Analysis: Can Obama's "breadth and depth" jump-start stagnating US-India relations?
NEW DELHI, India — U.S. President Barack Obama arrives in India on Saturday with a difficult mission.
With no "big ticket" pact in the works, fading popularity at home and suspicions in India about American military aid to Pakistan, he needs to reassure New Delhi that the burgeoning alliance begun by his predecessor is truly becoming a bona fide strategic partnership.
The bottom line: There's very little chance Indians won't be disappointed with the outcome.
"If you look closely at what the background briefings are from the Indian side and what is being said not only in Washington but by the U.S. ambassador here, one gets the sense that nothing dramatic is likely to emerge from the visit," said former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal.
Indeed, at a press briefing to outline the broad agenda for the visit, senior U.S. officials encouraged observers to focus on the big picture, rather than big agreements.
"The president's itinerary in India will highlight the growth, strength and breadth of the U.S.-India partnership and highlight the diversity and cultural vibrancy of India," a senior U.S. official said. "We believe the next big thing is taking this relationship from one focused on the civil nuke deal to one that's deeper and broader, and that rests on a full range of strategic areas of cooperation."
That means that the U.S. president will likely focus on India's potential to create U.S. jobs — simultaneously hitting the right notes at home and assuaging Indian fears about the protectionist tenor in recent U.S. statements and legislation regarding outsourcing. Obama will also emphasize that the U.S. recognizes India as a global power — reflected in more than 50 joint military exercises over the past eight years.
But the fact that the visit hinges on a combination of intangibles, closed-door discussions and a series of small steps forward ensures that the devil will be in the details.
"Mr. Obama and this administration are very good [people], full of nice sounding words, a lot of euphemisms," said Rajiv Sikri, a career Indian diplomat. "But I get the feeling that the Indian side is fairly hard-nosed, and will not be taken in. It's really action on the ground, and what the U.S. policies do to India's security and economic interests that will be the touchstone of how successful this visit is."
What India wants
In the wake of an announcement of more U.S. military aid for Pakistan and revelations that American intelligence may have withheld crucial information about the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai from their Indian counterparts, India wants assurance that the U.S. is coming closer to the Indian view that Pakistan is at the heart of the world's problems with terrorism.
While that won't be forthcoming, Obama's first address, at Mumbai's Taj Palace Hotel, will set the right tone, and the recent U.S. announcement of a director of national intelligence review of the Headley affair suggests that the U.S. intends to put more muscle behind cooperations on counterterrorism.
Perhaps more importantly, closed-door talks between Obama and Singh on Nov. 7 and 8 will likely flesh out the potential outcomes of the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan next year.
But symbolic gestures and closed-door assurances aside, India has concrete demands that Obama will be hard-pressed to satisfy. The two big items at the top of India's wish list are a clear statement backing India's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and some kind of official recognition of its territorial sovereignty — an oblique reference to its border disputes with China and Pakistan. Obama will probably steer clear of the border issues, experts say. And while the U.N. Security Council seat may find its way into one of Obama's speeches, the expectation is that the U.S. president's formulation will be too weak to fulfill India's hopes.
"If this was said after due deliberation, with full knowledge of the implications, a lot of discerning people would see that as a major change in how the U.S. is beginning to look at India after the nuclear deal," said Sibal.
The carefully worded statements of U.S. officials aren't promising. In a meeting with reporters to outline Obama's schedule, for instance, U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns would say only, "Given India’s rise and its significance, we believe that India will be a central part of any consideration of a reformed Security Council," continuing America's "natural candidate" line, which clearly stops short of pushing for immediate reform.
What the U.S. wants
America's ambitions for Obama's visit are smaller, perhaps, but would send clear signals that the economic and strategic relationship between the U.S. and India is growing closer. As a big win, the U.S. is still pushing for a revision of India's nuclear liability laws, which the U.S. nuclear lobby argues have robbed the 2008 Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear agreement of its significance by creating a business advantage for the state-owned nuclear firms of Russia and France.
To provide a much-needed boost for the American economy, the U.S. would also like to see India further loosen restrictions on foreign investment in multi-brand retail for stores like Walmart and finalize billions of dollars in defense contracts that would reportedly create tens of thousands of U.S. jobs. But here, too, little progress is expected.
Though India signed the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) in October, its own Civil Liability for Nuclear Damages Act remains in force. Moreover, with its failure to win compensation for victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy from Union Carbide as the backdrop for the negotiations, India appears both unwilling and politically unable to water down the 2010 law. As minister of state for science and technology, Prithviraj Chavan, told a gathering of reporters at the Founder’s Day celebration of India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center, “We won’t accept any conditions and agreements will be on our terms."
For the other items on the U.S. wish list, there's optimism on the question of if, but doubts regarding the question of when. Recently, India's commerce minister said the 51 percent cap on foreign direct investment in single-brand retail (e.g. the Nike store) could soon be eliminated, but said that a "consultative process" would be required before the ban on investment in multi-brand stores could be raised to an investment limit of 51 percent.
And while Obama is expected to conclude a $3.5 billion deal to buy 10 C-17 transport aircraft from Boeing, no decision is expected on an $11 billion tender for multi-role fighter jets — for which America's Lockheed Martin and Boeing are competing with European, Russian and Israeli manufacturers.
Wiggle room
Nevertheless, with some $50 billion in bilateral trade — and a broad trade balance — both the U.S. and India have strong economic incentives to ensure that Obama's visit is a success. As a result, both governments have worked hard to develop a set of "deliverables" where they believe there's a good chance to demonstrate tangible progress. These items include relatively anodyne projects in the areas of alternative energy and agriculture. But there could also be some wiggle room on defense moves that would provide clearer signals of a developing strategic partnership.
India is pushing for the U.S. to remove its space agency and defense research organization from the Bureau of Industry and Security "Entity List" that restricts them from purchasing so-called "dual use" technologies with potential nuclear applications, while the U.S. is pushing for India to sign several agreements that it says would facilitate better military cooperation.
Progress on neither is guaranteed, but both moves would mark significant steps forward. The removal of export controls — which were put in place after India tested its nuclear bomb in 1998 — would bring India a step closer to the acknowledgement as a legitimate nuclear weapons state that was the implicit promise of the Indo-U.S. nuclear pact.
Meanwhile, India's signing of America's three arcane defense pacts — the communications interoperability and security memorandum of agreement (CISMOA), the basic exchange and cooperation agreement for geo-spatial cooperation (BECA) and the logistical support agreement (LSA) — would demonstrate that the political and defense establishments in New Delhi no longer fear sacrificing neutrality if it means gaining a broader role in geopolitical affairs.
So far, the U.S. appears closer to removing export controls than India is to signing the defense agreements.
This August, Obama announced a general easing of restrictions on exports of products with potential military applications. And in praising India for signing the CSC, U.S. Undersecretary Burns expressed guarded optimism about the Entity List, saying, "We’re also making progress on cooperation in space and updating export controls to reflect the reality of a 21st century partnership in which India is treated as a partner and not as a target."
In contrast, Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony reportedly told U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates point blank at an October meeting in Washington that India would not sign the three "enabling" defense agreements during Obama's visit. Though the U.S. conducts more military exercises with India than with any other country, Indian defense officials maintain that the unsigned agreements do not pose a major impediment to the cooperation, and political concerns make signing the deals difficult.
"The implication of that [reluctance to sign the pacts] is that India should not be seen in too warm an embrace with the United States," said former Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, referring to the desire in some quarters to adhere to the Cold War policies written when India was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. "[But] if India wants to exercise greater responsibility and influence and larger strategic and security capacities in the broader neighborhood, then India will have to take specific stances in situations."
The trick for Obama will be to connect enough dots to create the big picture he needs to convince the remaining naysayers in India.
Source URL:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101101/barack-obama-US-india-relations-manmohan-singh
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
India: Turning point for democracy?
An election in India's so-called backward state may herald a new politics of accountability.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 26, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — The odds are good you didn't hear about the state elections this past weekend in Bihar.
But had you been paying attention, what you would have read about happening in this dusty, impoverished outpost in eastern India might just wind up signalling a shift toward better governance for the entire country.
Bihar state, located on the Nepal border and long derided as a basket case, closed the second phase of its six phase state assembly elections Sunday on an unusually optimistic note.
Yes, Maoist rebels succeeded in torching a poll booth and abducting three officials. But the insurgents' routine call for a boycott failed to stop voters. In the first two phases of the election, voter turnout exceeded 50 percent — marking a nearly 10 percent increase in voting from 2005, the last time the so-called backward state held polls.
The reason: Nitish Kumar, the state's reigning chief minister, has rekindled optimism by slowly building a functioning government and squashed fear by jailing notorious, politically connected criminals. His re-election — likely but not guaranteed, when votes are counted on Nov. 24, experts said — could therefore mark a turning point in Indian politics by ending the revolving door of "anti-incumbency" and proving that good governance can trump caste- and creed-based rhetoric.
"This election will be a benchmark election, because it has completely new parameters," said Shaibal Gupta, head of the Asian Development Research Institute, based in Patna, Bihar.
What that means is that a state that has always been ruled by identity politics — with voters choosing candidates based on their caste or religious community — has now begun a substantive debate about development and its economic future.
"Every election is a referendum, but this election assumes a greater character because so many steps have been taken that had never been taken earlier," Gupta said. "We have never had a functioning state, so we had to create new benchmarks."
Bihar was once the seat of the powerful Maurya Empire, which spread Buddhism throughout Asia and as far as the Mediterranean. But for a couple thousand years since then, with a breakneck acceleration over the past 20, it's been steadily marching into ruin.
After the British let feudal landlords run rampant, a series of peasant movements made Bihar instrumental in India's freedom struggle. But once India gained its independence, those movements stagnated, and powerful landlords hamstrung any efforts at land reform until a new political
formation of lower caste herdsmen and laborers raised Lalu Prasad Yadav to the chief minister's chair in 1990.
The victory for the oppressed, far from ushering in a golden age of fairness and prosperity, instead accelerated Bihar's descent into chaos. Open warfare prevailed between the militias of upper caste landlords and lower caste tillers, and Lalu, who ruled virtually without rival for three consecutive terms, despite widespread allegations of corruption, used his power to patronize his caste and install his relatives in positions of power.
By 2004, when he was finally defeated by Kumar, the state was barely functioning — unable to disperse funds for ordinary projects like maintaining roads — and most of the rural hinterland was under control of career criminals. Highway travel was out of the question after dark, and even in the capital, Patna, violent crime ensured that the shops closed and the streets were deserted at 8 o'clock.
Finally elected in 2004 after voters finally grew disgusted with Lalu — a charming Falstaff with a brilliant knack for politics — Kumar started Bihar on the path to a turnaround with a risky gambit. Instead of encouraging his own flunkies to get their own forelegs firmly planted in the government trough, he declared an end to the politics of patronage by ending the "transfer industry" that sold coveted bureaucratic posts to the highest bidder and cracked down on criminals that had long enjoyed political protection.
Setting up fast-track courts and hiring ex-soldiers to speedily fill vacancies in the police, he jailed some 40,000 criminals over his first term — more than four times the number of convictions during Lalu's three terms in power. By re-establishing a functioning government, he also increased government spending on building roads and training hundreds of thousands of primary school teachers dramatically.
From $320 million in 2001, government spending rose to $1.2 billion in 2005-2006, Kumar's first year in office, then rose to $2.2 billion in 2007-2008 and $3.5 billion in 2008-2009, raising economic growth from a laggard 3.5 percent under his predecessors to around 11 percent — the second-highest of any Indian state.
There is, of course, still a chance that Kumar might lose. Elections are notoriously difficult to call in India, and not everything has changed in the troubled state. The number of candidates with criminal antecedents — or those who themselves are facing serious charges — remains as high as 40 percent.
And in some constituencies a new trend has emerged in which relatives are standing against each other for rival parties to ensure that power remains in the family's hands, according to Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition, a group that monitors politicians and government performance.
Worse still, despite the progress the state has made, the living conditions for most Biharis remain miserable — leaving open the possibility that the very poor may vote against progress in exchange for the promise of sops.
But so far it appears voters are going to the polls this time convinced that there's more to democracy than simply expressing their displeasure with a venal and incompetent government or making sure the candidate from their own caste or religious community comes to power — though all the major political parties are still fielding candidates based on caste- and creed- formulations.
For example, the controversial Sept. 28 verdict [2] that granted ownership of the disputed site of the destruction of the Babri mosque to Hindu groups, which might have galvanized triumphant rightwing Hindus or disappointed Muslims, has played little role in the campaign. Instead, the debate has centered on issues like building roads and providing reliable electricity — new ideas for politics in Bihar.
The real turning point, though, promises to come after the election — if Kumar wins a second term as expected. Kumar pushed an anti-corruption bill through the state assembly in 2008 that has in recent months been approved by the central government. In his campaign speeches this round, Bihar's sitting chief minister has promised to progress from establishing basic law and order to taking on graft, saying, "The first time, I went after criminals. Next, it will be the turn of the corrupt." And, like his crackdown on crime, the promise could well prove to be more than election rhetoric.
Called the Bihar Special Court Bill, Kumar's new law for the first time empowers government investigators to confiscate assets of bureaucrats and politicians accused of corruption — which was previously impossible even after a conviction. And it sets the stage for fast-track courts like the ones he used to jail 40,000 thugs in four years.
In a state where government funds have always been siphoned off before work could begin, rather than while it was actually underway, the impact could be huge. Indeed, if Kumar wins, the money he confiscates alone might send the turnaround state's economic growth rocketing past his first term's 11 percent.
Moreover, because the Special Court Bill is unique for India, it just might make India's most backward state an example for the rest.
"If a couple of hundred people get punished, and their property gets confiscated, it will send out a message all over the country," said Gupta. "Things will be different."
India Bihar India democracy India development India elections India history Nitish Kumar
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101025/bihar-elections-democracy-nitish-kumar
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 26, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — The odds are good you didn't hear about the state elections this past weekend in Bihar.
But had you been paying attention, what you would have read about happening in this dusty, impoverished outpost in eastern India might just wind up signalling a shift toward better governance for the entire country.
Bihar state, located on the Nepal border and long derided as a basket case, closed the second phase of its six phase state assembly elections Sunday on an unusually optimistic note.
Yes, Maoist rebels succeeded in torching a poll booth and abducting three officials. But the insurgents' routine call for a boycott failed to stop voters. In the first two phases of the election, voter turnout exceeded 50 percent — marking a nearly 10 percent increase in voting from 2005, the last time the so-called backward state held polls.
The reason: Nitish Kumar, the state's reigning chief minister, has rekindled optimism by slowly building a functioning government and squashed fear by jailing notorious, politically connected criminals. His re-election — likely but not guaranteed, when votes are counted on Nov. 24, experts said — could therefore mark a turning point in Indian politics by ending the revolving door of "anti-incumbency" and proving that good governance can trump caste- and creed-based rhetoric.
"This election will be a benchmark election, because it has completely new parameters," said Shaibal Gupta, head of the Asian Development Research Institute, based in Patna, Bihar.
What that means is that a state that has always been ruled by identity politics — with voters choosing candidates based on their caste or religious community — has now begun a substantive debate about development and its economic future.
"Every election is a referendum, but this election assumes a greater character because so many steps have been taken that had never been taken earlier," Gupta said. "We have never had a functioning state, so we had to create new benchmarks."
Bihar was once the seat of the powerful Maurya Empire, which spread Buddhism throughout Asia and as far as the Mediterranean. But for a couple thousand years since then, with a breakneck acceleration over the past 20, it's been steadily marching into ruin.
After the British let feudal landlords run rampant, a series of peasant movements made Bihar instrumental in India's freedom struggle. But once India gained its independence, those movements stagnated, and powerful landlords hamstrung any efforts at land reform until a new political
formation of lower caste herdsmen and laborers raised Lalu Prasad Yadav to the chief minister's chair in 1990.
The victory for the oppressed, far from ushering in a golden age of fairness and prosperity, instead accelerated Bihar's descent into chaos. Open warfare prevailed between the militias of upper caste landlords and lower caste tillers, and Lalu, who ruled virtually without rival for three consecutive terms, despite widespread allegations of corruption, used his power to patronize his caste and install his relatives in positions of power.
By 2004, when he was finally defeated by Kumar, the state was barely functioning — unable to disperse funds for ordinary projects like maintaining roads — and most of the rural hinterland was under control of career criminals. Highway travel was out of the question after dark, and even in the capital, Patna, violent crime ensured that the shops closed and the streets were deserted at 8 o'clock.
Finally elected in 2004 after voters finally grew disgusted with Lalu — a charming Falstaff with a brilliant knack for politics — Kumar started Bihar on the path to a turnaround with a risky gambit. Instead of encouraging his own flunkies to get their own forelegs firmly planted in the government trough, he declared an end to the politics of patronage by ending the "transfer industry" that sold coveted bureaucratic posts to the highest bidder and cracked down on criminals that had long enjoyed political protection.
Setting up fast-track courts and hiring ex-soldiers to speedily fill vacancies in the police, he jailed some 40,000 criminals over his first term — more than four times the number of convictions during Lalu's three terms in power. By re-establishing a functioning government, he also increased government spending on building roads and training hundreds of thousands of primary school teachers dramatically.
From $320 million in 2001, government spending rose to $1.2 billion in 2005-2006, Kumar's first year in office, then rose to $2.2 billion in 2007-2008 and $3.5 billion in 2008-2009, raising economic growth from a laggard 3.5 percent under his predecessors to around 11 percent — the second-highest of any Indian state.
There is, of course, still a chance that Kumar might lose. Elections are notoriously difficult to call in India, and not everything has changed in the troubled state. The number of candidates with criminal antecedents — or those who themselves are facing serious charges — remains as high as 40 percent.
And in some constituencies a new trend has emerged in which relatives are standing against each other for rival parties to ensure that power remains in the family's hands, according to Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition, a group that monitors politicians and government performance.
Worse still, despite the progress the state has made, the living conditions for most Biharis remain miserable — leaving open the possibility that the very poor may vote against progress in exchange for the promise of sops.
But so far it appears voters are going to the polls this time convinced that there's more to democracy than simply expressing their displeasure with a venal and incompetent government or making sure the candidate from their own caste or religious community comes to power — though all the major political parties are still fielding candidates based on caste- and creed- formulations.
For example, the controversial Sept. 28 verdict [2] that granted ownership of the disputed site of the destruction of the Babri mosque to Hindu groups, which might have galvanized triumphant rightwing Hindus or disappointed Muslims, has played little role in the campaign. Instead, the debate has centered on issues like building roads and providing reliable electricity — new ideas for politics in Bihar.
The real turning point, though, promises to come after the election — if Kumar wins a second term as expected. Kumar pushed an anti-corruption bill through the state assembly in 2008 that has in recent months been approved by the central government. In his campaign speeches this round, Bihar's sitting chief minister has promised to progress from establishing basic law and order to taking on graft, saying, "The first time, I went after criminals. Next, it will be the turn of the corrupt." And, like his crackdown on crime, the promise could well prove to be more than election rhetoric.
Called the Bihar Special Court Bill, Kumar's new law for the first time empowers government investigators to confiscate assets of bureaucrats and politicians accused of corruption — which was previously impossible even after a conviction. And it sets the stage for fast-track courts like the ones he used to jail 40,000 thugs in four years.
In a state where government funds have always been siphoned off before work could begin, rather than while it was actually underway, the impact could be huge. Indeed, if Kumar wins, the money he confiscates alone might send the turnaround state's economic growth rocketing past his first term's 11 percent.
Moreover, because the Special Court Bill is unique for India, it just might make India's most backward state an example for the rest.
"If a couple of hundred people get punished, and their property gets confiscated, it will send out a message all over the country," said Gupta. "Things will be different."
India Bihar India democracy India development India elections India history Nitish Kumar
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101025/bihar-elections-democracy-nitish-kumar
Friday, October 22, 2010
US announces $2 billion aid package for Pakistan
Analysis: Does "going rogue" work? It has for Pakistan, our Delhi correspondent argues.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 23, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — Sarah Palin isn't the only one with a case for going rogue.
With U.S. President Barack Obama scheduled to come courting next month, Mother India might think about giving it a try, too.
Consider the evidence.
The U.S. today announced a $2 billion military and security aid package to Pakistan, a country widely suspected of harboring top leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban — including Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, by some accounts. In recent weeks, dozens of American fuel tankers bound for soldiers in Afghanistan have been blown up.
Coming on the back of a $7.5 billion package of economic aid announced in 2009, the new package brings the total since Sept. 11, 2001, to nearly $15 billion — double the amount of aid Islamabad received from Washington during all of the 1990s.
And the bulk of that money — about 10 times the amount of U.S. aid to India — came after 2004, when Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed to providing Iran, Libya and North Korea with designs and technology to aid in their nuclear weapons programs, receiving a pardon after maintaining, unconvincingly, that Islamabad had no role in his activities.
What did New Delhi, supposedly America's natural ally, get out of the deal? In December 2001, Pakistan-based terrorists attacked India's parliament, killing six policemen and one civilian, leading to a fraught standoff between the two nations across the disputed Line of Control in Kashmir. Then, in November 2008, a well-trained team conducted more than 10 coordinated terrorist attacks in Mumbai, killing some 170 people and injuring more than 300.
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was allegedly implicated by phone intercepts and the testimony of David Headley, who confessed to helping to plan the attacks on Mumbai's Taj Mahal Hotel and other locations. And new revelations from ProPublica suggest that America not only kept its knowledge of Headley's activities from India, but also that the former Drug Enforcement Agency informant may have been a double agent for the Central Intelligence Agency and the ISI.
When Obama visits India the first week of November, he'll have some explaining to do.
"The timing of this could not be worse," said Indiana University political scientist Sumit Ganguly. "With 16 days to go before the Obama visit, to announce this [aid package] was absolutely thoughtless. Of course, I don't know if announcing it after the visit would have been any better."
Though the U.S. has gotten precious little bang for its buck and India has been left out in the cold, for Pakistan the effects of going rogue have been positive. On Sept. 11, 2001, the value of the Karachi stock exchange's KSE 100 index stood at 1255.99 points. In 2002 alone, it doubled in value. By Friday's close, savvy investors have watched the formerly lackluster and volatile index march steadily past 10,000. Far from making Pakistan a stalwart ally or a liberal democracy, the lucrative gravy train has made it clearer than ever to many here that America's foreign policy establishment can be played.
"It has convinced the Pakistanis that America is so desperate for their support that they can get away with anything, including burning your supply trucks and doing precious little of what [America] wants," said Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, India's ambassador to Pakistan from 1998 to 2000.
From India's perspective, U.S. military aid to Pakistan is disproportionate to the actual cost of fighting terrorism — the ostensible justification for the funds — and Islamabad spends the bulk of the money on preparing for a possible future war with India.
This increases the risk of an escalating arms race in South Asia, implied Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony in discussions with U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not long after Pakistan received the first three of 18 F-16s — fighter jets that are ill-suited for ferreting out terrorists hiding in the caves of Waziristan.
Moreover, while America's military aid generally comes in the form of free or subsidized hardware from U.S. suppliers — acting as an economic stimulus for the U.S. defense industry — India believes that as much as half of the cash, paid as "Coalition Support Fund" reimbursements for expenses incurred supporting the U.S. war effort, is easily routed to make other purchases.
"The bulk of that [aid money] has gone to purchase Chinese weapons, because it goes as coalition support funds," said Parthasarathy. "So, militarily you are in effect promoting a Chinese-Pakistan relationship."
Over the past two decades, China has supplied Pakistan with everything from tanks to frigates, and aided the development of its nuclear program while under U.S. sanctions. But several big ticket purchases have come after the U.S. ramped up reimbursement payments. Pakistan signed a deal to buy four 2,500 ton F-22P frigates from China for $750 million in 2005, for example, and its navy recently expressed interest in buying some larger, 4,000-ton ships.
Meanwhile, under the ongoing JF-17 fighter project, speculated to be worth about $5 billion, Pakistan is expected to add some 250 jets to its air force by 2015. And, according to Farhan Bokhari, the Pakistan correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, it's difficult to compare those sums dollar-for-dollar, because China offers Pakistan deep discounts and concessionary payment terms.
The present government in New Delhi is convinced that the road to greatness runs through Washington, so India remains keen to wolf down whatever scraps Obama is prepared to offer to add substance to what both nations call a "strategic partnership."
That means India is less likely than ever to go rogue — by taking a firm stand to back neighboring Iran's nuclear ambitions, for example, or by funneling an expected $10 billion in defense purchases to its longtime supplier Russia instead of the U.S., even though some commentators here have pointed out that money will go into Pakistani pockets.
But Washington should be concerned about the other rogues in the audience, for whom the attractions of bad behavior just keep getting bigger. While Obama tries to keep Iran from seeking nuclear weapons, for example, the contrasting fates of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan demonstrate to many here that they are necessary for a seat at the big kids' table — so much so that an Indian general described the message sent by America's first invasion of Iraq as "get nuclear weapons as fast as possible, unless you want to be invaded by the U.S."
"I'm certain that any number of squalid dictators across the world will now infer that if you are suitably difficult and you have certain things that the U.S. desires, then squeezing the U.S. works," said Ganguly.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101022/us-announces-2-billion-aid-package-pakistan
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 23, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — Sarah Palin isn't the only one with a case for going rogue.
With U.S. President Barack Obama scheduled to come courting next month, Mother India might think about giving it a try, too.
Consider the evidence.
The U.S. today announced a $2 billion military and security aid package to Pakistan, a country widely suspected of harboring top leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban — including Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, by some accounts. In recent weeks, dozens of American fuel tankers bound for soldiers in Afghanistan have been blown up.
Coming on the back of a $7.5 billion package of economic aid announced in 2009, the new package brings the total since Sept. 11, 2001, to nearly $15 billion — double the amount of aid Islamabad received from Washington during all of the 1990s.
And the bulk of that money — about 10 times the amount of U.S. aid to India — came after 2004, when Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed to providing Iran, Libya and North Korea with designs and technology to aid in their nuclear weapons programs, receiving a pardon after maintaining, unconvincingly, that Islamabad had no role in his activities.
What did New Delhi, supposedly America's natural ally, get out of the deal? In December 2001, Pakistan-based terrorists attacked India's parliament, killing six policemen and one civilian, leading to a fraught standoff between the two nations across the disputed Line of Control in Kashmir. Then, in November 2008, a well-trained team conducted more than 10 coordinated terrorist attacks in Mumbai, killing some 170 people and injuring more than 300.
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was allegedly implicated by phone intercepts and the testimony of David Headley, who confessed to helping to plan the attacks on Mumbai's Taj Mahal Hotel and other locations. And new revelations from ProPublica suggest that America not only kept its knowledge of Headley's activities from India, but also that the former Drug Enforcement Agency informant may have been a double agent for the Central Intelligence Agency and the ISI.
When Obama visits India the first week of November, he'll have some explaining to do.
"The timing of this could not be worse," said Indiana University political scientist Sumit Ganguly. "With 16 days to go before the Obama visit, to announce this [aid package] was absolutely thoughtless. Of course, I don't know if announcing it after the visit would have been any better."
Though the U.S. has gotten precious little bang for its buck and India has been left out in the cold, for Pakistan the effects of going rogue have been positive. On Sept. 11, 2001, the value of the Karachi stock exchange's KSE 100 index stood at 1255.99 points. In 2002 alone, it doubled in value. By Friday's close, savvy investors have watched the formerly lackluster and volatile index march steadily past 10,000. Far from making Pakistan a stalwart ally or a liberal democracy, the lucrative gravy train has made it clearer than ever to many here that America's foreign policy establishment can be played.
"It has convinced the Pakistanis that America is so desperate for their support that they can get away with anything, including burning your supply trucks and doing precious little of what [America] wants," said Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, India's ambassador to Pakistan from 1998 to 2000.
From India's perspective, U.S. military aid to Pakistan is disproportionate to the actual cost of fighting terrorism — the ostensible justification for the funds — and Islamabad spends the bulk of the money on preparing for a possible future war with India.
This increases the risk of an escalating arms race in South Asia, implied Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony in discussions with U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not long after Pakistan received the first three of 18 F-16s — fighter jets that are ill-suited for ferreting out terrorists hiding in the caves of Waziristan.
Moreover, while America's military aid generally comes in the form of free or subsidized hardware from U.S. suppliers — acting as an economic stimulus for the U.S. defense industry — India believes that as much as half of the cash, paid as "Coalition Support Fund" reimbursements for expenses incurred supporting the U.S. war effort, is easily routed to make other purchases.
"The bulk of that [aid money] has gone to purchase Chinese weapons, because it goes as coalition support funds," said Parthasarathy. "So, militarily you are in effect promoting a Chinese-Pakistan relationship."
Over the past two decades, China has supplied Pakistan with everything from tanks to frigates, and aided the development of its nuclear program while under U.S. sanctions. But several big ticket purchases have come after the U.S. ramped up reimbursement payments. Pakistan signed a deal to buy four 2,500 ton F-22P frigates from China for $750 million in 2005, for example, and its navy recently expressed interest in buying some larger, 4,000-ton ships.
Meanwhile, under the ongoing JF-17 fighter project, speculated to be worth about $5 billion, Pakistan is expected to add some 250 jets to its air force by 2015. And, according to Farhan Bokhari, the Pakistan correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, it's difficult to compare those sums dollar-for-dollar, because China offers Pakistan deep discounts and concessionary payment terms.
The present government in New Delhi is convinced that the road to greatness runs through Washington, so India remains keen to wolf down whatever scraps Obama is prepared to offer to add substance to what both nations call a "strategic partnership."
That means India is less likely than ever to go rogue — by taking a firm stand to back neighboring Iran's nuclear ambitions, for example, or by funneling an expected $10 billion in defense purchases to its longtime supplier Russia instead of the U.S., even though some commentators here have pointed out that money will go into Pakistani pockets.
But Washington should be concerned about the other rogues in the audience, for whom the attractions of bad behavior just keep getting bigger. While Obama tries to keep Iran from seeking nuclear weapons, for example, the contrasting fates of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan demonstrate to many here that they are necessary for a seat at the big kids' table — so much so that an Indian general described the message sent by America's first invasion of Iraq as "get nuclear weapons as fast as possible, unless you want to be invaded by the U.S."
"I'm certain that any number of squalid dictators across the world will now infer that if you are suitably difficult and you have certain things that the U.S. desires, then squeezing the U.S. works," said Ganguly.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101022/us-announces-2-billion-aid-package-pakistan
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Disneyland meets Bollywood at Indian theme park
A new theme park offers a Bollywood fantasy version of India, minus the dirt.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 18, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — From a distance, the new Kingdom of Dreams theme park outside Delhi looks and sounds like one of the amber-colored, sandstone palaces of Rajasthan.
At the ticket booth, turban-clad musicians sit, horns blaring, beneath a life-sized stone elephant, and the middle-class patrons shuffle between great stone pillars before passing through a metal detector — just like the ones omnipresent at Delhi's new, posh shopping malls — that punctures the illusion.
Opened this August, the Kingdom of Dreams is arguably India's most ambitious entertainment complex yet. Combining a retail-and-restaurant complex called Culture Gully, an outdoor stage for productions of the Ramayana and wedding shows, and a palatial 800-seat theater, it's Disneyland meets Bollywood. And this month, it's pioneering the country's first live Broadway-style musical — a fusion of the aesthetics of Hinduism's mythical epics and Bollywood's tearjerkers called Zangoora: the Gypsy Prince.
For the promoters — which include the Apra Group and Wizcraft International Entertainment, the firm behind Bollywood's International Indian Film Academy awards — it's a huge gamble. Apart from productions of mythological plays associated with the Hindu holidays and a small, insular art scene in Delhi and Mumbai, India has no tradition of live theater. Tickets for Zangoora range from around $25 to $150 — well out of range of the majority of local residents. And according to local press reports, the show will have to run eight times a week for two to three years in order for producers to recover their investment.
"Theater in India has never gone to the scale that Wizcraft and Apra have taken it," said Hussein Kuwajerwalla, the veteran television actor and Indian Idol host who plays the title role in Zangoora. "When I saw [the complex] in front of my eyes, I thought, these guys are going big. Big and how."
So far, the novelty of live action appears to be satisfying the crowd, thanks to the show's high production values — three cinema screens complement the sets with 3D animation, and in one underwater sequence aerial dancers hang from wires to twirl and somersault above the audience. The house was about half full for the midweek showing that I attended, and company officials say it's packed on weekends.
"What attracted me to this was the largeness of it," said television soap veteran Kashmira Irani, who plays opposite Kuwajerwalla. "When I came to this place, I was, like, Oh my God. This is the largest theater in India, the first, and to be part of something like this, I'm sure is going to create history."
The show is impressive. Kuwajerwalla, Irani and Bollywood debutante Gauhar Khan bring a healthy dose of glamour, and the costumes, sets and choreography are up to New York standards. But can it launch Indian theater?
"Sadly, in India, the only medium that people consider people to be actors is the film medium," said Khan, who recently starred opposite Ranbir Kapoor in Shimit Amin's "Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year." "But when [Bollywood] directors and producers actually see me on stage, and see what I do, they are actually taken by surprise."
Stylistically, Zangoora has more in common with the television variety show and India's increasingly elaborate mythological plays than with Broadway or Bollywood. None of the actors do their own singing, of course — lip-syncing is the norm in Indian films. The actors' microphones are tuned loud enough that their echoing voices have no semblance of verisimilitude, and the "big speeches" are pronounced in the booming, stagy tones of televisions mythological epics.
In that respect, Zangoora fits in snugly with the rest of the theme park. Billed as "an incredible Indian experience," the Kingdom of Dreams sales pitch hinges on community and tradition, just as Zangoora's main touchstone is the neighborhood productions of the Ramayana — called Ramlilas — which take place on the holiday of Dussehra. This month, for instance, the park's outdoor stage will feature nightly performances of Gujarati dandiya dances for the nine nights of the Hindu Navratri festival, punctuated with its own lavish Ramlila.
But as the slogan suggests — conjuring memories of the selective photography of the Ministry of Tourism's "Incredible India" ad campaign — the community offered here is an ersatz India that has been cleaned up for the upper middle class. And by all accounts, it's better than the real thing. The consensus: It's beautiful.
"It's a beautiful place," said Neha, a 23-year-old Delhi resident who'd come to celebrate her birthday with her boyfriend. "If you can say India has been summed up in just one place, under one roof, I would say that would be it."
Take the Kingdom's version of the Indian street. Culture Gully is an air-conditioned stage set with six themed restaurants, street food stalls, a massage center, an astrology complex, retail stores selling products from India's most iconic regions and — yes, Mahatma — three street bars. A false blue sky overhead ensures that it is always twilight, and there is no evidence of the real bazaar's thickets of dusty electrical wires and crumbling buildings.
Everything is clean and sparkling and colorful. At one end of the street, a houseboat from the backwaters of Kerala lies grounded on a playground's worth of white sand. Mid-way down, you can board a train bound for Mumbai's erstwhile Victoria Terminus (now called Chatrapati Shivaji), then step across the street for a Chennai filter coffee.
It's strangely unreal, and (actually) rather fun. But there's something disturbing, too, about the idea that an Indian street where everything works is such a popular fantasy — and charges about double the daily minimum wage for entry.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101016/bollywood-theme-park-disneyland?page=0,1
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 18, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — From a distance, the new Kingdom of Dreams theme park outside Delhi looks and sounds like one of the amber-colored, sandstone palaces of Rajasthan.
At the ticket booth, turban-clad musicians sit, horns blaring, beneath a life-sized stone elephant, and the middle-class patrons shuffle between great stone pillars before passing through a metal detector — just like the ones omnipresent at Delhi's new, posh shopping malls — that punctures the illusion.
Opened this August, the Kingdom of Dreams is arguably India's most ambitious entertainment complex yet. Combining a retail-and-restaurant complex called Culture Gully, an outdoor stage for productions of the Ramayana and wedding shows, and a palatial 800-seat theater, it's Disneyland meets Bollywood. And this month, it's pioneering the country's first live Broadway-style musical — a fusion of the aesthetics of Hinduism's mythical epics and Bollywood's tearjerkers called Zangoora: the Gypsy Prince.
For the promoters — which include the Apra Group and Wizcraft International Entertainment, the firm behind Bollywood's International Indian Film Academy awards — it's a huge gamble. Apart from productions of mythological plays associated with the Hindu holidays and a small, insular art scene in Delhi and Mumbai, India has no tradition of live theater. Tickets for Zangoora range from around $25 to $150 — well out of range of the majority of local residents. And according to local press reports, the show will have to run eight times a week for two to three years in order for producers to recover their investment.
"Theater in India has never gone to the scale that Wizcraft and Apra have taken it," said Hussein Kuwajerwalla, the veteran television actor and Indian Idol host who plays the title role in Zangoora. "When I saw [the complex] in front of my eyes, I thought, these guys are going big. Big and how."
So far, the novelty of live action appears to be satisfying the crowd, thanks to the show's high production values — three cinema screens complement the sets with 3D animation, and in one underwater sequence aerial dancers hang from wires to twirl and somersault above the audience. The house was about half full for the midweek showing that I attended, and company officials say it's packed on weekends.
"What attracted me to this was the largeness of it," said television soap veteran Kashmira Irani, who plays opposite Kuwajerwalla. "When I came to this place, I was, like, Oh my God. This is the largest theater in India, the first, and to be part of something like this, I'm sure is going to create history."
The show is impressive. Kuwajerwalla, Irani and Bollywood debutante Gauhar Khan bring a healthy dose of glamour, and the costumes, sets and choreography are up to New York standards. But can it launch Indian theater?
"Sadly, in India, the only medium that people consider people to be actors is the film medium," said Khan, who recently starred opposite Ranbir Kapoor in Shimit Amin's "Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year." "But when [Bollywood] directors and producers actually see me on stage, and see what I do, they are actually taken by surprise."
Stylistically, Zangoora has more in common with the television variety show and India's increasingly elaborate mythological plays than with Broadway or Bollywood. None of the actors do their own singing, of course — lip-syncing is the norm in Indian films. The actors' microphones are tuned loud enough that their echoing voices have no semblance of verisimilitude, and the "big speeches" are pronounced in the booming, stagy tones of televisions mythological epics.
In that respect, Zangoora fits in snugly with the rest of the theme park. Billed as "an incredible Indian experience," the Kingdom of Dreams sales pitch hinges on community and tradition, just as Zangoora's main touchstone is the neighborhood productions of the Ramayana — called Ramlilas — which take place on the holiday of Dussehra. This month, for instance, the park's outdoor stage will feature nightly performances of Gujarati dandiya dances for the nine nights of the Hindu Navratri festival, punctuated with its own lavish Ramlila.
But as the slogan suggests — conjuring memories of the selective photography of the Ministry of Tourism's "Incredible India" ad campaign — the community offered here is an ersatz India that has been cleaned up for the upper middle class. And by all accounts, it's better than the real thing. The consensus: It's beautiful.
"It's a beautiful place," said Neha, a 23-year-old Delhi resident who'd come to celebrate her birthday with her boyfriend. "If you can say India has been summed up in just one place, under one roof, I would say that would be it."
Take the Kingdom's version of the Indian street. Culture Gully is an air-conditioned stage set with six themed restaurants, street food stalls, a massage center, an astrology complex, retail stores selling products from India's most iconic regions and — yes, Mahatma — three street bars. A false blue sky overhead ensures that it is always twilight, and there is no evidence of the real bazaar's thickets of dusty electrical wires and crumbling buildings.
Everything is clean and sparkling and colorful. At one end of the street, a houseboat from the backwaters of Kerala lies grounded on a playground's worth of white sand. Mid-way down, you can board a train bound for Mumbai's erstwhile Victoria Terminus (now called Chatrapati Shivaji), then step across the street for a Chennai filter coffee.
It's strangely unreal, and (actually) rather fun. But there's something disturbing, too, about the idea that an Indian street where everything works is such a popular fantasy — and charges about double the daily minimum wage for entry.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101016/bollywood-theme-park-disneyland?page=0,1
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Why Wal-mart struggles in India
Fears of big retail are strangling growth.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 7, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — The timing for Walmart's first buyer-seller summit in India earlier this month couldn't have been better.
As Indian firms keen to tap the retailing giant's global network prepared their pitches, the Indian government gave the first concrete sign that it may be ready to open up its potentially huge retail market to foreign investors — an opportunity that America's largest retailer has been chasing for as many as 20 years.
It's not just big for Walmart, the company argues. "For India, the opening of retail would be a game changer," said Rajan Mittal, vice chairman of the firm's joint venture partner here.
Barred from opening retail stores in India, Walmart had been sourcing millions of dollars worth of textiles and other products here since 2001. Then, finally, after years of waiting for the world's next largest market to open its doors, the Arkansas-based company went around back — forming a joint venture with billionaire Sunil Mittal's Bharti Enterprises, best known as the operator of India's largest telecommunications network, Airtel. That gave Walmart the right to open wholesale stores in India and lay some groundwork through the Indian-owned Bharti Retail chain. But it wasn't exactly a sweetheart deal.
After opening its first retail store in China in 1996, Walmart swiftly ramped up to nearly 300 retail outlets, as well as 180 larger "supercenters." But in India, the company's Bharti-Walmart joint venture has due to restrictions managed only to open three so-called cash-and-carry stores — which sell in bulk to other retailers.
While Walmart's claim to fame is its supply chain, its best suppliers in India could only manage a score of 60 out of 100 by the company's standard, so it has to keep more inventory in India than anywhere else in the world. So, too, India's tiny grassroots retailers — the bread and butter of the retail sector — find that it's not worth their trouble to schlep out to the hyperstore.
Worse, it was barred from selling to the retail outlets of its joint venture partner, Bharti Retail. Until now.
On Sept. 29, India moved to allow foreign-funded wholesalers like Bharti-Walmart to sell as much as 25 percent of their goods directly to consumers through retailers that are part of the same corporate group.
Though Mittal called the job "half-done," it gave Walmart a small opening through which to explore India's retail market. More significantly, the change in regulations provided the strongest hint yet that India's government may finally be ready to talk business on FDI in retail.
"Our intelligence is that there will definitely be some policy relaxation [soon] in terms of allowing multi-brand retailing to come in," said NV Siva Kumar, leader of retail and consumer industries for PricewaterhouseCoopers India. "There will definitely be some conditions attached, but some kind of calibrated opening is what we expect to happen."
There was a gold rush air at Walmart's first pan-India buyer-seller summit, held at New Delhi's Taj Palace hotel on Sept. 30.
A host of Indian agricultural companies — including biggies like ITC Ltd. Kohinoor Foods and Amul — had taken booths to woo Walmart and associated buyers from 13 different countries, including the United States and United Kingdom. Many firms, like South India-based Nani Agro, which recently gained a spot on Walmart's approved list as a supplier of turmeric, were pitching the rest of their product portfolio.
Despite India's position as the world's second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, the country's total agricultural exports amounted to just $8 billion last year, compared with China's $40 billion. Help from Walmart and its associated firms to meet international standards and make global connections could change that, India's farm and food companies hope.
For retailers like Walmart, as well as French competitor Carrefour and U.K.-based Tesco, the stakes are almost as high, and they are hoping that the first calibration in India's retail FDI policy could come as early as November, when U.S. President Barack Obama is slated to visit. Last month, Francisco Sanchez, U.S. under-secretary of commerce for international trade, told the Financial Times that opening up India's retail market is high on the agenda for Obama's delegation.
And, so far, most signs appear to be positive. The Indian commerce ministry's department of industrial policy and promotion recently issued a discussion paper that outlined the positive effects that FDI in retail could have on India's economy. "We believe that it is an opportunity to multiply jobs," a junior trade minister told Bloomberg.
However, India's Business Standard newspaper, citing unnamed sources in the finance ministry, has reported that no change is likely now.
Opening retail is perhaps the only big ticket item left on India's agenda of economic reforms, and the very idea of India lies at the issue's heart.
For the first six decades of India's independence, tiny cottage industries enjoyed various advantages due to regulations inspired by the philosophies of Mohandas K. Gandhi (better known as Mahatma). Small was good, subsistence was in and scale was out. Opening up retail to bigger-is-better players like Walmart would be a radical departure, and small trader organizations and India's communist parties are fighting it tooth and nail.
Experts from consultancies and economic think tanks, however, argue that opening up retail to FDI would benefit Indian consumers, farmers and workers in several ways. India's retail market is already worth some $400 billion, according to Business Monitor International. But the so-called "unorganized sector" of tiny mom-and-mop stores accounts for perhaps 97 percent of the market. And while outfits like the Confederation of All India Traders say that absorbing those tiny stores into larger, organized chains will result in massive unemployment, the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), which was tasked by the government to study the issue, found no evidence to support that claim.
According to the ICRIER study, big retail has little net effect on employment numbers. Moreover, large retail chains pay 25 percent higher prices for produce than farmers are able to get from the traditional market, and farmers selling directly to large retailers earn 60 percent higher profits — a remarkable fact considering that agriculture still employs two-thirds of India's 1.1 billion population.
But foreign funds could have an even larger impact. According to the Retailers Association of India, opening the retail sector to FDI would generate $20 billion in investment over the next five years. Much of that investment would go to improving transport linkages and developing the food processing industry, which could be a large employer and help cut the $12 billion a year's worth of agricultural produce that spoils before it ever reaches the market. According to ICRIER, small and medium sized companies in the textiles and clothing businesses would also get a huge boost.
PricewaterhouseCoopers' Kumar concluded: "It would be a terrific catalyst for trade."
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101006/walmart-economy
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 7, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — The timing for Walmart's first buyer-seller summit in India earlier this month couldn't have been better.
As Indian firms keen to tap the retailing giant's global network prepared their pitches, the Indian government gave the first concrete sign that it may be ready to open up its potentially huge retail market to foreign investors — an opportunity that America's largest retailer has been chasing for as many as 20 years.
It's not just big for Walmart, the company argues. "For India, the opening of retail would be a game changer," said Rajan Mittal, vice chairman of the firm's joint venture partner here.
Barred from opening retail stores in India, Walmart had been sourcing millions of dollars worth of textiles and other products here since 2001. Then, finally, after years of waiting for the world's next largest market to open its doors, the Arkansas-based company went around back — forming a joint venture with billionaire Sunil Mittal's Bharti Enterprises, best known as the operator of India's largest telecommunications network, Airtel. That gave Walmart the right to open wholesale stores in India and lay some groundwork through the Indian-owned Bharti Retail chain. But it wasn't exactly a sweetheart deal.
After opening its first retail store in China in 1996, Walmart swiftly ramped up to nearly 300 retail outlets, as well as 180 larger "supercenters." But in India, the company's Bharti-Walmart joint venture has due to restrictions managed only to open three so-called cash-and-carry stores — which sell in bulk to other retailers.
While Walmart's claim to fame is its supply chain, its best suppliers in India could only manage a score of 60 out of 100 by the company's standard, so it has to keep more inventory in India than anywhere else in the world. So, too, India's tiny grassroots retailers — the bread and butter of the retail sector — find that it's not worth their trouble to schlep out to the hyperstore.
Worse, it was barred from selling to the retail outlets of its joint venture partner, Bharti Retail. Until now.
On Sept. 29, India moved to allow foreign-funded wholesalers like Bharti-Walmart to sell as much as 25 percent of their goods directly to consumers through retailers that are part of the same corporate group.
Though Mittal called the job "half-done," it gave Walmart a small opening through which to explore India's retail market. More significantly, the change in regulations provided the strongest hint yet that India's government may finally be ready to talk business on FDI in retail.
"Our intelligence is that there will definitely be some policy relaxation [soon] in terms of allowing multi-brand retailing to come in," said NV Siva Kumar, leader of retail and consumer industries for PricewaterhouseCoopers India. "There will definitely be some conditions attached, but some kind of calibrated opening is what we expect to happen."
There was a gold rush air at Walmart's first pan-India buyer-seller summit, held at New Delhi's Taj Palace hotel on Sept. 30.
A host of Indian agricultural companies — including biggies like ITC Ltd. Kohinoor Foods and Amul — had taken booths to woo Walmart and associated buyers from 13 different countries, including the United States and United Kingdom. Many firms, like South India-based Nani Agro, which recently gained a spot on Walmart's approved list as a supplier of turmeric, were pitching the rest of their product portfolio.
Despite India's position as the world's second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, the country's total agricultural exports amounted to just $8 billion last year, compared with China's $40 billion. Help from Walmart and its associated firms to meet international standards and make global connections could change that, India's farm and food companies hope.
For retailers like Walmart, as well as French competitor Carrefour and U.K.-based Tesco, the stakes are almost as high, and they are hoping that the first calibration in India's retail FDI policy could come as early as November, when U.S. President Barack Obama is slated to visit. Last month, Francisco Sanchez, U.S. under-secretary of commerce for international trade, told the Financial Times that opening up India's retail market is high on the agenda for Obama's delegation.
And, so far, most signs appear to be positive. The Indian commerce ministry's department of industrial policy and promotion recently issued a discussion paper that outlined the positive effects that FDI in retail could have on India's economy. "We believe that it is an opportunity to multiply jobs," a junior trade minister told Bloomberg.
However, India's Business Standard newspaper, citing unnamed sources in the finance ministry, has reported that no change is likely now.
Opening retail is perhaps the only big ticket item left on India's agenda of economic reforms, and the very idea of India lies at the issue's heart.
For the first six decades of India's independence, tiny cottage industries enjoyed various advantages due to regulations inspired by the philosophies of Mohandas K. Gandhi (better known as Mahatma). Small was good, subsistence was in and scale was out. Opening up retail to bigger-is-better players like Walmart would be a radical departure, and small trader organizations and India's communist parties are fighting it tooth and nail.
Experts from consultancies and economic think tanks, however, argue that opening up retail to FDI would benefit Indian consumers, farmers and workers in several ways. India's retail market is already worth some $400 billion, according to Business Monitor International. But the so-called "unorganized sector" of tiny mom-and-mop stores accounts for perhaps 97 percent of the market. And while outfits like the Confederation of All India Traders say that absorbing those tiny stores into larger, organized chains will result in massive unemployment, the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), which was tasked by the government to study the issue, found no evidence to support that claim.
According to the ICRIER study, big retail has little net effect on employment numbers. Moreover, large retail chains pay 25 percent higher prices for produce than farmers are able to get from the traditional market, and farmers selling directly to large retailers earn 60 percent higher profits — a remarkable fact considering that agriculture still employs two-thirds of India's 1.1 billion population.
But foreign funds could have an even larger impact. According to the Retailers Association of India, opening the retail sector to FDI would generate $20 billion in investment over the next five years. Much of that investment would go to improving transport linkages and developing the food processing industry, which could be a large employer and help cut the $12 billion a year's worth of agricultural produce that spoils before it ever reaches the market. According to ICRIER, small and medium sized companies in the textiles and clothing businesses would also get a huge boost.
PricewaterhouseCoopers' Kumar concluded: "It would be a terrific catalyst for trade."
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101006/walmart-economy
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Has India got game?
An upstart Indian video game company launches its first big title.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 6, 2010
NEW DELHI, India and TOKYO, Japan — A line of patient gamers spiraled around the billowing white pavilion for El Shaddai — the first top-tier video game released by India's UTV Software Communications, which debuted at the Tokyo Game Show last month.
As the queue snaked past video screens playing scenes from the game's back story and display cases containing specially designed Edwin jeans “as worn by" the character Enoch in the game, some gamers scoped the storyboards, while others multitasked with handheld devices. At a game convention, you find game addicts.
The mood was mostly curious. Compared with Halo: Reach or Final Fantasy XIV, El Shaddai, designed by Sawaki Takeyasu for UTV's Ignition Entertainment unit, had virtually no hype going into the show. The animated trailer — a must for today's top-end, or AAA, games — would not be showing on a jumbotron at center court, and more than a few of the people waiting to play the old-school, third-person, punch-and-slash adventure had probably stumbled over because they'd stopped giving out badges at the nearby booth for the PlayStation Move.
But that didn't stop El Shaddai, a Cinderella at the ball, from winning fans. At the award ceremony on the final day of TGS, the 200,000-odd visitors voted El Shaddai "Future Game of the Show 2010" — honoring it among the top 10 favorite games showcased at the convention.
Now, for UTV, who invited me to attend TGS as its guest, the question is whether that recognition will pay off in sales. The Indian company — which has shelled out some serious coin to acquire game design firms in the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, as well as India, over the past three years — has a lot riding on its first AAA game's success.
Building on the reputation and financial wherewithal that the company has built producing and distributing Indian movies and TV shows, CEO Ronnie Screwvala hopes to become a significant player in the global video game business.
That means developing games from UTV's own family of studios, pushing new distribution models and attracting independent game designers who need a Harvey Weinstein-type mover to take their titles to the boardrooms of Sony, Capcom and Microsoft. A big splash out of the gate would draw that kind of attention right away — just at the right time.
"It's very important," Ronnie Screwvala, UTV's 54-year-old CEO, told GlobalPost. "We've got a lot riding on El Shaddai."
Though it has potential, the game business in India is worth a tiny $100 million of the $20-plus billion global market. Moreover, virtually all of that comes from games for mobile phones, and Indian animators and game designers are at least a decade behind their counterparts in America and Japan.
That's why Screwvala is striving to build a global gaming company, rather than an Indian one. The idea is to follow the so-called "Pixar model," with which Apple's Steve Jobs built a $7.5-billion company from a base of a measly $10 million by assembling a small, committed team of in-house directors and animators. But that's easier said than done — especially from India, skeptics say.
"Financially, if we sell a million units [of El Shaddai], it's not a big deal," said Screwvala. "But it's more about, 'Where the hell did you guys come from?' That's the reaction we want from the industry."
Acquiring controlling stakes in Mumbai-based Indiagames, U.K.-based Ignition, and U.S.-based True Games in 2007 and 2008, UTV has pumped $75 million into developing its gaming division — adding more than 400 visualizers, game designers and technology experts at studios in London, Tokyo and Shanghai, as well as Austin, Texas and Gainesville, Fla.
Revenue started trickling in too. But the big prize of its acquisition spree — an action sci-fi game called WarDevil designed for Ignition by Digi-Guys that was poised to turn the game world on its ear with ultra high-definition game play — failed to surface in time to put UTV's gaming business on the map.
"If we'd ever come up with a date in public, which we haven't, then the question would be delay. But we set ourselves our own expectations, and our own internal deadlines and we definitely are not on track with those internal deadlines," said Screwvala, who blames the delay on a decision to make the game available on Microsoft's Xbox360, as well as Sony's PS3.
The game that marked UTV's debut instead, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, is a completely different animal. It's a fantasy title, based on the apocryphal Book of Enoch — a text that was excluded from the Bible's Old Testament, which tells the story of the human Enoch's "ascent" to become the angel Metatron.
Naturally, in the game version, Enoch rises to heaven by taking out fallen angels with a flashing scimitar of God-energy (or some such). Where WarDevil is set to jump into the battle for ever more real-looking graphics through three-dimensional, computer-generated animation, El Shaddai has a hand-drawn feel reminiscent of Japanese anime.
Blogging for Wire.com, critic Daniel Feit, for instance, wrote that the game "dazzles with watercolor visuals." Will that made-in-Japan aesthetic play in the States — which accounts for the lion's share of the global game market?
"It has a very Japanese art form to it, but the storyline is very universal," said Screwvala. "So while most people feel that Japanese games, normally, are meant for the Japanese market, we've created a game in a Japanese studio but for a world market."
But, hey, if El Shaddai doesn't make that big a splash, don't expect UTV to roll over and play dead. Screwvala's Hollywood ambitions survived his company's production of M. Night Shyamalan's dismal "The Happening," and as far as he's concerned that flop just gave American show business another reason to recognize his name.
And unlike that lucky, or unlucky, one-off in Hollywood, UTV has a flurry of global game releases on the slate to ensure that even if El Shaddai flops, designers and distributors will take notice of the little video game company from Bollywood.
Targeting around $90 million in revenue and modest earnings, UTV expects to release seven sub-AAA console games this year. A massively multiplayer online fantasy role playing game called Mytheon from its Austin-based Truegames studio is due for release early in 2011. A second AAA console game called Reich — billed as a futuristic first-person shooter — and the much-awaited Wardevil are also scheduled for release. And, according to UTV, all three of its AAA console games have the potential to become movie-and-merchandising franchises like Resident Evil — or at least Streetfighter.
You know what they say: You can take the company out of Bollywood, but you can't take Bollywood out of the company.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 6, 2010
NEW DELHI, India and TOKYO, Japan — A line of patient gamers spiraled around the billowing white pavilion for El Shaddai — the first top-tier video game released by India's UTV Software Communications, which debuted at the Tokyo Game Show last month.
As the queue snaked past video screens playing scenes from the game's back story and display cases containing specially designed Edwin jeans “as worn by" the character Enoch in the game, some gamers scoped the storyboards, while others multitasked with handheld devices. At a game convention, you find game addicts.
The mood was mostly curious. Compared with Halo: Reach or Final Fantasy XIV, El Shaddai, designed by Sawaki Takeyasu for UTV's Ignition Entertainment unit, had virtually no hype going into the show. The animated trailer — a must for today's top-end, or AAA, games — would not be showing on a jumbotron at center court, and more than a few of the people waiting to play the old-school, third-person, punch-and-slash adventure had probably stumbled over because they'd stopped giving out badges at the nearby booth for the PlayStation Move.
But that didn't stop El Shaddai, a Cinderella at the ball, from winning fans. At the award ceremony on the final day of TGS, the 200,000-odd visitors voted El Shaddai "Future Game of the Show 2010" — honoring it among the top 10 favorite games showcased at the convention.
Now, for UTV, who invited me to attend TGS as its guest, the question is whether that recognition will pay off in sales. The Indian company — which has shelled out some serious coin to acquire game design firms in the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, as well as India, over the past three years — has a lot riding on its first AAA game's success.
Building on the reputation and financial wherewithal that the company has built producing and distributing Indian movies and TV shows, CEO Ronnie Screwvala hopes to become a significant player in the global video game business.
That means developing games from UTV's own family of studios, pushing new distribution models and attracting independent game designers who need a Harvey Weinstein-type mover to take their titles to the boardrooms of Sony, Capcom and Microsoft. A big splash out of the gate would draw that kind of attention right away — just at the right time.
"It's very important," Ronnie Screwvala, UTV's 54-year-old CEO, told GlobalPost. "We've got a lot riding on El Shaddai."
Though it has potential, the game business in India is worth a tiny $100 million of the $20-plus billion global market. Moreover, virtually all of that comes from games for mobile phones, and Indian animators and game designers are at least a decade behind their counterparts in America and Japan.
That's why Screwvala is striving to build a global gaming company, rather than an Indian one. The idea is to follow the so-called "Pixar model," with which Apple's Steve Jobs built a $7.5-billion company from a base of a measly $10 million by assembling a small, committed team of in-house directors and animators. But that's easier said than done — especially from India, skeptics say.
"Financially, if we sell a million units [of El Shaddai], it's not a big deal," said Screwvala. "But it's more about, 'Where the hell did you guys come from?' That's the reaction we want from the industry."
Acquiring controlling stakes in Mumbai-based Indiagames, U.K.-based Ignition, and U.S.-based True Games in 2007 and 2008, UTV has pumped $75 million into developing its gaming division — adding more than 400 visualizers, game designers and technology experts at studios in London, Tokyo and Shanghai, as well as Austin, Texas and Gainesville, Fla.
Revenue started trickling in too. But the big prize of its acquisition spree — an action sci-fi game called WarDevil designed for Ignition by Digi-Guys that was poised to turn the game world on its ear with ultra high-definition game play — failed to surface in time to put UTV's gaming business on the map.
"If we'd ever come up with a date in public, which we haven't, then the question would be delay. But we set ourselves our own expectations, and our own internal deadlines and we definitely are not on track with those internal deadlines," said Screwvala, who blames the delay on a decision to make the game available on Microsoft's Xbox360, as well as Sony's PS3.
The game that marked UTV's debut instead, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, is a completely different animal. It's a fantasy title, based on the apocryphal Book of Enoch — a text that was excluded from the Bible's Old Testament, which tells the story of the human Enoch's "ascent" to become the angel Metatron.
Naturally, in the game version, Enoch rises to heaven by taking out fallen angels with a flashing scimitar of God-energy (or some such). Where WarDevil is set to jump into the battle for ever more real-looking graphics through three-dimensional, computer-generated animation, El Shaddai has a hand-drawn feel reminiscent of Japanese anime.
Blogging for Wire.com, critic Daniel Feit, for instance, wrote that the game "dazzles with watercolor visuals." Will that made-in-Japan aesthetic play in the States — which accounts for the lion's share of the global game market?
"It has a very Japanese art form to it, but the storyline is very universal," said Screwvala. "So while most people feel that Japanese games, normally, are meant for the Japanese market, we've created a game in a Japanese studio but for a world market."
But, hey, if El Shaddai doesn't make that big a splash, don't expect UTV to roll over and play dead. Screwvala's Hollywood ambitions survived his company's production of M. Night Shyamalan's dismal "The Happening," and as far as he's concerned that flop just gave American show business another reason to recognize his name.
And unlike that lucky, or unlucky, one-off in Hollywood, UTV has a flurry of global game releases on the slate to ensure that even if El Shaddai flops, designers and distributors will take notice of the little video game company from Bollywood.
Targeting around $90 million in revenue and modest earnings, UTV expects to release seven sub-AAA console games this year. A massively multiplayer online fantasy role playing game called Mytheon from its Austin-based Truegames studio is due for release early in 2011. A second AAA console game called Reich — billed as a futuristic first-person shooter — and the much-awaited Wardevil are also scheduled for release. And, according to UTV, all three of its AAA console games have the potential to become movie-and-merchandising franchises like Resident Evil — or at least Streetfighter.
You know what they say: You can take the company out of Bollywood, but you can't take Bollywood out of the company.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Tokyo Game Show: Gamers go all out
In Japan, it's surreal reality meets virtual reality.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - Sept. 27, 2010
TOKYO, Japan — High atop a 30-foot tower built to showcase Microsoft's new Xbox360 Kinect, Japanese models kitted out in short-shorts, pigtails and sneakers scrambled to kick their virtual selves into high gear before a giant, cinema-sized screen.
As they jumped and ducked, and their on-screen icons — the popular skateboarders from Sega's new Sonic Free Riders game — raced and soared through the technicolor virtual landscape, it was hard to draw the line between the real and the surreal.
And all around the colossal tower, a horde of headsetted gamers shuffled to the hypnotic screens of blockbuster "franchises" like Halo, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy and Medal of Honor.
Welcome to the Tokyo Game Show, otherwise known as "TGS."
While you weren't paying attention, the global videogame industry has surpassed the movie business and the music business to become the highest-grossing entertainment industry in the world — bringing in about $20 billion a year.
That's right. The premier of a top title like Halo: Reach, the latest in a series of futuristic war games developed by a company called Bungie, is as big an event as the opening of a new flick from James Cameron or Steven Spielberg — both of whom have put their names behind top-flight game titles.
Tripling the opening weekend gross of Inception, Halo: Reach alone did $200 million in business on the first day of sales, which coincided with TGS, held Sept. 16-19 in Tokyo's Makuhari Messe.
And gaming console technologies like Microsoft Kinect's motion-sensitive game play (which makes Nintendo's Wii look like Pong) and Nintendo's glasses-free 3DS are actually pushing the cutting edge of computing.
But what's on display at TGS is not so much the technological advances in gaming — where the West has actually outstripped Japan in recent years, with biggies like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty coming out of Scotland and California.
What's on display here is the leading edge of virtual culture, where games go mainstream, and your average "salary man" blurs the lines between the everyday and the pixelated world.
TGS, which started way back in 1996, plays host to the biggest names in the game business, including publishers, developers and console makers like Capcom, Electronic Arts, Sony and Microsoft.
This year, more than 200,000 people attended the show, driving home the point that while Japan may be smaller in the gaming industry than it once was, the gaming industry is bigger than ever in Japan.
With Japanese developers creating franchises like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Resident Evil, handheld gaming devices as ubiquitous as mobile phones, and an arcade on every Tokyo corner, the videogame industry accounts for an even larger share of the entertainment market here than it does on the down low in the West.
Coming into this world as a non-gamer is a little like walking the red carpet at the Oscars without ever having seen a movie.
Fully a third of the attendees — most of them apparently amateurs — were dressed in elaborate costumes, portraying characters from popular games, anime and manga series like Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist, or Gyakuten Saiban ("Ace Attorney").
And the outdoor hallways between the exhibition centers were quickly taken over for impromptu photo shoots as duplicate versions of silver-haired, emerald-eyed elves squared off to compare threads.
The running patter of the models playing Sega's Sonic Free Riders game, piped over monstrous speakers, was like the banter between the hosts of a bizarre variety show. The girls themselves were the flesh-and-blood versions of the pop-eyed pin-ups of the anime world.
Outside the pavilion for Monster Hunter — the second-hottest selling game in Japan at the time — the surreal meets real aspect of the show hit me the hardest. A long line of fans waited patiently for their turn to be photographed with inflatable versions of characters from the game, and then grab a chance to play the new version for the handheld Playstation or Nintendo DS.
And in the back of the booth, a doe-eyed human mannequin sat with her feet in a bubbling wooden hot tub — ersatz ancient Japan, I suppose — while a mad horde of photographers surged in to snap close-ups. The kewpie-doll-style model worked her lips and eyes like an automaton, in perfect imitation of some animated self.
American game makers may have surpassed Japan's. But when it comes to gamers, Tokyo is still streets ahead.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/japan/100926/tokyo-game-show
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - Sept. 27, 2010
TOKYO, Japan — High atop a 30-foot tower built to showcase Microsoft's new Xbox360 Kinect, Japanese models kitted out in short-shorts, pigtails and sneakers scrambled to kick their virtual selves into high gear before a giant, cinema-sized screen.
As they jumped and ducked, and their on-screen icons — the popular skateboarders from Sega's new Sonic Free Riders game — raced and soared through the technicolor virtual landscape, it was hard to draw the line between the real and the surreal.
And all around the colossal tower, a horde of headsetted gamers shuffled to the hypnotic screens of blockbuster "franchises" like Halo, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy and Medal of Honor.
Welcome to the Tokyo Game Show, otherwise known as "TGS."
While you weren't paying attention, the global videogame industry has surpassed the movie business and the music business to become the highest-grossing entertainment industry in the world — bringing in about $20 billion a year.
That's right. The premier of a top title like Halo: Reach, the latest in a series of futuristic war games developed by a company called Bungie, is as big an event as the opening of a new flick from James Cameron or Steven Spielberg — both of whom have put their names behind top-flight game titles.
Tripling the opening weekend gross of Inception, Halo: Reach alone did $200 million in business on the first day of sales, which coincided with TGS, held Sept. 16-19 in Tokyo's Makuhari Messe.
And gaming console technologies like Microsoft Kinect's motion-sensitive game play (which makes Nintendo's Wii look like Pong) and Nintendo's glasses-free 3DS are actually pushing the cutting edge of computing.
But what's on display at TGS is not so much the technological advances in gaming — where the West has actually outstripped Japan in recent years, with biggies like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty coming out of Scotland and California.
What's on display here is the leading edge of virtual culture, where games go mainstream, and your average "salary man" blurs the lines between the everyday and the pixelated world.
TGS, which started way back in 1996, plays host to the biggest names in the game business, including publishers, developers and console makers like Capcom, Electronic Arts, Sony and Microsoft.
This year, more than 200,000 people attended the show, driving home the point that while Japan may be smaller in the gaming industry than it once was, the gaming industry is bigger than ever in Japan.
With Japanese developers creating franchises like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Resident Evil, handheld gaming devices as ubiquitous as mobile phones, and an arcade on every Tokyo corner, the videogame industry accounts for an even larger share of the entertainment market here than it does on the down low in the West.
Coming into this world as a non-gamer is a little like walking the red carpet at the Oscars without ever having seen a movie.
Fully a third of the attendees — most of them apparently amateurs — were dressed in elaborate costumes, portraying characters from popular games, anime and manga series like Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist, or Gyakuten Saiban ("Ace Attorney").
And the outdoor hallways between the exhibition centers were quickly taken over for impromptu photo shoots as duplicate versions of silver-haired, emerald-eyed elves squared off to compare threads.
The running patter of the models playing Sega's Sonic Free Riders game, piped over monstrous speakers, was like the banter between the hosts of a bizarre variety show. The girls themselves were the flesh-and-blood versions of the pop-eyed pin-ups of the anime world.
Outside the pavilion for Monster Hunter — the second-hottest selling game in Japan at the time — the surreal meets real aspect of the show hit me the hardest. A long line of fans waited patiently for their turn to be photographed with inflatable versions of characters from the game, and then grab a chance to play the new version for the handheld Playstation or Nintendo DS.
And in the back of the booth, a doe-eyed human mannequin sat with her feet in a bubbling wooden hot tub — ersatz ancient Japan, I suppose — while a mad horde of photographers surged in to snap close-ups. The kewpie-doll-style model worked her lips and eyes like an automaton, in perfect imitation of some animated self.
American game makers may have surpassed Japan's. But when it comes to gamers, Tokyo is still streets ahead.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/japan/100926/tokyo-game-show
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Quran desecration catalyzes Kashmir violence
Analysis: Will playing off the Quran destruction story discredit separatist struggle?
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 14, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — Hatred at India has been fueling violence in Kashmir all summer long. But it was an act of desecration against the Quran, thousands of miles away, that ultimately sparked the bloodiest day of Kashmir's summer.
Following reports that a protester tore pages out of the Muslim holy book in front of the White House on Sept. 11, at least 17 people died in violence across Kashmir — a sequence of events that exposed the faultlines criss-crossing this conflict. A political dispute over geography and self-determination, it cannot seem to escape getting enmeshed in the global struggle between the West and fundamentalist Islam — whatever the motivations of the primary players.
"There's a whole [dimension of] state politics that's just circulated around radical Islamism," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, a conservative think tank. "[Leveraging issues like these] is a very dangerous game."
On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with top administration and military officials to discuss possible moves to quiet the escalating unrest in Kashmir — including, reportedly, a climbdown on the hated law that allows the military to search homes, make arrests and shoot to kill civilians.
But any significant peace offerings Singh might have announced were stymied by an outpouring of anger in Kashmir, sparked by exaggerated Iranian reports of the desecration of the Quran in the U.S. and fueled by long-harbored frustrations over the military occupation of the disputed region.
Police shot and killed protesters who defied a curfew and took to the streets, in some cases attacking government installations and in one instance allegedly burning down a Christian school. According to local reports, the police alleged that politicians affiliated with the separatist Tehreek-e-Hurriyat party used the Quran story to encourage the violence.
"If this wasn't the basis for frustration and anger, then you would have had something else," said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. "It was inevitable in that there's such an angry mood, and the government's handling of it has been so inept. Any event that you could latch onto becomes one that you utilize to the best of your ability."
The danger in latching onto the Quran desecration is twofold. There is, of course, the danger of further radicalization of a population already incensed by decades of military occupation and thousands of cases of human rights violations — which could eventually lead to a resumption of an armed struggle for independence.
But there is also the danger that mixing too much religion into the fight will erode international sympathy and allow the government of India to dismiss the political dimensions of the separatist cause, which Kashmiris have been espousing for decades.
It's an idea that already has currency in New Delhi, where the separatist movement has been cast as a clandestine operation launched and funded from Pakistan.
"This is a pan-Islamicist movement," Sahni said in an interview with GlobalPost. "From the very outset ... the mobilization has been on the basis of pan-Islamism and radical Islam."
According to historian Ramachandra Guha, author of "India After Gandhi," fundamentalists co-opted the freedom struggle in Kashmir within a year after militancy began in 1989. The rallying cry changed swiftly from azaadi (freedom) to jihad (holy war).
Radicals pushed the local population to adopt the austere practices of fundamentalist Islam, shuttering cinema halls, banning smoking and drinking and ordering women to cover themselves from head to toe. But they didn't do it alone. The abuses of the Indian army pushed the local population to rally behind the separatists.
However, on the ground in Kashmir, observers say that the government of India is using the Quran desecration story to discredit the political struggle.
The present demands of the separatists do not have any religious character, and the ongoing cycle of protests has been raging for three months, during which Indian security forces have killed some 80 civilians. The separatists have demanded that India acknowledge that the dispute over Kashmir is an international one, begin the process of complete demilitarization, release political prisoners, end the killing and arrests of protesters, and prosecute the security personnel responsible for killing civilians.
"The Kashmir movement is an indigenous movement," said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a prominent separatist leader. "It's anger against state repression. India has tried its level best to try to link these protests to Lashkar-e-Taiba or Pakistan or even Al Qaeda, but that's not the fact."
Ordinary Kashmiris themselves reject the tag of radicalism, claiming that the valley's syncretic tradition of Islam, steeped in the spiritualism of the sufis, is alive and well. But there's a sense, also, that the army cannot remain in control indefinitely, and the government cannot continue to suppress political protests, without that changing.
"By and large, people in Kashmir are not of violent temperament, and have not been associated too much with [pan-Islamist] concerns outside," said Noor Ahmad Baba, a professor at Kashmir University. "But if this situation continues, maybe it can gradually develop."
On Wednesday, Singh will head an all-party meet to discuss the government's options in Kashmir. But it appears he won't have room for any meaningful maneuvers. The escalation of violence has made a substantial dilution of the army's powers politically impossible, even as Singh's opponents in the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party clamor for taking a tough stance.
For the first time in a decade, Srinagar airport has been closed to commercial flights. A stringent curfew is in effect, with police under orders to shoot violators on sight. And the most hard-line separatists in Kashmir have announced an 11-day protest schedule, which will violate the curfew and inevitably result in more people killed by police bullets.
Meanwhile, as the big wigs pay lip service to addressing concerns about human rights violations in New Delhi, the security forces in Srinagar seem bound and determined to protect their own.
When a video surfaced on Facebook and YouTube last week that allegedly showed police officers parading a group of youths naked as punishment, there wasn't a murmur of outrage from official channels. Instead, a reminder was issued that it could not be ascertained from the video whether the footage was genuine.
Then, a spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir police told the local press that they would be filing suit against Facebook and YouTube. And now, police have issued a press note alleging that "some miscreants are making repeated attempts to upload morphed pictures on Youtube against security forces to incite people" (sic). "With the latest missive in the battle for hearts and minds comes a reminder that uploading such pictures is punishable with a jail term of three years."
"Now the government is starting to crack down on people writing on Facebook [3]," said Farooq. "If the newer generation is becoming radicalized, it's because India is shrinking the space that's allowed to them."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100914/kashmir-quran-september-11-islam
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 14, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — Hatred at India has been fueling violence in Kashmir all summer long. But it was an act of desecration against the Quran, thousands of miles away, that ultimately sparked the bloodiest day of Kashmir's summer.
Following reports that a protester tore pages out of the Muslim holy book in front of the White House on Sept. 11, at least 17 people died in violence across Kashmir — a sequence of events that exposed the faultlines criss-crossing this conflict. A political dispute over geography and self-determination, it cannot seem to escape getting enmeshed in the global struggle between the West and fundamentalist Islam — whatever the motivations of the primary players.
"There's a whole [dimension of] state politics that's just circulated around radical Islamism," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, a conservative think tank. "[Leveraging issues like these] is a very dangerous game."
On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with top administration and military officials to discuss possible moves to quiet the escalating unrest in Kashmir — including, reportedly, a climbdown on the hated law that allows the military to search homes, make arrests and shoot to kill civilians.
But any significant peace offerings Singh might have announced were stymied by an outpouring of anger in Kashmir, sparked by exaggerated Iranian reports of the desecration of the Quran in the U.S. and fueled by long-harbored frustrations over the military occupation of the disputed region.
Police shot and killed protesters who defied a curfew and took to the streets, in some cases attacking government installations and in one instance allegedly burning down a Christian school. According to local reports, the police alleged that politicians affiliated with the separatist Tehreek-e-Hurriyat party used the Quran story to encourage the violence.
"If this wasn't the basis for frustration and anger, then you would have had something else," said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. "It was inevitable in that there's such an angry mood, and the government's handling of it has been so inept. Any event that you could latch onto becomes one that you utilize to the best of your ability."
The danger in latching onto the Quran desecration is twofold. There is, of course, the danger of further radicalization of a population already incensed by decades of military occupation and thousands of cases of human rights violations — which could eventually lead to a resumption of an armed struggle for independence.
But there is also the danger that mixing too much religion into the fight will erode international sympathy and allow the government of India to dismiss the political dimensions of the separatist cause, which Kashmiris have been espousing for decades.
It's an idea that already has currency in New Delhi, where the separatist movement has been cast as a clandestine operation launched and funded from Pakistan.
"This is a pan-Islamicist movement," Sahni said in an interview with GlobalPost. "From the very outset ... the mobilization has been on the basis of pan-Islamism and radical Islam."
According to historian Ramachandra Guha, author of "India After Gandhi," fundamentalists co-opted the freedom struggle in Kashmir within a year after militancy began in 1989. The rallying cry changed swiftly from azaadi (freedom) to jihad (holy war).
Radicals pushed the local population to adopt the austere practices of fundamentalist Islam, shuttering cinema halls, banning smoking and drinking and ordering women to cover themselves from head to toe. But they didn't do it alone. The abuses of the Indian army pushed the local population to rally behind the separatists.
However, on the ground in Kashmir, observers say that the government of India is using the Quran desecration story to discredit the political struggle.
The present demands of the separatists do not have any religious character, and the ongoing cycle of protests has been raging for three months, during which Indian security forces have killed some 80 civilians. The separatists have demanded that India acknowledge that the dispute over Kashmir is an international one, begin the process of complete demilitarization, release political prisoners, end the killing and arrests of protesters, and prosecute the security personnel responsible for killing civilians.
"The Kashmir movement is an indigenous movement," said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a prominent separatist leader. "It's anger against state repression. India has tried its level best to try to link these protests to Lashkar-e-Taiba or Pakistan or even Al Qaeda, but that's not the fact."
Ordinary Kashmiris themselves reject the tag of radicalism, claiming that the valley's syncretic tradition of Islam, steeped in the spiritualism of the sufis, is alive and well. But there's a sense, also, that the army cannot remain in control indefinitely, and the government cannot continue to suppress political protests, without that changing.
"By and large, people in Kashmir are not of violent temperament, and have not been associated too much with [pan-Islamist] concerns outside," said Noor Ahmad Baba, a professor at Kashmir University. "But if this situation continues, maybe it can gradually develop."
On Wednesday, Singh will head an all-party meet to discuss the government's options in Kashmir. But it appears he won't have room for any meaningful maneuvers. The escalation of violence has made a substantial dilution of the army's powers politically impossible, even as Singh's opponents in the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party clamor for taking a tough stance.
For the first time in a decade, Srinagar airport has been closed to commercial flights. A stringent curfew is in effect, with police under orders to shoot violators on sight. And the most hard-line separatists in Kashmir have announced an 11-day protest schedule, which will violate the curfew and inevitably result in more people killed by police bullets.
Meanwhile, as the big wigs pay lip service to addressing concerns about human rights violations in New Delhi, the security forces in Srinagar seem bound and determined to protect their own.
When a video surfaced on Facebook and YouTube last week that allegedly showed police officers parading a group of youths naked as punishment, there wasn't a murmur of outrage from official channels. Instead, a reminder was issued that it could not be ascertained from the video whether the footage was genuine.
Then, a spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir police told the local press that they would be filing suit against Facebook and YouTube. And now, police have issued a press note alleging that "some miscreants are making repeated attempts to upload morphed pictures on Youtube against security forces to incite people" (sic). "With the latest missive in the battle for hearts and minds comes a reminder that uploading such pictures is punishable with a jail term of three years."
"Now the government is starting to crack down on people writing on Facebook [3]," said Farooq. "If the newer generation is becoming radicalized, it's because India is shrinking the space that's allowed to them."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100914/kashmir-quran-september-11-islam
Monday, September 13, 2010
Is India cozying up to Big Brother?
Critics assail India's universal ID number program.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 14, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — In his office in the bureaucratic nerve center of New Delhi, Nandan Nilekani, the former corporate honcho and "blue-sky thinker" in charge of an ambitious plan to give every Indian a unique identification number, speaks as smoothly as ever.
But he appears a little harried. And when he's again questioned about his pet idea, his frustration begins to surface.
"The benefits will start rolling soon, so people will start to realize the value of it," he said in an interview with GlobalPost.
As the CEO of Infosys, Nilekani was the media's darling — a kid from a middle-class background who had risen to captain a billion-dollar company that was putting India on the global business map. He was a fixture at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
One of his stray comments was the inspiration for Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat," and his own book, "Imagining India," was feted as another mark of his genius here even before it won him a guest appearance on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."
Then he took on government work — albeit to implement one of his own ideas — as head of the Orwellian-sounding Unique Identification Authority of India. Though he still has plenty of supporters, he's now getting acquainted with the more critical side of India's press.
This month, as the Unique Identification project (UID) [2]— which aims to ultimately assign unique identification numbers to all Indians — completed its first pilot efforts and the actual, phased rollout loomed, a number of trenchant critics have begun to question whether the scheme is as clever as it's cracked up to be.
The more reputable skeptics, including members of the influential National Advisory Council, boast a wealth of grassroots experience with the corruption-plagued "public distribution system." They have attacked the program's potential efficacy in eliminating graft, questioned whether its benefits will justify its costs and even suggested the program's true aim is to identify and flush out illegal aliens.
And the fringe? Well, an obscure Christian sect from the state of Mizoram has stood up and refused to be counted, claiming that the ID project is, in fact, the Number of the Beast.
Issuing some 600 million unique identification numbers over the next four years, Nilekani's project will make India the first country to implement a biometric-based ID system on such a large scale. It will record every participant's name, address, date of birth, gender, parents' or spouse's names, and all 10 fingerprints and both iris scans — which means the government will potentially have every adult's fingerprints on file.
By charging a fee for authentication services, the program expects eventually to generate about $60 million in revenue a year, and it hopes to facilitate groundbreaking services like "micropayments" that would allow poor Indians whose typical transactions are only worth a few U.S. cents to get access to bank accounts, insurance, loans and so on. In other words, it's astounding. And it's a giant bulls-eye for skeptics.
"That's why we've built a large coalition," Nilekani said. "We've signed up with all the state governments. We've signed up with 10 banks. We've signed up with LIC (Life Insurance Corporation of India). We've signed up with three oil companies. We've signed up with many ministries. The idea is we create a grand coalition of partners to make this work."
Not everybody is on board yet. In a recent letter addressed to the rural development minister, Jean Dreze and Aruna Roy, members of the National Advisory Council and the Central Employment Guarantee Council, raised objections to the ministry's decision to link the the ID project to welfare program job cards without consulting them.
Dreze, a development economist who helped design the government's 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, also told a local newspaper that he had fears about the UID's real purpose.
"I am opposed to the UID project on grounds of civil liberties," Dreze told Business Standard. "Let us not be naive. This is not a social policy initiative — it is a national security project."
The claim echoed a statement made by former Intelligence Bureau chief A.K. Doval to Tehelka magazine.
“It was intended to wash out the aliens and unauthorized people," Doval told Tehelka. "But the focus appears to be shifting. Now, it is being projected as more development oriented, lest it ruffle any feathers."
Is the program really so scary? Apart from being linked to the holder's fingerprints and iris scans, it hardly differs from America's ubiquitous social security number — without which it is nearly impossible to get along in the United States. So, too, India already requires identification documents like ration cards, tax ID numbers and voter registration to access various services.
The identification number is also optional, though, like the social security card, it may become more and more necessary as agencies and corporations begin to require it. And while one hesitates at trusting the government too blithely, there are safeguards — except to confirm an ID, nobody can access the database other than national security agencies — and Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority is itself pushing for better privacy laws to protect data housed in computer servers.
"There are enough checks and balances in the system," Nilekani said. "Obviously, we take the concerns about security and privacy very seriously, and we believe that we have addressed those concerns."
Worries about the its usefulness are harder to dismiss.
At the heart of the matter is India's welfare apparatus, which has expanded under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, thanks to New Deal-style legislation that guarantees 100 days of employment for rural workers, the right to education and the right to food. The expansion of the welfare state has re-opened age-old debates about cost, waste and theft.
Arguments run the gambit, but here's a small sample. Some advocate a "universal" grain subsidy to eliminate the fruitless hassle of sifting the destitute from the plain old poor. Others say the employment guarantee is robbing the farms of the heartland of migrant labor. Still others (including the Supreme Court) argue that the grain now rotting in government warehouses must be distributed immediately, and for free, never mind how.
Nilekani, whose ID number is smack dab in the middle, projects "immense benefits" from the UID. It will bring down transaction costs for the poor, because they will only have to establish their identity once. It will "transform the delivery of social welfare programs" by bringing in new recipients who'd been excluded because they had no form of identification. It will curb theft by helping the government to pay welfare wages directly to the worker, instead of distributing them through a middleman. And it will slash fraud by eliminating duplicate and false identities from the system.
"The country spends 100,000-200,000 crores ($20 billion -$40 billion) on all these programs," Nilekani said. "This will cost a fraction of that and deliver efficiency across the board. Why would you not do it?"
Critics like Reetika Khera of New Delhi's Centre for Development Economics say that, unique or otherwise, Nilekani's numbers don't add up. First off, fake names on the rolls are only one of a host of methods used to defraud the welfare system. Employers with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (welfare) also inflate working hours in collusion with employees for a share of their wages. Or owners of ration shops extort a share of the grain subsidy from their poor customers with the threat of withholding it altogether. Or the grain is stolen, with the complicity of the shop owner, before it reaches the shop, and he claims that the government has failed to deliver. The only estimates about how much theft stems from false identities are back-of-the-envelope type calculations, and even those say that the proportion is less than 10 percent of the total.
"The bulk of leakage (as much as half of the grain in some states) from the public distribution system occurs because there is a powerful, corrupt nexus between bureaucrats-politicians-ration shop dealers," said Khera. "The UID can do little to change this."
Moreover, Khera says, some of the benefits to which the program has laid claim are actually the general benefits of establishing bank accounts for welfare recipients and computerization — which are already taking place. According to the economist, the transition to bank payments is largely complete, with 83 percent of welfare job cardholders paid through bank accounts.
Meanwhile, the public distribution system system in the states of Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh, for example, has been computerized and made more transparent to good effect, thanks to political will. And the government's own management information system for the rural employment scheme has also delivered some benefits, though it still has shortcomings.
"Many of the measures suggested in the [Unique Identification Authority]'s documents relate to computerization, with little, if anything, to do with the UID," said Khera. "Yet, the benefits from computerization are claimed as benefits of the UID. These cheap marketing gimmicks cannot be applied so irresponsibly to welfare programs!"
That's exactly the kind of flak Nilekani never had to face when he was a simple CEO.
"We never said we'd solve all the problems. It's not a magic bullet," he said. "To reform anything, you need political will, social citizen oversight and you need transformational technology. ... This is one out of the set that you need, but if you don't have it, then you can't do it."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100913/security-unique-identification-authority-infosys
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 14, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — In his office in the bureaucratic nerve center of New Delhi, Nandan Nilekani, the former corporate honcho and "blue-sky thinker" in charge of an ambitious plan to give every Indian a unique identification number, speaks as smoothly as ever.
But he appears a little harried. And when he's again questioned about his pet idea, his frustration begins to surface.
"The benefits will start rolling soon, so people will start to realize the value of it," he said in an interview with GlobalPost.
As the CEO of Infosys, Nilekani was the media's darling — a kid from a middle-class background who had risen to captain a billion-dollar company that was putting India on the global business map. He was a fixture at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
One of his stray comments was the inspiration for Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat," and his own book, "Imagining India," was feted as another mark of his genius here even before it won him a guest appearance on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."
Then he took on government work — albeit to implement one of his own ideas — as head of the Orwellian-sounding Unique Identification Authority of India. Though he still has plenty of supporters, he's now getting acquainted with the more critical side of India's press.
This month, as the Unique Identification project (UID) [2]— which aims to ultimately assign unique identification numbers to all Indians — completed its first pilot efforts and the actual, phased rollout loomed, a number of trenchant critics have begun to question whether the scheme is as clever as it's cracked up to be.
The more reputable skeptics, including members of the influential National Advisory Council, boast a wealth of grassroots experience with the corruption-plagued "public distribution system." They have attacked the program's potential efficacy in eliminating graft, questioned whether its benefits will justify its costs and even suggested the program's true aim is to identify and flush out illegal aliens.
And the fringe? Well, an obscure Christian sect from the state of Mizoram has stood up and refused to be counted, claiming that the ID project is, in fact, the Number of the Beast.
Issuing some 600 million unique identification numbers over the next four years, Nilekani's project will make India the first country to implement a biometric-based ID system on such a large scale. It will record every participant's name, address, date of birth, gender, parents' or spouse's names, and all 10 fingerprints and both iris scans — which means the government will potentially have every adult's fingerprints on file.
By charging a fee for authentication services, the program expects eventually to generate about $60 million in revenue a year, and it hopes to facilitate groundbreaking services like "micropayments" that would allow poor Indians whose typical transactions are only worth a few U.S. cents to get access to bank accounts, insurance, loans and so on. In other words, it's astounding. And it's a giant bulls-eye for skeptics.
"That's why we've built a large coalition," Nilekani said. "We've signed up with all the state governments. We've signed up with 10 banks. We've signed up with LIC (Life Insurance Corporation of India). We've signed up with three oil companies. We've signed up with many ministries. The idea is we create a grand coalition of partners to make this work."
Not everybody is on board yet. In a recent letter addressed to the rural development minister, Jean Dreze and Aruna Roy, members of the National Advisory Council and the Central Employment Guarantee Council, raised objections to the ministry's decision to link the the ID project to welfare program job cards without consulting them.
Dreze, a development economist who helped design the government's 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, also told a local newspaper that he had fears about the UID's real purpose.
"I am opposed to the UID project on grounds of civil liberties," Dreze told Business Standard. "Let us not be naive. This is not a social policy initiative — it is a national security project."
The claim echoed a statement made by former Intelligence Bureau chief A.K. Doval to Tehelka magazine.
“It was intended to wash out the aliens and unauthorized people," Doval told Tehelka. "But the focus appears to be shifting. Now, it is being projected as more development oriented, lest it ruffle any feathers."
Is the program really so scary? Apart from being linked to the holder's fingerprints and iris scans, it hardly differs from America's ubiquitous social security number — without which it is nearly impossible to get along in the United States. So, too, India already requires identification documents like ration cards, tax ID numbers and voter registration to access various services.
The identification number is also optional, though, like the social security card, it may become more and more necessary as agencies and corporations begin to require it. And while one hesitates at trusting the government too blithely, there are safeguards — except to confirm an ID, nobody can access the database other than national security agencies — and Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority is itself pushing for better privacy laws to protect data housed in computer servers.
"There are enough checks and balances in the system," Nilekani said. "Obviously, we take the concerns about security and privacy very seriously, and we believe that we have addressed those concerns."
Worries about the its usefulness are harder to dismiss.
At the heart of the matter is India's welfare apparatus, which has expanded under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, thanks to New Deal-style legislation that guarantees 100 days of employment for rural workers, the right to education and the right to food. The expansion of the welfare state has re-opened age-old debates about cost, waste and theft.
Arguments run the gambit, but here's a small sample. Some advocate a "universal" grain subsidy to eliminate the fruitless hassle of sifting the destitute from the plain old poor. Others say the employment guarantee is robbing the farms of the heartland of migrant labor. Still others (including the Supreme Court) argue that the grain now rotting in government warehouses must be distributed immediately, and for free, never mind how.
Nilekani, whose ID number is smack dab in the middle, projects "immense benefits" from the UID. It will bring down transaction costs for the poor, because they will only have to establish their identity once. It will "transform the delivery of social welfare programs" by bringing in new recipients who'd been excluded because they had no form of identification. It will curb theft by helping the government to pay welfare wages directly to the worker, instead of distributing them through a middleman. And it will slash fraud by eliminating duplicate and false identities from the system.
"The country spends 100,000-200,000 crores ($20 billion -$40 billion) on all these programs," Nilekani said. "This will cost a fraction of that and deliver efficiency across the board. Why would you not do it?"
Critics like Reetika Khera of New Delhi's Centre for Development Economics say that, unique or otherwise, Nilekani's numbers don't add up. First off, fake names on the rolls are only one of a host of methods used to defraud the welfare system. Employers with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (welfare) also inflate working hours in collusion with employees for a share of their wages. Or owners of ration shops extort a share of the grain subsidy from their poor customers with the threat of withholding it altogether. Or the grain is stolen, with the complicity of the shop owner, before it reaches the shop, and he claims that the government has failed to deliver. The only estimates about how much theft stems from false identities are back-of-the-envelope type calculations, and even those say that the proportion is less than 10 percent of the total.
"The bulk of leakage (as much as half of the grain in some states) from the public distribution system occurs because there is a powerful, corrupt nexus between bureaucrats-politicians-ration shop dealers," said Khera. "The UID can do little to change this."
Moreover, Khera says, some of the benefits to which the program has laid claim are actually the general benefits of establishing bank accounts for welfare recipients and computerization — which are already taking place. According to the economist, the transition to bank payments is largely complete, with 83 percent of welfare job cardholders paid through bank accounts.
Meanwhile, the public distribution system system in the states of Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh, for example, has been computerized and made more transparent to good effect, thanks to political will. And the government's own management information system for the rural employment scheme has also delivered some benefits, though it still has shortcomings.
"Many of the measures suggested in the [Unique Identification Authority]'s documents relate to computerization, with little, if anything, to do with the UID," said Khera. "Yet, the benefits from computerization are claimed as benefits of the UID. These cheap marketing gimmicks cannot be applied so irresponsibly to welfare programs!"
That's exactly the kind of flak Nilekani never had to face when he was a simple CEO.
"We never said we'd solve all the problems. It's not a magic bullet," he said. "To reform anything, you need political will, social citizen oversight and you need transformational technology. ... This is one out of the set that you need, but if you don't have it, then you can't do it."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100913/security-unique-identification-authority-infosys
Sunday, September 12, 2010
bhutan overland
A Nepal-based company makes truck travel comfy.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
Sept. 11, 2010
THIMPHU, Bhutan — About a mile from the India-Bhutan border, in the trash-strewn West Bengal town of Jaigaon, driver Nick Fulford wrestled with the gears of an enormous green-and-white Mercedes-Benz truck.
He heaved and slammed the stick shift as he wrenched the wheel around to swerve past bicycle rickshaws, scooters and unwary pedestrians. A big, ruddy bloke who looks like James Dean's less-fit cousin, he was probably the only United Kingdom national driving a big rig in India.
He was looking for the border, and, naturally, considering that I was navigator, he was lost.
"There was a sign back there that said something about immigration," I said.
"Do you think that's it? That can't be it. There'll be a checkpoint or something," Nick said.
He was right. But so was I. You can't actually enter Bhutan by accident. There is an ornate gate of sorts, with a couple guards in front of it. But they sent us back around the block — no small feat with an eight-ton tractor trailer in a small Indian town — to get our visas checked. The immigration officials were the friendliest I have ever met. About 20 minutes later, we rolled into Bhutan, the first group of "overlanders" to do it in a big rig.
This Bhutan journey is one of around a dozen trips that Australian truck driver-turned-entrepreneur Ben Grayling designed for his new company, Kathmandu-based Best of Asia Overland. Beginning in Kathmandu, the trip runs through Nepal's Chitwan National Park and India's Darjeeling and Gangtok before winding up the Bhutanese
mountains to Thimphu. But Grayling has developed a new model for overlanding.
Derived from an Australian stockmans' term for cattle drives, overlanding throughout the world relies on heavy trucks and off-road vehicles. But while its toughness has given it a cult following among young, once-in-a-lifetime adventurers, the hardships of its journeys have prevented traveling by truck from evolving into a very lucrative
business.
A web community devoted to overlanding lists about 30 companies, the vast majority focused on Africa. The largest company, Dragoman, with its 25 trucks, only attracts around 4,000 clients a year. Grayling believes that's because the group size for the journeys is large, most trips are spent camping out, and travelers are assigned chores to keep the truck rolling. So to tap into the new market represented by
today's more adventurous older travelers, his company offers smaller, more comfortable boutique journeys — some of which will see the passengers "roughing it" in five-star hotels.
“We're basically trying to create a new market,” said 43-year-old Grayling, who worked for seven years as a driver and expedition leader for Dragoman before starting BOA.
Snowy, the refitted truck used on our pioneering journey into Bhutan, is equipped with room for only 14 passengers — giving the interior the spacious, sociable feel of an American retiree's “recreational vehicle” rather than an off-roading tour bus. There's a powerful air conditioning system, wet bar and refrigerator, and when fully
operational BOA-contractor Andrej Kmet — a Slovenian telecom whiz who was one of the eggheads behind the webcast of the first madman to ski down Everest — promises that Snowy will offer WiFi access and VoIP by tapping into local GPRS and 3G networks along the routes.
To complete the package, for itineraries that include a 25-night road trip from Kathmandu to Llasa, a 21-night haul through the deserts of Rajasthan, and a two-week tour of the "creme de la creme" of Nepal, among others, BOA has identified four- and five-star hotels like Nepal's Dwarikas and The Last Resort, India's Fateh Garh and Ajit Bhavan and Tibet's Hotel Manasarovar and Yak Hotel. “We offer the best
accommodation that's available,” Grayling said.
It's a bit like "flashpacking" — where laptop-toting backpackers rough it out on public transport so they can afford to crash in flash hotels. But the idea is also to take seasoned travelers off the beaten track. So Bhutan, which only opened its borders to tourism in 1974, was a natural choice.
Even if it has some ominous Big Brother-type aspects, the erstwhile king's commitment to expanding “gross national happiness” rather than gross national product has so far protected the country's natural beauty and cultural heritage. With a $200 per day minimum for foreigners, only around 25,000 tourists visit the country each year.
And Bhutan still has only one airport and no railway, so the only way to see the country is by road.
But in Asia's hinterlands, and especially India, there's no way to avoid discomfort. On this exploratory trip, passengers endured 16-hour drives and had to criss-cross India and Nepal by plane just to get started, thanks to political unrest in Kathmandu. Some of the Indian hotels were grotty, or just a step above. And we may have eaten one too many meals at the region's ubiquitous roadside "dhabas" for the
Saks Fifth Avenue crowd's tastes. In other words, it's still overlanding.
"We're going to call them boutique trips," Grayling said. "[As for] luxury, I'm not sure that quite works out. On all our trips there is some form of camping. But it's not your sleeping bag on the ground. In India, we have a camel safari where we use permanent tented accommodation, and on our high road to Lhasa trip, where we do actual camping, because we go to Mount Kailash, we've got a support vehicle
and crew, so when we arrive at the camp, everything is already set up, and the meal is being cooked."
Fortunately, there are no plans afoot to prevent passengers from playing navigator.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100909/bhutan-thimphu-tourism-overlanding?page=0,1
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
Sept. 11, 2010
THIMPHU, Bhutan — About a mile from the India-Bhutan border, in the trash-strewn West Bengal town of Jaigaon, driver Nick Fulford wrestled with the gears of an enormous green-and-white Mercedes-Benz truck.
He heaved and slammed the stick shift as he wrenched the wheel around to swerve past bicycle rickshaws, scooters and unwary pedestrians. A big, ruddy bloke who looks like James Dean's less-fit cousin, he was probably the only United Kingdom national driving a big rig in India.
He was looking for the border, and, naturally, considering that I was navigator, he was lost.
"There was a sign back there that said something about immigration," I said.
"Do you think that's it? That can't be it. There'll be a checkpoint or something," Nick said.
He was right. But so was I. You can't actually enter Bhutan by accident. There is an ornate gate of sorts, with a couple guards in front of it. But they sent us back around the block — no small feat with an eight-ton tractor trailer in a small Indian town — to get our visas checked. The immigration officials were the friendliest I have ever met. About 20 minutes later, we rolled into Bhutan, the first group of "overlanders" to do it in a big rig.
This Bhutan journey is one of around a dozen trips that Australian truck driver-turned-entrepreneur Ben Grayling designed for his new company, Kathmandu-based Best of Asia Overland. Beginning in Kathmandu, the trip runs through Nepal's Chitwan National Park and India's Darjeeling and Gangtok before winding up the Bhutanese
mountains to Thimphu. But Grayling has developed a new model for overlanding.
Derived from an Australian stockmans' term for cattle drives, overlanding throughout the world relies on heavy trucks and off-road vehicles. But while its toughness has given it a cult following among young, once-in-a-lifetime adventurers, the hardships of its journeys have prevented traveling by truck from evolving into a very lucrative
business.
A web community devoted to overlanding lists about 30 companies, the vast majority focused on Africa. The largest company, Dragoman, with its 25 trucks, only attracts around 4,000 clients a year. Grayling believes that's because the group size for the journeys is large, most trips are spent camping out, and travelers are assigned chores to keep the truck rolling. So to tap into the new market represented by
today's more adventurous older travelers, his company offers smaller, more comfortable boutique journeys — some of which will see the passengers "roughing it" in five-star hotels.
“We're basically trying to create a new market,” said 43-year-old Grayling, who worked for seven years as a driver and expedition leader for Dragoman before starting BOA.
Snowy, the refitted truck used on our pioneering journey into Bhutan, is equipped with room for only 14 passengers — giving the interior the spacious, sociable feel of an American retiree's “recreational vehicle” rather than an off-roading tour bus. There's a powerful air conditioning system, wet bar and refrigerator, and when fully
operational BOA-contractor Andrej Kmet — a Slovenian telecom whiz who was one of the eggheads behind the webcast of the first madman to ski down Everest — promises that Snowy will offer WiFi access and VoIP by tapping into local GPRS and 3G networks along the routes.
To complete the package, for itineraries that include a 25-night road trip from Kathmandu to Llasa, a 21-night haul through the deserts of Rajasthan, and a two-week tour of the "creme de la creme" of Nepal, among others, BOA has identified four- and five-star hotels like Nepal's Dwarikas and The Last Resort, India's Fateh Garh and Ajit Bhavan and Tibet's Hotel Manasarovar and Yak Hotel. “We offer the best
accommodation that's available,” Grayling said.
It's a bit like "flashpacking" — where laptop-toting backpackers rough it out on public transport so they can afford to crash in flash hotels. But the idea is also to take seasoned travelers off the beaten track. So Bhutan, which only opened its borders to tourism in 1974, was a natural choice.
Even if it has some ominous Big Brother-type aspects, the erstwhile king's commitment to expanding “gross national happiness” rather than gross national product has so far protected the country's natural beauty and cultural heritage. With a $200 per day minimum for foreigners, only around 25,000 tourists visit the country each year.
And Bhutan still has only one airport and no railway, so the only way to see the country is by road.
But in Asia's hinterlands, and especially India, there's no way to avoid discomfort. On this exploratory trip, passengers endured 16-hour drives and had to criss-cross India and Nepal by plane just to get started, thanks to political unrest in Kathmandu. Some of the Indian hotels were grotty, or just a step above. And we may have eaten one too many meals at the region's ubiquitous roadside "dhabas" for the
Saks Fifth Avenue crowd's tastes. In other words, it's still overlanding.
"We're going to call them boutique trips," Grayling said. "[As for] luxury, I'm not sure that quite works out. On all our trips there is some form of camping. But it's not your sleeping bag on the ground. In India, we have a camel safari where we use permanent tented accommodation, and on our high road to Lhasa trip, where we do actual camping, because we go to Mount Kailash, we've got a support vehicle
and crew, so when we arrive at the camp, everything is already set up, and the meal is being cooked."
Fortunately, there are no plans afoot to prevent passengers from playing navigator.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100909/bhutan-thimphu-tourism-overlanding?page=0,1
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Games construction spurs Delhi dengue outbreak
Commonwealth Games must battle spread of deadly fever.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 5, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — With about a month to go before the opening ceremony of the already controversial 29th Commonwealth Games [2], Delhi bears the look of a mammoth construction site, as plucky migrant laborers scurry to build — and rebuild — roads and stadiums as they melt under the concrete- and asphalt-withering rains of the monsoon. But the worst news is yet to come.
Delhi's big dig has left stagnant water all over the city, breeding a huge swarm of aedes mosquitoes just in time for dengue fever season. As a result, Delhi is suffering a major epidemic at the absolute worst possible time. Already more than a thousand "official" cases of dengue fever have been reported, while independent reports suggest that the reality could be almost double that number. Malaysia and Australia have issued travel advisories and expressed concerns about their athletes, according to press reports [3], and at least 20 countries have written to Indian officials for reassurance. Worse still, Indian health officials say that the disease is set to peak just in time for the opening ceremony.
"This year, due to the construction activities for the Commonwealth Games, and the monsoon, which was a little bit delayed, there are innumerable breeding places for the aedes mosquito," said Dr. Kalpana Baruah, an official with India's National Vector Borne Disease Control Program. "Mosquito density has gone very high, and [because] we are having this virus circulating already in the area, immediately the dengue cases started pouring in. Now every day we are getting almost 60 to 70 new cases."
Even at those numbers, Municipal Corporation of Delhi officials say people's fears are exaggerated. "If you see the incidence of this disease in Thailand, it's much higher, and there has been no problem of visitors in Thailand," said Dr. N.K. Yadav, chief medical officer of the MCD health department. "Moreover, we are more proactive, and we are taking all preventive measures in the Games area and all over Delhi. I don't see any reason for alarm."
Nevertheless, alarm there is. And that's bad news for the games' planners, who oversold the event's ability to attract tourists — claiming they'd recoup most of the costs from travelers — before spending spiraled to $4.6 billion, or nine times the original estimate. So far, England's Queen Elizabeth and a host of top athletes have said they have prior commitments, and just 16,000 of the 170,000 tickets allotted for sale abroad have found takers. Mounting fears about dengue won't make selling the rest any easier.
Commonwealth Games Federation chief executive Mike Hooper downplayed the threat last week, saying that not a single member country had approached him with worries about dengue.
Meanwhile, in damage control mode at a press conference, Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the organizing committee, told reporters that 1,800 doctors will be on call to deal with dengue cases, and, separately, MCD officials announced they plan to fog the games venues with heavy duty insecticide.
Dengue results in extremely high fevers, and can be deadly, though the mortality rate has dropped considerably since 1996, when Delhi's worst outbreak saw more than 10,000 people infected and more than 400 killed. Transmitted by the aedes mosquito, the disease is endemic to India, along with virtually all of south and southeast Asia, but serious outbreaks are cyclical, waxing and waning with the monsoon and government enthusiasm for control programs. Even a mild case is misery. And there is no vaccine, and no real treatment, apart from paracetamol and fluids.
So far, around a thousand official cases of dengue have been reported in and around Delhi.
But because of a disagreement over testing methods and other factors, many cases go unregistered in the government tally. A recent television station survey [4], for example, found nearly 1,500 cases in just two area hospitals.
To fight back, local schools have told students to wear winter uniforms — with long-sleeved shirts and long pants. And there has been a run on mosquito repellent as local residents seek to protect themselves from the insects that carry the disease. Sales of mosquito-repelling sprays and lotions have doubled, according to local pharmacists, and supplies are beginning to run short.
The good news is that so far the death rate is low, with only three confirmed fatalities so far, according to the health department of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. But that's hardly inspiring to residents who can now add a deadly outbreak of disease to a list of games-related woes that includes the improper diversion of funds from programs for the historically oppressed Dalit caste, the expulsion of beggars and street vendors, and a day-and-night battle against colossal traffic jams.
Now, according to a poll conducted by the Times of India newspaper, a whopping 76 percent of residents say the whole exercise was a waste of money, while nearly half believe the fiasco and corruption of the preparations for the great showcase of India's rise has already damaged the country's image abroad.
With that in mind, and dengue-toting mosquitoes in the air, maybe it's just as well the queen won't be coming.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
September 5, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — With about a month to go before the opening ceremony of the already controversial 29th Commonwealth Games [2], Delhi bears the look of a mammoth construction site, as plucky migrant laborers scurry to build — and rebuild — roads and stadiums as they melt under the concrete- and asphalt-withering rains of the monsoon. But the worst news is yet to come.
Delhi's big dig has left stagnant water all over the city, breeding a huge swarm of aedes mosquitoes just in time for dengue fever season. As a result, Delhi is suffering a major epidemic at the absolute worst possible time. Already more than a thousand "official" cases of dengue fever have been reported, while independent reports suggest that the reality could be almost double that number. Malaysia and Australia have issued travel advisories and expressed concerns about their athletes, according to press reports [3], and at least 20 countries have written to Indian officials for reassurance. Worse still, Indian health officials say that the disease is set to peak just in time for the opening ceremony.
"This year, due to the construction activities for the Commonwealth Games, and the monsoon, which was a little bit delayed, there are innumerable breeding places for the aedes mosquito," said Dr. Kalpana Baruah, an official with India's National Vector Borne Disease Control Program. "Mosquito density has gone very high, and [because] we are having this virus circulating already in the area, immediately the dengue cases started pouring in. Now every day we are getting almost 60 to 70 new cases."
Even at those numbers, Municipal Corporation of Delhi officials say people's fears are exaggerated. "If you see the incidence of this disease in Thailand, it's much higher, and there has been no problem of visitors in Thailand," said Dr. N.K. Yadav, chief medical officer of the MCD health department. "Moreover, we are more proactive, and we are taking all preventive measures in the Games area and all over Delhi. I don't see any reason for alarm."
Nevertheless, alarm there is. And that's bad news for the games' planners, who oversold the event's ability to attract tourists — claiming they'd recoup most of the costs from travelers — before spending spiraled to $4.6 billion, or nine times the original estimate. So far, England's Queen Elizabeth and a host of top athletes have said they have prior commitments, and just 16,000 of the 170,000 tickets allotted for sale abroad have found takers. Mounting fears about dengue won't make selling the rest any easier.
Commonwealth Games Federation chief executive Mike Hooper downplayed the threat last week, saying that not a single member country had approached him with worries about dengue.
Meanwhile, in damage control mode at a press conference, Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the organizing committee, told reporters that 1,800 doctors will be on call to deal with dengue cases, and, separately, MCD officials announced they plan to fog the games venues with heavy duty insecticide.
Dengue results in extremely high fevers, and can be deadly, though the mortality rate has dropped considerably since 1996, when Delhi's worst outbreak saw more than 10,000 people infected and more than 400 killed. Transmitted by the aedes mosquito, the disease is endemic to India, along with virtually all of south and southeast Asia, but serious outbreaks are cyclical, waxing and waning with the monsoon and government enthusiasm for control programs. Even a mild case is misery. And there is no vaccine, and no real treatment, apart from paracetamol and fluids.
So far, around a thousand official cases of dengue have been reported in and around Delhi.
But because of a disagreement over testing methods and other factors, many cases go unregistered in the government tally. A recent television station survey [4], for example, found nearly 1,500 cases in just two area hospitals.
To fight back, local schools have told students to wear winter uniforms — with long-sleeved shirts and long pants. And there has been a run on mosquito repellent as local residents seek to protect themselves from the insects that carry the disease. Sales of mosquito-repelling sprays and lotions have doubled, according to local pharmacists, and supplies are beginning to run short.
The good news is that so far the death rate is low, with only three confirmed fatalities so far, according to the health department of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. But that's hardly inspiring to residents who can now add a deadly outbreak of disease to a list of games-related woes that includes the improper diversion of funds from programs for the historically oppressed Dalit caste, the expulsion of beggars and street vendors, and a day-and-night battle against colossal traffic jams.
Now, according to a poll conducted by the Times of India newspaper, a whopping 76 percent of residents say the whole exercise was a waste of money, while nearly half believe the fiasco and corruption of the preparations for the great showcase of India's rise has already damaged the country's image abroad.
With that in mind, and dengue-toting mosquitoes in the air, maybe it's just as well the queen won't be coming.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
CrackBerry addicts rejoice: No ban in India. For now.
To avoid being shut down, BlackBerry maker said it would allow access to encrypted messages.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
August 31, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — A corporate lawyer who deals with high-profile clients in the United States and Europe, Sunila Awasthi lives by her BlackBerry. But in the wake of an Indian government move to gain access to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's proprietary encryption technology, she fears she may be spending more late nights at the office.
"Our main concern is confidentiality," Awasthi told GlobalPost. "We advise foreign companies in different jurisdictions and different time zones, so it's very convenient to access confidential information [by BlackBerry]. But if that confidentiality is discontinued, that convenience goes away instantly."
At least where the Indian government is concerned, that's what's about to happen. At an eleventh hour meeting with government officials Monday, Research in Motion (RIM) caved in to India's demands for access to users' emails and other data to avoid an immediate ban on its encrypted data services.
Under the agreement, RIM will immediately implement systems to grant "lawful access by law enforcement agencies" to customer data, India's Home Ministry said in a statement. The
regulatory bodies will evaluate the feasibility of this arrangement for the next 60 days, even as India presses forward with demands to force not only RIM, but also Google and Skype to set up servers for hosting customer accounts in India — which would facilitate easier access to private data and wire tapping of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) phone calls.
In the meantime, Indian market leader Nokia pre-empted trouble with the announcement that it would move servers for its "push mail" service to India and allow access to India's security agencies.
"The processes here are very transparent, not opaque like in countries like China," said Pankaj Mohindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association. "They've been given sufficient time by the government, and I think they've done the right thing."
BlackBerry is already starting to look like the Compuserve of the smartphone era thanks to Google's Android operating system, so the blow to its U.S. Department of Defense-certified encryption couldn't come at a worse time. And the leverage that India has exerted as the world's fastest growing mobile market is likely to provide more ammunition for other countries — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Lebanon — which have also sought access to BlackBerry's encrypted data.
BlackBerry addicts like Romil Ratra, general manager of an international hotel, are just happy that they can keep thumbing. Was he relieved to hear RIM had averted a ban? "Very relieved," he said.
Ratra, whose been using a BlackBerry since the brand was first launched in India, says he uses his device constantly. "I'm on the phone a lot, plus I'm a social media addict, between Twitter and Facebook, and a million other things that keep coming up," he said.
"I'm not one of those guys who puts it off when I go to sleep; I leave it on."
In that respect, India is like everyplace else. But it does have some special characteristics that make some of the million-odd BlackBerry users a wee bit wary that the government has extorted its way to
getting the key to the code.
Awasthi, the lawyer, doesn't trust the government to keep her secrets, she says. India doesn't have any privacy laws that cover emails, apart from the general constitutional protections, and the precedent set for voice calls is hardly encouraging.
According to a recent expose by Outlook India, a weekly magazine, India's intelligence services routinely monitor citizens' mobile phones with technology that allows them to pluck conversations out of the air. Those checks and balances that do exist are flouted or manipulated to facilitate questionable wire taps — and wire tapping doesn't require a warrant. Police can get access to a variety of mobile information without a court order.
But it's not just criminals who come under the scanner. Monitoring systems around top hotels routinely pick up conversations between prominent corporate leaders discussing sensitive business dealings. And the only recourse available is too little, too late.
"You can say that we have the fundamental right to privacy under the constitution, but that means I have to go to the Supreme Court every time I want to see it enforced," said Awasthi. "That's not a
practical solution."
Other BlackBerry users are more sanguine about sharing their private data with government spooks.
"I'm not sure exactly how to react," said Ratra. "I don't think I'm happy that somebody is going to be able to monitor my mails, [but] if it's something that BlackBerry is already doing for North America, or Canada, or other countries, there's no reason that they shouldn't do it here."
Hardeep Sachdeva, another corporate lawyer, agrees. He argues that concerns that confidential information could leak from behind the government firewall are unfounded. Moreover, the difficult task of preventing terrorist attacks — not just investigating them after the fact — justifies some curtailment of citizens' fundamental right to privacy.
"Every system provider in this country should provide access to the authorities to ensure that the security of the nation is not compromised," Sachdeva said. "I don't see why BlackBerry should be an
exception."
But who will monitor the monitors? As recently as this April, when opposition Bharatiya Janata Party leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy argued that Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance government was misusing wiretaps to spy on political adversaries, and even their own unruly allies. "In the garb of tracking terror, the government is tracking politicians and even their cabinet ministers," Rudy said.
Lucky for them, most Indian pols aren't big on email.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100831/blackberry-research-in-motion-ban
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost
August 31, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — A corporate lawyer who deals with high-profile clients in the United States and Europe, Sunila Awasthi lives by her BlackBerry. But in the wake of an Indian government move to gain access to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's proprietary encryption technology, she fears she may be spending more late nights at the office.
"Our main concern is confidentiality," Awasthi told GlobalPost. "We advise foreign companies in different jurisdictions and different time zones, so it's very convenient to access confidential information [by BlackBerry]. But if that confidentiality is discontinued, that convenience goes away instantly."
At least where the Indian government is concerned, that's what's about to happen. At an eleventh hour meeting with government officials Monday, Research in Motion (RIM) caved in to India's demands for access to users' emails and other data to avoid an immediate ban on its encrypted data services.
Under the agreement, RIM will immediately implement systems to grant "lawful access by law enforcement agencies" to customer data, India's Home Ministry said in a statement. The
regulatory bodies will evaluate the feasibility of this arrangement for the next 60 days, even as India presses forward with demands to force not only RIM, but also Google and Skype to set up servers for hosting customer accounts in India — which would facilitate easier access to private data and wire tapping of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) phone calls.
In the meantime, Indian market leader Nokia pre-empted trouble with the announcement that it would move servers for its "push mail" service to India and allow access to India's security agencies.
"The processes here are very transparent, not opaque like in countries like China," said Pankaj Mohindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association. "They've been given sufficient time by the government, and I think they've done the right thing."
BlackBerry is already starting to look like the Compuserve of the smartphone era thanks to Google's Android operating system, so the blow to its U.S. Department of Defense-certified encryption couldn't come at a worse time. And the leverage that India has exerted as the world's fastest growing mobile market is likely to provide more ammunition for other countries — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Lebanon — which have also sought access to BlackBerry's encrypted data.
BlackBerry addicts like Romil Ratra, general manager of an international hotel, are just happy that they can keep thumbing. Was he relieved to hear RIM had averted a ban? "Very relieved," he said.
Ratra, whose been using a BlackBerry since the brand was first launched in India, says he uses his device constantly. "I'm on the phone a lot, plus I'm a social media addict, between Twitter and Facebook, and a million other things that keep coming up," he said.
"I'm not one of those guys who puts it off when I go to sleep; I leave it on."
In that respect, India is like everyplace else. But it does have some special characteristics that make some of the million-odd BlackBerry users a wee bit wary that the government has extorted its way to
getting the key to the code.
Awasthi, the lawyer, doesn't trust the government to keep her secrets, she says. India doesn't have any privacy laws that cover emails, apart from the general constitutional protections, and the precedent set for voice calls is hardly encouraging.
According to a recent expose by Outlook India, a weekly magazine, India's intelligence services routinely monitor citizens' mobile phones with technology that allows them to pluck conversations out of the air. Those checks and balances that do exist are flouted or manipulated to facilitate questionable wire taps — and wire tapping doesn't require a warrant. Police can get access to a variety of mobile information without a court order.
But it's not just criminals who come under the scanner. Monitoring systems around top hotels routinely pick up conversations between prominent corporate leaders discussing sensitive business dealings. And the only recourse available is too little, too late.
"You can say that we have the fundamental right to privacy under the constitution, but that means I have to go to the Supreme Court every time I want to see it enforced," said Awasthi. "That's not a
practical solution."
Other BlackBerry users are more sanguine about sharing their private data with government spooks.
"I'm not sure exactly how to react," said Ratra. "I don't think I'm happy that somebody is going to be able to monitor my mails, [but] if it's something that BlackBerry is already doing for North America, or Canada, or other countries, there's no reason that they shouldn't do it here."
Hardeep Sachdeva, another corporate lawyer, agrees. He argues that concerns that confidential information could leak from behind the government firewall are unfounded. Moreover, the difficult task of preventing terrorist attacks — not just investigating them after the fact — justifies some curtailment of citizens' fundamental right to privacy.
"Every system provider in this country should provide access to the authorities to ensure that the security of the nation is not compromised," Sachdeva said. "I don't see why BlackBerry should be an
exception."
But who will monitor the monitors? As recently as this April, when opposition Bharatiya Janata Party leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy argued that Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance government was misusing wiretaps to spy on political adversaries, and even their own unruly allies. "In the garb of tracking terror, the government is tracking politicians and even their cabinet ministers," Rudy said.
Lucky for them, most Indian pols aren't big on email.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100831/blackberry-research-in-motion-ban
Saturday, August 28, 2010
In Kashmir, inshallah, there will be football
A new documentary on Kashmir offers the opposite of "Invictus."
By Jason Overdorf
August 28, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — When Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar traveled to Kashmir for the first time, in 2009, to research a possible feature film, he discovered a true story that was more inspiring than fiction. He dropped everything and settled in to make a documentary.
Next month, the resulting film, "Inshallah, Football" [2] will premiere at the prestigious Pusan International Film Festival in Korea. The documentary tells the story of a young Argentinean coach who founds a soccer academy in Srinagar to bring so-called "stone pelters" off the killing streets and onto the soccer field. He places many of his players with local professional leagues.
But when he manages to get the team captain an opportunity to train with a professional club in Spain, Kashmir's troubled history emerges to block his efforts, as the government of India denies the boy a passport because two decades earlier his father had joined a militant separatist struggle for an independent Kashmir. At the eleventh hour, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah intervenes on the boy's behalf.
"It's the story of three remarkable men — one is his father who fought for his beliefs, another about the football coach who's come all the way from Argentina to start this football academy, and this young man who is struggling to play football," said Kumar.
That was a summer of hope. When I spoke with coach Juan Marcos Troia (aka "Marco") shortly after Kumar finished filming in 2009, Marco told me happily that his International Sports Academy Trust had trained about 1,000 young men from all over Kashmir — taking at least 50 from the armies of stone-throwing street protesters that plague local police.
He'd stuck it out even after he'd been beaten up by soldiers on the street just five minutes away from the soccer field, after they stopped him for questioning and suspected that he was only pretending to be a foreigner. He'd brought his wife and two daughters with him to Kashmir. The two girls attended school in Srinagar, despite soldiers and curfews, like ordinary Kashmiris. And Marco believed he was making a difference.
"I have seen how it [soccer] is helping to change the mentality of some of the officials in the government and how it's changing the mentality of the people," Troia said at the time. "It's very interesting to see in only two-and-a-half years, how much our program has helped not only football, but also the development of the society."
This summer, as Kumar readies his film, "Inshallah, Football" for Pusan, that hope has been crushed. Spiraling out of control since June, Kashmir seems locked into an escalating pattern of violence, as local residents take to the streets to protest the deaths of innocent civilians, only to see more of their number gunned down by the security forces. Over the past two months, more than 60 civilians have been killed, most of them teenagers. Sport is the last thing on anybody's mind, as local journalists bitterly describe decades-long careers as nothing more than "obituary writing."
"Everything has completely stopped," Kumar told me in a recent phone interview. "There's no chance of anybody getting anywhere. Marco had trained about 1,000 boys and he had them playing in professional leagues. The idea was to send all 11 players to train in Brazil on a scholarship. But in essence, I think the program has ground to a halt."
That makes his film more important than ever. And selection for the Pusan festival promises to attract a wider audience for a story that Kumar hopes will cut through what he describes as a simplistic, blinkered attitude about Kashmir.
"For me, it's a great opportunity," Kumar said. "It's Asia's biggest festival, and it's the right kind of place to show a film like this because it opens up a debate about Asia."
Following the lives of 18-year-old Basharat Bashir and his former militant father, "Inshallah, Football" offers an unusually hopeful perspective on Kashmir's cycle of violence.
But the contemporary events that now form the backdrop for its release make the hope it offers bittersweet. This summer's deadly confrontations have illustrated tragically that, where Kashmir is concerned, India keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Thus, even as the Indian government struggles to win the loyalty of Kashmiris, the film illustrates, it is undermined at every turn by its inability to trust in its own democratic ideals.
And instead of a cricket bat or a soccer ball, local boys pick up stones to throw at the police.
By Jason Overdorf
August 28, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — When Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar traveled to Kashmir for the first time, in 2009, to research a possible feature film, he discovered a true story that was more inspiring than fiction. He dropped everything and settled in to make a documentary.
Next month, the resulting film, "Inshallah, Football" [2] will premiere at the prestigious Pusan International Film Festival in Korea. The documentary tells the story of a young Argentinean coach who founds a soccer academy in Srinagar to bring so-called "stone pelters" off the killing streets and onto the soccer field. He places many of his players with local professional leagues.
But when he manages to get the team captain an opportunity to train with a professional club in Spain, Kashmir's troubled history emerges to block his efforts, as the government of India denies the boy a passport because two decades earlier his father had joined a militant separatist struggle for an independent Kashmir. At the eleventh hour, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah intervenes on the boy's behalf.
"It's the story of three remarkable men — one is his father who fought for his beliefs, another about the football coach who's come all the way from Argentina to start this football academy, and this young man who is struggling to play football," said Kumar.
That was a summer of hope. When I spoke with coach Juan Marcos Troia (aka "Marco") shortly after Kumar finished filming in 2009, Marco told me happily that his International Sports Academy Trust had trained about 1,000 young men from all over Kashmir — taking at least 50 from the armies of stone-throwing street protesters that plague local police.
He'd stuck it out even after he'd been beaten up by soldiers on the street just five minutes away from the soccer field, after they stopped him for questioning and suspected that he was only pretending to be a foreigner. He'd brought his wife and two daughters with him to Kashmir. The two girls attended school in Srinagar, despite soldiers and curfews, like ordinary Kashmiris. And Marco believed he was making a difference.
"I have seen how it [soccer] is helping to change the mentality of some of the officials in the government and how it's changing the mentality of the people," Troia said at the time. "It's very interesting to see in only two-and-a-half years, how much our program has helped not only football, but also the development of the society."
This summer, as Kumar readies his film, "Inshallah, Football" for Pusan, that hope has been crushed. Spiraling out of control since June, Kashmir seems locked into an escalating pattern of violence, as local residents take to the streets to protest the deaths of innocent civilians, only to see more of their number gunned down by the security forces. Over the past two months, more than 60 civilians have been killed, most of them teenagers. Sport is the last thing on anybody's mind, as local journalists bitterly describe decades-long careers as nothing more than "obituary writing."
"Everything has completely stopped," Kumar told me in a recent phone interview. "There's no chance of anybody getting anywhere. Marco had trained about 1,000 boys and he had them playing in professional leagues. The idea was to send all 11 players to train in Brazil on a scholarship. But in essence, I think the program has ground to a halt."
That makes his film more important than ever. And selection for the Pusan festival promises to attract a wider audience for a story that Kumar hopes will cut through what he describes as a simplistic, blinkered attitude about Kashmir.
"For me, it's a great opportunity," Kumar said. "It's Asia's biggest festival, and it's the right kind of place to show a film like this because it opens up a debate about Asia."
Following the lives of 18-year-old Basharat Bashir and his former militant father, "Inshallah, Football" offers an unusually hopeful perspective on Kashmir's cycle of violence.
But the contemporary events that now form the backdrop for its release make the hope it offers bittersweet. This summer's deadly confrontations have illustrated tragically that, where Kashmir is concerned, India keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Thus, even as the Indian government struggles to win the loyalty of Kashmiris, the film illustrates, it is undermined at every turn by its inability to trust in its own democratic ideals.
And instead of a cricket bat or a soccer ball, local boys pick up stones to throw at the police.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
It's Rush Limbaugh's India
A liberal guru can't compete with India's new televangelists.
By Jason Overdorf
July 27, 2010
GlobalPost
NEW DELHI, India — Dressed in a long, orange kurta, orange pajamas and a bright orange turban, Swami Agnivesh looks every bit the haranguing fanatic.
But India's latest televangelist is cut from a different cloth. In a forest of Rush Limbaugh-style conservatives, Agnivesh is the sole voice of India's fast-fading social liberalism on TV. Or was. The crusader has just been canceled.
"From March 1968 till today I've been deeply involved with the struggle of the people, with the main focus on issues of social justice," Agnivesh said. "I felt that in order to consolidate an ideological perspective around these movements, struggles, agitations, which are all directed towards social change, I need a platform by which I can reach millions of viewers and engage them in discussion, debate and dialogue."
At 74 years old, Agnivesh speaks with a quiet, measured voice. As the president of the World Council of Arya Samaj — an affiliate of the Hindu reform movement that was founded in the 19th century to eradicate the caste system — his "sermons" are as much about politics as they are about religion.
Frustrated with religious leaders' opaque platitudes and increasingly commercial bent, not to mention the news channels' preference for shouting matches featuring the same old rogue gallery of party hacks, he set out to open substantive debates about the causes underlying caste discrimination, illiteracy, poverty, corruption and more. And he did it by passing the microphone to people whose voices had never been heard on Indian TV: including the Dalits who scrape human excrement from primitive toilets for a living, AIDS patients and lepers.
"We got an extensive response, not only through letters and emails," said Agnivesh. "But in my travels throughout the length and breadth of the country, people would walk up to me, shake hands and talk about the latest episode. I could see from their faces that it was impacting the minds of the people."
An ascetic who took monastic orders in 1970, Agnivesh is most famous for his decades-long fight against bonded labor. But he has also crusaded against female feticide, the liquor mafia and sati — a practice in which widows are encouraged, or forced, to immolate themselves on their deceased husbands' funeral pyres. On TV, he adopted the talk show format to send out his message for 52 episodes, playing devil's advocate instead of preaching.
"The strength of this program was that we took up issues that were not being taken up by the mainstream media and demonstrated through this talk show that there is more than one side to the truth," Agnivesh said.
There were some of the usual hijinks, too, of course. He theatrically touched the feet of a Dalit woman on one episode. But what was striking about the show was that he encouraged his underprivileged guests to talk for themselves, rather than banging on for them.
The fact that the government and the Maoists agreed to make him the go-between for peace negotiations in May — until his Maoist interlocutor was killed in controversial circumstances in June — is testament that he came off as fair, reasonable and honest. But fair, reasonable and honest doesn't sell.
Agnivesh's message of social reform cuts against the grain in modernizing India, where the upwardly mobile masses are increasingly looking to conservative leaders to explain their new world. That's why his show first migrated from the state-owned general interest channel, Doordarshan, to Lok Sabha TV — a channel primarily dedicated to the live broadcast of parliament — and was eventually canceled, while his most prominent competitors continue to amass million-dollar television empires.
"[The new conservative evangelism] marries the notion of what the audience feels to be traditional with consumption and individualism," said Santosh Desai, a prominent media analyst and CEO of Future Brands. "It sits really well with the Indian middle class, which is trying to make sense of the world around them. It assuages a lot of anxiety about change, by giving it a sort of spiritual sanctity."
Freed from state control in the 1990s, Indian cable has moved from soap operas to game shows to reality TV. Along the way, spiritual India's preoccupation with gods and gurus has inspired a bouquet of religious channels, too. They run the gamut from homegrown Sanskar TV, which broadcasts Hindu sermons and devotional music, to Power Vision, an all-God-all-the-time Christian channel that broadcasts in Hindi, Malayalam and English.
But in contrast to bygone gurus like the Hare Krishna movement's Swami Prabhupada or Beatles inspiration Mahesh Yogi, who sought to explode and transform society, India's new preachers are essentially conservative protectors of tradition. And the biggest stars of televangelism are its most controversial ideologues: Hinduism's Baba Ramdev and Islam's Zakir Naik.
Both televangelists appeal to a young, new India that's embracing commercialism and trying to make sense of a rapidly changing socio-economic landscape. Ramdev is more like self-help star Tony Robbins than Pat Robertson; he promises viewers tangible, individual benefits, like any brand, says Desai.
Similarly, Naik offers an imminently practical and useful service for Muslims. "He seems to have connected with the middle class Muslims ... [because] he tries to show that Islam is not incompatible with modern ideas," said Mujibur Rehman, a professor at New Delhi's Jamia Milia University.
"They are propagating themselves," said Agnivesh. "With each show, they are getting a little more followers, a little more power in that sense and, also, a little more money."
Their self-promotion, if that's what it's all about, can take an ugly turn. After claiming simple breathing exercises could cure cancer and AIDS, Baba Ramdev drew liberal ire — and additional fans — by opposing India's progressive move to decriminalize homosexuality. He went on to claim he could turn any erring lad butch with his yogic arts, and promptly announced he was forming his own political party.
For his part, Zakir Naik's opaque statements in support of terrorism and Osama bin Laden — though he claims they've been taken out of context — got him banned from entering the United Kingdom and Canada this June.
Arguably, this is reactionary radicalism in the guise of the rational. Whether the effect is intentional or not, Naik's propensity for inflammatory statements like "every Muslim should be a terrorist," make him a dangerous influence. And Ramdev's peddling of prejudice and superstition is perhaps more dangerous still in a country already flirting with Hindu fundamentalism.
"It's too much to say that Hindu right revivalism is directly linked to this, but certainly it softens up the audience for the revivalist agenda to some extent," said Desai. "In that respect, although it's couched in the language of modern, it has the effect of the other kind."
Indeed, with every bombshell, India's conservative gurus have grown more popular. Ramdev's programs reportedly attract an audience of more than 85 million people, and his yoga and homeopathic medicines businesses bring in $40 million a year. Meanwhile, Naik claims an audience of 50 million for his program on Peace TV, and one of India's top newspapers ranks him the country's third-most powerful guru, after Ramdev and the Art of Living's Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
At the same time, Agnivesh's most radical statements helped get his show canceled. He didn't just call out the government on the Maoist issue. He came out against Hinduism's massively important kumbh mela — a ritual bath in the Ganges that attracts millions of pilgrims — and threatened to launch a Right to Information inquiry into the huge sums that the government spends on the celebration. And he pilloried Dalit leaders, like the present Congress Party speaker of the Lok Sabha, who rise to power based on their caste affiliation and then abandon the empowerment agenda for party politics.
Sometimes, when the truth sets you free, it also leaves you unemployed.
By Jason Overdorf
July 27, 2010
GlobalPost
NEW DELHI, India — Dressed in a long, orange kurta, orange pajamas and a bright orange turban, Swami Agnivesh looks every bit the haranguing fanatic.
But India's latest televangelist is cut from a different cloth. In a forest of Rush Limbaugh-style conservatives, Agnivesh is the sole voice of India's fast-fading social liberalism on TV. Or was. The crusader has just been canceled.
"From March 1968 till today I've been deeply involved with the struggle of the people, with the main focus on issues of social justice," Agnivesh said. "I felt that in order to consolidate an ideological perspective around these movements, struggles, agitations, which are all directed towards social change, I need a platform by which I can reach millions of viewers and engage them in discussion, debate and dialogue."
At 74 years old, Agnivesh speaks with a quiet, measured voice. As the president of the World Council of Arya Samaj — an affiliate of the Hindu reform movement that was founded in the 19th century to eradicate the caste system — his "sermons" are as much about politics as they are about religion.
Frustrated with religious leaders' opaque platitudes and increasingly commercial bent, not to mention the news channels' preference for shouting matches featuring the same old rogue gallery of party hacks, he set out to open substantive debates about the causes underlying caste discrimination, illiteracy, poverty, corruption and more. And he did it by passing the microphone to people whose voices had never been heard on Indian TV: including the Dalits who scrape human excrement from primitive toilets for a living, AIDS patients and lepers.
"We got an extensive response, not only through letters and emails," said Agnivesh. "But in my travels throughout the length and breadth of the country, people would walk up to me, shake hands and talk about the latest episode. I could see from their faces that it was impacting the minds of the people."
An ascetic who took monastic orders in 1970, Agnivesh is most famous for his decades-long fight against bonded labor. But he has also crusaded against female feticide, the liquor mafia and sati — a practice in which widows are encouraged, or forced, to immolate themselves on their deceased husbands' funeral pyres. On TV, he adopted the talk show format to send out his message for 52 episodes, playing devil's advocate instead of preaching.
"The strength of this program was that we took up issues that were not being taken up by the mainstream media and demonstrated through this talk show that there is more than one side to the truth," Agnivesh said.
There were some of the usual hijinks, too, of course. He theatrically touched the feet of a Dalit woman on one episode. But what was striking about the show was that he encouraged his underprivileged guests to talk for themselves, rather than banging on for them.
The fact that the government and the Maoists agreed to make him the go-between for peace negotiations in May — until his Maoist interlocutor was killed in controversial circumstances in June — is testament that he came off as fair, reasonable and honest. But fair, reasonable and honest doesn't sell.
Agnivesh's message of social reform cuts against the grain in modernizing India, where the upwardly mobile masses are increasingly looking to conservative leaders to explain their new world. That's why his show first migrated from the state-owned general interest channel, Doordarshan, to Lok Sabha TV — a channel primarily dedicated to the live broadcast of parliament — and was eventually canceled, while his most prominent competitors continue to amass million-dollar television empires.
"[The new conservative evangelism] marries the notion of what the audience feels to be traditional with consumption and individualism," said Santosh Desai, a prominent media analyst and CEO of Future Brands. "It sits really well with the Indian middle class, which is trying to make sense of the world around them. It assuages a lot of anxiety about change, by giving it a sort of spiritual sanctity."
Freed from state control in the 1990s, Indian cable has moved from soap operas to game shows to reality TV. Along the way, spiritual India's preoccupation with gods and gurus has inspired a bouquet of religious channels, too. They run the gamut from homegrown Sanskar TV, which broadcasts Hindu sermons and devotional music, to Power Vision, an all-God-all-the-time Christian channel that broadcasts in Hindi, Malayalam and English.
But in contrast to bygone gurus like the Hare Krishna movement's Swami Prabhupada or Beatles inspiration Mahesh Yogi, who sought to explode and transform society, India's new preachers are essentially conservative protectors of tradition. And the biggest stars of televangelism are its most controversial ideologues: Hinduism's Baba Ramdev and Islam's Zakir Naik.
Both televangelists appeal to a young, new India that's embracing commercialism and trying to make sense of a rapidly changing socio-economic landscape. Ramdev is more like self-help star Tony Robbins than Pat Robertson; he promises viewers tangible, individual benefits, like any brand, says Desai.
Similarly, Naik offers an imminently practical and useful service for Muslims. "He seems to have connected with the middle class Muslims ... [because] he tries to show that Islam is not incompatible with modern ideas," said Mujibur Rehman, a professor at New Delhi's Jamia Milia University.
"They are propagating themselves," said Agnivesh. "With each show, they are getting a little more followers, a little more power in that sense and, also, a little more money."
Their self-promotion, if that's what it's all about, can take an ugly turn. After claiming simple breathing exercises could cure cancer and AIDS, Baba Ramdev drew liberal ire — and additional fans — by opposing India's progressive move to decriminalize homosexuality. He went on to claim he could turn any erring lad butch with his yogic arts, and promptly announced he was forming his own political party.
For his part, Zakir Naik's opaque statements in support of terrorism and Osama bin Laden — though he claims they've been taken out of context — got him banned from entering the United Kingdom and Canada this June.
Arguably, this is reactionary radicalism in the guise of the rational. Whether the effect is intentional or not, Naik's propensity for inflammatory statements like "every Muslim should be a terrorist," make him a dangerous influence. And Ramdev's peddling of prejudice and superstition is perhaps more dangerous still in a country already flirting with Hindu fundamentalism.
"It's too much to say that Hindu right revivalism is directly linked to this, but certainly it softens up the audience for the revivalist agenda to some extent," said Desai. "In that respect, although it's couched in the language of modern, it has the effect of the other kind."
Indeed, with every bombshell, India's conservative gurus have grown more popular. Ramdev's programs reportedly attract an audience of more than 85 million people, and his yoga and homeopathic medicines businesses bring in $40 million a year. Meanwhile, Naik claims an audience of 50 million for his program on Peace TV, and one of India's top newspapers ranks him the country's third-most powerful guru, after Ramdev and the Art of Living's Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
At the same time, Agnivesh's most radical statements helped get his show canceled. He didn't just call out the government on the Maoist issue. He came out against Hinduism's massively important kumbh mela — a ritual bath in the Ganges that attracts millions of pilgrims — and threatened to launch a Right to Information inquiry into the huge sums that the government spends on the celebration. And he pilloried Dalit leaders, like the present Congress Party speaker of the Lok Sabha, who rise to power based on their caste affiliation and then abandon the empowerment agenda for party politics.
Sometimes, when the truth sets you free, it also leaves you unemployed.
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