent to prison," he says — referring to a juvenile detention center. "The first time, I was locked up for 14 days. The next time, it was 42 days." In India, this meant spending all day locked in a small room with 25 other boys.
Today Brijesh and company aren't exactly millionaires.
But in a sense, they have hit the jackpot — perhaps ironically — due to another film about Indian street kids, called "Salaam Bombay," that also drew criticism when it was released. All four boys were "rescued" from Delhi's streets by a non-governmental organization called the Salaam Balak Trust, which was started by director Mira Nair after she made "Salaam Bombay." The former street kids got counseling, protection and a place to live. And a chance at a better life. Brijesh, for instance, has finished high school and is now studying for a college degree in tourism. And Faisal has already acted in a feature film — a fact that became screamingly obvious when I asked him how "Slumdog" differed from a Bollywood movie.
"An Indian director would only use two or three cameras, at most," he says authoritatively. "Danny Boyle used at least four or five."
Friday, February 13, 2009
india: a million romeos, a million juliets
What happens when love is stronger than caste?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 13, 2009
NEW DELHI — Not long ago in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, television viewers
were treated to a real-life soap opera as newscasters interrupted the regular TV programming to broadcast the elopement of 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela and 23-year-old Shirish Bharadwaj — just one of the millions of Romeo-and-Juliet couples who are hammering cracks into the foundation of Indian society.
Because the youngsters came from different sub-castes and different economic backgrounds, Sreeja's father — a hugely popular South Indian film star named Chiranjeevi — had forbidden them from dating and kept Sreeja under virtual house arrest for more than a year.
But Chiranjeevi's untold wealth, police connections and implicit authority as a superstar were nothing compared with the power of love.
They didn't catch a glimpse of one another for all that time, but Shirish and Sreeja kept the flame burning by exchanging notes, passed once a month through a friend. Then Shirish popped the question. After Sreeja's father forced her to drop out of college, there was no longer any reason to wait.
"When she was coming to college, we never thought we could marry for another three or four years," Shirish recalls. "But once she was house arrested, we knew if something had to be done now. Through the letters, she communicated that she was getting marriage proposals [for arranged marriages]."
It wouldn't be easy. In India, the fundamentalist thugs who terrorize young couples every Valentine's Day aren't the only forces aligned against romance. With the traditional institution of the arranged marriage under pressure — threatening to break down the boundaries of caste and creed — teachers, neighbors, the police and even sometimes the courts conspire to make sure young people follow their parents' wishes.
Though intercaste and intercommunity marriages have been legal since 1872 — almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 U.S. states — over time the law designed to facilitate these civil unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has come to be used to prevent self-arranged marriages. Thanks to a 1954 amendment, the couple must announce their impending nuptials, provide the names and addresses of their parents, and wait 30 days while the police verify with their families that neither person is already married. The delay helps parents locate runaway couples and retrieve them by filing false kidnapping and abduction cases (which have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women since 2002).
The police track the couple down, throw the groom in jail and return the bride to her parents. The courts, too, are often complicit, as judges reject the girl's own testimony as proof of consent and reject the usual legal documents as proof that she is of marriageable age. Among communities that place a high premium on their izzat, or honor, like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the reaction is stronger still. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."
Shirish and Sreeja knew all about the obstacles they would face. But they also knew that sometimes, love does conquer all. Through their secret communiques, the couple made plans to elope. Sreeja would tell her parents that she was going to her aunt's house, but instead she'd meet Shirish on a nearby street corner, abandon her car, and go directly to the temple to get married. That wasn't all, though.
Because parents often use false abduction cases against grooms to recapture runaway brides, the couple used Chiranjeevi's fame against him and called the news media to their wedding ceremony. The live broadcast made the marriage indisputable. But it also alerted Chiranjeevi and his passionate fans to what was going on. "We actually wanted to go to the registrar's office after we were married at [the temple]," says Shirish. "But there were lots of people and police waiting there." Frightened, the couple kept driving — first across the country to Goa and then all the way north to Delhi, where they sought court protection from "the illegal and malafide actions" of the girl's father.
Slowly, public opinion began to shift in their favor. Progressive editorials in local and national newspapers argued that the youngsters were both adults and had married by mutual consent, so any actions to stop them violated their rights. The Delhi high court — following the lead of a 2006 Supreme Court judgment in favor of protecting love marriages — also expressed its support. Eventually, the young couple were able to return to their lives in Hyderabad, where today they live with Shirish's family.
But it's not entirely "happily ever after." Many months after the elopement story had died down, one of Sreeja's close relatives passed away. Word came that her father had decided that she could attend the funeral, but Shirish would have to wait outside. As more than an hour passed, he grew more and more worried that — like many families — his in-laws had decided to keep Sreeja prisoner until she agreed to an annulment.
Finally, though, she reappeared, looking flustered and upset, at the entrance of the wedding hall. Shirish gave a sigh of relief. She'd been forced to endure an hour and a half of browbeating. But she'd stood up for herself. "They kept saying, 'We don't think it's right. It's time to realize for yourself. If at all you realize, we'll always welcome you back — alone," Sreeja recalls. "They just tried brainwashing. So I got out of the situation."
With or without the sanction of the film star and his family, Sreeja and Shirish say nothing will drive them apart. "All these obstacles have made us even closer," Sreeja says.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 13, 2009
NEW DELHI — Not long ago in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, television viewers
were treated to a real-life soap opera as newscasters interrupted the regular TV programming to broadcast the elopement of 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela and 23-year-old Shirish Bharadwaj — just one of the millions of Romeo-and-Juliet couples who are hammering cracks into the foundation of Indian society.
Because the youngsters came from different sub-castes and different economic backgrounds, Sreeja's father — a hugely popular South Indian film star named Chiranjeevi — had forbidden them from dating and kept Sreeja under virtual house arrest for more than a year.
But Chiranjeevi's untold wealth, police connections and implicit authority as a superstar were nothing compared with the power of love.
They didn't catch a glimpse of one another for all that time, but Shirish and Sreeja kept the flame burning by exchanging notes, passed once a month through a friend. Then Shirish popped the question. After Sreeja's father forced her to drop out of college, there was no longer any reason to wait.
"When she was coming to college, we never thought we could marry for another three or four years," Shirish recalls. "But once she was house arrested, we knew if something had to be done now. Through the letters, she communicated that she was getting marriage proposals [for arranged marriages]."
It wouldn't be easy. In India, the fundamentalist thugs who terrorize young couples every Valentine's Day aren't the only forces aligned against romance. With the traditional institution of the arranged marriage under pressure — threatening to break down the boundaries of caste and creed — teachers, neighbors, the police and even sometimes the courts conspire to make sure young people follow their parents' wishes.
Though intercaste and intercommunity marriages have been legal since 1872 — almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 U.S. states — over time the law designed to facilitate these civil unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has come to be used to prevent self-arranged marriages. Thanks to a 1954 amendment, the couple must announce their impending nuptials, provide the names and addresses of their parents, and wait 30 days while the police verify with their families that neither person is already married. The delay helps parents locate runaway couples and retrieve them by filing false kidnapping and abduction cases (which have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women since 2002).
The police track the couple down, throw the groom in jail and return the bride to her parents. The courts, too, are often complicit, as judges reject the girl's own testimony as proof of consent and reject the usual legal documents as proof that she is of marriageable age. Among communities that place a high premium on their izzat, or honor, like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the reaction is stronger still. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."
Shirish and Sreeja knew all about the obstacles they would face. But they also knew that sometimes, love does conquer all. Through their secret communiques, the couple made plans to elope. Sreeja would tell her parents that she was going to her aunt's house, but instead she'd meet Shirish on a nearby street corner, abandon her car, and go directly to the temple to get married. That wasn't all, though.
Because parents often use false abduction cases against grooms to recapture runaway brides, the couple used Chiranjeevi's fame against him and called the news media to their wedding ceremony. The live broadcast made the marriage indisputable. But it also alerted Chiranjeevi and his passionate fans to what was going on. "We actually wanted to go to the registrar's office after we were married at [the temple]," says Shirish. "But there were lots of people and police waiting there." Frightened, the couple kept driving — first across the country to Goa and then all the way north to Delhi, where they sought court protection from "the illegal and malafide actions" of the girl's father.
Slowly, public opinion began to shift in their favor. Progressive editorials in local and national newspapers argued that the youngsters were both adults and had married by mutual consent, so any actions to stop them violated their rights. The Delhi high court — following the lead of a 2006 Supreme Court judgment in favor of protecting love marriages — also expressed its support. Eventually, the young couple were able to return to their lives in Hyderabad, where today they live with Shirish's family.
But it's not entirely "happily ever after." Many months after the elopement story had died down, one of Sreeja's close relatives passed away. Word came that her father had decided that she could attend the funeral, but Shirish would have to wait outside. As more than an hour passed, he grew more and more worried that — like many families — his in-laws had decided to keep Sreeja prisoner until she agreed to an annulment.
Finally, though, she reappeared, looking flustered and upset, at the entrance of the wedding hall. Shirish gave a sigh of relief. She'd been forced to endure an hour and a half of browbeating. But she'd stood up for herself. "They kept saying, 'We don't think it's right. It's time to realize for yourself. If at all you realize, we'll always welcome you back — alone," Sreeja recalls. "They just tried brainwashing. So I got out of the situation."
With or without the sanction of the film star and his family, Sreeja and Shirish say nothing will drive them apart. "All these obstacles have made us even closer," Sreeja says.
Friday, February 06, 2009
gandhi the whipping boy
One of India's most revered figures is losing some of his posthumous influence.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 29, 2009
NEW DELHI — Jan. 30 is the 61st anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi. As that date approaches, the reputation of the Mahatma, or “great soul”, has seen better days.
Sure, when a British magazine publishes a cartoon of the emaciated and bespectacled figure getting pummeled by a muscle man India erupts in outrage. And when a Bollywood hero embraces nonviolent resistance in a slapstick masala movie the youth are suddenly fired with enthusiasm for candlelit marches. But in the sphere of politics, the man known as the father of the nation has in recent years become its whipping boy.
Though Gandhi worked to eliminate the practice of untouchability, the leaders of caste-based parties castigate him for his stalwart defense of Hinduism and for blocking India's oppressed castes demand for special voting rights. And despite Gandhi's efforts to prevent a rift between Jawaharlal Nehru's Indian National Congress and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League in the leadup to India's independence in 1947, ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum today blame Gandhi for the bloody partitioning of India that killed as many as a million people and laid the foundations for 60 years of bitter strife between India and Pakistan.
“Because Indian politics today is about competing sectarian identities — on language, on region, on religion, on caste — you have people attacking Gandhi and blaming him for all kinds of errors, real and imagined,” says historian Ram Guha, author of India After Gandhi. “In the first ten years of independence, he may have been a holy cow. But now there's open season.”
Consider the condemnation offered by a former chief of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS). "While Gandhi succeeded in creating and leading a people's movement, he committed two mistakes: supporting the Khilafat movement and making Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the prime minister. The end result was that two enemies, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were created forever."
Apologists from the Hindu right have long sought to justify the assassination of Gandhi — who was killed by a Hindu nationalist and former RSS member named Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948 — by arguing that the Mahatma had betrayed his country by supporting the proposal for an independent Pakistan and encouraging a policy of Muslim “appeasement.” Every year on the anniversary of Godse's execution his relatives still gather to celebrate his grim achievement. But this year the stakes grew much higher, as an organization run by the assassin's niece — allegedly the country's first Hindu nationalist terrorist cell — was linked to a series of bombings of Muslim sites.
The partition of India itself remains at the heart of the conflict between India and Pakistan. More than the territorial dispute over Kashmir, partition instilled deep fear and distrust — even hatred. Some 18 million people were forced to migrate to areas where they would be in the religious majority. As many as a million, from both sides, were butchered en route. And the arbitrary dividing line, which granted India 90 percent of the subcontinent's industrial capacity and its three most important cities, encouraged an inferiority complex in Pakistan that has had disastrous consequences.
However, Gandhi's actual role in the division of India is ambiguous. On the one hand, despite his propagation of an early form of multiculturalism, Gandhi's religious idealism bordered on the obsessive, and probably encouraged doubts among the Muslim League about their role in an independent but united India. But on the other, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly, “the real actors were Jinnah, [Viceroy Louis] Mountbatten, [Congress leader Vallabhbhai] Patel and Nehru.” And no one was more upset than Gandhi by the religious divide that eventually tore India in two. Says Ganguly: “Remember that he wrote, 'On this day of independence and partition, my heart is divided; let others rejoice, leave me alone to shed my tears.'”
“Of all the major leaders of the time, he's certainly the least culpable,” says political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research. And the question of how to share power among Hindus and Muslims was an impossible quandary. “One historian once said Partition was a non-solution to an insoluble problem,” says Bhanu Mehta. But that hasn't shielded Gandhi from blame, partly because the partition had such tragic and long-lasting consequences, and partly because Gandhi is the only one of his contemporaries who still holds enough relevance to justify an attack.
The simmering conflict in Kashmir, the disturbing emergence of a Hindu nationalist terrorist cell, and the devastating attacks in Mumbai on November 26 drive home the need for Gandhi's idealism. “Worldwide you see a rise of competitive religious fundamentalisms,” says Guha. “What Gandhi does is he provides a way out of this.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 29, 2009
NEW DELHI — Jan. 30 is the 61st anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi. As that date approaches, the reputation of the Mahatma, or “great soul”, has seen better days.
Sure, when a British magazine publishes a cartoon of the emaciated and bespectacled figure getting pummeled by a muscle man India erupts in outrage. And when a Bollywood hero embraces nonviolent resistance in a slapstick masala movie the youth are suddenly fired with enthusiasm for candlelit marches. But in the sphere of politics, the man known as the father of the nation has in recent years become its whipping boy.
Though Gandhi worked to eliminate the practice of untouchability, the leaders of caste-based parties castigate him for his stalwart defense of Hinduism and for blocking India's oppressed castes demand for special voting rights. And despite Gandhi's efforts to prevent a rift between Jawaharlal Nehru's Indian National Congress and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League in the leadup to India's independence in 1947, ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum today blame Gandhi for the bloody partitioning of India that killed as many as a million people and laid the foundations for 60 years of bitter strife between India and Pakistan.
“Because Indian politics today is about competing sectarian identities — on language, on region, on religion, on caste — you have people attacking Gandhi and blaming him for all kinds of errors, real and imagined,” says historian Ram Guha, author of India After Gandhi. “In the first ten years of independence, he may have been a holy cow. But now there's open season.”
Consider the condemnation offered by a former chief of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS). "While Gandhi succeeded in creating and leading a people's movement, he committed two mistakes: supporting the Khilafat movement and making Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the prime minister. The end result was that two enemies, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were created forever."
Apologists from the Hindu right have long sought to justify the assassination of Gandhi — who was killed by a Hindu nationalist and former RSS member named Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948 — by arguing that the Mahatma had betrayed his country by supporting the proposal for an independent Pakistan and encouraging a policy of Muslim “appeasement.” Every year on the anniversary of Godse's execution his relatives still gather to celebrate his grim achievement. But this year the stakes grew much higher, as an organization run by the assassin's niece — allegedly the country's first Hindu nationalist terrorist cell — was linked to a series of bombings of Muslim sites.
The partition of India itself remains at the heart of the conflict between India and Pakistan. More than the territorial dispute over Kashmir, partition instilled deep fear and distrust — even hatred. Some 18 million people were forced to migrate to areas where they would be in the religious majority. As many as a million, from both sides, were butchered en route. And the arbitrary dividing line, which granted India 90 percent of the subcontinent's industrial capacity and its three most important cities, encouraged an inferiority complex in Pakistan that has had disastrous consequences.
However, Gandhi's actual role in the division of India is ambiguous. On the one hand, despite his propagation of an early form of multiculturalism, Gandhi's religious idealism bordered on the obsessive, and probably encouraged doubts among the Muslim League about their role in an independent but united India. But on the other, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly, “the real actors were Jinnah, [Viceroy Louis] Mountbatten, [Congress leader Vallabhbhai] Patel and Nehru.” And no one was more upset than Gandhi by the religious divide that eventually tore India in two. Says Ganguly: “Remember that he wrote, 'On this day of independence and partition, my heart is divided; let others rejoice, leave me alone to shed my tears.'”
“Of all the major leaders of the time, he's certainly the least culpable,” says political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research. And the question of how to share power among Hindus and Muslims was an impossible quandary. “One historian once said Partition was a non-solution to an insoluble problem,” says Bhanu Mehta. But that hasn't shielded Gandhi from blame, partly because the partition had such tragic and long-lasting consequences, and partly because Gandhi is the only one of his contemporaries who still holds enough relevance to justify an attack.
The simmering conflict in Kashmir, the disturbing emergence of a Hindu nationalist terrorist cell, and the devastating attacks in Mumbai on November 26 drive home the need for Gandhi's idealism. “Worldwide you see a rise of competitive religious fundamentalisms,” says Guha. “What Gandhi does is he provides a way out of this.”
the man who killed gandhi
The mysteries, complexities and surprising ideas behind of one of India's darkest moments.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 5, 2009
NEW DELHI — On Jan. 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse, a young, clean-cut Indian newspaper editor, left the waiting room at the Delhi railway station to attend the daily prayer meeting held by Mohandas K. Gandhi. As the meeting began, the young man bowed reverently before the emaciated leader known universally as the Mahatma, or great soul, and known in India as the father of the nation. Then Godse rose, produced a Beretta semi-automatic pistol, and shot Gandhi three times in the chest.
Today, as then, the ruthless assassination of a leader so firmly committed to nonviolence is so abhorrent, so repulsive, that it is tempting to dismiss its perpetrator as a deranged lunatic. But the truth, as Indian political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out, is far more complicated. And over the past six months, a series of unsettling revelations have suggested that while Gandhi's ideology of nonviolence and tolerance may be fading, the ideology of violent Hindu nationalism that motivated Godse — though it goes by many names — remains as powerful as ever.
“You can disagree with Godse very deeply and find what he did reprehensible,” says Bhanu Mehta. “But I think as even some of the Gandhians have argued — like Ashis Nandy — there was a kind of internal integrity to what he was doing. If you read his speech at his trial, it's hard not to be in some senses fascinated by the internal integrity of the argument.”
Godse remains a better foil for the Mahatma than his perennial adversaries like the low-caste leader B.R. Ambedkar or Pakistan-founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Far from being an insane fanatic, Godse perceived that Gandhi's fast unto death — the ultimate expression of passive resistance — was not nonviolence, but violence turned inward against the self. Ambedkar and Jinnah had recognized this, too.
But Godse stands apart because he was able to respond in kind. “Many people thought that [Gandhi's] politics were irrational,” Godse said before his execution. “But they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked.”
No politician could afford to let Gandhi kill himself, but Godse understood that by murdering him he would martyr himself as well — achieving his own ends as ruthlessly and inexorably as the Mahatma. “I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred ... if I were to kill Gandhiji,” he observed. “But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.” It is not a flattering mirror.
Godse's assassination of Gandhi, which was traced back to Hindu nationalist groups including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — though the ties of evidence were not strong enough for criminal charges — sequestered these groups on the fringe of Indian politics for almost 30 years.
Eventually, though, the nationalist ideology that motivated Gandhi's killer managed to work its way back into the mainstream. In 2003, the Bharatiya Janata Party even ventured to put a portrait of Veer Savarkar — who had been accused with Godse but never convicted of conspiracy — on display directly opposite Gandhi's in the hall of parliament, implying that the two are equal in status.
“In [Gandhi's] lifetime, the Hindus had moved away from Savarkar toward Gandhi,” explains historian Ramachandra Guha, author of "India After Gandhi." “But posthumously many Hindus, such as those in the BJP and RSS, see merit in Savarkar's more aggressive Hindutva.”
Then perhaps India should not have been surprised when — shortly before the terrorist attacks on Mumbai — a bizarre Hindu terrorist cell emerged that was fascinated by Godse's repugnant logic. Following leads developed over two years, the elite police unit swept down on a previously unknown group of Hindu nationalist fanatics for allegedly planning and executing a series of terrorist strikes in Muslim neighborhoods throughout the country — which had previously been attributed to internecine rivalries among the faithful. Among the accused were a retired army colonel, a Hindu nun and several self-styled gurus who'd hardly ventured outside the bastions of the lunatic nationalist fringe.
But the head of the organization that united them — a woman named Hemani Savarkar who was not charged in the police case — had a very well-known name indeed. She was the daughter of Godse's brother and was married to the nephew of Veer Savarkar — the Hindu nationalist who developed the fascism-inspired ideology of Hindutva, or Hinduness.
Even though Indian journalists have long been aware that Godse's descendants gather each year in Pune on the anniversary of the assassin's execution to commemorate his “achievement,” it was always believed that they were too absurd to matter. Now the evidence suggests — though the court case is still pending — that they were very serious indeed. According to the ATS (Maharastra Anti-Terrorism Squad), they planted at least one bomb in Malegaon that killed six and injured 70 people in 2006. They may also have been involved in other terrorist attacks, the ATS says, such as the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express “friendship train” linking India and Pakistan, which killed 68 people.
“They're all offshoots of the thing that Gandhi predicted, that deification of the nation state would have the consequence of communalism,” says Bhanu Mehta.
Like any group of cloistered fanatics, the isolation of Godse's descendants has given them the freakishness of the hopelessly inbred. Consider the wisdom that Hemani Savarkar offered India's Outlook magazine: “Why can’t we have a blast for a blast? (The alleged Hindu nationalist terrorists) are patriots who love their country. But the government is now trying to declare them guilty to weaken the Hindus,” she said. “We must declare ourselves a Hindu (nation) where everyone is a Hindu. Anyone who isn’t should be declared a second-class citizen and denied voting rights. Those who have problems with this should leave and settle in other countries.”
Those are exactly the sentiments that Gandhi was killed for opposing. But from the moment that his murderer was executed — despite Gandhi's deep abhorrence for the death penalty — it was clear that his dream of nonviolence and religious tolerance would not come true.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 5, 2009
NEW DELHI — On Jan. 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse, a young, clean-cut Indian newspaper editor, left the waiting room at the Delhi railway station to attend the daily prayer meeting held by Mohandas K. Gandhi. As the meeting began, the young man bowed reverently before the emaciated leader known universally as the Mahatma, or great soul, and known in India as the father of the nation. Then Godse rose, produced a Beretta semi-automatic pistol, and shot Gandhi three times in the chest.
Today, as then, the ruthless assassination of a leader so firmly committed to nonviolence is so abhorrent, so repulsive, that it is tempting to dismiss its perpetrator as a deranged lunatic. But the truth, as Indian political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out, is far more complicated. And over the past six months, a series of unsettling revelations have suggested that while Gandhi's ideology of nonviolence and tolerance may be fading, the ideology of violent Hindu nationalism that motivated Godse — though it goes by many names — remains as powerful as ever.
“You can disagree with Godse very deeply and find what he did reprehensible,” says Bhanu Mehta. “But I think as even some of the Gandhians have argued — like Ashis Nandy — there was a kind of internal integrity to what he was doing. If you read his speech at his trial, it's hard not to be in some senses fascinated by the internal integrity of the argument.”
Godse remains a better foil for the Mahatma than his perennial adversaries like the low-caste leader B.R. Ambedkar or Pakistan-founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Far from being an insane fanatic, Godse perceived that Gandhi's fast unto death — the ultimate expression of passive resistance — was not nonviolence, but violence turned inward against the self. Ambedkar and Jinnah had recognized this, too.
But Godse stands apart because he was able to respond in kind. “Many people thought that [Gandhi's] politics were irrational,” Godse said before his execution. “But they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked.”
No politician could afford to let Gandhi kill himself, but Godse understood that by murdering him he would martyr himself as well — achieving his own ends as ruthlessly and inexorably as the Mahatma. “I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred ... if I were to kill Gandhiji,” he observed. “But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.” It is not a flattering mirror.
Godse's assassination of Gandhi, which was traced back to Hindu nationalist groups including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — though the ties of evidence were not strong enough for criminal charges — sequestered these groups on the fringe of Indian politics for almost 30 years.
Eventually, though, the nationalist ideology that motivated Gandhi's killer managed to work its way back into the mainstream. In 2003, the Bharatiya Janata Party even ventured to put a portrait of Veer Savarkar — who had been accused with Godse but never convicted of conspiracy — on display directly opposite Gandhi's in the hall of parliament, implying that the two are equal in status.
“In [Gandhi's] lifetime, the Hindus had moved away from Savarkar toward Gandhi,” explains historian Ramachandra Guha, author of "India After Gandhi." “But posthumously many Hindus, such as those in the BJP and RSS, see merit in Savarkar's more aggressive Hindutva.”
Then perhaps India should not have been surprised when — shortly before the terrorist attacks on Mumbai — a bizarre Hindu terrorist cell emerged that was fascinated by Godse's repugnant logic. Following leads developed over two years, the elite police unit swept down on a previously unknown group of Hindu nationalist fanatics for allegedly planning and executing a series of terrorist strikes in Muslim neighborhoods throughout the country — which had previously been attributed to internecine rivalries among the faithful. Among the accused were a retired army colonel, a Hindu nun and several self-styled gurus who'd hardly ventured outside the bastions of the lunatic nationalist fringe.
But the head of the organization that united them — a woman named Hemani Savarkar who was not charged in the police case — had a very well-known name indeed. She was the daughter of Godse's brother and was married to the nephew of Veer Savarkar — the Hindu nationalist who developed the fascism-inspired ideology of Hindutva, or Hinduness.
Even though Indian journalists have long been aware that Godse's descendants gather each year in Pune on the anniversary of the assassin's execution to commemorate his “achievement,” it was always believed that they were too absurd to matter. Now the evidence suggests — though the court case is still pending — that they were very serious indeed. According to the ATS (Maharastra Anti-Terrorism Squad), they planted at least one bomb in Malegaon that killed six and injured 70 people in 2006. They may also have been involved in other terrorist attacks, the ATS says, such as the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express “friendship train” linking India and Pakistan, which killed 68 people.
“They're all offshoots of the thing that Gandhi predicted, that deification of the nation state would have the consequence of communalism,” says Bhanu Mehta.
Like any group of cloistered fanatics, the isolation of Godse's descendants has given them the freakishness of the hopelessly inbred. Consider the wisdom that Hemani Savarkar offered India's Outlook magazine: “Why can’t we have a blast for a blast? (The alleged Hindu nationalist terrorists) are patriots who love their country. But the government is now trying to declare them guilty to weaken the Hindus,” she said. “We must declare ourselves a Hindu (nation) where everyone is a Hindu. Anyone who isn’t should be declared a second-class citizen and denied voting rights. Those who have problems with this should leave and settle in other countries.”
Those are exactly the sentiments that Gandhi was killed for opposing. But from the moment that his murderer was executed — despite Gandhi's deep abhorrence for the death penalty — it was clear that his dream of nonviolence and religious tolerance would not come true.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
welcome to the ghost fair
The uneasy mix of superstition and science in rural India
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: January 26, 2009 13:30 ET
BETUL, MADHYA PRADESH, India — As a priest wafts incense over her with a broom and recites an melodic incantation, Jyoti Salu begins to declaim loudly over the noise of the crowd. "All religions are one. All saints are one. Sai Baba and Guru Saheb are one. Only Guru Saheb understands the trouble in my heart."
Since collapsing at a marriage ceremony a month ago, Salu has been behaving strangely and raving about gods and saints. Her parents believe she may be possessed.
"Once or twice a day she has a fit and then she starts talking like this, taking the name of gods and saints," says the girl's father, Bhim Lal Sahu. "We took her to a psychiatrist and he prescribed some medicines for 20 days. But we are also taking her to shrines where they perform exorcisms, just in case."
Like most of the thousands of people who flock to the central Indian village of Mallajpur for the annual ghost fair — some traveling hundreds of kilometers — Bhim Lal believes more strongly in evil spirits than modern medicine. So he has brought his disturbed daughter to this shrine to Guru Saheb — an 18th century ascetic purported to have on this spot in 1770 attained moksha, or the liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death that is the ultimate goal of Hinduism. With smoke and mantras, a little help from Guru Saheb, and more than a few healthy whacks, the priests here claim to cast out demons and imprison them in the nearby trees. Bhim Lal hopes they can help his daughter.
The treatment appears to help Mahenge Lal, a farmer from the village of Hardu, about 10 kilometers away, who says he is possessed by 500 million ghosts that shake his body like a rag doll, torment him with migraines and fill his head with a clamor of voices. As the priest sweeps smoke from the shrine over him, Lal's head wags spasmodically, his eyes rolls skywards, and he cries out the name of the guru. The priest delivers a resounding slap to the middle of Lal's back, and the patient sighs with relief and eagerly slumps to lick a lump of raw sugar from the concrete base of the shrine. One down, 499 million to go.
Locals say the victims of evil spirits speak in odd voices and foreign languages that their families claim they never learned. Most of the afflicted are women, who according to Bhopal University sociologist Gyanendra Gautam lead heavily constricted lives with little hope of escape. With slack faces and off-kilter stares, most of them appear to be haunted by nothing more exotic than schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or mental retardation.
Psychological professionals agree. According to a recent study by the Indian Council of Medical Research, India's poorly educated masses most frequently ascribe the abnormal or inappropriate behaviors that Westerners would associate with insanity to black magic, evil spirits, masturbation and excessive sex. And even if it were desired, the appropriate medical treatment is rarely available. "Godmen of every faith that we have have forever been in charge of mental health in India," says Dr. Vinay Mishra, a Bhopal-based psychologist. "Science has not really caught on in our lives."
About ten years ago, Mishra and some colleagues attempted to educate rural clerics about mental illness, hoping to encourage them to counsel people with minor neuroses but to send those with chemical disorders like schizophrenia to urban hospitals for treatment. The project failed miserably. The priests depended on the cash and offerings of the possessed for their livelihoods, they were reluctant to give up the privileged status that performing exorcisms granted them, and they found the psychiatrists' scientific explanations utterly absurd. "They didn't believe that psychological problems could be triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain," says Mishra.
Perhaps that's why the possessed attending the fair seem so eager. Forming an impromptu lineup in hopes of attention from what appears to be a foreign specialist, they recount a litany of mysterious and random ailments. "I saw a doctor, but he couldn't understand my problem," says 35-year-old Kaushal. "The ghost gives me headaches and makes my body parts crack, but yet I am unable to cry."
"The ghost possessed me nearly two years ago," says 52-year-old Gauri Bai. "At the shrine I am finding some relief." And then 45-year-old Buri steps forward, snaps to attention, and sticks out her long, yellowish tongue. From her eyes, it is clear that she believed her problem to be self-evident.
But that is the last moment of humor. Soon after her exorcism, Jyoti's voice rings out in protest as the priest tries to convince her father to keep her there overnight. "You said I would only have to come here for two hours!" she shouts. "It's been two hours. Now I want to go home." Thanks to her education, she is strong enough to exert her will, whatever her problems. But that is not true for everyone. Soon a terrified 14-year-old girl is dragged to the altar. As the tears stream down her face, the priest winds up and smacks her in the middle of the back, then grabs her by the hair and forces her to lick the piece of raw sugar from the shrine.
Her ailment is unclear. But the devil who torments her is plain to see.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: January 26, 2009 13:30 ET
BETUL, MADHYA PRADESH, India — As a priest wafts incense over her with a broom and recites an melodic incantation, Jyoti Salu begins to declaim loudly over the noise of the crowd. "All religions are one. All saints are one. Sai Baba and Guru Saheb are one. Only Guru Saheb understands the trouble in my heart."
Since collapsing at a marriage ceremony a month ago, Salu has been behaving strangely and raving about gods and saints. Her parents believe she may be possessed.
"Once or twice a day she has a fit and then she starts talking like this, taking the name of gods and saints," says the girl's father, Bhim Lal Sahu. "We took her to a psychiatrist and he prescribed some medicines for 20 days. But we are also taking her to shrines where they perform exorcisms, just in case."
Like most of the thousands of people who flock to the central Indian village of Mallajpur for the annual ghost fair — some traveling hundreds of kilometers — Bhim Lal believes more strongly in evil spirits than modern medicine. So he has brought his disturbed daughter to this shrine to Guru Saheb — an 18th century ascetic purported to have on this spot in 1770 attained moksha, or the liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death that is the ultimate goal of Hinduism. With smoke and mantras, a little help from Guru Saheb, and more than a few healthy whacks, the priests here claim to cast out demons and imprison them in the nearby trees. Bhim Lal hopes they can help his daughter.
The treatment appears to help Mahenge Lal, a farmer from the village of Hardu, about 10 kilometers away, who says he is possessed by 500 million ghosts that shake his body like a rag doll, torment him with migraines and fill his head with a clamor of voices. As the priest sweeps smoke from the shrine over him, Lal's head wags spasmodically, his eyes rolls skywards, and he cries out the name of the guru. The priest delivers a resounding slap to the middle of Lal's back, and the patient sighs with relief and eagerly slumps to lick a lump of raw sugar from the concrete base of the shrine. One down, 499 million to go.
Locals say the victims of evil spirits speak in odd voices and foreign languages that their families claim they never learned. Most of the afflicted are women, who according to Bhopal University sociologist Gyanendra Gautam lead heavily constricted lives with little hope of escape. With slack faces and off-kilter stares, most of them appear to be haunted by nothing more exotic than schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or mental retardation.
Psychological professionals agree. According to a recent study by the Indian Council of Medical Research, India's poorly educated masses most frequently ascribe the abnormal or inappropriate behaviors that Westerners would associate with insanity to black magic, evil spirits, masturbation and excessive sex. And even if it were desired, the appropriate medical treatment is rarely available. "Godmen of every faith that we have have forever been in charge of mental health in India," says Dr. Vinay Mishra, a Bhopal-based psychologist. "Science has not really caught on in our lives."
About ten years ago, Mishra and some colleagues attempted to educate rural clerics about mental illness, hoping to encourage them to counsel people with minor neuroses but to send those with chemical disorders like schizophrenia to urban hospitals for treatment. The project failed miserably. The priests depended on the cash and offerings of the possessed for their livelihoods, they were reluctant to give up the privileged status that performing exorcisms granted them, and they found the psychiatrists' scientific explanations utterly absurd. "They didn't believe that psychological problems could be triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain," says Mishra.
Perhaps that's why the possessed attending the fair seem so eager. Forming an impromptu lineup in hopes of attention from what appears to be a foreign specialist, they recount a litany of mysterious and random ailments. "I saw a doctor, but he couldn't understand my problem," says 35-year-old Kaushal. "The ghost gives me headaches and makes my body parts crack, but yet I am unable to cry."
"The ghost possessed me nearly two years ago," says 52-year-old Gauri Bai. "At the shrine I am finding some relief." And then 45-year-old Buri steps forward, snaps to attention, and sticks out her long, yellowish tongue. From her eyes, it is clear that she believed her problem to be self-evident.
But that is the last moment of humor. Soon after her exorcism, Jyoti's voice rings out in protest as the priest tries to convince her father to keep her there overnight. "You said I would only have to come here for two hours!" she shouts. "It's been two hours. Now I want to go home." Thanks to her education, she is strong enough to exert her will, whatever her problems. But that is not true for everyone. Soon a terrified 14-year-old girl is dragged to the altar. As the tears stream down her face, the priest winds up and smacks her in the middle of the back, then grabs her by the hair and forces her to lick the piece of raw sugar from the shrine.
Her ailment is unclear. But the devil who torments her is plain to see.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
beware the "killer blueline"
Private bus companies take a deadly toll on Indian pedestrians. Here's the problem: they're needed.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 9, 2009
NEW DELHI — Around 10 a.m. on a busy Wednesday last month, 38-year-old Raj Kumar had a narrow escape from death when a careening bus plowed into him from behind. He picked himself up, dusted off his clothes and felt his limbs for breaks. Shaken but not gravely injured, he climbed into an auto rickshaw headed for the hospital.
Twenty minutes later, he decided that he didn't need the emergency room, so he left. As he started crossing the road to make his way to work, a second bus slammed into him and dragged him under the wheels. This time, he didn't get up.
This bizarre story is not as unlikely as it seems. Kumar was the 118th person to be mowed down in 2008 by one of Delhi's “killer Blueline buses,” as the local press has christened the 4,500-odd buses contracted out to private operators by the Delhi government.
And he wasn't the last. The killer buses have claimed more victims in 2009, and despite a relentless media campaign, the government's plan to phase them out is progressing at a snail's pace.
To be sure, the Bluelines are symptomatic of a larger problem. With more than 100,000 traffic fatalities a year and a mortality rate about seven times that of the roads in developed countries, according to the World Bank, India's roads are among the world's most deadly. And Delhi, where the number of vehicles is growing faster than any other city in India, presents a frightening vision of the future.
Every few months pavement dwellers — sometimes whole families — are run over in their sleep by drunk drivers. Road rage assaults and even murders are on the rise, and nobody, but nobody, follows the rules. Last year, for instance, police statistics show that incidents of dangerous driving in India's capital nearly doubled, increasing to about 125,000 from 69,000 in 2007.
"The road safety issue of Delhi is not just the Blueline buses,” says Dinesh Mohan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) who studies traffic safety. “Our roads are still not designed for the amount of traffic in Delhi and other cities in India, and that's not likely to change for some time.”
Reckless drivers are indeed common on Delhi roads. But because of their mammoth size and the deafening whistles that they use instead of horns, the Bluelines are the most frightening of all. And when they strike, their victims are among India's most vulnerable people. “They may be rickshaw pullers, or people traveling on the bus, or just walking on the road,” says advocate Rajinder Singh, who has argued 20 such cases. “They're from the poorest strata of society.”
Since July 2007, when Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit announced that the Bluelines would be taken off the roads, they have killed as many as 200 people. Hardly a single bus has been removed from service, and when tough action was taken to cancel the permits of errant operators the government was forced to cave by a citywide strike.
Killers or not, it turned out that the Blueline buses were the only thing keeping the city running. “There are about 4,500 Blueline buses, and they transport about 6.5 million passengers per day,” said H.S. Kalra, president of the Federation of Delhi Bus Operators. Despite covering many kilometers in the city's worst traffic, he adds, “Bluelines are only responsible for about 10 percent of the city's traffic fatalities.”
Plans are still underway to get rid of them. Just a week before Kumar was hit twice in 20 minutes, Transport Minister R.K. Verma had unveiled a new scheme that — if implemented — steps up the phaseout deadline to 2010 from 2012. But observers remain skeptical that a plan to consolidate the Bluelines under corporations that own 100 or more vehicles, instead of individual owners, will be effective in reining in reckless drivers.
“The basic problem is that the drivers try to catch the maximum number of passengers by racing to overtake one another,” Singh says. “The reason is that the more tickets they sell, the more revenue they earn, and if the drivers don't bring in a base of revenue, the bus owners don't pay their salaries at the end of the day.”
Says Mohan: “You shouldn't have a public service which is given to private operators, because then you have a profit motive that drives the system. Any human being would behave the same way under that incentive system.”
Pedestrians have good reason to be cynical. The Bluelines are actually this decade's solution to last decade's problem — the relaunched and rebranded version of the Redline buses that enjoyed their own reputation for mayhem. Initially, the government opted to pay the Blueline operators by the kilometer, rather than letting them compete for ticket revenue, in an effort to stop the racing and careening into the bus stops that was thought to account for most accidents.
But when bus owners decided that it was more convenient, put less wear and tear on the fleet, and earned them just as much money not to stop for passengers at all, the kilometer scheme was scrapped and the Bluelines became nothing more than the Redlines with a less-bloody sounding name.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 9, 2009
NEW DELHI — Around 10 a.m. on a busy Wednesday last month, 38-year-old Raj Kumar had a narrow escape from death when a careening bus plowed into him from behind. He picked himself up, dusted off his clothes and felt his limbs for breaks. Shaken but not gravely injured, he climbed into an auto rickshaw headed for the hospital.
Twenty minutes later, he decided that he didn't need the emergency room, so he left. As he started crossing the road to make his way to work, a second bus slammed into him and dragged him under the wheels. This time, he didn't get up.
This bizarre story is not as unlikely as it seems. Kumar was the 118th person to be mowed down in 2008 by one of Delhi's “killer Blueline buses,” as the local press has christened the 4,500-odd buses contracted out to private operators by the Delhi government.
And he wasn't the last. The killer buses have claimed more victims in 2009, and despite a relentless media campaign, the government's plan to phase them out is progressing at a snail's pace.
To be sure, the Bluelines are symptomatic of a larger problem. With more than 100,000 traffic fatalities a year and a mortality rate about seven times that of the roads in developed countries, according to the World Bank, India's roads are among the world's most deadly. And Delhi, where the number of vehicles is growing faster than any other city in India, presents a frightening vision of the future.
Every few months pavement dwellers — sometimes whole families — are run over in their sleep by drunk drivers. Road rage assaults and even murders are on the rise, and nobody, but nobody, follows the rules. Last year, for instance, police statistics show that incidents of dangerous driving in India's capital nearly doubled, increasing to about 125,000 from 69,000 in 2007.
"The road safety issue of Delhi is not just the Blueline buses,” says Dinesh Mohan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) who studies traffic safety. “Our roads are still not designed for the amount of traffic in Delhi and other cities in India, and that's not likely to change for some time.”
Reckless drivers are indeed common on Delhi roads. But because of their mammoth size and the deafening whistles that they use instead of horns, the Bluelines are the most frightening of all. And when they strike, their victims are among India's most vulnerable people. “They may be rickshaw pullers, or people traveling on the bus, or just walking on the road,” says advocate Rajinder Singh, who has argued 20 such cases. “They're from the poorest strata of society.”
Since July 2007, when Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit announced that the Bluelines would be taken off the roads, they have killed as many as 200 people. Hardly a single bus has been removed from service, and when tough action was taken to cancel the permits of errant operators the government was forced to cave by a citywide strike.
Killers or not, it turned out that the Blueline buses were the only thing keeping the city running. “There are about 4,500 Blueline buses, and they transport about 6.5 million passengers per day,” said H.S. Kalra, president of the Federation of Delhi Bus Operators. Despite covering many kilometers in the city's worst traffic, he adds, “Bluelines are only responsible for about 10 percent of the city's traffic fatalities.”
Plans are still underway to get rid of them. Just a week before Kumar was hit twice in 20 minutes, Transport Minister R.K. Verma had unveiled a new scheme that — if implemented — steps up the phaseout deadline to 2010 from 2012. But observers remain skeptical that a plan to consolidate the Bluelines under corporations that own 100 or more vehicles, instead of individual owners, will be effective in reining in reckless drivers.
“The basic problem is that the drivers try to catch the maximum number of passengers by racing to overtake one another,” Singh says. “The reason is that the more tickets they sell, the more revenue they earn, and if the drivers don't bring in a base of revenue, the bus owners don't pay their salaries at the end of the day.”
Says Mohan: “You shouldn't have a public service which is given to private operators, because then you have a profit motive that drives the system. Any human being would behave the same way under that incentive system.”
Pedestrians have good reason to be cynical. The Bluelines are actually this decade's solution to last decade's problem — the relaunched and rebranded version of the Redline buses that enjoyed their own reputation for mayhem. Initially, the government opted to pay the Blueline operators by the kilometer, rather than letting them compete for ticket revenue, in an effort to stop the racing and careening into the bus stops that was thought to account for most accidents.
But when bus owners decided that it was more convenient, put less wear and tear on the fleet, and earned them just as much money not to stop for passengers at all, the kilometer scheme was scrapped and the Bluelines became nothing more than the Redlines with a less-bloody sounding name.
Monday, January 12, 2009
the boom from the bottom
Isolated from world trends, India's aspiring poor will help it grow through the credit storm.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009
Though it may not look it on the ground at times, India is one of the few bright spots in a global economy with decidedly dim prospects in 2009. It is forecast to grow at a robust 5 to 6 percent this year—which is faster than it averaged in the 1990s, and nearly double the rate of expansion over the country's first three decades of independence. Yes, its stock market has crashed, unemployment is spiking, swaths of the real-estate market have more than a passing resemblance to Miami Beach and it now turns out that Satyam Computer Services—one of the country's top five IT companies—has been cooking its books. But a one off incident of fraud in the flagship IT sector won't knock the country off the rails. India boasts an unlikely growth driver all its own: legions of poor whose incomes have risen just enough in recent years to create powerful demands for basic goods and services.
The rise of India's aspiring middle—a group that lives above the poverty line but hasn't yet attained true membership in modern consumer society—is hardly a new story. But what's surprising is the resilience of this cohort, and the extent to which it has counterbalanced the global credit crisis and the slump in the global export economy of which India is a key player. In part, this is a consequence of New Delhi's past failures; policymakers were never able to make India the export powerhouse that China has become over the past three decades, so now they don't rely nearly as heavily on growth driven by investment and demand from foreign markets.
Yet Indian planners deserve some credit, too, for avoiding a national addiction to cheap credit and creating "growth multipliers" like roads and telecom networks that now link the country's vast interior to modern cities. "The basic component of domestic demand [in India] is consumer demand, because people still have incomes to earn," says Saumitra Chaudhuri, chief economist at ICRA, an Indian credit-ratings agency affiliated with Moody's. "And those incomes are not substantially influenced by international developments."
The idea that Indian backwardness is a plus may sound absurd. But it is always easier to grow from a poor base, so the fact that India is not yet a major economy is an advantage in a downturn. A population so large that subsists at such a low economic base is a powerful economic driver if it can be mobilized. India's has been, and it is proving resilient to the prevailing headwinds in the global economy. "It's kind of a self-sustaining process," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "There's a huge, huge underpenetration of most commodities and services, and you have enough people at the bottom experiencing enough of an increase in income to sustain growth."
So even as middle-class consumption wanes in India—signified by a sharp drop in auto sales, airline travel and fine restaurant dining since mid-2008—domestic demand remains strong thanks to aspiring consumers, many still tied to the farms, who spend their rupees on essentials like soap, medicine and the shoes and clothing that they wear to work. As Gokarn puts it: "If you go back to the economic textbooks, they will tell you that the poorer you are, the stronger your propensity to consume."
The contrast with China, Asia's other economic giant, is stark. Domestic demand makes up three quarters of the Indian economy, compared with less than half for China, which is "why, relative to East Asian economies, India is somewhat insulated from the global trade slowdown," says Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government. Another Indian mainstay—agricultural growth—should remain steady this year, and the services sector, which now accounts for about 55 percent of India's GDP, is expected to be "more resilient" than manufacturing, says Acharya.
Despite the financial crisis, the nation's IT sector managed to grow some 20 percent in 2008, according to India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, and IT companies have already extended 100,000 new job offers for 2009. "For whatever reason, China has been highly focused on the export market, while Indian business has been highly focused on the domestic market, and their exports have been incidental," says Chaudhuri. Which makes India, more than China, a master of its own destiny.
The conventional wisdom has always held that India failed to become an export-driven dynamo on the Chinese model because its democratic system couldn't deliver the hard infrastructure and soft labor laws needed to manufacture competitively. While there is some truth to that, what is often overlooked is how much India's current growth multipliers—all of them linked to infrastructure—resemble China's in the 1980s.
One example: India's ambitious program to expand the national highway system, launched in 2003, which is now adding about 100 kilometers of highway per day to the grid. Each new strip of pavement links additional villagers to urban markets, allowing them to fetch more for what they grow or make and to travel farther afield for wage-paying jobs. Capitalized at a whopping 5 percent of GDP in 2000, India's rural roads program will ultimately connect all Indian villages of more than 500 people to one another with all-weather roads. Fewer than half of these villages had roads of any sort when the project started. Similarly, in a six-phase national project, the National Highway Authority plans to add or upgrade nearly 30,000 kilometers of highway, which would expand the existing system by a third.
Telecommunications has made faster inroads. In 2008 the subscriber base for India's national telecom network topped 350 million people, and India's telecom market is now growing faster than even China's. Charges have dropped to less than 50 U.S. cents per call. That connectedness has a huge potential impact on incomes in a job market "extremely sensitive to how quickly one can get information," says Gokarn. There's also the IT sector itself to consider. It has created 1.8 million jobs directly over the past decade, and as many as 6.5 million more support jobs for drivers, security guards and gofers with primary or high school educations. That has put rupees into the hands of people "more likely to spend it rather than save it," says Gokarn, and though job creation will slow as the IT sector cools off, the huge workforce creates a good deal of momentum.
India's bottom-up boom can't drive the economy at full speed, to be sure. But it is largely immune to the downturn that's evident higher up the consumer chain. The stock bust hasn't affected the aspiring underclass because its members are not invested in the markets, and they're not to blame for the drop in auto sales because they're too poor to afford cars. Even the housing bust is far removed from them; despite the glut of top-end condos in places like Mumbai and New Delhi, India as a whole is suffering an acute housing shortage. The problem: construction companies all aimed for the top of the market, leaving the lower tiers underserved. According to the National Planning Commission, urban India needs an additional 24.7 million ordinary homes to satisfy current demand. As evidence of this unquenchable thirst, when the Delhi Development Authority held a lottery last year to find buyers for 5,000 affordable flats it built in the city, some 500,000 applications flooded in.
The mismatch illuminates India's way forward. Like many other governments, New Delhi recently announced a major new spending package aimed at bolstering growth. And it, too, seeks to spur domestic demand. Yet the main target isn't the urban middle, as in China or the United States, but the poor. In October, Parliament approved additional spending of about $50 billion (or 4.5 percent of GDP) to boost salaries of government workers, waive farm loans, further fund the rural-employment-guarantee program and finance petroleum bonds so that oil and fertilizer companies can keep prices low. "While there are legitimate concerns about the long-term impact of some of these measures," says Gokarn, "they will undoubtedly help boost consumption spending, particularly by lower income households, which in turn will help shore up growth in the immediate future."
India avoided a U.S.-style housing bust and is better positioned to pump money into the cash-starved financial system today because its much-maligned central bank was never wooed by the allure of easy money—no matter how loudly industry clamored for faster growth. When the central banks of other countries were essentially offering free money, India's realized that, as a democracy of mostly poor voters, it couldn't afford to grow at 10 percent a year if that meant skyrocketing prices for essential commodities like rice and flour. For that reason, the central bank constricted the money inflating the real-estate bubble (and prices for everything else) by raising interest rates to a peak of 12.5 percent last summer, which earned it criticism for being out of step with more aggressively growth-oriented central banks. Because of this, India has ample ground clearance to lower rates and reduce reserve requirements for banks to spur growth and avert deflation.
The private sector is in pretty solid financial shape, too. The central bank kept a close eye on both state-owned and private banks, preventing them from leveraging to perilous heights by keeping the cash reserve ratio high, limiting the use of securitizations and derivatives and essentially barring the off-balance sheet vehicles that U.S. banks used, disastrously, to hide their debt. As a result, India's banks aren't sitting on a mountain of bad loans, which makes them freer to lend to companies in need. Indian companies, cognizant of the cash crunch that burned them in the late 1990s, didn't overextend this time, either. "[One] great source of strength is India's corporate sector, who have much stronger balance sheets [than in the past]," says Chaudhuri.
One sign of that is companies that are putting their wealth to work. In December, India's Wipro Technologies purchased Citigroup's captive IT services firm Citi Technology Services for $127 million in cash, and in October, Tata Consultancy Services was able to buy Citi's business process outsourcing business, Citigroup Global Services, paying $505 million. Both moves suggest that reports of the IT sector's demise in India are greatly exaggerated.
The biggest risk to India in 2009 at this point may not be the global economy but domestic politics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance will see its term expire in May, and India's election rules mean that he can no longer enact any significant policies—a measure adopted to prevent incumbents from stacking the deck with populist sops. That means as much as five months of paralysis, precisely when speedy, creative action is the order of the day. Moreover, though the nemesis of Singh's Congress party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—mostly favors similar policies, a change in government would likely result in some further slowing of infrastructure projects that are already running behind schedule. And elections in India can be tricky. In the last one, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost despite racing economic growth, because poor voters rejected the BJP's campaign claims of an "India Shining."
With the light bulb flickering, Singh's Congress may face an even bigger challenge winning them over. The poor don't care how much faster than other nations India is growing, only whether their lives are better than they were five years ago.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/178814
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009
Though it may not look it on the ground at times, India is one of the few bright spots in a global economy with decidedly dim prospects in 2009. It is forecast to grow at a robust 5 to 6 percent this year—which is faster than it averaged in the 1990s, and nearly double the rate of expansion over the country's first three decades of independence. Yes, its stock market has crashed, unemployment is spiking, swaths of the real-estate market have more than a passing resemblance to Miami Beach and it now turns out that Satyam Computer Services—one of the country's top five IT companies—has been cooking its books. But a one off incident of fraud in the flagship IT sector won't knock the country off the rails. India boasts an unlikely growth driver all its own: legions of poor whose incomes have risen just enough in recent years to create powerful demands for basic goods and services.
The rise of India's aspiring middle—a group that lives above the poverty line but hasn't yet attained true membership in modern consumer society—is hardly a new story. But what's surprising is the resilience of this cohort, and the extent to which it has counterbalanced the global credit crisis and the slump in the global export economy of which India is a key player. In part, this is a consequence of New Delhi's past failures; policymakers were never able to make India the export powerhouse that China has become over the past three decades, so now they don't rely nearly as heavily on growth driven by investment and demand from foreign markets.
Yet Indian planners deserve some credit, too, for avoiding a national addiction to cheap credit and creating "growth multipliers" like roads and telecom networks that now link the country's vast interior to modern cities. "The basic component of domestic demand [in India] is consumer demand, because people still have incomes to earn," says Saumitra Chaudhuri, chief economist at ICRA, an Indian credit-ratings agency affiliated with Moody's. "And those incomes are not substantially influenced by international developments."
The idea that Indian backwardness is a plus may sound absurd. But it is always easier to grow from a poor base, so the fact that India is not yet a major economy is an advantage in a downturn. A population so large that subsists at such a low economic base is a powerful economic driver if it can be mobilized. India's has been, and it is proving resilient to the prevailing headwinds in the global economy. "It's kind of a self-sustaining process," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "There's a huge, huge underpenetration of most commodities and services, and you have enough people at the bottom experiencing enough of an increase in income to sustain growth."
So even as middle-class consumption wanes in India—signified by a sharp drop in auto sales, airline travel and fine restaurant dining since mid-2008—domestic demand remains strong thanks to aspiring consumers, many still tied to the farms, who spend their rupees on essentials like soap, medicine and the shoes and clothing that they wear to work. As Gokarn puts it: "If you go back to the economic textbooks, they will tell you that the poorer you are, the stronger your propensity to consume."
The contrast with China, Asia's other economic giant, is stark. Domestic demand makes up three quarters of the Indian economy, compared with less than half for China, which is "why, relative to East Asian economies, India is somewhat insulated from the global trade slowdown," says Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government. Another Indian mainstay—agricultural growth—should remain steady this year, and the services sector, which now accounts for about 55 percent of India's GDP, is expected to be "more resilient" than manufacturing, says Acharya.
Despite the financial crisis, the nation's IT sector managed to grow some 20 percent in 2008, according to India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, and IT companies have already extended 100,000 new job offers for 2009. "For whatever reason, China has been highly focused on the export market, while Indian business has been highly focused on the domestic market, and their exports have been incidental," says Chaudhuri. Which makes India, more than China, a master of its own destiny.
The conventional wisdom has always held that India failed to become an export-driven dynamo on the Chinese model because its democratic system couldn't deliver the hard infrastructure and soft labor laws needed to manufacture competitively. While there is some truth to that, what is often overlooked is how much India's current growth multipliers—all of them linked to infrastructure—resemble China's in the 1980s.
One example: India's ambitious program to expand the national highway system, launched in 2003, which is now adding about 100 kilometers of highway per day to the grid. Each new strip of pavement links additional villagers to urban markets, allowing them to fetch more for what they grow or make and to travel farther afield for wage-paying jobs. Capitalized at a whopping 5 percent of GDP in 2000, India's rural roads program will ultimately connect all Indian villages of more than 500 people to one another with all-weather roads. Fewer than half of these villages had roads of any sort when the project started. Similarly, in a six-phase national project, the National Highway Authority plans to add or upgrade nearly 30,000 kilometers of highway, which would expand the existing system by a third.
Telecommunications has made faster inroads. In 2008 the subscriber base for India's national telecom network topped 350 million people, and India's telecom market is now growing faster than even China's. Charges have dropped to less than 50 U.S. cents per call. That connectedness has a huge potential impact on incomes in a job market "extremely sensitive to how quickly one can get information," says Gokarn. There's also the IT sector itself to consider. It has created 1.8 million jobs directly over the past decade, and as many as 6.5 million more support jobs for drivers, security guards and gofers with primary or high school educations. That has put rupees into the hands of people "more likely to spend it rather than save it," says Gokarn, and though job creation will slow as the IT sector cools off, the huge workforce creates a good deal of momentum.
India's bottom-up boom can't drive the economy at full speed, to be sure. But it is largely immune to the downturn that's evident higher up the consumer chain. The stock bust hasn't affected the aspiring underclass because its members are not invested in the markets, and they're not to blame for the drop in auto sales because they're too poor to afford cars. Even the housing bust is far removed from them; despite the glut of top-end condos in places like Mumbai and New Delhi, India as a whole is suffering an acute housing shortage. The problem: construction companies all aimed for the top of the market, leaving the lower tiers underserved. According to the National Planning Commission, urban India needs an additional 24.7 million ordinary homes to satisfy current demand. As evidence of this unquenchable thirst, when the Delhi Development Authority held a lottery last year to find buyers for 5,000 affordable flats it built in the city, some 500,000 applications flooded in.
The mismatch illuminates India's way forward. Like many other governments, New Delhi recently announced a major new spending package aimed at bolstering growth. And it, too, seeks to spur domestic demand. Yet the main target isn't the urban middle, as in China or the United States, but the poor. In October, Parliament approved additional spending of about $50 billion (or 4.5 percent of GDP) to boost salaries of government workers, waive farm loans, further fund the rural-employment-guarantee program and finance petroleum bonds so that oil and fertilizer companies can keep prices low. "While there are legitimate concerns about the long-term impact of some of these measures," says Gokarn, "they will undoubtedly help boost consumption spending, particularly by lower income households, which in turn will help shore up growth in the immediate future."
India avoided a U.S.-style housing bust and is better positioned to pump money into the cash-starved financial system today because its much-maligned central bank was never wooed by the allure of easy money—no matter how loudly industry clamored for faster growth. When the central banks of other countries were essentially offering free money, India's realized that, as a democracy of mostly poor voters, it couldn't afford to grow at 10 percent a year if that meant skyrocketing prices for essential commodities like rice and flour. For that reason, the central bank constricted the money inflating the real-estate bubble (and prices for everything else) by raising interest rates to a peak of 12.5 percent last summer, which earned it criticism for being out of step with more aggressively growth-oriented central banks. Because of this, India has ample ground clearance to lower rates and reduce reserve requirements for banks to spur growth and avert deflation.
The private sector is in pretty solid financial shape, too. The central bank kept a close eye on both state-owned and private banks, preventing them from leveraging to perilous heights by keeping the cash reserve ratio high, limiting the use of securitizations and derivatives and essentially barring the off-balance sheet vehicles that U.S. banks used, disastrously, to hide their debt. As a result, India's banks aren't sitting on a mountain of bad loans, which makes them freer to lend to companies in need. Indian companies, cognizant of the cash crunch that burned them in the late 1990s, didn't overextend this time, either. "[One] great source of strength is India's corporate sector, who have much stronger balance sheets [than in the past]," says Chaudhuri.
One sign of that is companies that are putting their wealth to work. In December, India's Wipro Technologies purchased Citigroup's captive IT services firm Citi Technology Services for $127 million in cash, and in October, Tata Consultancy Services was able to buy Citi's business process outsourcing business, Citigroup Global Services, paying $505 million. Both moves suggest that reports of the IT sector's demise in India are greatly exaggerated.
The biggest risk to India in 2009 at this point may not be the global economy but domestic politics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance will see its term expire in May, and India's election rules mean that he can no longer enact any significant policies—a measure adopted to prevent incumbents from stacking the deck with populist sops. That means as much as five months of paralysis, precisely when speedy, creative action is the order of the day. Moreover, though the nemesis of Singh's Congress party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—mostly favors similar policies, a change in government would likely result in some further slowing of infrastructure projects that are already running behind schedule. And elections in India can be tricky. In the last one, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost despite racing economic growth, because poor voters rejected the BJP's campaign claims of an "India Shining."
With the light bulb flickering, Singh's Congress may face an even bigger challenge winning them over. The poor don't care how much faster than other nations India is growing, only whether their lives are better than they were five years ago.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/178814
from bollywood to hollywood
The "Mozart from Madras" is ready for his close up after winning a Golden Globe for "Slumdog Millionaire."
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 12, 2009
NEW DELHI — Calling India's A.R. Rahman — who won a Golden Globe award for the score of "Slumdog Millionaire" last night — the best composer you've never heard of is beyond understatement.
Known locally as "the Mozart from Madras," Rahman has sold over 200 million albums worldwide: more than Madonna and Britney Spears combined. But the truth of the matter is you probably can't hum one of his songs. That's about to change.
"There are a number of gifts that single [Rahman] out as special. His handling of rhythmical elements is astonishing and his solutions very South Indian," said Ken Hunt, one of the authors of the upcoming third edition of "The Rough Guide to World Music." "His melodies are catchy, clever and reveal a command of theatrical music techniques," Hunt adds. "He was pretty much ready for the big time from the get-go."
And now the big time is ready for him. With a multicultural soundtrack unlike anything he's ever done for Bollywood, the 43-year-old composer-singer-producer might be on his way to becoming America's hottest new hand on the mixing board. Indian-origin DJs in New York and London have been saying it for years, but now it just may be true. Brown is the new black.
As far as Indians are concerned, it's about time. Audiences here, where "Slumdog Millionaire" has not yet been released, have been overjoyed by the film's surprise victories at the Critics' Choice and Golden Globe awards. Here's one tribute: Only three Indian films ever have been nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category, "Mother India" (1957), "Salaam Bombay!" (1988) and "Lagaan" (2001). None took home the prize.
So even though "Slumdog" — written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — is not technically an Indian production, or even a Bollywood-style film, the accolades for Rahman have provided some validation for the larger-than-life musicals that Indians often simply call "our films."
Rahman, who started to learn the piano at the age of 4, is something of a Slumdog Millionaire himself. After his father died, he was forced to start work as a keyboard player to support his family at just 11 years old. He later dropped out of high school to pursue his music career. About that same time, he converted from Hinduism to Islam, a brave choice in a country where Muslims often face persecution. But he says Islam "set [him] free."
From his humble beginnings, Rahman swiftly became one of Bollywood's biggest money spinners — a kind of Indian Quincy Jones — virtually owning the industry for more than a decade. His hits, like Chaiya Chaiya, Chhoti Si Asha and Thee Thee, have as much enduring appeal as any Beatles standard, and not only for Bollywood fans. "A.R. Rahman is nothing short of a melodic genius," Andrew Lloyd Webber has said. "I admire his unique sense of harmony, his staggering rhythms and his melodies that take an unexpected twist that no Western composer would dream of."
Bollywood insiders know that kind of staggering genius can make or break a film in India. "In Indian cinema, the music is such an important part of it that music can save a mediocre film," says film critic Jai Arjun Singh. "With Rahman, it happens frequently."
That's not an overstatement. Marketers use song-and-dance numbers from movies for the trailers, videos on Channel V and MTV drive repeat business, and soundtrack sales and music video rights account for a significant part of the picture's revenue.
That's why Indian producers swear by him. "He has demonstrated fusion of west and east more than most musicians over the world," said Ronnie Screwvala, chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, one of India's most successful film production companies. "All our tent pole [productions] have always been Rahman [films]—from Swades to Rang De Basanti to Jodha Akhbar and Delhi 6."
Nevertheless, though he performed with Michael Jackson and wrote the music for Webber's Broadway musical Bombay Dreams and the stage production of the Lord of the Rings, Rahman was virtually unknown to Western fans until last night.
Now he has to be considered a frontrunner for an Oscar, and a raft of offers from record companies and producers in the U.S. music industry.
Here comes the close up.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 12, 2009
NEW DELHI — Calling India's A.R. Rahman — who won a Golden Globe award for the score of "Slumdog Millionaire" last night — the best composer you've never heard of is beyond understatement.
Known locally as "the Mozart from Madras," Rahman has sold over 200 million albums worldwide: more than Madonna and Britney Spears combined. But the truth of the matter is you probably can't hum one of his songs. That's about to change.
"There are a number of gifts that single [Rahman] out as special. His handling of rhythmical elements is astonishing and his solutions very South Indian," said Ken Hunt, one of the authors of the upcoming third edition of "The Rough Guide to World Music." "His melodies are catchy, clever and reveal a command of theatrical music techniques," Hunt adds. "He was pretty much ready for the big time from the get-go."
And now the big time is ready for him. With a multicultural soundtrack unlike anything he's ever done for Bollywood, the 43-year-old composer-singer-producer might be on his way to becoming America's hottest new hand on the mixing board. Indian-origin DJs in New York and London have been saying it for years, but now it just may be true. Brown is the new black.
As far as Indians are concerned, it's about time. Audiences here, where "Slumdog Millionaire" has not yet been released, have been overjoyed by the film's surprise victories at the Critics' Choice and Golden Globe awards. Here's one tribute: Only three Indian films ever have been nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category, "Mother India" (1957), "Salaam Bombay!" (1988) and "Lagaan" (2001). None took home the prize.
So even though "Slumdog" — written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — is not technically an Indian production, or even a Bollywood-style film, the accolades for Rahman have provided some validation for the larger-than-life musicals that Indians often simply call "our films."
Rahman, who started to learn the piano at the age of 4, is something of a Slumdog Millionaire himself. After his father died, he was forced to start work as a keyboard player to support his family at just 11 years old. He later dropped out of high school to pursue his music career. About that same time, he converted from Hinduism to Islam, a brave choice in a country where Muslims often face persecution. But he says Islam "set [him] free."
From his humble beginnings, Rahman swiftly became one of Bollywood's biggest money spinners — a kind of Indian Quincy Jones — virtually owning the industry for more than a decade. His hits, like Chaiya Chaiya, Chhoti Si Asha and Thee Thee, have as much enduring appeal as any Beatles standard, and not only for Bollywood fans. "A.R. Rahman is nothing short of a melodic genius," Andrew Lloyd Webber has said. "I admire his unique sense of harmony, his staggering rhythms and his melodies that take an unexpected twist that no Western composer would dream of."
Bollywood insiders know that kind of staggering genius can make or break a film in India. "In Indian cinema, the music is such an important part of it that music can save a mediocre film," says film critic Jai Arjun Singh. "With Rahman, it happens frequently."
That's not an overstatement. Marketers use song-and-dance numbers from movies for the trailers, videos on Channel V and MTV drive repeat business, and soundtrack sales and music video rights account for a significant part of the picture's revenue.
That's why Indian producers swear by him. "He has demonstrated fusion of west and east more than most musicians over the world," said Ronnie Screwvala, chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, one of India's most successful film production companies. "All our tent pole [productions] have always been Rahman [films]—from Swades to Rang De Basanti to Jodha Akhbar and Delhi 6."
Nevertheless, though he performed with Michael Jackson and wrote the music for Webber's Broadway musical Bombay Dreams and the stage production of the Lord of the Rings, Rahman was virtually unknown to Western fans until last night.
Now he has to be considered a frontrunner for an Oscar, and a raft of offers from record companies and producers in the U.S. music industry.
Here comes the close up.
for which it stands: india
Decoding Obama's (increasingly) complex India problem
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (Jan. 8, 2009)
NEW DELHI — Like many countries, India was rooting hard for Barack Obama to become America's 44th president. But the enormous challenges that Obama faces in South Asia — and India's huge expectations — could make the love affair short-lived.
Since former President Bill Clinton's second term, U.S.-India ties have been growing ever closer. With the nuclear agreement signed in September, the relationship has begun to look like a strategic alliance.
But that warm embrace could turn into a cold shoulder. The rub: Obama's commitment to building a viable state from the rubble of Afghanistan, which will likely lead him to lean on Pakistan for assistance.
Indians worry that the U.S. may allow Pakistan to wriggle out of its espoused promises to arrest and prosecute the terrorists responsible for the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai.
"We expect the U.S. to apply the same strict standards that they have for the western border of Pakistan for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism against India," said former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha.
"The litmus test for this will be the surrender or repatriation to India of those criminals who have taken shelter in Pakistan, and no alibi by the Pakistani rulers should be allowed to stand in the way," he added.
India has banked heavily on America's ability to pressure Pakistan to bring the Mumbai culprits to justice. But the U.S. needs the Pakistani army's help in fighting the Taliban on Pakistan's western border.
If in return the U.S. allows Islamabad to skate on its promises to catch and prosecute the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack, India's love affair with Obama would come to a speedy end.
And it could well reverse the trajectory of India's increasingly U.S.-centric foreign
policy — which has seen New Delhi step back from Iran, inch closer to Israel and distance itself from the Shanghai Cooperation's Russia-China-India formulation in favor of a budding alliance with the U.S., Japan and Australia.
"President Bush has left a very strong legacy of establishing a strategic relationship between India and the United States and President Obama will have to find ways and means to consolidate that relationship and build on it," said Kanwal Sibal, a former India foreign secretary.
"However, (Obama's) thinking about Afghanistan and what the United States needs to do there — the surge strategy that is being propounded by Gen. Petraeus — will require certain tough policy decisions vis a vis Pakistan," Sibal added.
Pakistan has maneuvered U.S. intervention after the Mumbai attacks into an effort to stop India from taking action, rather than compelling Pakistan to do so, according to M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career Indian diplomat.
That has already "exposed the fallacy" of India's thinking that in the post-Cold War world it is a natural ally of the U.S., while the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is a mere marriage of convenience, said Bhadrakumar.
And when Obama takes office, the rhetoric of putting pressure on Pakistan to arrest terror suspects will likely give way to a multibillion-dollar aid package, including $300 million in annual military aid for the next five years.
"That gives Pakistan a misplaced confidence that they can get away with terrorist acts against India. That the world will watch for awhile, then remain quiet and wait for the next strike, and India will be helpless to act," Sinha said.
"Mumbai, with the kind of deep hurt it has caused to the Indian psyche, is making India increasingly unwilling to accept this situation," he added.
So far, Obama's early efforts at developing a strategy for balancing America's complex dual alliance with India and Pakistan have appeared to Indians like naive blunders that play into Pakistan's hands.
According to U.S. media reports, for instance, Obama suggested he might appoint former President Clinton as special envoy to Kashmir as part of an effort to resolve India-Pakistan tensions, freeing Pakistan to be more aggressive in fighting al-Qaida on the Afghan border.
That might sound like a good idea to non-Indian readers.
But to most Indians, the suggestion betrays either a basic ignorance or a deliberate oversight of India's point of view: that Kashmir is a bilateral issue in which it occupies the literal and the moral high ground.
India has trumpeted the fact that despite the attacks on Mumbai and a call for a boycott by separatists, more than 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for state elections held in Kashmir in November and December, and the clear majority chose pro-India parties.
Pakistan's chief argument against the legitimacy of India's dominion over Kashmir is that India has never held the plebiscite to determine who will have sovereignty over the state that the U.N. Security Council ordered as part of the original peace plan for the region in 1948.
"The inherent message that you get from this is that by appointing a special envoy, the United States would want India to make additional compromises," Sibal said.
"That is where the rub is," Sibal continued. "What additional compromises? Because we have a purely defensive strategy on Kashmir. It's Pakistan that has the offensive strategy, which wants to grab part of the territory, which wants to destabilize the situation from within, which is engaging in terrorism."
Though India remains skeptical, the latest news out of Pakistan has been relatively positive.
Under increasing U.S. pressure as the FBI progresses in its own investigation of the Mumbai attacks, Islamabad has at least acknowledged that the terrorist in Indian custody is a Pakistani national.
What remains to be seen is whether Obama's administration will be as forceful in dealing with Islamabad at the beginning of his term as Bush suddenly seemed to be in his final days in office — when he knew his successor would have to deal with the consequences.
For Indians, the answer could define the Obama presidency almost before it begins.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (Jan. 8, 2009)
NEW DELHI — Like many countries, India was rooting hard for Barack Obama to become America's 44th president. But the enormous challenges that Obama faces in South Asia — and India's huge expectations — could make the love affair short-lived.
Since former President Bill Clinton's second term, U.S.-India ties have been growing ever closer. With the nuclear agreement signed in September, the relationship has begun to look like a strategic alliance.
But that warm embrace could turn into a cold shoulder. The rub: Obama's commitment to building a viable state from the rubble of Afghanistan, which will likely lead him to lean on Pakistan for assistance.
Indians worry that the U.S. may allow Pakistan to wriggle out of its espoused promises to arrest and prosecute the terrorists responsible for the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai.
"We expect the U.S. to apply the same strict standards that they have for the western border of Pakistan for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism against India," said former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha.
"The litmus test for this will be the surrender or repatriation to India of those criminals who have taken shelter in Pakistan, and no alibi by the Pakistani rulers should be allowed to stand in the way," he added.
India has banked heavily on America's ability to pressure Pakistan to bring the Mumbai culprits to justice. But the U.S. needs the Pakistani army's help in fighting the Taliban on Pakistan's western border.
If in return the U.S. allows Islamabad to skate on its promises to catch and prosecute the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack, India's love affair with Obama would come to a speedy end.
And it could well reverse the trajectory of India's increasingly U.S.-centric foreign
policy — which has seen New Delhi step back from Iran, inch closer to Israel and distance itself from the Shanghai Cooperation's Russia-China-India formulation in favor of a budding alliance with the U.S., Japan and Australia.
"President Bush has left a very strong legacy of establishing a strategic relationship between India and the United States and President Obama will have to find ways and means to consolidate that relationship and build on it," said Kanwal Sibal, a former India foreign secretary.
"However, (Obama's) thinking about Afghanistan and what the United States needs to do there — the surge strategy that is being propounded by Gen. Petraeus — will require certain tough policy decisions vis a vis Pakistan," Sibal added.
Pakistan has maneuvered U.S. intervention after the Mumbai attacks into an effort to stop India from taking action, rather than compelling Pakistan to do so, according to M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career Indian diplomat.
That has already "exposed the fallacy" of India's thinking that in the post-Cold War world it is a natural ally of the U.S., while the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is a mere marriage of convenience, said Bhadrakumar.
And when Obama takes office, the rhetoric of putting pressure on Pakistan to arrest terror suspects will likely give way to a multibillion-dollar aid package, including $300 million in annual military aid for the next five years.
"That gives Pakistan a misplaced confidence that they can get away with terrorist acts against India. That the world will watch for awhile, then remain quiet and wait for the next strike, and India will be helpless to act," Sinha said.
"Mumbai, with the kind of deep hurt it has caused to the Indian psyche, is making India increasingly unwilling to accept this situation," he added.
So far, Obama's early efforts at developing a strategy for balancing America's complex dual alliance with India and Pakistan have appeared to Indians like naive blunders that play into Pakistan's hands.
According to U.S. media reports, for instance, Obama suggested he might appoint former President Clinton as special envoy to Kashmir as part of an effort to resolve India-Pakistan tensions, freeing Pakistan to be more aggressive in fighting al-Qaida on the Afghan border.
That might sound like a good idea to non-Indian readers.
But to most Indians, the suggestion betrays either a basic ignorance or a deliberate oversight of India's point of view: that Kashmir is a bilateral issue in which it occupies the literal and the moral high ground.
India has trumpeted the fact that despite the attacks on Mumbai and a call for a boycott by separatists, more than 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for state elections held in Kashmir in November and December, and the clear majority chose pro-India parties.
Pakistan's chief argument against the legitimacy of India's dominion over Kashmir is that India has never held the plebiscite to determine who will have sovereignty over the state that the U.N. Security Council ordered as part of the original peace plan for the region in 1948.
"The inherent message that you get from this is that by appointing a special envoy, the United States would want India to make additional compromises," Sibal said.
"That is where the rub is," Sibal continued. "What additional compromises? Because we have a purely defensive strategy on Kashmir. It's Pakistan that has the offensive strategy, which wants to grab part of the territory, which wants to destabilize the situation from within, which is engaging in terrorism."
Though India remains skeptical, the latest news out of Pakistan has been relatively positive.
Under increasing U.S. pressure as the FBI progresses in its own investigation of the Mumbai attacks, Islamabad has at least acknowledged that the terrorist in Indian custody is a Pakistani national.
What remains to be seen is whether Obama's administration will be as forceful in dealing with Islamabad at the beginning of his term as Bush suddenly seemed to be in his final days in office — when he knew his successor would have to deal with the consequences.
For Indians, the answer could define the Obama presidency almost before it begins.
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