The flagship of the British colonial empire comes back as a luxury brand.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 16, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Once upon a time, the East India Company toppled governments, enslaved peoples and staffed a private army and navy to rule the world of commerce — then dominated by tea, coffee and exotic spices.
Now Sanjiv Mehta, a 48-year-old British Indian businessman, believes it's time for the ultimate symbol of colonial oppression to make a comeback — you guessed it, as a luxury brand.
"Wealth is moving from the West to the East, and all the luxury brands are typically brands which originated in the West," Mehta told GlobalPost. "[In that context] the East India Company is an interesting brand because Asia looks at it as the old West and the West looks at it as the exotic East."
An Indian buying the East India Company is a gimmick that makes good copy, of course. But the East India Company is actually the real deal.
Having been nationalized after the 1857 rebellion in India that Britain dubbed "the mutiny" despite its revolutionary character, the "brand" was lying virtually forgotten in the hands of the British crown and a handful of apathetic shareholders when Mehta ran across it in 2004. He snapped it up — along with the original coat of arms and merchant's mark — and set about sourcing some $15 million in investment capital to put it back on the map.
According to company lore, Mehta then spent six years meeting museum curators and examining company artifacts to make sure he got the image right before he finally launched the flagship store in London last year.
"It was a long journey," Mehta said.
The London launch received predictable fanfare. This year, though, will be time to put up or shut up, as the East India Company goes back to its colonial roots in Hong Kong, Singapore and India, where the $7 billion Mahindra Group announced it was taking a minority stake in the brand in January.
"India, Singapore and Hong Kong were huge locations for the East India Company," Mehta said, recalling the company's role in forming each of these nations. "We definitely have a very aggressive plan to enter all these markets," he added. "We will be entering with our fine foods business in India in 2011, starting from Bombay."
Mahindra, which knows the market, is optimistic. "The East India Company (EIC) is a truly global brand and can transverse across multiple product categories," Parag Shah, managing partner in Mahindra's investment arm, said in a press statement. "This 400-year-old brand is the first modern transnational brand and in a sense, the founder of the phrase 'international trade.'"
But will colonial chic sell in the colony that lent the company its name?
"The relationship of India with its colonial past has always been surprisingly without rancor, and the fact that some Indian businessman is reviving the brand is not without irony and all that," said Santosh Desai, chief executive of Future Brands. "But it's a symbolic kind of move. It's hardly likely to be a significant brand in a real sense."
The new East India Company sells posh chocolates, tea and coffee and the kind of condiments that old India hands used to whinge were always running out (mustards, marmalade — but not Marmite), as well as gold bullion. But in all of those product categories, it's likely to find that the same economic and cultural developments that have refurbished the old colonial brand as politically correct will also make its former home market a tough nut to crack, says Desai.
To be sure, India has shed its postcolonial baggage. There are still gin and tonics and whisky sodas at "the club" for the old Indian elite, and condo complexes with pretentious-sounding names like the Wyndham Estate. But these days, the cricket team expects to thrash the Brits soundly whenever they meet, and the players are as apt to call their white opponents "sir" as they are to sprout wings and fly.
Young people no longer strive for "propah" British accents — or even American ones — preferring the free-flowing mashup of Hinglish to any other lingo. And the most popular foreign grub — American fast food — must be thoroughly Indianized before it will sell.
"In general, 15 years ago there was a presumption of superiority for an international brand in all sorts of categories," said Desai. But that's no longer the case — even when it comes to products like cars, refrigerators and stereos. "For a whole set of general brands, in everyday categories, Western brands have become commonplace, and the distinction between Indian and Western brands has become less significant."
For luxury brands like the East India Company aspires to be, that's not strictly the case, though one increasingly finds the collections of top Indian designers alongside clothing labeled with Armani or Zegna — and Jaguar, of course, is already owned by Tata. The Haagen Daaz outlet in New Delhi's most popular mall, for instance, is almost always packed even though — or perhaps because — its ice cream costs nearly $10 a scoop.
But brand-conscious consumers are conservative in India — where class distinctions are rigid, and the gossip is vicious. So however long its history, East India Company may find it tough to compete with established brands.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Killing India's Right to Information law
India's most vital tool for fighting corruption is bleeding from a thousand cuts.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 15, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Empowered by a groundbreaking new law designed to help ordinary citizens fight corruption, Jagdish Sharma took on the leading clan of his village to expose the alleged theft of an elderly residents' pension money last week. But his triumph was short lived.
Just days after Sharma filed his case against the village head, Dharambir Malik, using India's Right to Information (RTI) act, Malik allegedly plowed down Sharma and several other protesters with his SUV — crushing Sharma's legs and killing his daughter-in-law, Sonu, according to local press reports. And though police say murder charges have been leveled against Malik, India's RTI crusaders argue that Sonu's death is the latest in a thousand cuts that are slowly killing the country's most powerful tool in the fight against corruption.
"This is a message to anyone raising their voice against corruption, that you will be killed," said Arvind Kejriwal, one of the leaders of the decade-long campaign for the RTI Act.
At least a dozen whistleblowers have been murdered for daring to expose crime and corruption since the RTI act was passed in 2005, according to activist Parshuram Ray. But rather than strengthening the law and fighting to protect the citizens who use it, the government is backpedaling fast to strip RTI of its sweeping powers, even as politicians and bureaucrats have adopted an informal go-slow policy that threatens to make it obsolete.
Already, by 2015, the Central Information Commission — the body responsible for addressing complaints when officials give incomplete or evasive answers to RTI requests — will face a backlog of 90,000 cases, which means an applicant would have to wait up to six years for an appeal. And the situation is all too likely to get worse.
"Despite all the provisions of the act, at every level information is being denied, and nothing is happening. Nobody is being punished for that," said Ray, who faced stonewalling when he sought to use RTI to expose corruption in a national program that provides work and wages for the rural poor. "The reality is that the original aims and objectives of the RTI act have almost been shattered."
The success or failure of these efforts to hamstring India's information law could well mark a turning point in the country's escalating battle against corruption, as well as the struggle for basic human rights.
The volume of alleged corruption exposed in recent months has been dramatic enough to raise fears that failure to rein in crony capitalism could derail the India rise to prominence on the global stage — especially after it was revealed that foreign direct investment has plunged 60 percent this year.
But the drama might actually be a sign of progress — showing not that corruption is increasing by leaps and bounds, but that more and more scandals are coming to light. And as bruised and battered as it may be, say some activists, that's down to the RTI. Not only did the act play a direct role in exposing two of the largest recent corruption scandals involving the telecom and defense ministries, says Nikhil Dey, another RTI pioneer, but it has also made it much easier for whistleblowers inside government to leak information without fear of reprisals, since an RTI filing from a newspaper is a speedy way to end a witchhunt.
"Once you enter the domain of open information, even a leak is legitimized much more," said Dey. "Before, the press had to think of a million ways to legitimize the information, because otherwise their source would be traced and persecuted. Now, because RTI is so extensive and powerful, it makes it very difficult for someone to say, 'How did this information get out?'"
Indeed, when it was passed in 2005, the RTI act promised a sea change in governance. By granting citizens the right to demand transparency, it swept out the colonial era practice of denying access to even the most mundane details of government programs under the official secrets act. It sought to pre-empt bureaucratic sloth and obfuscation by requiring government departments to respond to requests within 30 days. It mandated that every department computerize and make public its records proactively so that citizens could eventually access most information without filing a request. And it put in place stiff penalties for officials who refuse to comply.
But as individual citizens and civil society groups discover more and more ways to use the law, various efforts to undermine the RTI are gathering momentum. Virtually no department has voluntarily complied with the provision requiring proactive disclosure. Everyone from the Supreme Court to the Central Bureau of Investigation is fighting to be declared exempt from information requests. The government is seeking to amend the rules governing RTI requests in a move that activists say would make the procedure more arcane and thus make it easier for bureaucrats to justify stonewalling.
The information commissions are also being starved of resources. There are only six central information commissioners instead of the allotted 11, for instance, and limitations on hiring additional staff prevent them from clearing their backlog of complaints. Meanwhile, at the state level matters can be even worse. In Orissa and West Bengal, for example, the information commissioners are so far behind that they'll need more than 10 years to clear their present backlog of complaints, according to a survey by the Public Cause Research Foundation — and that's if they don't receive any appeals over the next decade.
"The reluctance to part with the information is just part of an old mindset," said Dey. "Very often if bureaucrats meet together they exchange notes about how they can avoid revealing information."
And that teamwork might be working, according to Anjali Bhardwaj, who heads Satark Nagrik Sangathan, an non-governmental organization that trains citizens to use the RTI act. At the grassroots level, India's bureaucrats are getting more and more clever at sidestepping the law. Aware of the long delays of an appeal, officials routinely refuse to disclose basic information about government activities by claiming it would violate the right to privacy, require applicants to prove their citizenship before they'll accept the request, or use the arcane structure of the bureaucracy itself to send them from one public information officer to another like Kafka's man before the law.
In the latest twist, most government bodies are putting low-level functionaries in place as public information officers so that even if they are sincere they don't have the clout needed to get documents from their colleagues.
"It clearly looks like a very deliberate move in government departments," said Bhardwaj.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
(February 15, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Empowered by a groundbreaking new law designed to help ordinary citizens fight corruption, Jagdish Sharma took on the leading clan of his village to expose the alleged theft of an elderly residents' pension money last week. But his triumph was short lived.
Just days after Sharma filed his case against the village head, Dharambir Malik, using India's Right to Information (RTI) act, Malik allegedly plowed down Sharma and several other protesters with his SUV — crushing Sharma's legs and killing his daughter-in-law, Sonu, according to local press reports. And though police say murder charges have been leveled against Malik, India's RTI crusaders argue that Sonu's death is the latest in a thousand cuts that are slowly killing the country's most powerful tool in the fight against corruption.
"This is a message to anyone raising their voice against corruption, that you will be killed," said Arvind Kejriwal, one of the leaders of the decade-long campaign for the RTI Act.
At least a dozen whistleblowers have been murdered for daring to expose crime and corruption since the RTI act was passed in 2005, according to activist Parshuram Ray. But rather than strengthening the law and fighting to protect the citizens who use it, the government is backpedaling fast to strip RTI of its sweeping powers, even as politicians and bureaucrats have adopted an informal go-slow policy that threatens to make it obsolete.
Already, by 2015, the Central Information Commission — the body responsible for addressing complaints when officials give incomplete or evasive answers to RTI requests — will face a backlog of 90,000 cases, which means an applicant would have to wait up to six years for an appeal. And the situation is all too likely to get worse.
"Despite all the provisions of the act, at every level information is being denied, and nothing is happening. Nobody is being punished for that," said Ray, who faced stonewalling when he sought to use RTI to expose corruption in a national program that provides work and wages for the rural poor. "The reality is that the original aims and objectives of the RTI act have almost been shattered."
The success or failure of these efforts to hamstring India's information law could well mark a turning point in the country's escalating battle against corruption, as well as the struggle for basic human rights.
The volume of alleged corruption exposed in recent months has been dramatic enough to raise fears that failure to rein in crony capitalism could derail the India rise to prominence on the global stage — especially after it was revealed that foreign direct investment has plunged 60 percent this year.
But the drama might actually be a sign of progress — showing not that corruption is increasing by leaps and bounds, but that more and more scandals are coming to light. And as bruised and battered as it may be, say some activists, that's down to the RTI. Not only did the act play a direct role in exposing two of the largest recent corruption scandals involving the telecom and defense ministries, says Nikhil Dey, another RTI pioneer, but it has also made it much easier for whistleblowers inside government to leak information without fear of reprisals, since an RTI filing from a newspaper is a speedy way to end a witchhunt.
"Once you enter the domain of open information, even a leak is legitimized much more," said Dey. "Before, the press had to think of a million ways to legitimize the information, because otherwise their source would be traced and persecuted. Now, because RTI is so extensive and powerful, it makes it very difficult for someone to say, 'How did this information get out?'"
Indeed, when it was passed in 2005, the RTI act promised a sea change in governance. By granting citizens the right to demand transparency, it swept out the colonial era practice of denying access to even the most mundane details of government programs under the official secrets act. It sought to pre-empt bureaucratic sloth and obfuscation by requiring government departments to respond to requests within 30 days. It mandated that every department computerize and make public its records proactively so that citizens could eventually access most information without filing a request. And it put in place stiff penalties for officials who refuse to comply.
But as individual citizens and civil society groups discover more and more ways to use the law, various efforts to undermine the RTI are gathering momentum. Virtually no department has voluntarily complied with the provision requiring proactive disclosure. Everyone from the Supreme Court to the Central Bureau of Investigation is fighting to be declared exempt from information requests. The government is seeking to amend the rules governing RTI requests in a move that activists say would make the procedure more arcane and thus make it easier for bureaucrats to justify stonewalling.
The information commissions are also being starved of resources. There are only six central information commissioners instead of the allotted 11, for instance, and limitations on hiring additional staff prevent them from clearing their backlog of complaints. Meanwhile, at the state level matters can be even worse. In Orissa and West Bengal, for example, the information commissioners are so far behind that they'll need more than 10 years to clear their present backlog of complaints, according to a survey by the Public Cause Research Foundation — and that's if they don't receive any appeals over the next decade.
"The reluctance to part with the information is just part of an old mindset," said Dey. "Very often if bureaucrats meet together they exchange notes about how they can avoid revealing information."
And that teamwork might be working, according to Anjali Bhardwaj, who heads Satark Nagrik Sangathan, an non-governmental organization that trains citizens to use the RTI act. At the grassroots level, India's bureaucrats are getting more and more clever at sidestepping the law. Aware of the long delays of an appeal, officials routinely refuse to disclose basic information about government activities by claiming it would violate the right to privacy, require applicants to prove their citizenship before they'll accept the request, or use the arcane structure of the bureaucracy itself to send them from one public information officer to another like Kafka's man before the law.
In the latest twist, most government bodies are putting low-level functionaries in place as public information officers so that even if they are sincere they don't have the clout needed to get documents from their colleagues.
"It clearly looks like a very deliberate move in government departments," said Bhardwaj.
Friday, February 11, 2011
India-Pakistan talks: read between the lines
Analysis: It's official. New Delhi lost the stalemate.
By Jason Overdorf
(February 11, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Nominally, India and Pakistan agreed to resume [2] high level peace talks Thursday.
But in reality, New Delhi bent over backwards to give in to Islamabad before the proposed negotiations even begin — by granting the Kashmir dispute equal status on the agenda with the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
So how did India go from refusing to talk to begging for talks?
New Delhi believes that it has no choice but to talk eventually and surmises that the anger over the Mumbai attacks has faded enough over the past two years to make a resumption possible. Meanwhile, with the expected drawdown and eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan on the horizon, India may believe that a magnanimous stance today could help it to negotiate a stronger post-conflict role for itself in Kabul.
"I think it was necessary for us to discuss Afghanistan ... ," Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna [3] told reporters in New York Thursday, according to the Times of India newspaper. "India has been playing a very positive role in trying to build Afghanistan in terms of our volunteers who have gone there for capacity building and so I think Afghanistan had to be included," the paper quoted Rao as saying.
Unfortunately, what's more likely is that resuming the dialogue will just give Islamabad — which is wary even of India's limited present role in Afghanistan — another chance to run circles around India's negotiators.
Already, India has agreed to discuss a whole range of issues, including Pakistan's claims to territory in Indian-administered Kashmir, which will inevitably remove the focus from Pakistan's alleged support of terrorist groups that attack India.
At a 90-minute meeting between Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting in Thimphu, Bhutan, on Sunday, the two countries agreed to a series of secretary-level meetings to discuss, among other issues, confidence-building measures like cross-border bus services, the dispute over Sir Creek (between India's Gujarat and Pakistan's Sindh province) and Pakistan's desire to redraw the borders of Kashmir.
"The reality is that India and Pakistan cannot afford to turn their backs to each other, that they must engage in dialogue which is, as I said, serious and sustainable and comprehensive," Rao said in a televised interview on Thursday, when the substance of the Sunday meeting was disclosed.
It's taken two years, but that's a pretty big flip-flop.
Once, India claimed it would not resume normal diplomatic relations until Islamabad cracked down on terrorist groups operating with impunity in Pakistan and began a vigorous prosecution of the alleged perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. That vigorous prosecution never happened, of course. But as the United States proved unable to exert any pressure on Pakistan and instead began pressuring India to return to the negotiating table, New Delhi swiftly went from refusing to talk to begging to talk.
To make matters worse, China stepped up to back Pakistan's military shadow government. And events like the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer for opposing Pakistan's blasphemy laws — which suggest that Pakistan's radicals are gaining ground — have convinced India that it has no choice but to backpedal. Playing hardball, the logic runs, will only give Pakistan's hardliners more room for saber-rattling — and more credibility on the street. If it wasn't clear before, it is clear now: India has lost the stalemate.
"Any rational observer would say this is not the time to nourish much hope on moving forward on substantive issues," said former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "But on our side they feel that vacuum is not in our favor and by not talking we would be giving up whatever little hope there is ... of stemming the rise of these radical forces and giving some backing to those who wish to normalize relations with India — especially Pakistani civil society."
But preventing Pakistani hardliners from playing the India card comes at a cost. The presumption that Qureshi will visit India in July to review the progress made by the two countries' foreign secretaries over the intervening months underscores the impression that India must woo Pakistan, even to merit a visit from its foreign minister. And it's far easier to make friendly noises now — when Indian-administered Kashmir enjoys a predictable winter lull in separatist protests — than it will be when Srinagar inevitably heats up for the summer.
At the last meeting between Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers last July, for instance, when Srinagar was rocked by bloody riots over the killing of civilian by Indian security forces, Qureshi sandbagged during meetings with Krishna in Islamabad. Then Qureshi undermined any possible gains at the post mortem press conference by equating a top Indian official with Hafiz Saeed — the Pakistani radical whom India believes masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and whose continued freedom and influence in Pakistan is a major impediment to better relations.
Indeed, if past talks are any indicator, nothing is likely to emerge from more dialogue. Though talking with Qureshi does grant Pakistan's democratically elected government an added stamp of legitimacy, in order to make progress India needs to negotiate with the real center of power in Islamabad — Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who heads the Pakistani army.
Moreover, Manmohan Singh's government is in a weakened position domestically, and recent revelations about the involvement of Hindu terror cells in the bombing of a "Friendship Express" train between Delhi and Lahore — in which 42 Pakistani citizens were killed — has undermined India's previous position of moral superiority.
"The jury is still out on these talks," said Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly. "Any progress, will necessarily be extremely slow and incremental. The level of distrust in India is too great and the PM is too weak with the opposition in an uproar about multiple [corruption] scandals."
By caving into Pakistan's demands up front and allowing Kashmir and "all outstanding issues" back on the table, India has essentially admitted that it has nothing to negotiate with. The threat of war is an empty one (thankfully), and generous aid from an opportunistic China and a fearful United States renders India's economic clout meaningless.
"The stick we have we can't use, and the carrot that the Pakistanis want [Kashmir] we can't give them," said Sibal.
By Jason Overdorf
(February 11, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Nominally, India and Pakistan agreed to resume [2] high level peace talks Thursday.
But in reality, New Delhi bent over backwards to give in to Islamabad before the proposed negotiations even begin — by granting the Kashmir dispute equal status on the agenda with the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
So how did India go from refusing to talk to begging for talks?
New Delhi believes that it has no choice but to talk eventually and surmises that the anger over the Mumbai attacks has faded enough over the past two years to make a resumption possible. Meanwhile, with the expected drawdown and eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan on the horizon, India may believe that a magnanimous stance today could help it to negotiate a stronger post-conflict role for itself in Kabul.
"I think it was necessary for us to discuss Afghanistan ... ," Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna [3] told reporters in New York Thursday, according to the Times of India newspaper. "India has been playing a very positive role in trying to build Afghanistan in terms of our volunteers who have gone there for capacity building and so I think Afghanistan had to be included," the paper quoted Rao as saying.
Unfortunately, what's more likely is that resuming the dialogue will just give Islamabad — which is wary even of India's limited present role in Afghanistan — another chance to run circles around India's negotiators.
Already, India has agreed to discuss a whole range of issues, including Pakistan's claims to territory in Indian-administered Kashmir, which will inevitably remove the focus from Pakistan's alleged support of terrorist groups that attack India.
At a 90-minute meeting between Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting in Thimphu, Bhutan, on Sunday, the two countries agreed to a series of secretary-level meetings to discuss, among other issues, confidence-building measures like cross-border bus services, the dispute over Sir Creek (between India's Gujarat and Pakistan's Sindh province) and Pakistan's desire to redraw the borders of Kashmir.
"The reality is that India and Pakistan cannot afford to turn their backs to each other, that they must engage in dialogue which is, as I said, serious and sustainable and comprehensive," Rao said in a televised interview on Thursday, when the substance of the Sunday meeting was disclosed.
It's taken two years, but that's a pretty big flip-flop.
Once, India claimed it would not resume normal diplomatic relations until Islamabad cracked down on terrorist groups operating with impunity in Pakistan and began a vigorous prosecution of the alleged perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. That vigorous prosecution never happened, of course. But as the United States proved unable to exert any pressure on Pakistan and instead began pressuring India to return to the negotiating table, New Delhi swiftly went from refusing to talk to begging to talk.
To make matters worse, China stepped up to back Pakistan's military shadow government. And events like the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer for opposing Pakistan's blasphemy laws — which suggest that Pakistan's radicals are gaining ground — have convinced India that it has no choice but to backpedal. Playing hardball, the logic runs, will only give Pakistan's hardliners more room for saber-rattling — and more credibility on the street. If it wasn't clear before, it is clear now: India has lost the stalemate.
"Any rational observer would say this is not the time to nourish much hope on moving forward on substantive issues," said former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "But on our side they feel that vacuum is not in our favor and by not talking we would be giving up whatever little hope there is ... of stemming the rise of these radical forces and giving some backing to those who wish to normalize relations with India — especially Pakistani civil society."
But preventing Pakistani hardliners from playing the India card comes at a cost. The presumption that Qureshi will visit India in July to review the progress made by the two countries' foreign secretaries over the intervening months underscores the impression that India must woo Pakistan, even to merit a visit from its foreign minister. And it's far easier to make friendly noises now — when Indian-administered Kashmir enjoys a predictable winter lull in separatist protests — than it will be when Srinagar inevitably heats up for the summer.
At the last meeting between Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers last July, for instance, when Srinagar was rocked by bloody riots over the killing of civilian by Indian security forces, Qureshi sandbagged during meetings with Krishna in Islamabad. Then Qureshi undermined any possible gains at the post mortem press conference by equating a top Indian official with Hafiz Saeed — the Pakistani radical whom India believes masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and whose continued freedom and influence in Pakistan is a major impediment to better relations.
Indeed, if past talks are any indicator, nothing is likely to emerge from more dialogue. Though talking with Qureshi does grant Pakistan's democratically elected government an added stamp of legitimacy, in order to make progress India needs to negotiate with the real center of power in Islamabad — Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who heads the Pakistani army.
Moreover, Manmohan Singh's government is in a weakened position domestically, and recent revelations about the involvement of Hindu terror cells in the bombing of a "Friendship Express" train between Delhi and Lahore — in which 42 Pakistani citizens were killed — has undermined India's previous position of moral superiority.
"The jury is still out on these talks," said Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly. "Any progress, will necessarily be extremely slow and incremental. The level of distrust in India is too great and the PM is too weak with the opposition in an uproar about multiple [corruption] scandals."
By caving into Pakistan's demands up front and allowing Kashmir and "all outstanding issues" back on the table, India has essentially admitted that it has nothing to negotiate with. The threat of war is an empty one (thankfully), and generous aid from an opportunistic China and a fearful United States renders India's economic clout meaningless.
"The stick we have we can't use, and the carrot that the Pakistanis want [Kashmir] we can't give them," said Sibal.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
A Bend In The River
The fabulous Darbargadh Palace in Morvi opens its doors.
JASON OVERDORF
Outlook Traveler - Feb. 1, 2011
In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I’m an easy enough heritage tourist. To me the mark of a good hotel has never been the variety of pillows on the bedside menu or the number of 20-something management trainees deputed to be my personal slaves. I am not in business. I have never sent an urgent fax in the pitch-black night. I like to feel comfortable, and I am not comfortable with absurd efficiency—which so often comes to resemble its opposite—or with making a dozen decisions before something so simple as turning off the light and drifting off to sleep.
A little charm and character makes up for a lot of opulence, and I don’t mind wearing a sweater in my room or running the tap for ten minutes to get hot water.
Fortunately, the Darbargadh Palace, a new heritage hotel in Morvi, Gujarat, has that charm and character in spades.
Opening to tourists this month, Darbargadh is a stunning, nineteenth-century neoclassical palace that has been lovingly restored by the Neemrana Group and Maharani Uma Dubash Morvi. The oldest of the region’s palaces, its stone walls tower over the meandering Macchu river alongside a swaying footbridge, but it feels less like a fortress than a mansion. Only seven guest rooms have been restored so far—there is an entire wing, equally large, that remains untouched—so, intimacy is the rule.
Unlike some heritage properties, there are no poor rooms here. Every room is a vast suite, with bedroom, dining area, sitting room and a colossal bathroom that would dwarf many a Manhattan studio, and the Maharani, who personally chose the décor, has beautifully recreated the neoclassical ambience with rich details like the embroidered cloth tapestries—specially woven by some of the world’s largest looms in Jaipur—which grace the stone instead of paint or wallpaper.
Each room boasts a distinguishing feature that gives it character, a marble fireplace or carved frieze, and wherever possible the designers have retained and accentuated elements of the palace’s original structure. The Kesarba Mahal I stayed in, for example—which was chosen for the terrace overlooking the Macchu—had an exposed stone archway separating the bedroom from the seating area, while the Mahindra Mahal boasts an original stone frieze depicting characters from ancient Greece.
The town of Morvi—a sleepy hamlet, known mainly for tile manufacturing, in the centre of a dry state—is, of course, not on the usual tourist’s itinerary. Morvi is only an hour from the airport (and railway station) at Rajkot, and there are a few attractions within striking distance in Dhrangadhra, Wadhwan, Maliya and Limbdi—each of which boasts palaces, stepwells and rustic bazaars. The only real ‘sights’ in Morvi are the hanging bridge and the Wagh Mandir, a 70-year-old temple of Jaipur stone that is currently being restored and expanded into a museum dedicated to the region’s royal past.
Darbargadh itself is the only true reason to stop here, most likely en route from Ahmedabad to Kutch. But Neemrana is renowned for turning hotels into destinations, and Darbargadh seems likely to uphold that tradition. Over my two-night stay, I never felt the least inclined to step outside the palace, whose high, thick walls kept out the noise of the city so that I could hear only the parakeets and songbirds as I lounged by the swimming pool in the courtyard with my Kindle. The winter sun was warm and bright, and from the terrace attached to my room I could look out over the tenant farms on the floodplain the way Maharaja Waghji Rawaji Thakore must have done in 1885.
The food at Darbargadh was excellent, and the service impeccable—as personable and informal as a trusted family retainer. Each morning, I devoured a stack of aloo parathas, a plate of sharp cheddar cheese and a basket of toast fingers with homemade jam, yet I always seemed to find room for lunch and dinner. As the hotel’s first guest, I had the luxury of ordering whatever I felt like (there was no menu), but I left it to the chef to try to impress me with his specialities, and once I convinced him that he didn’t need to make everything foreigner-bland, the eclectic feasts he prepared—think devilled eggs, penne arrabiata, mashed potatoes and mutton rogan josh—never failed to satisfy.
Only when it came time to leave did I venture out for a brief tour, stopping at the Wagh Mandir for an impromptu lesson in the techniques that the builders from Structwel—the same outfit that repaired the Taj Palace after the Mumbai attacks —were employing to fortify the cupolas damaged by the 2001 earthquake. Vipul, the hotel manager, had also arranged for me to visit the ‘new palace’ across the river, which the Maharani maintains as a part-time residence, so I spent the rest of the morning on a private viewing of the country’s finest art-deco palace outside of Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhavan.
When I left I was stuffed, rested and fully content, my only worry that I was returning to Delhi and work, instead of on down the road to Bhuj and further adventures.
The information
Location Morvi, Gujarat; three-four hours by car from Ahmedabad/one hour from Rajkot
Accommodation Seven suites (Vijayba, Kesarba, Bajiraj, Waghji, Lakhdir, Mahindra and Mayurdhwaj Mahals)
Tariff Rs 8,000 (Vijayba, Kesarba, Lakhdir, Mahindra, Mayurdhwaj); Rs 10,000 (Bajiraj, Waghji)
Contact 011-46661666, neemranahotels.com
JASON OVERDORF
Outlook Traveler - Feb. 1, 2011
In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I’m an easy enough heritage tourist. To me the mark of a good hotel has never been the variety of pillows on the bedside menu or the number of 20-something management trainees deputed to be my personal slaves. I am not in business. I have never sent an urgent fax in the pitch-black night. I like to feel comfortable, and I am not comfortable with absurd efficiency—which so often comes to resemble its opposite—or with making a dozen decisions before something so simple as turning off the light and drifting off to sleep.
A little charm and character makes up for a lot of opulence, and I don’t mind wearing a sweater in my room or running the tap for ten minutes to get hot water.
Fortunately, the Darbargadh Palace, a new heritage hotel in Morvi, Gujarat, has that charm and character in spades.
Opening to tourists this month, Darbargadh is a stunning, nineteenth-century neoclassical palace that has been lovingly restored by the Neemrana Group and Maharani Uma Dubash Morvi. The oldest of the region’s palaces, its stone walls tower over the meandering Macchu river alongside a swaying footbridge, but it feels less like a fortress than a mansion. Only seven guest rooms have been restored so far—there is an entire wing, equally large, that remains untouched—so, intimacy is the rule.
Unlike some heritage properties, there are no poor rooms here. Every room is a vast suite, with bedroom, dining area, sitting room and a colossal bathroom that would dwarf many a Manhattan studio, and the Maharani, who personally chose the décor, has beautifully recreated the neoclassical ambience with rich details like the embroidered cloth tapestries—specially woven by some of the world’s largest looms in Jaipur—which grace the stone instead of paint or wallpaper.
Each room boasts a distinguishing feature that gives it character, a marble fireplace or carved frieze, and wherever possible the designers have retained and accentuated elements of the palace’s original structure. The Kesarba Mahal I stayed in, for example—which was chosen for the terrace overlooking the Macchu—had an exposed stone archway separating the bedroom from the seating area, while the Mahindra Mahal boasts an original stone frieze depicting characters from ancient Greece.
The town of Morvi—a sleepy hamlet, known mainly for tile manufacturing, in the centre of a dry state—is, of course, not on the usual tourist’s itinerary. Morvi is only an hour from the airport (and railway station) at Rajkot, and there are a few attractions within striking distance in Dhrangadhra, Wadhwan, Maliya and Limbdi—each of which boasts palaces, stepwells and rustic bazaars. The only real ‘sights’ in Morvi are the hanging bridge and the Wagh Mandir, a 70-year-old temple of Jaipur stone that is currently being restored and expanded into a museum dedicated to the region’s royal past.
Darbargadh itself is the only true reason to stop here, most likely en route from Ahmedabad to Kutch. But Neemrana is renowned for turning hotels into destinations, and Darbargadh seems likely to uphold that tradition. Over my two-night stay, I never felt the least inclined to step outside the palace, whose high, thick walls kept out the noise of the city so that I could hear only the parakeets and songbirds as I lounged by the swimming pool in the courtyard with my Kindle. The winter sun was warm and bright, and from the terrace attached to my room I could look out over the tenant farms on the floodplain the way Maharaja Waghji Rawaji Thakore must have done in 1885.
The food at Darbargadh was excellent, and the service impeccable—as personable and informal as a trusted family retainer. Each morning, I devoured a stack of aloo parathas, a plate of sharp cheddar cheese and a basket of toast fingers with homemade jam, yet I always seemed to find room for lunch and dinner. As the hotel’s first guest, I had the luxury of ordering whatever I felt like (there was no menu), but I left it to the chef to try to impress me with his specialities, and once I convinced him that he didn’t need to make everything foreigner-bland, the eclectic feasts he prepared—think devilled eggs, penne arrabiata, mashed potatoes and mutton rogan josh—never failed to satisfy.
Only when it came time to leave did I venture out for a brief tour, stopping at the Wagh Mandir for an impromptu lesson in the techniques that the builders from Structwel—the same outfit that repaired the Taj Palace after the Mumbai attacks —were employing to fortify the cupolas damaged by the 2001 earthquake. Vipul, the hotel manager, had also arranged for me to visit the ‘new palace’ across the river, which the Maharani maintains as a part-time residence, so I spent the rest of the morning on a private viewing of the country’s finest art-deco palace outside of Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhavan.
When I left I was stuffed, rested and fully content, my only worry that I was returning to Delhi and work, instead of on down the road to Bhuj and further adventures.
The information
Location Morvi, Gujarat; three-four hours by car from Ahmedabad/one hour from Rajkot
Accommodation Seven suites (Vijayba, Kesarba, Bajiraj, Waghji, Lakhdir, Mahindra and Mayurdhwaj Mahals)
Tariff Rs 8,000 (Vijayba, Kesarba, Lakhdir, Mahindra, Mayurdhwaj); Rs 10,000 (Bajiraj, Waghji)
Contact 011-46661666, neemranahotels.com
Saturday, January 29, 2011
India's "black money" trail
Why won't the government go after billions of dollars in stolen taxes?
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 28, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — If it's true that Indians have stashed more than $450 billion abroad, why doesn't the government appear to care?
The stakes are high. According to international money-laundering watchdog Global Financial Integrity, the unreported overseas funds, or so-called "black money," amounts to a whopping 35 percent of the country's total gross domestic product.
And yet, the Indian government appears to be protecting these tax evaders, despite the fact that the money may be linked to terrorism, the arms trade and drug trafficking. The government has refused to divulge the names of 26 tax evaders with secret accounts abroad — possibly due to links to prominent politicians.
On Thursday, India's Supreme Court blasted the government for withholding the information.
"What steps have you taken? Have you set the law in motion?" the court demanded of solicitor general Gopal Subramanium, who has done everything in his power to avoid releasing the names of the tax evaders.
Though billions of dollars in lost tax income means India has that much less to spend on vital programs designed to uplift its poverty stricken people, there's more to the picture than tax evasion.
With a new corruption scandal surfacing seemingly every week, India's image with global investors has already been tarnished. And by dragging its feet on chasing black money, Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government risks compounding the damage done by the alleged $500 million rice export scam [2], $1.5 billion Commonwealth Games scam [3] and the $40 billion 2G spectrum scam [4] — among many other scandals.
But most importantly, failure to stop the crony capitalism at the root of the black money trail could derail the economic rise of India — where the UPA is preaching "inclusive growth" but the country's 10 richest tycoons account for one-tenth of the entire economy.
This current controversy began in 2009, when former law minister Ram Jethmalani (an opposition legislator), former secretary general of the parliament Subhash Kashyap and several other prominent citizens filed a petition, alleging that the government hasn't taken effective steps to recover illegal funds secreted abroad.
The petitioners' case was strengthened in May 2010, when the government was virtually forced to accept a list of Indians with secret bank accounts in LGT Bank of Liechtenstein — part of a much longer list that Germany that had obtained from a former bank employee in the so-called "Liechtenstein Affair."
In fact, and ridiculously enough, when Germany first offered India the names of the Indian Liechtenstein tax evaders in 2008, the government did its best to avoid accepting them. Then, when it finally accepted the list, the government routed it through the prime minister's office and the directorate of enforcement so that citizens could not demand that the names be divulged through the country's powerful Right to Information Act.
"It's rubbish," said Supreme Court lawyer Kamini Jaiswal. People have a right to know, and this information must be divulged."
While Germany and the United States have already used the information about secret accounts in Liechtenstein to recover millions of dollars and prosecute tax evaders, India has made little progress on either score.
"Either they are protecting their own party members or the corporates who have bribed them," said Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan.
If India were to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Corruption — which India signed in 2005 but is still "studying" — the government could not only divulge the 26 names that Germany revealed but also the names of countless others, he argues. "If they were serious about investigating this illegal money they could easily do so," Bhushan said.
The Indian government has been roundly criticized by the Supreme Court and opposition parties for failing to publicize the names of the individuals involved or launch proceedings against them.
"You know the names and where the money is," the Supreme Court admonished on Thursday. "What action have you taken when you came to know that they have stashed money in foreign banks?"
For its part, the government claims that it cannot follow the money trail because of confidentiality clauses in its double-taxation avoidance agreement with Germany. But critics suggest that argument, as well as claims that the names cannot be divulged without compromising the investigation into the offenders, are just stalling tactics to protect unknown powerful people on the list.
"That [argument] is utterly dishonest," said Bhushan. "Germany openly offered this information to all the countries. It was not even information pertaining to German entities. It was pertaining to account holders to a bank in Liechtenstein, so there was no condition that it would not be revealed."
One of the reasons for the government's prevarication, says Bhushan, is that the illegal funds may also comprise billions of dollars in bribes paid to political parties and public officials.
The signs are pretty grim. Even as prime minister Manmohan Singh has been fighting the impression that his government has allowed corruption to thrive, his solicitor general has been battling tooth and nail to stall the investigation into ill-gotten gains.
Meanwhile, though the Supreme Court has taken an aggressive stance in this case, the judiciary is itself under fire for alleged corruption — after battling to prevent its judges from being forced to reveal their financial assets. As it turns out, the head of the central vigilance commission responsible for investigating all this alleged chicanery was appointed even while he himself faced corruption charges in his home state.
"The watchdog for corruption cases is touted to be corrupt, the judiciary that's looking into the matter is apparently corrupt, and the government is now defending people involved in black money and money laundering," said a lawyer close to the proceedings. "It's quite incredible."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110128/india-corruption-tax-evasion-manmohan-singh
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 28, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — If it's true that Indians have stashed more than $450 billion abroad, why doesn't the government appear to care?
The stakes are high. According to international money-laundering watchdog Global Financial Integrity, the unreported overseas funds, or so-called "black money," amounts to a whopping 35 percent of the country's total gross domestic product.
And yet, the Indian government appears to be protecting these tax evaders, despite the fact that the money may be linked to terrorism, the arms trade and drug trafficking. The government has refused to divulge the names of 26 tax evaders with secret accounts abroad — possibly due to links to prominent politicians.
On Thursday, India's Supreme Court blasted the government for withholding the information.
"What steps have you taken? Have you set the law in motion?" the court demanded of solicitor general Gopal Subramanium, who has done everything in his power to avoid releasing the names of the tax evaders.
Though billions of dollars in lost tax income means India has that much less to spend on vital programs designed to uplift its poverty stricken people, there's more to the picture than tax evasion.
With a new corruption scandal surfacing seemingly every week, India's image with global investors has already been tarnished. And by dragging its feet on chasing black money, Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government risks compounding the damage done by the alleged $500 million rice export scam [2], $1.5 billion Commonwealth Games scam [3] and the $40 billion 2G spectrum scam [4] — among many other scandals.
But most importantly, failure to stop the crony capitalism at the root of the black money trail could derail the economic rise of India — where the UPA is preaching "inclusive growth" but the country's 10 richest tycoons account for one-tenth of the entire economy.
This current controversy began in 2009, when former law minister Ram Jethmalani (an opposition legislator), former secretary general of the parliament Subhash Kashyap and several other prominent citizens filed a petition, alleging that the government hasn't taken effective steps to recover illegal funds secreted abroad.
The petitioners' case was strengthened in May 2010, when the government was virtually forced to accept a list of Indians with secret bank accounts in LGT Bank of Liechtenstein — part of a much longer list that Germany that had obtained from a former bank employee in the so-called "Liechtenstein Affair."
In fact, and ridiculously enough, when Germany first offered India the names of the Indian Liechtenstein tax evaders in 2008, the government did its best to avoid accepting them. Then, when it finally accepted the list, the government routed it through the prime minister's office and the directorate of enforcement so that citizens could not demand that the names be divulged through the country's powerful Right to Information Act.
"It's rubbish," said Supreme Court lawyer Kamini Jaiswal. People have a right to know, and this information must be divulged."
While Germany and the United States have already used the information about secret accounts in Liechtenstein to recover millions of dollars and prosecute tax evaders, India has made little progress on either score.
"Either they are protecting their own party members or the corporates who have bribed them," said Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan.
If India were to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Corruption — which India signed in 2005 but is still "studying" — the government could not only divulge the 26 names that Germany revealed but also the names of countless others, he argues. "If they were serious about investigating this illegal money they could easily do so," Bhushan said.
The Indian government has been roundly criticized by the Supreme Court and opposition parties for failing to publicize the names of the individuals involved or launch proceedings against them.
"You know the names and where the money is," the Supreme Court admonished on Thursday. "What action have you taken when you came to know that they have stashed money in foreign banks?"
For its part, the government claims that it cannot follow the money trail because of confidentiality clauses in its double-taxation avoidance agreement with Germany. But critics suggest that argument, as well as claims that the names cannot be divulged without compromising the investigation into the offenders, are just stalling tactics to protect unknown powerful people on the list.
"That [argument] is utterly dishonest," said Bhushan. "Germany openly offered this information to all the countries. It was not even information pertaining to German entities. It was pertaining to account holders to a bank in Liechtenstein, so there was no condition that it would not be revealed."
One of the reasons for the government's prevarication, says Bhushan, is that the illegal funds may also comprise billions of dollars in bribes paid to political parties and public officials.
The signs are pretty grim. Even as prime minister Manmohan Singh has been fighting the impression that his government has allowed corruption to thrive, his solicitor general has been battling tooth and nail to stall the investigation into ill-gotten gains.
Meanwhile, though the Supreme Court has taken an aggressive stance in this case, the judiciary is itself under fire for alleged corruption — after battling to prevent its judges from being forced to reveal their financial assets. As it turns out, the head of the central vigilance commission responsible for investigating all this alleged chicanery was appointed even while he himself faced corruption charges in his home state.
"The watchdog for corruption cases is touted to be corrupt, the judiciary that's looking into the matter is apparently corrupt, and the government is now defending people involved in black money and money laundering," said a lawyer close to the proceedings. "It's quite incredible."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110128/india-corruption-tax-evasion-manmohan-singh
Thursday, January 27, 2011
India: Can tourism trickle down?
"Heritage" tourism moves from the palace to the hinterland.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 27, 2011)
MORBI, Gujarat — Far below the terrace of the Darbargarh Palace in Morbi, Gujarat — once the fiefdom of a minor Indian prince — tenant farmers plow the floodplain beside the meandering Macchu river.
Car horns blare faintly in the distance. Across the water, smokestacks from the town's many tile factories gently puff soot into the sky. A parakeet swoops onto the terrace. Room service arrives with breakfast.
As the first guest to sleep under Maharani Uma Dubash Morbi's roof since she turned this 19th century, neoclassical palace into a hotel, I was surely at the frontier of so-called "heritage tourism."
"Heritage tourism" is the rubric that India uses for the forts, palaces and havelis that savvy or desperate owners have converted into hotels to prevent them from falling to ruins.
Once upon a time, virtually the only heritage hotels belonged to the grand Maharajas of Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur in Rajasthan — the Indian state created from the erstwhile kingdoms of Rajputana, "the land of kings." These days India's rapid economic growth and a new Indian confidence about the country's postcolonial identity is bringing heritage tourism to the hinterland.
"Now we see a lot of people doing heritage tourism," said Prateek Chawla, co-owner of New Delhi-based Outbound Travels. "Everybody is restoring old properties. It's a big trend, and now it's moving to smaller places, with smaller, boutique hotels."
On the grand scale, the conversion of India's palaces into hotels began in Rajasthan in the early 1980s, after then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi abolished the privy purses with which the erstwhile royals had sustained their colossal properties.
Suddenly robbed of a lifestyle that would put Fifty Cent to shame — with bathtubs filled with champagne, Rolls Royces made of gold and palaces that glistened with precious gems — first the Maharana of Udaipur, then the Maharajas of Jaipur and Jodhpur each converted their various properties into hotels or museums to avoid bankruptcy, turning the state of Rajasthan into India's leading tourist destination.
Soon, the former kings had outsourced the management to professionals, and Taj Hotels and Oberoi Hotels, India's top luxury chains, were dominating the business (Oberoi with spanking new, imitation palaces that rivaled the real ones).
But the acknowledged pioneers of the trickle-down movement, Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg of the Neemrana Group, are of humbler origins. They first showed that even the tiny castles of obscure royals could turn a profit when they bought and restored an otherwise unremarkable 15th-century fortress in tourist-poor Haryana and converted it into a hotel in 1986.
Today, the Neemrana Fort is the flagship of a company that operates 23 intimate heritage hotels on the fringes of the traditional tourist's itinerary. Moreover, as the recent addition of Morbi's Darbargarh Palace shows, they are now pushing even harder to draw tourists into the unexplored heart of India — and that's providing new hope that India's rich architectural and cultural heritage will survive.
"For all people with ancestral properties, we at Neemrana have come to represent a company who turns liabilities into assets," said Nath. "By that logic, every week we get one or two offers from people who want us to buy or manage their forts or palaces. We're buried by it. We're forever looking at properties."
That could be a big boost for India's forgotten places. According to the Ministry of Tourism, the travel industry — which generates substantially more jobs per dollar of investment than either agriculture or industry — can be a major source of employment and economic growth in areas of India that have yet to benefit from the current boom.
To capitalize, the country will need to draw more tourists — last year 5.6 million foreign tourists visited India, generating nearly $15 billion in revenue, but tiny coup-plagued Thailand, next door, saw 15 million tourists spend nearly $20 billion. But it will also need to draw travelers to rural areas and smaller towns, which is one of the national tourism policy's expressed goals.
Some of Neemrana's core properties are in strong locations for tourism — like the Glasshouse on the Ganges, near the Hindu pilgrimage town of Rishikesh, or the Hotel de L'Orient, in the one-time French colony of Pondicherry. But the latest additions are pushing the idea — common throughout Europe — that a charming hotel can itself draw tourists to places like Patiala, where the group operates the Punjab's first heritage hotel in the 19th-century Baradari Palace.
"What we claim to do is give an authentic image of a particular area, by sticking to the way the palaces were furnished in the olden days and serving the food of the area and also employing the local people so the body language belongs to that area," said Wacziarg. "The entire approach to hospitality is different."
Take Morbi, for example. The closest sizable city to this small, industrial town is Ahmedabad — the better part of a day's drive away — and even that city struggles to attract many tourists, not least because alcohol is forbidden in Gujarat. Apart from Darbargarh, the only real attractions in Morbi itself are a couple clock towers, a swinging footbridge that spans the Macchu, and a Hindu temple that's only 70 years old. Yet Neemrana's founders are confident that they can make the old palace go as a hotel, and in the process introduce seasoned tourists to rarely visited sights such as Lothal — an ancient harbor city of the Indus Valley civilization that dates back to 2400 B.C.
"We think when you put somebody out in the wilderness, you will find some 1500 or 1000 year old site," said Nath. "For the real traveler, it's very hot to make private discoveries, not just to go to the Taj Mahal."
India's profit-minded entrepreneurs aren't far behind. Along with older firms like HRH Hotels (where HRH stands for His Royal Highness, the Maharana of Udaipur), large hotel companies like ITCWelcom Group's WelcomHeritage and smaller upstarts like the Pachar Group are restoring properties and forming marketing tie-ups with otherwise isolated hoteliers. WelcomHeritage, for instance, which handled just five heritage properties in 1997, now markets 67 small, niche hotels in 18 states.
"There are a lot of smaller agents doing similar work," said Pankaj Gupta, Chawla's partner at Outbound Travels. "They get a bigger commission from the heritage properties, which they add on and send to people like us. They're only doing B2B work, and they've made people like us aware of the products."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110118/india-tourism-heritage-palace
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 27, 2011)
MORBI, Gujarat — Far below the terrace of the Darbargarh Palace in Morbi, Gujarat — once the fiefdom of a minor Indian prince — tenant farmers plow the floodplain beside the meandering Macchu river.
Car horns blare faintly in the distance. Across the water, smokestacks from the town's many tile factories gently puff soot into the sky. A parakeet swoops onto the terrace. Room service arrives with breakfast.
As the first guest to sleep under Maharani Uma Dubash Morbi's roof since she turned this 19th century, neoclassical palace into a hotel, I was surely at the frontier of so-called "heritage tourism."
"Heritage tourism" is the rubric that India uses for the forts, palaces and havelis that savvy or desperate owners have converted into hotels to prevent them from falling to ruins.
Once upon a time, virtually the only heritage hotels belonged to the grand Maharajas of Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur in Rajasthan — the Indian state created from the erstwhile kingdoms of Rajputana, "the land of kings." These days India's rapid economic growth and a new Indian confidence about the country's postcolonial identity is bringing heritage tourism to the hinterland.
"Now we see a lot of people doing heritage tourism," said Prateek Chawla, co-owner of New Delhi-based Outbound Travels. "Everybody is restoring old properties. It's a big trend, and now it's moving to smaller places, with smaller, boutique hotels."
On the grand scale, the conversion of India's palaces into hotels began in Rajasthan in the early 1980s, after then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi abolished the privy purses with which the erstwhile royals had sustained their colossal properties.
Suddenly robbed of a lifestyle that would put Fifty Cent to shame — with bathtubs filled with champagne, Rolls Royces made of gold and palaces that glistened with precious gems — first the Maharana of Udaipur, then the Maharajas of Jaipur and Jodhpur each converted their various properties into hotels or museums to avoid bankruptcy, turning the state of Rajasthan into India's leading tourist destination.
Soon, the former kings had outsourced the management to professionals, and Taj Hotels and Oberoi Hotels, India's top luxury chains, were dominating the business (Oberoi with spanking new, imitation palaces that rivaled the real ones).
But the acknowledged pioneers of the trickle-down movement, Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg of the Neemrana Group, are of humbler origins. They first showed that even the tiny castles of obscure royals could turn a profit when they bought and restored an otherwise unremarkable 15th-century fortress in tourist-poor Haryana and converted it into a hotel in 1986.
Today, the Neemrana Fort is the flagship of a company that operates 23 intimate heritage hotels on the fringes of the traditional tourist's itinerary. Moreover, as the recent addition of Morbi's Darbargarh Palace shows, they are now pushing even harder to draw tourists into the unexplored heart of India — and that's providing new hope that India's rich architectural and cultural heritage will survive.
"For all people with ancestral properties, we at Neemrana have come to represent a company who turns liabilities into assets," said Nath. "By that logic, every week we get one or two offers from people who want us to buy or manage their forts or palaces. We're buried by it. We're forever looking at properties."
That could be a big boost for India's forgotten places. According to the Ministry of Tourism, the travel industry — which generates substantially more jobs per dollar of investment than either agriculture or industry — can be a major source of employment and economic growth in areas of India that have yet to benefit from the current boom.
To capitalize, the country will need to draw more tourists — last year 5.6 million foreign tourists visited India, generating nearly $15 billion in revenue, but tiny coup-plagued Thailand, next door, saw 15 million tourists spend nearly $20 billion. But it will also need to draw travelers to rural areas and smaller towns, which is one of the national tourism policy's expressed goals.
Some of Neemrana's core properties are in strong locations for tourism — like the Glasshouse on the Ganges, near the Hindu pilgrimage town of Rishikesh, or the Hotel de L'Orient, in the one-time French colony of Pondicherry. But the latest additions are pushing the idea — common throughout Europe — that a charming hotel can itself draw tourists to places like Patiala, where the group operates the Punjab's first heritage hotel in the 19th-century Baradari Palace.
"What we claim to do is give an authentic image of a particular area, by sticking to the way the palaces were furnished in the olden days and serving the food of the area and also employing the local people so the body language belongs to that area," said Wacziarg. "The entire approach to hospitality is different."
Take Morbi, for example. The closest sizable city to this small, industrial town is Ahmedabad — the better part of a day's drive away — and even that city struggles to attract many tourists, not least because alcohol is forbidden in Gujarat. Apart from Darbargarh, the only real attractions in Morbi itself are a couple clock towers, a swinging footbridge that spans the Macchu, and a Hindu temple that's only 70 years old. Yet Neemrana's founders are confident that they can make the old palace go as a hotel, and in the process introduce seasoned tourists to rarely visited sights such as Lothal — an ancient harbor city of the Indus Valley civilization that dates back to 2400 B.C.
"We think when you put somebody out in the wilderness, you will find some 1500 or 1000 year old site," said Nath. "For the real traveler, it's very hot to make private discoveries, not just to go to the Taj Mahal."
India's profit-minded entrepreneurs aren't far behind. Along with older firms like HRH Hotels (where HRH stands for His Royal Highness, the Maharana of Udaipur), large hotel companies like ITCWelcom Group's WelcomHeritage and smaller upstarts like the Pachar Group are restoring properties and forming marketing tie-ups with otherwise isolated hoteliers. WelcomHeritage, for instance, which handled just five heritage properties in 1997, now markets 67 small, niche hotels in 18 states.
"There are a lot of smaller agents doing similar work," said Pankaj Gupta, Chawla's partner at Outbound Travels. "They get a bigger commission from the heritage properties, which they add on and send to people like us. They're only doing B2B work, and they've made people like us aware of the products."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110118/india-tourism-heritage-palace
Saturday, January 22, 2011
India's red-hot art scene
What will it take for the Indian Art Summit to be the next big thing?
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 23, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Inside New Delhi's Pragati Maidan convention center, workmen with electric drills, staple guns and masking tape rushed to hang paintings, power up video installations and position sculptures for the public opening of India's largest art fair today.
The atmosphere was frenetic, and the exhibitors were harried, but the excitement and optimism was palpable.
"It will take a few more years to get established as a significant international art fair, but I'm very optimistic about it because of the circumstances and focus on India," said Gigi Scaria, an artist with several works for sale here. "The world is turning toward India, so that momentum is crucial."
In its third year, the India Art Summit, which opens to the public today, is staking its claim as the next big art fair on the international calendar — hoping to compete with London, Miami and Basel within the next decade. Lured by India's red-hot art market and growing number of art buyers, some 75 galleries will participate, top experts will speak on art in emerging markets and an education series will be conducted to inform buyers.
But even as more and more contemporary Indian artists cross the $100,000 threshold and experts predict the market will grow more than 10 times by 2018, artists and gallery owners are concerned that India lacks the institutions needed to build a strong body of serious, knowledgeable collectors.
"That's down the road," said Deepak Talwar, whose New York-based Talwar Gallery promotes several prominent Indian artists. "The amount of time it takes to get there will not just depend on the [Indian Art] Summit or any one factor. The biggest factor that will influence that is even some small interest from the government in terms of giving a little more attention to the art institutions, creating some new ones and improving the ones that they have."
Indeed, India's public art museums are in dismal shape. There are only a handful of institutions, their permanent collections are small and unimpressive, and the state of curating is dismal. Until its renovation last year, for instance, viewing the permanent collection at New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art felt like stumbling on a few paintings in the basement of a college library, and even post-renovation, the ongoing show of the impressive works of sculptor-architect Anish Kapoor is marred by haphazard organization.
"Do they have any independent curators there? No. It's one bureaucrat making all the decisions," said Talwar.
That absence of state-run institutions has raised the stakes for the summit, which has to play a larger role than a typical sales-focused art fair. In a sense, it is emerging from the vacuum as a kind of focal point for the developing art scene, helping to create critical mass for budding domestic galleries and a host of disparate private initiatives aimed at creating institutions whose concerns run deeper than tracking the auction prices at Christie's.
Apart from the 84 galleries that have taken booths at the fair, displaying some 500 artists, most of the New Delhi-based galleries have timed openings to coincide with the summit. On Wednesday night philanthropist Kiran Nadar launched a stunning private museum in the heart of the city's shopping district. And Czech carmaker Skoda will announce the winner of its new prize for contemporary art on Friday evening — as the art summit opens to the public.
Essentially, three years after its rather humble beginning, the Indian Art Summit has created a reason for everybody interested in the future of Indian art to be in India in the same place at the same time.
Since the first Indian Art Summit, in 2008, the number of exhibiting galleries has tripled, the number of visitors is tipped to grow from fewer than 10,000 people to more than 60,000, and the value of works sold at the fair is expected to reach nearly $10 million, compared with less than $2.5 million in its first year.
Moreover, the number of international galleries attending this year — while still modest at only 34 — has doubled since 2010. And even though the bigger names, such as London's Lisson Gallery, are here promoting top Indian artists such as Anish Kapoor, smaller and hungrier international galleries are dipping their toes in the water to see if India's burgeoning art collectors can be tempted to look beyond Indian art. That means that works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali and Damien Hirst are on the block, but also a host of lesser known artists from the U.K., Europe and Asia.
"With the Indian GDP booming and the number of Indian millionaires on the rise, a section of the international galleries are interested in exploring the potential of promoting their program to the Indian collector base," said Arvind Vijaymohan, a consultant who advises art buyers. "The Art Summit is the most viable platform in the current context for anyone interested in connecting with Indian collectors."
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 23, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Inside New Delhi's Pragati Maidan convention center, workmen with electric drills, staple guns and masking tape rushed to hang paintings, power up video installations and position sculptures for the public opening of India's largest art fair today.
The atmosphere was frenetic, and the exhibitors were harried, but the excitement and optimism was palpable.
"It will take a few more years to get established as a significant international art fair, but I'm very optimistic about it because of the circumstances and focus on India," said Gigi Scaria, an artist with several works for sale here. "The world is turning toward India, so that momentum is crucial."
In its third year, the India Art Summit, which opens to the public today, is staking its claim as the next big art fair on the international calendar — hoping to compete with London, Miami and Basel within the next decade. Lured by India's red-hot art market and growing number of art buyers, some 75 galleries will participate, top experts will speak on art in emerging markets and an education series will be conducted to inform buyers.
But even as more and more contemporary Indian artists cross the $100,000 threshold and experts predict the market will grow more than 10 times by 2018, artists and gallery owners are concerned that India lacks the institutions needed to build a strong body of serious, knowledgeable collectors.
"That's down the road," said Deepak Talwar, whose New York-based Talwar Gallery promotes several prominent Indian artists. "The amount of time it takes to get there will not just depend on the [Indian Art] Summit or any one factor. The biggest factor that will influence that is even some small interest from the government in terms of giving a little more attention to the art institutions, creating some new ones and improving the ones that they have."
Indeed, India's public art museums are in dismal shape. There are only a handful of institutions, their permanent collections are small and unimpressive, and the state of curating is dismal. Until its renovation last year, for instance, viewing the permanent collection at New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art felt like stumbling on a few paintings in the basement of a college library, and even post-renovation, the ongoing show of the impressive works of sculptor-architect Anish Kapoor is marred by haphazard organization.
"Do they have any independent curators there? No. It's one bureaucrat making all the decisions," said Talwar.
That absence of state-run institutions has raised the stakes for the summit, which has to play a larger role than a typical sales-focused art fair. In a sense, it is emerging from the vacuum as a kind of focal point for the developing art scene, helping to create critical mass for budding domestic galleries and a host of disparate private initiatives aimed at creating institutions whose concerns run deeper than tracking the auction prices at Christie's.
Apart from the 84 galleries that have taken booths at the fair, displaying some 500 artists, most of the New Delhi-based galleries have timed openings to coincide with the summit. On Wednesday night philanthropist Kiran Nadar launched a stunning private museum in the heart of the city's shopping district. And Czech carmaker Skoda will announce the winner of its new prize for contemporary art on Friday evening — as the art summit opens to the public.
Essentially, three years after its rather humble beginning, the Indian Art Summit has created a reason for everybody interested in the future of Indian art to be in India in the same place at the same time.
Since the first Indian Art Summit, in 2008, the number of exhibiting galleries has tripled, the number of visitors is tipped to grow from fewer than 10,000 people to more than 60,000, and the value of works sold at the fair is expected to reach nearly $10 million, compared with less than $2.5 million in its first year.
Moreover, the number of international galleries attending this year — while still modest at only 34 — has doubled since 2010. And even though the bigger names, such as London's Lisson Gallery, are here promoting top Indian artists such as Anish Kapoor, smaller and hungrier international galleries are dipping their toes in the water to see if India's burgeoning art collectors can be tempted to look beyond Indian art. That means that works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali and Damien Hirst are on the block, but also a host of lesser known artists from the U.K., Europe and Asia.
"With the Indian GDP booming and the number of Indian millionaires on the rise, a section of the international galleries are interested in exploring the potential of promoting their program to the Indian collector base," said Arvind Vijaymohan, a consultant who advises art buyers. "The Art Summit is the most viable platform in the current context for anyone interested in connecting with Indian collectors."
Friday, January 21, 2011
India's military shopping spree
Analysis: India plans to spend $100 billion to modernize its military. But how likely is success?
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 21, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Nearly 30 years after its inception, India's supersonic light combat aircraft was finally cleared for induction into the air force this week — four years behind schedule, $500 million over budget and still propelled by an American-made engine.
Now, New Delhi is getting ready to double-down.
"After the Tejas [aircraft] accomplishes a series of milestones, the country is poised for a major turning point," Defense Minister A.K. Antony said at the test flight ceremony in Bangalore on Monday.
With a whopping $100 billion earmarked for defense purchases this decade, India has its sights set on simultaneously modernizing its moribund military and jumpstarting its own lame duck defense industry.
But there's a long way to go. Shortly before YouTube videos surfaced of a Chinese stealth fighter, India's Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) in all seriousness unveiled a domestically designed and developed... airship.
"There's a gap between their ability and their claims," said Anit Mukherjee, a research fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. "They may not be able to do a Fiat, but they claim to be able to build a Ferrari."
Meanwhile, the stakes couldn't be higher. A modern military is essential if India is to take a larger role in Asia and the Indian Ocean — where China is swiftly gaining influence. The DRDO is 40 years behind schedule and $1.6 billion over budget, the defense minister said in May. And its most ambitious and vital projects have by and large been failures.
While that might be embarrassing for India, it's a huge opportunity for U.S. suppliers like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. But Washington will need to cut some of the red tape associated with U.S. arms deals to leverage American industry's cutting-edge defense prowess to reshape U.S.-India relations. And New Delhi will need to defeat the rearguard resistance to private industry posed by the left to transform its domestic defense industry.
"There are three gods in Hinduism: Brahma, the creator; Shiva, the destroyer, and Vishnu, the preserver. You will need all three to reform our aerospace sector," said former Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, who now heads a think tank called the Center for Air Power Studies.
The first step will be Shiva's job: destroying — or radically restructuring — the existing system.
India's department of atomic energy has built a nuclear bomb and its space agency has sent a rocket to the Moon. But since 1992, when APJ Abdul Kalam declared that India should aim to make 70 percent of the equipment used by its military by 2005, the DRDO has "invented" radar and sonar systems, combat rifles, an artillery gun and cold weather gear for soldiers posted on the Siachen glacier — all of which it could have bought off the shelf elsewhere (including North Face).
Various ballistic missiles have failed in the testing process. Army personnel say the Arjun tank doesn't shoot straight. And even after it gets a second-generation engine in 2014, again from General Electric, critics say the Tejas — which was jointly produced by the DRDO and state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. — will not be able to compete with state-of-the-art fighters.
"DRDO has not produced anything that would change India's strategic condition in any way," said Sunil Dasgupta, a defense expert with the Brookings Institution. "After all, that's the entire point of military research and development."
As a result, India is preparing for a foreign shopping spree. According to a recent study by the consultancy firm KPMG, India is expected to buy $100 billion in foreign weapons by 2022. In the pipeline already are a $10 billion contract for 126 multi-role combat aircraft, a $7.6 billion tender for 12 stealth frigates, a $3.5 billion deal for seven submarines and a $3 billion contract for 197 light helicopters, among other items.
But Indian industry could benefit, too, if New Delhi plays its cards right. If it succeeds in leveraging its planned big-ticket purchases and its attractiveness as a manufacturing center for global suppliers to encourage technology transfers, KPMG argues, India could become one of the world's key sourcing destinations for defense systems and equipment, fueling technology spinoffs for a host of industries.
"If you look very conservatively, over the next 20 years, India will require about 1,200-1,500 aircraft in the civil sector alone," said Kak. "If you take the military aircraft, the military and civilian infrastructure, and you put it all together I see in the next 20 years a market of between $250 and $300 billion."
That's not the only reason the intersection of the commercial and military aerospace industries presents exciting prospects. There's a lesson in history, too. Prior to India's 1991 economic liberalization, the country's automobile sector was in much the same condition as its aerospace industry is today — with only two state-owned manufacturers, both relying on outdated designs to generate a pittance in sales.
Since opening to joint ventures and later direct foreign competition, however, India's car industry has grown more than tenfold in sales and manufacturing capacity — producing nearly 2.5 million cars a year, compared with less than a million in 2003. More than 40 Indian auto parts companies generate $100 million or more in annual revenue — supplying components to virtually every carmaker in the world. And half a dozen of the world's largest auto companies have invested $500 million or more in the past year to make India a global hub for small car manufacturing.
Aerospace could be looking at its own reform-era boom, following the government's decisions to open up the defense industry to domestic private companies and allow limited foreign direct investment in defense in 2001. Already, Mahindra Defence Systems has inked a deal with Seabird. Tata Advanced Systems has formed agreements with Boeing, Israel Aerospace Industries and Sikorsky Aircraft. And Larsen and Toubro has signed pacts with the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), Boeing, Raytheon, the Russian Aircraft Corporation (RAC MiG), Saab Gripen and Lockheed Martin.
"The Indian aerospace industry, both military and civil, stands uniquely poised today, on the threshold of catapulting itself into the global arena," the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote in a recent industry report.
But both New Delhi and Washington will have to break existing paradigms for U.S. suppliers to seize the opportunity and bolster the ongoing transformation of U.S.-India relations.
For decades, India has preferred to buy arms from Russian defense companies, due to the erroneous impression that its state-owned firms are less prone to corruption — especially after allegations of kickbacks from Sweden's Bofors brought down Rajiv Gandhi's government in 1989. Moreover, Indian strategists until recently deemed American companies to be unreliable weapons suppliers, following America's gunboat diplomacy in the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, the U.S. decision to equip Pakistan's air force with the F-16 in the 1980s, and the imposition of sanctions in response to India's nuclear tests in 1998.
At the same time, America's private defense firms — in contrast to state-owned rivals — will likely have deep reservations about the demands India is making in return for access to its large and fast-growing weapons market. The terms of the multi-role combat aircraft contract, for instance, require that a massive 50 percent of the total outlay be outsourced back to Indian industry in what is known in the industry as "offsets." And the absence of any significant privately owned Indian defense companies will make meeting that requirement difficult for American firms — which unlike their Russian rivals are reluctant to form joint ventures with state-owned enterprises.
"I don't think Indian officials accept this idea that government can fund research without actually conducting it. There are no startups, no programs whereby people can come together in garages to develop new technology," said Dasgupta, who co-authored "Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization," with the Brookings Institute's Stephen P. Cohen. "That is something that needs to happen in order to foment the activity that breeds innovation."
To overcome those obstacles, Washington will need to cut some of the red tape associated with U.S. arms deals and begin to treat India like the "strategic partner" it is meant to be instead of a subordinate ally.
For example, India at first baulked at signing America's boilerplate logistical supply agreement and proliferation security initiative, because some Indian policymakers feared it would force India into toeing the U.S. line on foreign policy.
Meanwhile, New Delhi will need to shake off its fears about private firms in the defense sector — whether related to corruption or sovereignty. At the simplest level, that means opening defense and aerospace further to foreign direct investment and removing the remaining tax incentives and the like that give state-owned firms a cost advantage. But it also means formulating a defense industrialization policy that identifies and prioritizes the technologies and capacities it wants to acquire, and amending the existing offset policies, according to KPMG.
Currently, India doesn't offer its foreign suppliers any offset multipliers — which encourage technology transfer by giving desired technologies a greater offset value than the contract's actual dollar amount. (For example, if India assigned jet engine technologies a multiplier of 7, then choosing a local company to manufacture $100 million in components would earn the foreign firm $700 million in offsets). But most importantly, India will need to re-envision its current narrow definition of privatization — which doesn't allow for government-funded research unless one of its moribund government labs does the work.
"The biggest long-term thing is to create a procedure whereby research can be independent from the state," said Dasgupta. "If that can happen somehow the pace of innovation will get faster."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110111/india-military-air-force-tejas
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 21, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Nearly 30 years after its inception, India's supersonic light combat aircraft was finally cleared for induction into the air force this week — four years behind schedule, $500 million over budget and still propelled by an American-made engine.
Now, New Delhi is getting ready to double-down.
"After the Tejas [aircraft] accomplishes a series of milestones, the country is poised for a major turning point," Defense Minister A.K. Antony said at the test flight ceremony in Bangalore on Monday.
With a whopping $100 billion earmarked for defense purchases this decade, India has its sights set on simultaneously modernizing its moribund military and jumpstarting its own lame duck defense industry.
But there's a long way to go. Shortly before YouTube videos surfaced of a Chinese stealth fighter, India's Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) in all seriousness unveiled a domestically designed and developed... airship.
"There's a gap between their ability and their claims," said Anit Mukherjee, a research fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. "They may not be able to do a Fiat, but they claim to be able to build a Ferrari."
Meanwhile, the stakes couldn't be higher. A modern military is essential if India is to take a larger role in Asia and the Indian Ocean — where China is swiftly gaining influence. The DRDO is 40 years behind schedule and $1.6 billion over budget, the defense minister said in May. And its most ambitious and vital projects have by and large been failures.
While that might be embarrassing for India, it's a huge opportunity for U.S. suppliers like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. But Washington will need to cut some of the red tape associated with U.S. arms deals to leverage American industry's cutting-edge defense prowess to reshape U.S.-India relations. And New Delhi will need to defeat the rearguard resistance to private industry posed by the left to transform its domestic defense industry.
"There are three gods in Hinduism: Brahma, the creator; Shiva, the destroyer, and Vishnu, the preserver. You will need all three to reform our aerospace sector," said former Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, who now heads a think tank called the Center for Air Power Studies.
The first step will be Shiva's job: destroying — or radically restructuring — the existing system.
India's department of atomic energy has built a nuclear bomb and its space agency has sent a rocket to the Moon. But since 1992, when APJ Abdul Kalam declared that India should aim to make 70 percent of the equipment used by its military by 2005, the DRDO has "invented" radar and sonar systems, combat rifles, an artillery gun and cold weather gear for soldiers posted on the Siachen glacier — all of which it could have bought off the shelf elsewhere (including North Face).
Various ballistic missiles have failed in the testing process. Army personnel say the Arjun tank doesn't shoot straight. And even after it gets a second-generation engine in 2014, again from General Electric, critics say the Tejas — which was jointly produced by the DRDO and state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. — will not be able to compete with state-of-the-art fighters.
"DRDO has not produced anything that would change India's strategic condition in any way," said Sunil Dasgupta, a defense expert with the Brookings Institution. "After all, that's the entire point of military research and development."
As a result, India is preparing for a foreign shopping spree. According to a recent study by the consultancy firm KPMG, India is expected to buy $100 billion in foreign weapons by 2022. In the pipeline already are a $10 billion contract for 126 multi-role combat aircraft, a $7.6 billion tender for 12 stealth frigates, a $3.5 billion deal for seven submarines and a $3 billion contract for 197 light helicopters, among other items.
But Indian industry could benefit, too, if New Delhi plays its cards right. If it succeeds in leveraging its planned big-ticket purchases and its attractiveness as a manufacturing center for global suppliers to encourage technology transfers, KPMG argues, India could become one of the world's key sourcing destinations for defense systems and equipment, fueling technology spinoffs for a host of industries.
"If you look very conservatively, over the next 20 years, India will require about 1,200-1,500 aircraft in the civil sector alone," said Kak. "If you take the military aircraft, the military and civilian infrastructure, and you put it all together I see in the next 20 years a market of between $250 and $300 billion."
That's not the only reason the intersection of the commercial and military aerospace industries presents exciting prospects. There's a lesson in history, too. Prior to India's 1991 economic liberalization, the country's automobile sector was in much the same condition as its aerospace industry is today — with only two state-owned manufacturers, both relying on outdated designs to generate a pittance in sales.
Since opening to joint ventures and later direct foreign competition, however, India's car industry has grown more than tenfold in sales and manufacturing capacity — producing nearly 2.5 million cars a year, compared with less than a million in 2003. More than 40 Indian auto parts companies generate $100 million or more in annual revenue — supplying components to virtually every carmaker in the world. And half a dozen of the world's largest auto companies have invested $500 million or more in the past year to make India a global hub for small car manufacturing.
Aerospace could be looking at its own reform-era boom, following the government's decisions to open up the defense industry to domestic private companies and allow limited foreign direct investment in defense in 2001. Already, Mahindra Defence Systems has inked a deal with Seabird. Tata Advanced Systems has formed agreements with Boeing, Israel Aerospace Industries and Sikorsky Aircraft. And Larsen and Toubro has signed pacts with the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), Boeing, Raytheon, the Russian Aircraft Corporation (RAC MiG), Saab Gripen and Lockheed Martin.
"The Indian aerospace industry, both military and civil, stands uniquely poised today, on the threshold of catapulting itself into the global arena," the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote in a recent industry report.
But both New Delhi and Washington will have to break existing paradigms for U.S. suppliers to seize the opportunity and bolster the ongoing transformation of U.S.-India relations.
For decades, India has preferred to buy arms from Russian defense companies, due to the erroneous impression that its state-owned firms are less prone to corruption — especially after allegations of kickbacks from Sweden's Bofors brought down Rajiv Gandhi's government in 1989. Moreover, Indian strategists until recently deemed American companies to be unreliable weapons suppliers, following America's gunboat diplomacy in the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, the U.S. decision to equip Pakistan's air force with the F-16 in the 1980s, and the imposition of sanctions in response to India's nuclear tests in 1998.
At the same time, America's private defense firms — in contrast to state-owned rivals — will likely have deep reservations about the demands India is making in return for access to its large and fast-growing weapons market. The terms of the multi-role combat aircraft contract, for instance, require that a massive 50 percent of the total outlay be outsourced back to Indian industry in what is known in the industry as "offsets." And the absence of any significant privately owned Indian defense companies will make meeting that requirement difficult for American firms — which unlike their Russian rivals are reluctant to form joint ventures with state-owned enterprises.
"I don't think Indian officials accept this idea that government can fund research without actually conducting it. There are no startups, no programs whereby people can come together in garages to develop new technology," said Dasgupta, who co-authored "Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization," with the Brookings Institute's Stephen P. Cohen. "That is something that needs to happen in order to foment the activity that breeds innovation."
To overcome those obstacles, Washington will need to cut some of the red tape associated with U.S. arms deals and begin to treat India like the "strategic partner" it is meant to be instead of a subordinate ally.
For example, India at first baulked at signing America's boilerplate logistical supply agreement and proliferation security initiative, because some Indian policymakers feared it would force India into toeing the U.S. line on foreign policy.
Meanwhile, New Delhi will need to shake off its fears about private firms in the defense sector — whether related to corruption or sovereignty. At the simplest level, that means opening defense and aerospace further to foreign direct investment and removing the remaining tax incentives and the like that give state-owned firms a cost advantage. But it also means formulating a defense industrialization policy that identifies and prioritizes the technologies and capacities it wants to acquire, and amending the existing offset policies, according to KPMG.
Currently, India doesn't offer its foreign suppliers any offset multipliers — which encourage technology transfer by giving desired technologies a greater offset value than the contract's actual dollar amount. (For example, if India assigned jet engine technologies a multiplier of 7, then choosing a local company to manufacture $100 million in components would earn the foreign firm $700 million in offsets). But most importantly, India will need to re-envision its current narrow definition of privatization — which doesn't allow for government-funded research unless one of its moribund government labs does the work.
"The biggest long-term thing is to create a procedure whereby research can be independent from the state," said Dasgupta. "If that can happen somehow the pace of innovation will get faster."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110111/india-military-air-force-tejas
Friday, January 07, 2011
Food crisis threatens India
In a country where cost of onions has toppled two governments, Singh has to act fast.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 7, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Alok Kumar, a 30-year-old father of two, is worried. Though the monthly salary he earns as a chauffeur in New Delhi amounts to about half the sum the average Indian earns in a year, high prices have forced him to stop giving his children their allowance and eliminate essentials from his family's diet.
"We used to live on 3000-4000 rupees a month, and that has gone up to as much as 13000," Kumar said. "At home we don’t even use onion and garlic now. Not at all! That has made the food bland and tasteless. Yes. But what else can we do? We have no way out. We are helpless.”
Kumar is hardly alone. The specter of another food crisis has the whole world nervous. But in India, skyrocketing food prices threaten to send the entire economy into a tailspin, as the government struggles to balance growth and inflation — and create a safety net for the millions still mired in poverty.
Government data revealed on Thursday that India's food inflation topped 18 percent for the week ending Dec. 25, with vegetables prices up more than 50 percent from the same period last year. The steep increase came as a surprise to economists, who had predicted a moderation in prices due to last year's good monsoon.
For India, a spike in food prices means real suffering. But a prolonged and seemingly unstoppable rise in the cost of basic commodities like the one India has witnessed over the past two years could have farther reaching effects.
"If food prices rise, wages go up because workers will demand high wages," said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "Wages going up make cost of products go up, and manufacturers will try to pass it on to the consumer. It's called a wage-price spiral."
That's grim news for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, which has already seen its approval rate plummet. According to a recent India Today/AC-Nielsen poll, the UPA has since August fallen behind the opposition in nearly 20 percent of the parliamentary constituencies it won in 2009. In a country where economists track inflation every week, instead of every month, and the cost of onions has brought down two governments, that means Singh has to act fast. The trouble is, there may not be anything he can do.
“We are not sure whether we have all the tools in our hands to control food inflation,” former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who is now the home minister, said earlier this week.
Since coming to power for its first term in 2004, the UPA has sought in vain for "inclusive growth" that will bring the rural poor out of poverty as rapidly as it creates wealth for the elite and middle class. The stopgap answer has been social welfare programs like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which ensures that rural laborers get 100 days of work per year. But economists argue that the NREGS has only driven up prices, especially for items like milk, eggs and vegetables, as the poor begin to buy better food and change the ratio of demand to supply.
Now, to avert a crisis, the government has no choice but to increase the wages paid under the scheme, even while the central bank tightens monetary policy to rein in inflation. Essentially, India's politicians are driving up demand at the same time that its fiscal authorities seek to curb it. Thus, the same day that the gaudy inflation numbers came out, Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi announced wage increases of 17-30 percent for NREGS workers, and economists pushed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to add another hike to the 150 basis points it has boosted its benchmark lending rate since mid-March.
The bottom line: India will have to sacrifice growth to stave off inflation. But tightening money supply to slow demand for fuel and concrete may not be enough to avert a food crisis.
"It's going to be a very difficult balancing act for the government to maintain growth expectations over 8.5 to 9 percent," said Shubhata Rao, chief economist at Yes Bank. "Some growth will have to be compromised in its focus toward inflation management."
Complicating matters, the very reason that India was able to weather the global financial crisis may make it more vulnerable to the food crisis.
India's economic growth is driven by domestic demand — not exports — so India didn't blink when the United States hit the skids. But that same domestic demand, fueled by the rising incomes of the middle class and government spending on the poor, has put new pressure on the supply of oil, steel, cement and everything else. And the meltdown elsewhere has pushed hot money into India, further feeding the fire.
In agriculture especially, economists say, supply has not kept up with demand.
The core problems are poor supply chain management, stagnating investment and diminishing returns from the green revolution's prescription of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and heavy irrigation. But some agriculturalists argue that these issues are exacerbated by the current attempts to solve them — by dismantling government-regulated pricing, creating a commodities futures market and encouraging industrialized agriculture. Thus, while pro-market and anti-industry experts alike blame middlemen for exaggerating the price rise by hoarding items like onions, there are deep divides over what action should be taken.
On one hand, market reformers argue that big retail — and foreign players like Walmart — must be allowed a freer hand in Indian agriculture to encourage investment and streamline the supply chain. On the other, left leaning farmer advocates say that the government's "market mantra" and politicians' dependence on traders for campaign financing has prevented timely and efficient moves to curb profiteering.
"The country does not face a constraint on the supply front," said Devinder Sharma, a farm policy analyst. "If it is happening it is because the middleman is making a killing."
Whoever is to blame, no country fears skyrocketing food prices more than India, where some two-thirds of the billion-plus population lives hand to mouth.
“We are barely managing because of the price rise," said Jai Chand, a 32-year-old security guard. "My children have become thin because we can’t give them enough milk. We eat vegetables once a day and sometimes not even that."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110106/food-security-crisis-economy
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 7, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — Alok Kumar, a 30-year-old father of two, is worried. Though the monthly salary he earns as a chauffeur in New Delhi amounts to about half the sum the average Indian earns in a year, high prices have forced him to stop giving his children their allowance and eliminate essentials from his family's diet.
"We used to live on 3000-4000 rupees a month, and that has gone up to as much as 13000," Kumar said. "At home we don’t even use onion and garlic now. Not at all! That has made the food bland and tasteless. Yes. But what else can we do? We have no way out. We are helpless.”
Kumar is hardly alone. The specter of another food crisis has the whole world nervous. But in India, skyrocketing food prices threaten to send the entire economy into a tailspin, as the government struggles to balance growth and inflation — and create a safety net for the millions still mired in poverty.
Government data revealed on Thursday that India's food inflation topped 18 percent for the week ending Dec. 25, with vegetables prices up more than 50 percent from the same period last year. The steep increase came as a surprise to economists, who had predicted a moderation in prices due to last year's good monsoon.
For India, a spike in food prices means real suffering. But a prolonged and seemingly unstoppable rise in the cost of basic commodities like the one India has witnessed over the past two years could have farther reaching effects.
"If food prices rise, wages go up because workers will demand high wages," said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. "Wages going up make cost of products go up, and manufacturers will try to pass it on to the consumer. It's called a wage-price spiral."
That's grim news for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, which has already seen its approval rate plummet. According to a recent India Today/AC-Nielsen poll, the UPA has since August fallen behind the opposition in nearly 20 percent of the parliamentary constituencies it won in 2009. In a country where economists track inflation every week, instead of every month, and the cost of onions has brought down two governments, that means Singh has to act fast. The trouble is, there may not be anything he can do.
“We are not sure whether we have all the tools in our hands to control food inflation,” former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who is now the home minister, said earlier this week.
Since coming to power for its first term in 2004, the UPA has sought in vain for "inclusive growth" that will bring the rural poor out of poverty as rapidly as it creates wealth for the elite and middle class. The stopgap answer has been social welfare programs like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which ensures that rural laborers get 100 days of work per year. But economists argue that the NREGS has only driven up prices, especially for items like milk, eggs and vegetables, as the poor begin to buy better food and change the ratio of demand to supply.
Now, to avert a crisis, the government has no choice but to increase the wages paid under the scheme, even while the central bank tightens monetary policy to rein in inflation. Essentially, India's politicians are driving up demand at the same time that its fiscal authorities seek to curb it. Thus, the same day that the gaudy inflation numbers came out, Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi announced wage increases of 17-30 percent for NREGS workers, and economists pushed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to add another hike to the 150 basis points it has boosted its benchmark lending rate since mid-March.
The bottom line: India will have to sacrifice growth to stave off inflation. But tightening money supply to slow demand for fuel and concrete may not be enough to avert a food crisis.
"It's going to be a very difficult balancing act for the government to maintain growth expectations over 8.5 to 9 percent," said Shubhata Rao, chief economist at Yes Bank. "Some growth will have to be compromised in its focus toward inflation management."
Complicating matters, the very reason that India was able to weather the global financial crisis may make it more vulnerable to the food crisis.
India's economic growth is driven by domestic demand — not exports — so India didn't blink when the United States hit the skids. But that same domestic demand, fueled by the rising incomes of the middle class and government spending on the poor, has put new pressure on the supply of oil, steel, cement and everything else. And the meltdown elsewhere has pushed hot money into India, further feeding the fire.
In agriculture especially, economists say, supply has not kept up with demand.
The core problems are poor supply chain management, stagnating investment and diminishing returns from the green revolution's prescription of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and heavy irrigation. But some agriculturalists argue that these issues are exacerbated by the current attempts to solve them — by dismantling government-regulated pricing, creating a commodities futures market and encouraging industrialized agriculture. Thus, while pro-market and anti-industry experts alike blame middlemen for exaggerating the price rise by hoarding items like onions, there are deep divides over what action should be taken.
On one hand, market reformers argue that big retail — and foreign players like Walmart — must be allowed a freer hand in Indian agriculture to encourage investment and streamline the supply chain. On the other, left leaning farmer advocates say that the government's "market mantra" and politicians' dependence on traders for campaign financing has prevented timely and efficient moves to curb profiteering.
"The country does not face a constraint on the supply front," said Devinder Sharma, a farm policy analyst. "If it is happening it is because the middleman is making a killing."
Whoever is to blame, no country fears skyrocketing food prices more than India, where some two-thirds of the billion-plus population lives hand to mouth.
“We are barely managing because of the price rise," said Jai Chand, a 32-year-old security guard. "My children have become thin because we can’t give them enough milk. We eat vegetables once a day and sometimes not even that."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/110106/food-security-crisis-economy
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Industrial espionage booming in corporate India
Insiders say government phone taps are just the tip of the iceberg.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 2, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — For the past month, Indian business leaders have watched in horror as a series of tapped telephone conversations between a powerful lobbyist and top industrialists have surfaced in the press.
But local security experts say the revelations associated with the alleged 2G telecom scam are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to vulnerable company secrets. In India's fast-growing economy, they say, no industry is booming bigger than corporate espionage.
"If you look at all the companies doing business in the electronic sector in India, the chances are that four out of 10 would invariably have faced or are facing such issues," said Pavan Duggal, a supreme court lawyer who specializes in cyber law. "The reality is that these thefts of intellectual property rights and confidential data are hitting the corporate world in a big way."
Cut-throat competition provides ample motive, as companies battle to carve out brand positions, retain top talent and develop new products. A lax legal environment allows spies to operate with relative impunity. And a boom in white collar jobs means that employees shift jobs every few months — making it all too easy for companies to plant a mole in competing operations, and all too tempting for job-jumpers to walk away with sensitive information or protected intellectual property.
"The perpetrators of unauthorized access of corporate data do it with impunity, knowing full well that the law is deficient and that it will take a long time for them to be prosecuted," said Duggal.
According to a recent survey conducted by the consultancy firm KPMG, 14 percent of Indian companies have been victims of corporate spying, while another 39 percent fell prey to intellectual property theft and computer-related fraud — and business-sensitive information and user IDs/passwords were the principal targets.
The potential losses from this kind of spying are difficult to calculate — since nobody knows what effect a stolen ad campaign might have had, or how a stolen design might have dominated the market. But there's no doubt that big money is at stake. Early this year, for instance, India's Thermax agreed to pay Pennsylvania-based Purolite International $38 million to settle a lawsuit over the alleged theft of proprietary water purification technology.
"You may not use [your competitor's] research work," said Kunwar Vikram Singh, president of the Indian Council of Corporate Investigators. "But suppose you have already developed your own brilliant idea. Even to launch that brilliant idea in the shape of a product you must know the market."
The spies aren't always after new technology. The targeted information ranges from client lists to proprietary software to advertising strategies, says Singh.
Not long ago, for instance, a company was readying a new ad blitz when, on the day before the launch, executives saw their planned slogan all over the city on their morning commute — on billboards advertising one of their competitors.
In another case, one of the country's foremost motorcycle and scooter manufacturers lost the design and specifications for an upcoming model to a competitor through a spy planted with the contractor that was running the company cafeteria.
"They planted a guy ... who knew a little about IT and could become friendly with people, and then when the office was closed he would access employees' computers and get the information out," said Ravi Kapur of ACE Detectives, the private investigator hired to plug the leak.
Part of the problem is that Indian laws governing these areas are weak and ambiguous. India has no specific data protection law, so the theft of sensitive information like marketing strategies or employee salaries — which is not governed by intellectual property laws — throws up a host of legal questions.
And while the unauthorized downloading or copying of computer files is illegal, the civil and criminal penalties are minor compared with the sums at stake for corporations. A criminal booked for data theft under the Information Technology Act, for instance, faces a maximum three-year term in prison and a maximum fine of around $10,000, and the most a victim can seek in civil damage is about $1 million — which the Thermax-Purolite settlement reveals as a pittance.
"It's extremely lax," said Kapur. "People don't generally get caught. Then, even if this guy gets caught, they're not after this guy [who took the information] — they're after the competitors. Now, to ensure that the whole chain gets into the loop is not the easiest of tasks."
Private investigators have been the biggest beneficiaries, as the budding industry profits from both sides of the information war. While none of the detective agencies interviewed would admit to conducting actual corporate espionage, firms that perform similar work — such as planting spies for clients within labor unions — say that they get requests to steal competitive information on a daily basis.
Moreover, there's almost as much money to be made in protecting firms from spies as there is from spying on them, not only through investigating leaks, but also in risk analysis, security systems design and — since it's the enemy inside that's most feared — employee background checks.
And that means going to work for an outsourcing company is starting to seem like applying to the Pentagon.
"Before, people were reluctant to snoop around," said Singh. "Now, they go deep."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101223/industrial-espionage-corporate-india
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - January 2, 2011)
NEW DELHI, India — For the past month, Indian business leaders have watched in horror as a series of tapped telephone conversations between a powerful lobbyist and top industrialists have surfaced in the press.
But local security experts say the revelations associated with the alleged 2G telecom scam are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to vulnerable company secrets. In India's fast-growing economy, they say, no industry is booming bigger than corporate espionage.
"If you look at all the companies doing business in the electronic sector in India, the chances are that four out of 10 would invariably have faced or are facing such issues," said Pavan Duggal, a supreme court lawyer who specializes in cyber law. "The reality is that these thefts of intellectual property rights and confidential data are hitting the corporate world in a big way."
Cut-throat competition provides ample motive, as companies battle to carve out brand positions, retain top talent and develop new products. A lax legal environment allows spies to operate with relative impunity. And a boom in white collar jobs means that employees shift jobs every few months — making it all too easy for companies to plant a mole in competing operations, and all too tempting for job-jumpers to walk away with sensitive information or protected intellectual property.
"The perpetrators of unauthorized access of corporate data do it with impunity, knowing full well that the law is deficient and that it will take a long time for them to be prosecuted," said Duggal.
According to a recent survey conducted by the consultancy firm KPMG, 14 percent of Indian companies have been victims of corporate spying, while another 39 percent fell prey to intellectual property theft and computer-related fraud — and business-sensitive information and user IDs/passwords were the principal targets.
The potential losses from this kind of spying are difficult to calculate — since nobody knows what effect a stolen ad campaign might have had, or how a stolen design might have dominated the market. But there's no doubt that big money is at stake. Early this year, for instance, India's Thermax agreed to pay Pennsylvania-based Purolite International $38 million to settle a lawsuit over the alleged theft of proprietary water purification technology.
"You may not use [your competitor's] research work," said Kunwar Vikram Singh, president of the Indian Council of Corporate Investigators. "But suppose you have already developed your own brilliant idea. Even to launch that brilliant idea in the shape of a product you must know the market."
The spies aren't always after new technology. The targeted information ranges from client lists to proprietary software to advertising strategies, says Singh.
Not long ago, for instance, a company was readying a new ad blitz when, on the day before the launch, executives saw their planned slogan all over the city on their morning commute — on billboards advertising one of their competitors.
In another case, one of the country's foremost motorcycle and scooter manufacturers lost the design and specifications for an upcoming model to a competitor through a spy planted with the contractor that was running the company cafeteria.
"They planted a guy ... who knew a little about IT and could become friendly with people, and then when the office was closed he would access employees' computers and get the information out," said Ravi Kapur of ACE Detectives, the private investigator hired to plug the leak.
Part of the problem is that Indian laws governing these areas are weak and ambiguous. India has no specific data protection law, so the theft of sensitive information like marketing strategies or employee salaries — which is not governed by intellectual property laws — throws up a host of legal questions.
And while the unauthorized downloading or copying of computer files is illegal, the civil and criminal penalties are minor compared with the sums at stake for corporations. A criminal booked for data theft under the Information Technology Act, for instance, faces a maximum three-year term in prison and a maximum fine of around $10,000, and the most a victim can seek in civil damage is about $1 million — which the Thermax-Purolite settlement reveals as a pittance.
"It's extremely lax," said Kapur. "People don't generally get caught. Then, even if this guy gets caught, they're not after this guy [who took the information] — they're after the competitors. Now, to ensure that the whole chain gets into the loop is not the easiest of tasks."
Private investigators have been the biggest beneficiaries, as the budding industry profits from both sides of the information war. While none of the detective agencies interviewed would admit to conducting actual corporate espionage, firms that perform similar work — such as planting spies for clients within labor unions — say that they get requests to steal competitive information on a daily basis.
Moreover, there's almost as much money to be made in protecting firms from spies as there is from spying on them, not only through investigating leaks, but also in risk analysis, security systems design and — since it's the enemy inside that's most feared — employee background checks.
And that means going to work for an outsourcing company is starting to seem like applying to the Pentagon.
"Before, people were reluctant to snoop around," said Singh. "Now, they go deep."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101223/industrial-espionage-corporate-india
Friday, December 31, 2010
Indian justice: punishment by trial?
High-profile human rights activist gets life for treason, exposing cracks in justice system.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - December 31, 2010)
NEW DELHI, India — Consider the following scenario: A much-admired man points out gross human rights violations committed against tribal peoples — including alleged rapes, murders, etc. But the state consistently seeks to cover up the incidents this man exposes, and instead uses a colonial-era law against free speech to sentence him to life in prison.
If this were China and its Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, it would come as no surprise. But, brace yourself, this is cuddly India we're talking about.
One of India's biggest selling points, particularly in contrast to China, has been its progressive attitude toward human rights and its commitment to the rule of law.
But the conviction and subsequent sentencing of human rights activist Binayak Sen — and the similar sedition charges leveled against novelist Arundhati Roy and several other outspoken Indians this year — show that India's commitment to democracy is more fragile than anyone believed.
The question now is, will it be enough to threaten India's image as a progressive, democracy-loving state?
Here's a play-by-play: On Christmas Eve, a lower court in the eastern state of Chhattisgarh sentenced Sen, a celebrated pediatrician and activist, to life in prison for his alleged links to the Maoist revolutionaries.
Sen and his supporters say he was targeted for exposing the state's involvement in the large-scale clearing of villages. In 2005, Sen led an investigation that pegged so-called economic development — in the form of Chhattisgarh's booming mining industry — as the culprit in driving indigenous tribes off their ancestral lands and turning them into beggars.
After Sen received his life sentence and the judgment was made public, outrage began mounting almost immediately among India's intellectual circles. Some asserted that Sen was railroaded through the system as payback for exposing alleged rape and murder committed in the name of the government.
Many critics said his treatment once again exposed the weaknesses in India's legal system. Corruption and politically motivated trials, critics said, have now joined incompetence and sloth to make a travesty of justice.
"The judge has become a willing instrument of the state to victimize people who are raising their voices against [its] human rights abuses," said Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan. "It's not merely a gross miscarriage of justice, it's outrageous."
So, what's the impact going forward?
The court decision has further polarized an India already deeply divided over the path its economic development should take. One side says develop at all costs, even if that means stealing land and giving it to mining companies who destroy the environment and ravage indigenous cultures. The other side says that further subverting the rule of law in favor of crony capitalism promises a disastrous future.
Already, street protests have mushroomed across India and associations of every stripe — including police — have condemned the verdict. But even if it is eventually overturned by a higher court, the apparent misuse of the legal system as a political tool could have broader implications.
Indian students, teachers and activists protest in New Delhi against Binayak Sen's life sentence, Dec. 27, 2010. (Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images)
"The whole judiciary system is a mess at so many levels — delays, process, sanctity of evidence — and [a judgment like this one] really shows you how vulnerable it is," said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who heads the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank.
Some of those problems are notorious. An overburdened system has created a vicious cycle of continuances, appeals and a mounting backlog that some estimate will take hundreds of years to clear. Petty corruption — fees to access files and the like — is ubiquitous, and hardly a day goes by without a report of a witness recanting his testimony when challenged over lack of evidence.
But in recent years allegations of higher level corruption have been given seeming validity by the supreme court's refusal to make judges' assets subject to public scrutiny under the Right to Information Act (RTI).
Increasingly, high-profile judgments like the Allahabad High Court's decision to divide into three parts the disputed Ayodhya site [2] of the destroyed Babri Mosque and the decision to reopen the case and dole out a harsher sentence to the policeman accused of molesting Ruchika Girhotra have showed that India's courts are all too willing to ignore the letter of the law when it is expedient or popular to do so.
More and more cases like Sen's have demonstrated that the legal system's other deep flaws make it ideally suited for abuse for political, or even criminal, ends.
"We often say punishment should be after due process," said Bhanu Mehta. "In India, due process can be the punishment."
That doesn't make India look good in the eyes of investors. An unknown wag once quipped that an Indian civil suit was the closest one could get to experiencing eternity. A simple property dispute — such as evicting a delinquent tenant — can take decades of monthly court appearances to resolve. And corporations have by and large dismissed the Indian legal system as a means of enforcing contracts, writing in clauses that mandate arbitration or litigation in foreign courts.
But for the Indian people, who must depend on the courts to protect their rights and enforce their laws, it's chilling.
The Chhattisgarh court found Sen guilty of two counts of sedition and conspiracy based on charges that he carried letters from a jailed Maoist leader to his comrades in the field and opened a bank account on behalf of another rebel.
But because the evidence presented by the prosecution hinged largely on circular reasoning — proof of links to people whom the police claim are Maoists but who themselves have not been convicted, for instance, and the letters that Sen allegedly carried contain nothing incriminating — critics say that it's nothing more than another attempt to silence peaceful support for the tribal people caught between the Maoists and the state.
Most ironic of all, Sen earned his life sentence for the same crime — sedition — that India's British colonizers used against Gandhi and other freedom fighters.
Typical of persecution laws, the storied history of the supposed crime gives its perpetrator an added aura of legitimacy, much like China's old standby, "exposing state secrets" — which implicitly acknowledges that the dissidents jailed for it speak the truth.
Worse than that, to apply it to Sen's case, legal experts say the Chhattisgarh district judge had to ignore a landmark supreme court ruling that mandated that sedition could only be allowed to curb free speech when there is a direct incitement to violence or serious public disorder.
"It's a hideous judgment; it's a hideous case," said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, which researches terrorism and other Indian security concerns. "They had no business taking this to court in the first place. They had no evidence."
If there's any silver lining, it can be found in the encouragingly unified chorus against the verdict. However, most of the criticism has hinged on the claims that Sen is a good man, rather than a clearheaded assessment of the evidence and his legal rights.
And Sen himself — who was jailed for two years without bail after his arrest in 2007 — must be growing tired of all the support. In 2008, the cause celebre languished in jail while 22 Nobel winners lobbied for his release after he was chosen to receive the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for his efforts to reduce the infant mortality rate and deaths from diarrhea. Who's to say today's protests will be any different?
"What you are doing right now is using what I describe as punishment by trial," said Sahni. "If he is innocent, how are you ever going to restore those years to this man? And if he's guilty, you should have brought the evidence against him. It's utterly disgraceful."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101230/india-human-rights-binayak-sen-arundhati-roy-justice
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - December 31, 2010)
NEW DELHI, India — Consider the following scenario: A much-admired man points out gross human rights violations committed against tribal peoples — including alleged rapes, murders, etc. But the state consistently seeks to cover up the incidents this man exposes, and instead uses a colonial-era law against free speech to sentence him to life in prison.
If this were China and its Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, it would come as no surprise. But, brace yourself, this is cuddly India we're talking about.
One of India's biggest selling points, particularly in contrast to China, has been its progressive attitude toward human rights and its commitment to the rule of law.
But the conviction and subsequent sentencing of human rights activist Binayak Sen — and the similar sedition charges leveled against novelist Arundhati Roy and several other outspoken Indians this year — show that India's commitment to democracy is more fragile than anyone believed.
The question now is, will it be enough to threaten India's image as a progressive, democracy-loving state?
Here's a play-by-play: On Christmas Eve, a lower court in the eastern state of Chhattisgarh sentenced Sen, a celebrated pediatrician and activist, to life in prison for his alleged links to the Maoist revolutionaries.
Sen and his supporters say he was targeted for exposing the state's involvement in the large-scale clearing of villages. In 2005, Sen led an investigation that pegged so-called economic development — in the form of Chhattisgarh's booming mining industry — as the culprit in driving indigenous tribes off their ancestral lands and turning them into beggars.
After Sen received his life sentence and the judgment was made public, outrage began mounting almost immediately among India's intellectual circles. Some asserted that Sen was railroaded through the system as payback for exposing alleged rape and murder committed in the name of the government.
Many critics said his treatment once again exposed the weaknesses in India's legal system. Corruption and politically motivated trials, critics said, have now joined incompetence and sloth to make a travesty of justice.
"The judge has become a willing instrument of the state to victimize people who are raising their voices against [its] human rights abuses," said Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan. "It's not merely a gross miscarriage of justice, it's outrageous."
So, what's the impact going forward?
The court decision has further polarized an India already deeply divided over the path its economic development should take. One side says develop at all costs, even if that means stealing land and giving it to mining companies who destroy the environment and ravage indigenous cultures. The other side says that further subverting the rule of law in favor of crony capitalism promises a disastrous future.
Already, street protests have mushroomed across India and associations of every stripe — including police — have condemned the verdict. But even if it is eventually overturned by a higher court, the apparent misuse of the legal system as a political tool could have broader implications.
Indian students, teachers and activists protest in New Delhi against Binayak Sen's life sentence, Dec. 27, 2010. (Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images)
"The whole judiciary system is a mess at so many levels — delays, process, sanctity of evidence — and [a judgment like this one] really shows you how vulnerable it is," said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who heads the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank.
Some of those problems are notorious. An overburdened system has created a vicious cycle of continuances, appeals and a mounting backlog that some estimate will take hundreds of years to clear. Petty corruption — fees to access files and the like — is ubiquitous, and hardly a day goes by without a report of a witness recanting his testimony when challenged over lack of evidence.
But in recent years allegations of higher level corruption have been given seeming validity by the supreme court's refusal to make judges' assets subject to public scrutiny under the Right to Information Act (RTI).
Increasingly, high-profile judgments like the Allahabad High Court's decision to divide into three parts the disputed Ayodhya site [2] of the destroyed Babri Mosque and the decision to reopen the case and dole out a harsher sentence to the policeman accused of molesting Ruchika Girhotra have showed that India's courts are all too willing to ignore the letter of the law when it is expedient or popular to do so.
More and more cases like Sen's have demonstrated that the legal system's other deep flaws make it ideally suited for abuse for political, or even criminal, ends.
"We often say punishment should be after due process," said Bhanu Mehta. "In India, due process can be the punishment."
That doesn't make India look good in the eyes of investors. An unknown wag once quipped that an Indian civil suit was the closest one could get to experiencing eternity. A simple property dispute — such as evicting a delinquent tenant — can take decades of monthly court appearances to resolve. And corporations have by and large dismissed the Indian legal system as a means of enforcing contracts, writing in clauses that mandate arbitration or litigation in foreign courts.
But for the Indian people, who must depend on the courts to protect their rights and enforce their laws, it's chilling.
The Chhattisgarh court found Sen guilty of two counts of sedition and conspiracy based on charges that he carried letters from a jailed Maoist leader to his comrades in the field and opened a bank account on behalf of another rebel.
But because the evidence presented by the prosecution hinged largely on circular reasoning — proof of links to people whom the police claim are Maoists but who themselves have not been convicted, for instance, and the letters that Sen allegedly carried contain nothing incriminating — critics say that it's nothing more than another attempt to silence peaceful support for the tribal people caught between the Maoists and the state.
Most ironic of all, Sen earned his life sentence for the same crime — sedition — that India's British colonizers used against Gandhi and other freedom fighters.
Typical of persecution laws, the storied history of the supposed crime gives its perpetrator an added aura of legitimacy, much like China's old standby, "exposing state secrets" — which implicitly acknowledges that the dissidents jailed for it speak the truth.
Worse than that, to apply it to Sen's case, legal experts say the Chhattisgarh district judge had to ignore a landmark supreme court ruling that mandated that sedition could only be allowed to curb free speech when there is a direct incitement to violence or serious public disorder.
"It's a hideous judgment; it's a hideous case," said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, which researches terrorism and other Indian security concerns. "They had no business taking this to court in the first place. They had no evidence."
If there's any silver lining, it can be found in the encouragingly unified chorus against the verdict. However, most of the criticism has hinged on the claims that Sen is a good man, rather than a clearheaded assessment of the evidence and his legal rights.
And Sen himself — who was jailed for two years without bail after his arrest in 2007 — must be growing tired of all the support. In 2008, the cause celebre languished in jail while 22 Nobel winners lobbied for his release after he was chosen to receive the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for his efforts to reduce the infant mortality rate and deaths from diarrhea. Who's to say today's protests will be any different?
"What you are doing right now is using what I describe as punishment by trial," said Sahni. "If he is innocent, how are you ever going to restore those years to this man? And if he's guilty, you should have brought the evidence against him. It's utterly disgraceful."
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101230/india-human-rights-binayak-sen-arundhati-roy-justice
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Can telecom scam bring down India's government?
In scam central, corruption allegations alone might not be enough to engineer change.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - Dec. 21, 2010)
NEW DELHI, India — As investigations continue into the most damaging corruption scandal to strike the Congress party in decades, Sonia Gandhi, the party's leader, had a go at flipping the script.
At the party plenary marking the Congress' 125th year on Sunday, Sonia stood up for beleaguered Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. She unveiled a five-point plan to root out corruption, and she blasted the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its "despicable" attacks on Singh — they said he was asleep at the switch while his telecom minister allegedly defrauded the country of billions of dollars. But Singh, she said, is an "embodiment of sobriety, dignity and integrity."
It wasn't Sonia's remarks, however — or Singh's promise to appear before an investigating committee, saying "I have nothing to hide from the public at all" —that gave the best hint as to the Congress strategy for regaining control of the news cycle. That came from the party's general secretary, Digvijay Singh, in the role of hatchet man as he defended the 40-year-old prime minister-in-waiting, Rahul Gandhi.
Embracing Rahul's trepidations about "Hindu terror" — WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables revealed that Rahul told the U.S. ambassador that he feared Hindu terrorist groups more than Islamic ones — the general secretary attacked the BJP's Hindu nationalist parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). And by amplifying Rahul's rhetoric — he apparently sought to shift the focus from corruption to communalism, the word India uses to discuss its religious divides.
"The RSS in the garb of its nationalist ideology is targeting Muslims the same way Nazis targeted Jews in the 1930s," Digvijay told plenary attendees.
In a less corrupt country [2], the context for the general secretary's comments might itself be enough to reveal it as a transparent attempt to distract attention from the problems besetting his party.
Thanks to a series [3] of high-profile corruption scandals [4], the Congress party faces its biggest challenge in years. Every day, new revelations hit the headlines from leaked transcripts of tapped telephone conversations between an influential lobbyist and top politicians, billionaire tycoons and (formerly) respected journalists.
And even though the party has already ousted the chief accused — who is a coalition ally, rather than a Congress party member — the perception remains that the government is dragging its feet on a full-scale inquiry, as its resistance to an investigation by a joint parliamentary committee was at the root of opposition disruptions that prevented legislators even from meeting for all but seven hours of the month-long winter session of parliament.
"After the Bofors [defense kickbacks] scam in the '80s and various scandals of the Narasimha Rao government, this is the first time the opposition has something that it looks like will stick," said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst. "The opposition is united with an issue for the first time since the beginning of the UPA [the Congress-led coalition government.]"
Despite his impeccable personal reputation, the prime minister's two terms at the helm of the UPA have paid rich dividends in allegations of corrupt dealings — or what Indian reporters like to call scams. In the so-called rice scam, for instance, officials at state-owned companies involved in grain exports to Africa allegedly bent rules to help private players cheat the government out of $500 million.
In the Commonwealth Games scam, organizing officials allegedly bilked the state for $100 million in inflated rentals for furniture and other fixtures. And in the mother of them all, the 2G spectrum scam, former Telecommunications Minister A. Raja of Tamil Nadu's Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam party allegedly cost the country as much as $40 billion by allowing top industrialists to buy telecom licenses for what opposition politicians term "throwaway prices."
"People are struck by the magnitude of the scandal," said political analyst Praful Bidwai. "This is pretty outrageous."
But in scam central, questions remain whether corruption allegations alone — or even a smoking gun — is enough to engineer a change in government. One need look no further than the last election results to see that Indians — who by and large believe that all their politicians are equally corrupt — suffer from scam fatigue.
Despite new efforts to publicize the criminal records and outsized assets of politicians, the number of members of parliament who face charges of crimes including robbery, extortion and murder increased from 128 in the 2004 elections to 162 in 2009, while the average lawmaker's assets grew to $1 million apiece from around $400,000.
True to form, while this season of scams brought the legislature grinding to a halt, there was no sign that the government might fall. Moreover, with the next national election not scheduled until 2014, unless it loses a confidence vote the Congress will have more than enough time for damage control. And that's where the renewed focus on fundamentalism gets interesting — if we look back at the most famous corruption scandal in Indian history.
Though it certainly contributed to his defeat, the Bofors defense kickbacks scandal, revealed in 1987, was only the final straw for then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Like the present, the late 1980s were halcyon days for the "India story." Rajiv, who had not yet turned 40, was hailed as India's John F. Kennedy, and his efforts to open up the economy ushered in industrial growth of 5.5 percent and manufacturing growth of 8.9 percent a year.
But during Rajiv's term, Sikh terrorism had spread, militancy had begun in Kashmir, reporters had begun to call his intercession in Sri Lanka's civil war "India's Vietnam," and two catastrophic droughts had struck the poor even as his economic policies drew criticism for pandering to the rich, according to Ramachandra Guha, the author of India After Gandhi.
Moreover, instead of ousting an implicated cabinet minister — as Manmohan Singh has done — Rajiv sacked the man who had brought the irregularities to light.
Even then, Rajiv might have been able to weather the storm if not for the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. The BJP capitalized on a new enthusiasm for the god Ram and the claim that Rajiv had adopted a policy of Muslim appeasement to increase their tally of parliamentary seats from just four in 1984 to 88 in 1989 — tipping the balance in favor of the National Front coalition.
And three years later, after Rajiv's assassination, the Ram temple movement and the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya — believed by Hindus to be Ram's birthplace — began the rise of the BJP as a legitimate national rival to the once unassailable Congress.
With the Congress itself now endeavoring to turn the national dialogue back to multicultural secularism versus Hindu nationalism, the Bofors comparison shows how much India has changed — and how much it remains the same.
Today, in stark contrast to 1992 or 2002, the Congress believes that the BJP's failures to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment after the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai indicates that the opposition party's fundamentalist ideology is a weakness, rather than a strength. But at the same time, today's daily allegations about the back room deals behind seemingly every Indian fortune — and the public outrage that trusted journalists, too, might be corrupt — suggest that in the broader arenas of business and politics the wide-eyed enthusiasm for the "new India" was mostly plain naivete.
During the Bofors era, when a former gas station attendant built Reliance Industries into India's most powerful company by dint of his political connections, every large business house maintained lobbyists in New Delhi to lever an advantage from the so-called License-Permit Raj, according to Guha.
But cutting the red tape associated with the planned economy wasn't enough to destroy — or even dent — the culture of corruption, the ongoing 2G telecom license debacle shows. The corruption-free information technology boom of the 1990s was an aberration, because there were no regulations governing IT and thus no bribes to pay. But now that India's economic growth has shifted to mining, telecom, property development and public works, the continued dominance of crony capitalism is becoming clear.
The only thing that's changed in this era — often called India's Gilded Age, in allusion to the freewheeling decades that created the fortunes of America's robber barons — is the scale.
"Business has never been as powerful, as interfering, and as assertive and self-confident as it is now," Bidwai said.
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101220/india-congress-sonia-gandhi-manmohan-singh-telecom
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - Dec. 21, 2010)
NEW DELHI, India — As investigations continue into the most damaging corruption scandal to strike the Congress party in decades, Sonia Gandhi, the party's leader, had a go at flipping the script.
At the party plenary marking the Congress' 125th year on Sunday, Sonia stood up for beleaguered Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. She unveiled a five-point plan to root out corruption, and she blasted the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its "despicable" attacks on Singh — they said he was asleep at the switch while his telecom minister allegedly defrauded the country of billions of dollars. But Singh, she said, is an "embodiment of sobriety, dignity and integrity."
It wasn't Sonia's remarks, however — or Singh's promise to appear before an investigating committee, saying "I have nothing to hide from the public at all" —that gave the best hint as to the Congress strategy for regaining control of the news cycle. That came from the party's general secretary, Digvijay Singh, in the role of hatchet man as he defended the 40-year-old prime minister-in-waiting, Rahul Gandhi.
Embracing Rahul's trepidations about "Hindu terror" — WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables revealed that Rahul told the U.S. ambassador that he feared Hindu terrorist groups more than Islamic ones — the general secretary attacked the BJP's Hindu nationalist parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). And by amplifying Rahul's rhetoric — he apparently sought to shift the focus from corruption to communalism, the word India uses to discuss its religious divides.
"The RSS in the garb of its nationalist ideology is targeting Muslims the same way Nazis targeted Jews in the 1930s," Digvijay told plenary attendees.
In a less corrupt country [2], the context for the general secretary's comments might itself be enough to reveal it as a transparent attempt to distract attention from the problems besetting his party.
Thanks to a series [3] of high-profile corruption scandals [4], the Congress party faces its biggest challenge in years. Every day, new revelations hit the headlines from leaked transcripts of tapped telephone conversations between an influential lobbyist and top politicians, billionaire tycoons and (formerly) respected journalists.
And even though the party has already ousted the chief accused — who is a coalition ally, rather than a Congress party member — the perception remains that the government is dragging its feet on a full-scale inquiry, as its resistance to an investigation by a joint parliamentary committee was at the root of opposition disruptions that prevented legislators even from meeting for all but seven hours of the month-long winter session of parliament.
"After the Bofors [defense kickbacks] scam in the '80s and various scandals of the Narasimha Rao government, this is the first time the opposition has something that it looks like will stick," said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst. "The opposition is united with an issue for the first time since the beginning of the UPA [the Congress-led coalition government.]"
Despite his impeccable personal reputation, the prime minister's two terms at the helm of the UPA have paid rich dividends in allegations of corrupt dealings — or what Indian reporters like to call scams. In the so-called rice scam, for instance, officials at state-owned companies involved in grain exports to Africa allegedly bent rules to help private players cheat the government out of $500 million.
In the Commonwealth Games scam, organizing officials allegedly bilked the state for $100 million in inflated rentals for furniture and other fixtures. And in the mother of them all, the 2G spectrum scam, former Telecommunications Minister A. Raja of Tamil Nadu's Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam party allegedly cost the country as much as $40 billion by allowing top industrialists to buy telecom licenses for what opposition politicians term "throwaway prices."
"People are struck by the magnitude of the scandal," said political analyst Praful Bidwai. "This is pretty outrageous."
But in scam central, questions remain whether corruption allegations alone — or even a smoking gun — is enough to engineer a change in government. One need look no further than the last election results to see that Indians — who by and large believe that all their politicians are equally corrupt — suffer from scam fatigue.
Despite new efforts to publicize the criminal records and outsized assets of politicians, the number of members of parliament who face charges of crimes including robbery, extortion and murder increased from 128 in the 2004 elections to 162 in 2009, while the average lawmaker's assets grew to $1 million apiece from around $400,000.
True to form, while this season of scams brought the legislature grinding to a halt, there was no sign that the government might fall. Moreover, with the next national election not scheduled until 2014, unless it loses a confidence vote the Congress will have more than enough time for damage control. And that's where the renewed focus on fundamentalism gets interesting — if we look back at the most famous corruption scandal in Indian history.
Though it certainly contributed to his defeat, the Bofors defense kickbacks scandal, revealed in 1987, was only the final straw for then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Like the present, the late 1980s were halcyon days for the "India story." Rajiv, who had not yet turned 40, was hailed as India's John F. Kennedy, and his efforts to open up the economy ushered in industrial growth of 5.5 percent and manufacturing growth of 8.9 percent a year.
But during Rajiv's term, Sikh terrorism had spread, militancy had begun in Kashmir, reporters had begun to call his intercession in Sri Lanka's civil war "India's Vietnam," and two catastrophic droughts had struck the poor even as his economic policies drew criticism for pandering to the rich, according to Ramachandra Guha, the author of India After Gandhi.
Moreover, instead of ousting an implicated cabinet minister — as Manmohan Singh has done — Rajiv sacked the man who had brought the irregularities to light.
Even then, Rajiv might have been able to weather the storm if not for the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. The BJP capitalized on a new enthusiasm for the god Ram and the claim that Rajiv had adopted a policy of Muslim appeasement to increase their tally of parliamentary seats from just four in 1984 to 88 in 1989 — tipping the balance in favor of the National Front coalition.
And three years later, after Rajiv's assassination, the Ram temple movement and the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya — believed by Hindus to be Ram's birthplace — began the rise of the BJP as a legitimate national rival to the once unassailable Congress.
With the Congress itself now endeavoring to turn the national dialogue back to multicultural secularism versus Hindu nationalism, the Bofors comparison shows how much India has changed — and how much it remains the same.
Today, in stark contrast to 1992 or 2002, the Congress believes that the BJP's failures to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment after the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai indicates that the opposition party's fundamentalist ideology is a weakness, rather than a strength. But at the same time, today's daily allegations about the back room deals behind seemingly every Indian fortune — and the public outrage that trusted journalists, too, might be corrupt — suggest that in the broader arenas of business and politics the wide-eyed enthusiasm for the "new India" was mostly plain naivete.
During the Bofors era, when a former gas station attendant built Reliance Industries into India's most powerful company by dint of his political connections, every large business house maintained lobbyists in New Delhi to lever an advantage from the so-called License-Permit Raj, according to Guha.
But cutting the red tape associated with the planned economy wasn't enough to destroy — or even dent — the culture of corruption, the ongoing 2G telecom license debacle shows. The corruption-free information technology boom of the 1990s was an aberration, because there were no regulations governing IT and thus no bribes to pay. But now that India's economic growth has shifted to mining, telecom, property development and public works, the continued dominance of crony capitalism is becoming clear.
The only thing that's changed in this era — often called India's Gilded Age, in allusion to the freewheeling decades that created the fortunes of America's robber barons — is the scale.
"Business has never been as powerful, as interfering, and as assertive and self-confident as it is now," Bidwai said.
Copyright 2010 GlobalPost – International News
Source URL - http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101220/india-congress-sonia-gandhi-manmohan-singh-telecom
India: illegal guns plague cities
According to aid groups, India accounts for about 40 million of the 75 million illegal small arms currently in circulation.
By Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng
GlobalPost - December 2010
Editor's note: "India: armed and dangerous" is a three-part series on India's rising gun culture, the proliferation of illegal weapons and the middle-class fight to bear arms. Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng researched this project with the aid of the South Asian Journalists' Association (SAJA) Reporting Fellowship.
NEW DELHI, India — About a year after India's first school shooting, Soumya Viswanathan, a 26-year-old television journalist, was shot and killed on her way home from work. A pretty and vivacious girl with a broad, bright smile, she had stayed late at the station to help her colleagues finish editing a story. At 3 a.m., knowing that her parents worried about her, she called her father to tell him that she was on her way home. She never made it.
"She was not coming," Soumya's father, M.K. Viswanathan, said, remembering that night. "I told [my wife] I would go downstairs and see why she was not coming. And then she said 'No, no don’t go downstairs. It’s 3:15 in the morning."
He stayed in bed. But sensing something was wrong, he kept calling Soumya's mobile phone. After another hour, Madhavi, Soumya's mother, began trying from her handset, as well. "Somebody picked up around 5. They said, ‘Who is on the line? There has been accident.'"
Soumya was less than a mile from her house, within shouting distance of two police stations, when a car full of young men allegedly tried to force her to pull over. Most likely, they wanted to rob her. Or, like too many of Delhi's young men, they saw a girl traveling alone, in the dark, as practically asking to be raped. When she didn't stop, one of them pulled out a country-made pistol and fired.
In a terrible stroke of fate, the simple single-shot weapon didn't misfire or blow up in his hand. The bullet flew true, and Soumya became another of India's ever-increasing multitude of illegal guns.
According to the International Action Network on Small Arms, Amnesty International and Oxfam, India accounts for about 40 million of the 75 million illegal small arms currently in circulation.
Even more troubling, local experts say illegal factories produce a huge number of pistols and machine guns every year. In many places, police say, a so-called "katta" or country-made weapon, costs as little as $10, and picking one up is as easy as buying paan, the betel nut-based stimulant ubiquitous in the subcontinent.
"If you look at serious crimes for our national capital, the looting of cash vans, bank robberies, house robberies, car jackings — invariably country-made weapons are involved," said H.G.S. Dhaliwal, deputy commissioner of the Delhi police (South District).
After Jigisha Ghose, a 28-year-old IT executive, was killed in similar circumstances, police arrested five men they believe were responsible for Soumya's murder. But more than a year later, her shattered family is still waiting for justice — which in India might take a decade or more.
"Criminals are roaming free," said Soumya's mother. "It is we who are sort of put in a prison somehow. We are frightened and have to stay in the house. That’s the way it’s become. Even in house it’s not safe. Anywhere it’s not safe."
In 2008, the year that Soumya was murdered, only 73 people were murdered with guns in Delhi, compared with 292 in New York City — which now has one of the lowest crime rates of America's largest cities. But as police in the Big Apple are succeeding in bringing down gun murders by taking illegal weapons off the street, their counterparts in Delhi say the number of illegal firearms in India's capital is climbing steadily.
Already, there are eight illegal guns for every legal weapon in Delhi, and more than 90 percent of crimes are committed with unlicensed guns. Most of them are made in secret sweatshops in neighboring states with a reputation for lawlessness and political turmoil.
"There’s a joke in India which says if you want sophisticated weapons, illegal weapons you get it from the northeast of India [where several insurgencies are simmering,]" said Binalakshmi Nepram, head of the Control Arms Foundation of India. "If you want really crude weapons you get it from the heartlands like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh. In these parts of India, [the] cottage industry of guns is huge."
In just one rural district, Munger, Bihar — where the current chief minister has cracked down on criminals — police uncovered as many as 65 illegal gun factories last year. They estimate that the trade earns some $4 million a year for the rustic backwater. But reports suggest that there are thousands more such factories in manufacturing centers like Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, across the country.
For nearly 10 years, 27-year-old "Sanjay," who asked that his real name not be revealed, was part of the problem. A short, muscular young man with a close-trimmed beard, Sanjay parlayed a job in a metal shop in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, into a lucrative career as a gun runner between 1992 and 2000. Then one of his own gang members betrayed him, setting him up for an ambush by a rival crew who had placed a false order for a thousand pistols.
"We had been given half the money. On the last day when we were doing all the packing up, they came and attacked us. Three of my men got killed, including our best gun maker, who was their target all along," Sanjay said. "He was a very close friend of mine. He was the one who saved my life. But in doing so he got killed. That's when I decided to stop the business."
In the beginning, Sanjay's crew made cartridges with gunpowder sourced from a local company licensed to make firecrackers and fuses contrived from feathers rolled with carbon and chemicals found in detergent and other household products. Then, he graduated to making .315 and .12 bore pistols in three different barrel lengths: "small," "quarter" and "half" — the same terms used for bottles of local whiskey. His best products, with barrels sourced from Rampur, another district in Uttar Pradesh, could be fired three times in rapid succession without overheating, and they never exploded in a customer's hand. He sold them for between $50 and $100, compared with nearly $2,000 for a simple legal .32 caliber revolver made by one of India's official, government-owned ordnance factories.
Villagers bought his weapons to show off and protect themselves from wild animals and bandits. Schoolboys and college kids bought them to protect themselves in the cutthroat business of student politics. But most of Sanjay's customers were criminal gangs who enjoyed the patronage of local politicians, who use thugs or "goondas" to influence voters and even capture polling booths during elections. And now with ethnic tensions, overcrowding and scalding temperatures causing tempers to flare, country-made pistols have come to the city, and it's not just hardened criminals pulling guns.
"Earlier guns were used as mostly status symbols," said Rajat Mitra, a psychologist and expert on violence who works closely with the police. "But now guns are seen as a way of solving problems, of resolving issues, of using threats and intimidation that were not considered necessary earlier. And there is a perception among a very large number of young people and even children that having a gun is not morally wrong."
Last year, in a typically petty incident, 22-year-old Himanshu Sharma was shot dead in an altercation over urinating on the street. This June, another 22-year-old was shot and killed in an argument over water, a married couple from different castes was gunned down in an apparent "honor killing" and a government employee shot three security guards, killing one, when they barred him from entering a building in the city's red light district.
In response to this kind of violence, India's home ministry has tightened the laws on licensed guns, which DCP Dhaliwal said "haven't been any problem at all," while allowing the rotten core of the illegal gun trade to fester. And insiders say that as long as pervasive corruption continues to make politics the country's biggest money spinner — turning elected officials with no real assets into millionaires in a single term — nobody will destroy the factories who arm the parties' musclemen.
"This game happens at a big level," said Sanjay, who now works as a police informer. "Otherwise it couldn’t happen. Mostly it’s politicians who help us. Police and politicians both together help us do business. Nothing happens without their sanction."
By Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng
GlobalPost - December 2010
Editor's note: "India: armed and dangerous" is a three-part series on India's rising gun culture, the proliferation of illegal weapons and the middle-class fight to bear arms. Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng researched this project with the aid of the South Asian Journalists' Association (SAJA) Reporting Fellowship.
NEW DELHI, India — About a year after India's first school shooting, Soumya Viswanathan, a 26-year-old television journalist, was shot and killed on her way home from work. A pretty and vivacious girl with a broad, bright smile, she had stayed late at the station to help her colleagues finish editing a story. At 3 a.m., knowing that her parents worried about her, she called her father to tell him that she was on her way home. She never made it.
"She was not coming," Soumya's father, M.K. Viswanathan, said, remembering that night. "I told [my wife] I would go downstairs and see why she was not coming. And then she said 'No, no don’t go downstairs. It’s 3:15 in the morning."
He stayed in bed. But sensing something was wrong, he kept calling Soumya's mobile phone. After another hour, Madhavi, Soumya's mother, began trying from her handset, as well. "Somebody picked up around 5. They said, ‘Who is on the line? There has been accident.'"
Soumya was less than a mile from her house, within shouting distance of two police stations, when a car full of young men allegedly tried to force her to pull over. Most likely, they wanted to rob her. Or, like too many of Delhi's young men, they saw a girl traveling alone, in the dark, as practically asking to be raped. When she didn't stop, one of them pulled out a country-made pistol and fired.
In a terrible stroke of fate, the simple single-shot weapon didn't misfire or blow up in his hand. The bullet flew true, and Soumya became another of India's ever-increasing multitude of illegal guns.
According to the International Action Network on Small Arms, Amnesty International and Oxfam, India accounts for about 40 million of the 75 million illegal small arms currently in circulation.
Even more troubling, local experts say illegal factories produce a huge number of pistols and machine guns every year. In many places, police say, a so-called "katta" or country-made weapon, costs as little as $10, and picking one up is as easy as buying paan, the betel nut-based stimulant ubiquitous in the subcontinent.
"If you look at serious crimes for our national capital, the looting of cash vans, bank robberies, house robberies, car jackings — invariably country-made weapons are involved," said H.G.S. Dhaliwal, deputy commissioner of the Delhi police (South District).
After Jigisha Ghose, a 28-year-old IT executive, was killed in similar circumstances, police arrested five men they believe were responsible for Soumya's murder. But more than a year later, her shattered family is still waiting for justice — which in India might take a decade or more.
"Criminals are roaming free," said Soumya's mother. "It is we who are sort of put in a prison somehow. We are frightened and have to stay in the house. That’s the way it’s become. Even in house it’s not safe. Anywhere it’s not safe."
In 2008, the year that Soumya was murdered, only 73 people were murdered with guns in Delhi, compared with 292 in New York City — which now has one of the lowest crime rates of America's largest cities. But as police in the Big Apple are succeeding in bringing down gun murders by taking illegal weapons off the street, their counterparts in Delhi say the number of illegal firearms in India's capital is climbing steadily.
Already, there are eight illegal guns for every legal weapon in Delhi, and more than 90 percent of crimes are committed with unlicensed guns. Most of them are made in secret sweatshops in neighboring states with a reputation for lawlessness and political turmoil.
"There’s a joke in India which says if you want sophisticated weapons, illegal weapons you get it from the northeast of India [where several insurgencies are simmering,]" said Binalakshmi Nepram, head of the Control Arms Foundation of India. "If you want really crude weapons you get it from the heartlands like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh. In these parts of India, [the] cottage industry of guns is huge."
In just one rural district, Munger, Bihar — where the current chief minister has cracked down on criminals — police uncovered as many as 65 illegal gun factories last year. They estimate that the trade earns some $4 million a year for the rustic backwater. But reports suggest that there are thousands more such factories in manufacturing centers like Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, across the country.
For nearly 10 years, 27-year-old "Sanjay," who asked that his real name not be revealed, was part of the problem. A short, muscular young man with a close-trimmed beard, Sanjay parlayed a job in a metal shop in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, into a lucrative career as a gun runner between 1992 and 2000. Then one of his own gang members betrayed him, setting him up for an ambush by a rival crew who had placed a false order for a thousand pistols.
"We had been given half the money. On the last day when we were doing all the packing up, they came and attacked us. Three of my men got killed, including our best gun maker, who was their target all along," Sanjay said. "He was a very close friend of mine. He was the one who saved my life. But in doing so he got killed. That's when I decided to stop the business."
In the beginning, Sanjay's crew made cartridges with gunpowder sourced from a local company licensed to make firecrackers and fuses contrived from feathers rolled with carbon and chemicals found in detergent and other household products. Then, he graduated to making .315 and .12 bore pistols in three different barrel lengths: "small," "quarter" and "half" — the same terms used for bottles of local whiskey. His best products, with barrels sourced from Rampur, another district in Uttar Pradesh, could be fired three times in rapid succession without overheating, and they never exploded in a customer's hand. He sold them for between $50 and $100, compared with nearly $2,000 for a simple legal .32 caliber revolver made by one of India's official, government-owned ordnance factories.
Villagers bought his weapons to show off and protect themselves from wild animals and bandits. Schoolboys and college kids bought them to protect themselves in the cutthroat business of student politics. But most of Sanjay's customers were criminal gangs who enjoyed the patronage of local politicians, who use thugs or "goondas" to influence voters and even capture polling booths during elections. And now with ethnic tensions, overcrowding and scalding temperatures causing tempers to flare, country-made pistols have come to the city, and it's not just hardened criminals pulling guns.
"Earlier guns were used as mostly status symbols," said Rajat Mitra, a psychologist and expert on violence who works closely with the police. "But now guns are seen as a way of solving problems, of resolving issues, of using threats and intimidation that were not considered necessary earlier. And there is a perception among a very large number of young people and even children that having a gun is not morally wrong."
Last year, in a typically petty incident, 22-year-old Himanshu Sharma was shot dead in an altercation over urinating on the street. This June, another 22-year-old was shot and killed in an argument over water, a married couple from different castes was gunned down in an apparent "honor killing" and a government employee shot three security guards, killing one, when they barred him from entering a building in the city's red light district.
In response to this kind of violence, India's home ministry has tightened the laws on licensed guns, which DCP Dhaliwal said "haven't been any problem at all," while allowing the rotten core of the illegal gun trade to fester. And insiders say that as long as pervasive corruption continues to make politics the country's biggest money spinner — turning elected officials with no real assets into millionaires in a single term — nobody will destroy the factories who arm the parties' musclemen.
"This game happens at a big level," said Sanjay, who now works as a police informer. "Otherwise it couldn’t happen. Mostly it’s politicians who help us. Police and politicians both together help us do business. Nothing happens without their sanction."
Monday, December 20, 2010
India Armed and Dangerous: Gun Rights vs. Gun Restrictions
In India, a new gun rights lobby is emerging to fight against gun control.
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India's own Charlton Hestons
A new lobby group modeled on America's NRA is pushing for Indians' right to bear arms.
By Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng
Editor's note: "India: armed and dangerous" is a three-part series on India's rising gun culture, the proliferation of illegal weapons and the middle-class fight to bear arms. Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng researched this project with the aid of the South Asian Journalists' Association (SAJA) Reporting Fellowship.
NEW DELHI, India — At a posh farmhouse outside Delhi, a group of gun enthusiasts gathered on a recent Sunday afternoon to compare weapons, do a little shooting and talk strategy. Software professionals, executives and salesmen in their 30s and 40s, they're typical upper middle-class Delhiwallahs. Except for one thing: While liberal India bemoans the gun culture taking over its metropolitan cities, they're fighting to make sure one day every Indian gets the right to bear arms — American-style.
"Everyone’s life is precious. And everyone has the right to defend their life and liberty. And that right is meaningless without the means to do so," said Abhijeet Singh.
With some 40 million guns in civilian hands making India the second-most heavily armed nation in the world and a steady rise in violent crime, the debate over gun control is heating up. Gun control advocates are pushing India to crack down on guns and sign a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty that would tighten restrictions on small arms, while supporters of gun rights are fighting to make the country's gun laws less restrictive. And with both groups citing Gandhi as precedent, at stake is the very identity of India itself.
A 38-year-old software engineer, Singh founded the web forum, Indiansforguns.com, which brought these Sunday afternoon firearm fans together. But in late 2009, his hobby took on a new urgency when the home ministry proposed several amendments to India's 1959 Arms Act that would make it much more difficult to get a gun license and harder to buy ammunition. Already an old hand in disseminating editorials and raising petitions, Singh soon joined forces with another group — the National Association for Gun Rights India (NAGRI) — that's modeled on America's National Rifle Association and led by Haryana's Naveen Jindal, a member of parliament who studied in Texas.
"The National Rifle Association in America is the standard by which all gun owners judge themselves," said Rahoul Rai, NAGRI's semi-official spokesman. "Here is an organization that has protected the fundamental democratic right [to bear arms] which has withstood the test of time. Which has brought gun ownership not just to the United States but to the whole world. For us in India, this is the beacon of hope."
NAGRI held its first meeting in January 2010, and so far few police officials or politicians take the organization very seriously. But that dismissive attitude may be misguided. According to several estimates, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions of Indians waiting for stalled gun licenses or smarting over rejections. In some regions, the desire to own a firearm is great enough that the government population control program dangles the reward of a gun license to convince men to get a vasectomy. With people like these, NAGRI claims, it's already struck a chord.
"The response is overwhelming," said Rai. "From all the corners of India, people have been sending us emails, giving telephone calls and personally meeting us, supporting the cause. ... We are now trying in a lawful and peaceful manner to organize all this energy, organize all these feelings to tell our elected representatives that this [move to tighten licensing restrictions] is wrong."
Already, it's extremely difficult to get an arms license, though many of the existing hurdles are not enshrined in the 1959 Arms Act, and the Indian government has itself argued to the United Nations that India has one of the most stringent gun control regimes in the world. Apart from owners of heirloom weapons, citizens can obtain a license only if they are a competitive shooter or they can demonstrate an imminent threat to life and limb. Prices for legal guns and ammunition are among the highest in the world, due to import restrictions that give a near monopoly to government-owned ordnance factories — which weapons enthusiasts say make some of the worst products on the planet. Licensing bureaus can impose limits as low as five cartridges per year on legal purchases of ammunition. And if all else fails, there's always reams and reams of red tape.
"The whole process of applying for a gun licenses is very humiliating for most people, which is why people who have firearms also decide to sell them and not continue with the tradition of owning firearms in their family," said Singh. "Because it is just so difficult."
But with pressure from the U.N. and arms control advocates, a host of simmering guerrilla rebellions and growing concern over gunplay spilling into the streets, India's home ministry aims to make owning a gun even tougher.
This July, the prime minister's cabinet approved a proposal requiring a "verification report" from the police before a license could be issued. Several more amendments are on the anvil, such as requiring license holders to produce a record of when, where and why they fired their weapon anytime they want to buy replacement ammunition. The ministry's justification for these changes, naturally, is the increase in violent crime and the apparent proliferation of guns. But that's exactly the reason NAGRI says every law-abiding Indian deserves the right to carry a firearm himself.
"How then is the ordinary citizen going to protect himself?" said NAGRI's Rai. "How then is the ordinary citizen going to take care of his loved ones, of his family of his property? This is the reason why there is a need to have legitimate weapons."
With less than one officer per thousand people, India has one of the world's most understaffed police forces. And while it's true that a third of Indian districts are affected by terrorism and the crime rate is increasing, only a tiny fraction of that violence can be attributed to licensed guns. For instance, National Crime Records Bureau figures show that just 574 of 4,101 gun murders were committed with legal firearms in 2008 — while nearly 30,000 murders were committed with knives and other weapons. Moreover, only about 5.5 million of the 40 million odd guns in India are legal.
"If a guy can get [an illegal] katta for 200 [rupees], on what moral grounds can the government deny a law-abiding citizen a license for a gun on which he will blow a packet and [then face] all sorts of restrictions and encumbrances?" Singh said.
Gun control advocates say that the climbing crime graph is all the more reason to crack down further, and cite the U.S. crime data to prove that the most thoroughly armed nation is not the safest.
"We have to leave it to the state to tackle the security of every Indian," said Binalakshmi Nepram, head of the Control Arms Federation of India. "NAGRI and the Indians for Guns have to understand the fact that the independence of India was won without firing a single bullet. India gave the world non-violence. [It gave the world] Mahatma Gandhi the epitome of non-violence."
With America replacing Britain as India's primary cultural influence, rethinking India's colonial history may not be so simple, however. Perhaps because India's colonial revolution was achieved through nonviolence, the constitution written shortly after it does not specifically guarantee Indian citizens the right to bear arms.
But in at least one court case, a judge has ruled that "the right to bear arms is embedded in Article 21 of the Constitution," which states "No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."
And NAGRI and others point out that the Arms Act itself was not written to restrict the ownership of weapons. It was drafted to repeal British regulations that disarmed the general population after the Uprising, or Mutiny, of 1857 — of which Gandhi himself wrote, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”
With that in mind, NAGRI stakes its own claim to the Mahatma's legacy.
"An armed society is a polite society," said Rai. "I think if people are armed, other people will think twice before attacking them. I think if a nation is armed other nations think twice before attacking them. This is how we get more ahimsa. This is how we get less lawlessness. This is how we get a better society."
By Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng
Editor's note: "India: armed and dangerous" is a three-part series on India's rising gun culture, the proliferation of illegal weapons and the middle-class fight to bear arms. Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng researched this project with the aid of the South Asian Journalists' Association (SAJA) Reporting Fellowship.
NEW DELHI, India — At a posh farmhouse outside Delhi, a group of gun enthusiasts gathered on a recent Sunday afternoon to compare weapons, do a little shooting and talk strategy. Software professionals, executives and salesmen in their 30s and 40s, they're typical upper middle-class Delhiwallahs. Except for one thing: While liberal India bemoans the gun culture taking over its metropolitan cities, they're fighting to make sure one day every Indian gets the right to bear arms — American-style.
"Everyone’s life is precious. And everyone has the right to defend their life and liberty. And that right is meaningless without the means to do so," said Abhijeet Singh.
With some 40 million guns in civilian hands making India the second-most heavily armed nation in the world and a steady rise in violent crime, the debate over gun control is heating up. Gun control advocates are pushing India to crack down on guns and sign a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty that would tighten restrictions on small arms, while supporters of gun rights are fighting to make the country's gun laws less restrictive. And with both groups citing Gandhi as precedent, at stake is the very identity of India itself.
A 38-year-old software engineer, Singh founded the web forum, Indiansforguns.com, which brought these Sunday afternoon firearm fans together. But in late 2009, his hobby took on a new urgency when the home ministry proposed several amendments to India's 1959 Arms Act that would make it much more difficult to get a gun license and harder to buy ammunition. Already an old hand in disseminating editorials and raising petitions, Singh soon joined forces with another group — the National Association for Gun Rights India (NAGRI) — that's modeled on America's National Rifle Association and led by Haryana's Naveen Jindal, a member of parliament who studied in Texas.
"The National Rifle Association in America is the standard by which all gun owners judge themselves," said Rahoul Rai, NAGRI's semi-official spokesman. "Here is an organization that has protected the fundamental democratic right [to bear arms] which has withstood the test of time. Which has brought gun ownership not just to the United States but to the whole world. For us in India, this is the beacon of hope."
NAGRI held its first meeting in January 2010, and so far few police officials or politicians take the organization very seriously. But that dismissive attitude may be misguided. According to several estimates, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions of Indians waiting for stalled gun licenses or smarting over rejections. In some regions, the desire to own a firearm is great enough that the government population control program dangles the reward of a gun license to convince men to get a vasectomy. With people like these, NAGRI claims, it's already struck a chord.
"The response is overwhelming," said Rai. "From all the corners of India, people have been sending us emails, giving telephone calls and personally meeting us, supporting the cause. ... We are now trying in a lawful and peaceful manner to organize all this energy, organize all these feelings to tell our elected representatives that this [move to tighten licensing restrictions] is wrong."
Already, it's extremely difficult to get an arms license, though many of the existing hurdles are not enshrined in the 1959 Arms Act, and the Indian government has itself argued to the United Nations that India has one of the most stringent gun control regimes in the world. Apart from owners of heirloom weapons, citizens can obtain a license only if they are a competitive shooter or they can demonstrate an imminent threat to life and limb. Prices for legal guns and ammunition are among the highest in the world, due to import restrictions that give a near monopoly to government-owned ordnance factories — which weapons enthusiasts say make some of the worst products on the planet. Licensing bureaus can impose limits as low as five cartridges per year on legal purchases of ammunition. And if all else fails, there's always reams and reams of red tape.
"The whole process of applying for a gun licenses is very humiliating for most people, which is why people who have firearms also decide to sell them and not continue with the tradition of owning firearms in their family," said Singh. "Because it is just so difficult."
But with pressure from the U.N. and arms control advocates, a host of simmering guerrilla rebellions and growing concern over gunplay spilling into the streets, India's home ministry aims to make owning a gun even tougher.
This July, the prime minister's cabinet approved a proposal requiring a "verification report" from the police before a license could be issued. Several more amendments are on the anvil, such as requiring license holders to produce a record of when, where and why they fired their weapon anytime they want to buy replacement ammunition. The ministry's justification for these changes, naturally, is the increase in violent crime and the apparent proliferation of guns. But that's exactly the reason NAGRI says every law-abiding Indian deserves the right to carry a firearm himself.
"How then is the ordinary citizen going to protect himself?" said NAGRI's Rai. "How then is the ordinary citizen going to take care of his loved ones, of his family of his property? This is the reason why there is a need to have legitimate weapons."
With less than one officer per thousand people, India has one of the world's most understaffed police forces. And while it's true that a third of Indian districts are affected by terrorism and the crime rate is increasing, only a tiny fraction of that violence can be attributed to licensed guns. For instance, National Crime Records Bureau figures show that just 574 of 4,101 gun murders were committed with legal firearms in 2008 — while nearly 30,000 murders were committed with knives and other weapons. Moreover, only about 5.5 million of the 40 million odd guns in India are legal.
"If a guy can get [an illegal] katta for 200 [rupees], on what moral grounds can the government deny a law-abiding citizen a license for a gun on which he will blow a packet and [then face] all sorts of restrictions and encumbrances?" Singh said.
Gun control advocates say that the climbing crime graph is all the more reason to crack down further, and cite the U.S. crime data to prove that the most thoroughly armed nation is not the safest.
"We have to leave it to the state to tackle the security of every Indian," said Binalakshmi Nepram, head of the Control Arms Federation of India. "NAGRI and the Indians for Guns have to understand the fact that the independence of India was won without firing a single bullet. India gave the world non-violence. [It gave the world] Mahatma Gandhi the epitome of non-violence."
With America replacing Britain as India's primary cultural influence, rethinking India's colonial history may not be so simple, however. Perhaps because India's colonial revolution was achieved through nonviolence, the constitution written shortly after it does not specifically guarantee Indian citizens the right to bear arms.
But in at least one court case, a judge has ruled that "the right to bear arms is embedded in Article 21 of the Constitution," which states "No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."
And NAGRI and others point out that the Arms Act itself was not written to restrict the ownership of weapons. It was drafted to repeal British regulations that disarmed the general population after the Uprising, or Mutiny, of 1857 — of which Gandhi himself wrote, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”
With that in mind, NAGRI stakes its own claim to the Mahatma's legacy.
"An armed society is a polite society," said Rai. "I think if people are armed, other people will think twice before attacking them. I think if a nation is armed other nations think twice before attacking them. This is how we get more ahimsa. This is how we get less lawlessness. This is how we get a better society."
Sunday, December 19, 2010
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