By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
from the network that brought you MTV: child marriage
Can a TV sensation in modern India change an ancient tradition?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
in india, the congress wins big
Analysts see ruling party's decisive victory as a rejection of identity politics.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party's secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won't depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
Previously, the most optimistic exit polls had suggested that the entire UPA coalition would win just 216 parliamentary seats and the Congress Party just 160. To form a majority government in India and select the prime minister, a single party or coalition must win 272 of 543 constituencies. Even if the UPA tally doesn't increase as counting finishes, with 257 seats it can easily attain a majority with the addition of one of the smaller parties that will be angling for influence.
The verdict vindicated Singh's steadfast refusal to give up last year's path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India's diversity over the BJP's ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Because India's communist parties continue to oppose the nuclear pact with the U.S. and remain suspicious of India's burgeoning economic and military ties with America, it is also a verdict that is sure to go down well in Washington. And because the Left blocked Singh from pushing forward with liberalizing India's economy — preventing progress on loosening labor laws, selling off state-owned enterprises, and opening up new sectors like retail to direct foreign investment — the results will also provide some unexpected cheer to the business community.
The Indian stock exchange, too, will doubtless get a boost on Monday from the prospect of a stable government that will almost certainly survive for its entire five-year term.
“Clearly, the perception of stability will be reinforced, so there's no fear of government collapse and mid-term elections,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “That's absolutely critical in these circumstances for medium- and long-term planning" of business activities and investments.
But the most exciting implications of these results lie in the complex terrain of India's domestic politics. The vote has been hailed as marking the official arrival of Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi as a major figure, signaling the decline of identity politics and sounding the death knell for religious extremism.
Throughout his early career, and, indeed, throughout this campaign, Rahul Gandhi — who is the direct descendant of three of India's most respected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — was decried as an untested political ingenue, much as John F. Kennedy Jr. was in the years shortly after he finally passed the bar exam.
This election was Rahul's first real test. Despite his inexperience he made some bold moves — convincing senior members of the party that the Congress should fight the elections alone rather than forming pre-poll alliances in several key states, for instance.
He was the party's chief campaigner, traveling constantly and logging thousands of kilometers by convoy and helicopter. He sometimes went as far as to ditch his security cordon to woo voters from India's poorest classes with symbolic gestures like eating meals in the homes of Dalits (the people once called Untouchables). In both respects, he was incredibly successful, simultaneously rejuvenating the Congress as a national force and shaking the stranglehold that the Dalit leader Mayawati held on Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state.
“It was a huge victory for him, at many levels,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “One, the fact that there's a revival underway in UP, where he took the decision to go without allies and campaigned very hard. Second, the Congress has done well in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Gujarat — these are the states where Rahul experimented with reviving the Youth Congress. In that sense, it might strengthen his hand about the kind of organization that is needed in the party.”
Longtime political observers now also say that the Congress's huge gains in UP — and its strong performance in many other states where pollsters and pundits had been predicting that regional parties based on caste and ethnic formulations would dominate — may signal an end to the identity-based voting that has ruled Indian politics since the mid-1980s.
In this regard, it wasn't just the gains that Rahul's Congress made against Mayawati in UP that were significant; also significant was the thumping defeat in Bihar of Lalu Prasad Yadav, a middle-caste icon once as powerful and controversial a figure in his state as Boss Tweed.
The verdict points toward an end of regional factionalism, Mehta said. “Two things are clearly coming out,” he said. “It's a vote against the politics of opportunism — all kinds of small parties and formulations [allied for cynical reasons]. The second interesting trend is that you cannot take any vote bank for granted. The things that we took for granted, the Muslim vote, the Dalit vote, were all up for grabs.”
For the Hindu nationalist BJP, the election was a total debacle. As the results rolled in on the local television network CNN/IBN, historian Ramachandra Guha drew attention to the electorate's rejection of divisive and extremist politics to call this “the most sensible verdict in an Indian election since 1977.”
As such, this will undoubtedly be the swan song for Lal Krishna Advani — who could not shake the reputation for prejudice and extremism he had acquired while spearheading the agitation that led to the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in 1992 — and it confirms that the BJP faces a full-on leadership crisis.
“We never imagined this unexpected result,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh as he conceded defeat and announced that the party would retreat to headquarters Saturday night for a long session of troubled soul-searching.
They have plenty of reason to worry. Analysts see the verdict as a rejection of jingoistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some suggest this could relegate the BJP to a perennial also-ran. None of the BJP's attempts to polarize the electorate over issues like terrorism or the dredging of a canal through a natural land bridge that some devout Hindus believe was built by the god Ram ever got off the ground. And there are serious questions about whether the party's erstwhile alliance partners will accept Advani's heir apparent, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, due to his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom that killed as many as a thousand Muslims in Ahmedabad.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party's secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won't depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
Previously, the most optimistic exit polls had suggested that the entire UPA coalition would win just 216 parliamentary seats and the Congress Party just 160. To form a majority government in India and select the prime minister, a single party or coalition must win 272 of 543 constituencies. Even if the UPA tally doesn't increase as counting finishes, with 257 seats it can easily attain a majority with the addition of one of the smaller parties that will be angling for influence.
The verdict vindicated Singh's steadfast refusal to give up last year's path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India's diversity over the BJP's ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Because India's communist parties continue to oppose the nuclear pact with the U.S. and remain suspicious of India's burgeoning economic and military ties with America, it is also a verdict that is sure to go down well in Washington. And because the Left blocked Singh from pushing forward with liberalizing India's economy — preventing progress on loosening labor laws, selling off state-owned enterprises, and opening up new sectors like retail to direct foreign investment — the results will also provide some unexpected cheer to the business community.
The Indian stock exchange, too, will doubtless get a boost on Monday from the prospect of a stable government that will almost certainly survive for its entire five-year term.
“Clearly, the perception of stability will be reinforced, so there's no fear of government collapse and mid-term elections,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “That's absolutely critical in these circumstances for medium- and long-term planning" of business activities and investments.
But the most exciting implications of these results lie in the complex terrain of India's domestic politics. The vote has been hailed as marking the official arrival of Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi as a major figure, signaling the decline of identity politics and sounding the death knell for religious extremism.
Throughout his early career, and, indeed, throughout this campaign, Rahul Gandhi — who is the direct descendant of three of India's most respected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — was decried as an untested political ingenue, much as John F. Kennedy Jr. was in the years shortly after he finally passed the bar exam.
This election was Rahul's first real test. Despite his inexperience he made some bold moves — convincing senior members of the party that the Congress should fight the elections alone rather than forming pre-poll alliances in several key states, for instance.
He was the party's chief campaigner, traveling constantly and logging thousands of kilometers by convoy and helicopter. He sometimes went as far as to ditch his security cordon to woo voters from India's poorest classes with symbolic gestures like eating meals in the homes of Dalits (the people once called Untouchables). In both respects, he was incredibly successful, simultaneously rejuvenating the Congress as a national force and shaking the stranglehold that the Dalit leader Mayawati held on Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state.
“It was a huge victory for him, at many levels,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “One, the fact that there's a revival underway in UP, where he took the decision to go without allies and campaigned very hard. Second, the Congress has done well in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Gujarat — these are the states where Rahul experimented with reviving the Youth Congress. In that sense, it might strengthen his hand about the kind of organization that is needed in the party.”
Longtime political observers now also say that the Congress's huge gains in UP — and its strong performance in many other states where pollsters and pundits had been predicting that regional parties based on caste and ethnic formulations would dominate — may signal an end to the identity-based voting that has ruled Indian politics since the mid-1980s.
In this regard, it wasn't just the gains that Rahul's Congress made against Mayawati in UP that were significant; also significant was the thumping defeat in Bihar of Lalu Prasad Yadav, a middle-caste icon once as powerful and controversial a figure in his state as Boss Tweed.
The verdict points toward an end of regional factionalism, Mehta said. “Two things are clearly coming out,” he said. “It's a vote against the politics of opportunism — all kinds of small parties and formulations [allied for cynical reasons]. The second interesting trend is that you cannot take any vote bank for granted. The things that we took for granted, the Muslim vote, the Dalit vote, were all up for grabs.”
For the Hindu nationalist BJP, the election was a total debacle. As the results rolled in on the local television network CNN/IBN, historian Ramachandra Guha drew attention to the electorate's rejection of divisive and extremist politics to call this “the most sensible verdict in an Indian election since 1977.”
As such, this will undoubtedly be the swan song for Lal Krishna Advani — who could not shake the reputation for prejudice and extremism he had acquired while spearheading the agitation that led to the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in 1992 — and it confirms that the BJP faces a full-on leadership crisis.
“We never imagined this unexpected result,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh as he conceded defeat and announced that the party would retreat to headquarters Saturday night for a long session of troubled soul-searching.
They have plenty of reason to worry. Analysts see the verdict as a rejection of jingoistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some suggest this could relegate the BJP to a perennial also-ran. None of the BJP's attempts to polarize the electorate over issues like terrorism or the dredging of a canal through a natural land bridge that some devout Hindus believe was built by the god Ram ever got off the ground. And there are serious questions about whether the party's erstwhile alliance partners will accept Advani's heir apparent, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, due to his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom that killed as many as a thousand Muslims in Ahmedabad.
give it a good shake
By Jason Overdorf
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Monday, May 04, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
in india, love hurts
With an increased emphasis on romantic love, and greater opportunities for women, more Indian marriages are breaking down.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: April 21, 2009
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
At least among Internet users, the problem knows no geographical boundaries. About 60 percent of the 50,000 customers who have registered with SecondShaadi.com, an online matchmaking service for divorced Indians that launched a year ago, live outside India's five largest cities; more than a third live outside the 20 largest cities. “In a few years, we may not even be talking about divorce and remarriage as a stigma anymore,” says Vivek Pahwa, the company's chief executive.
For men and women trapped in bad marriages, that's wonderful news. Rani, a 23-year-old woman from the provincial town of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, for instance, applied for the courts after her husband sent her back to her parents a year into their marriage with a demand for a dowry supplement of 50,000 rupees (the equivalent of a year's salary in these parts). And when she gave birth to a daughter, her husband didn't even come to look at the baby. After three years of legal wrangling over the dowry — prohibited since 1961, though the law is widely flouted — she now says, “I want to be divorced this minute!”
But the state is flailing helplessly as it tries to balance tradition with modernity when it comes to the legal and law enforcement responses to marital discord.
Because a court-ordered divorce can take 15 years, women's attorneys often advise them to file dowry or domestic violence cases against their husbands instead, says Geeta Luthra, a lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues. The criminal courts are equally slow, but the threat of being arrested and spending time behind bars while their lawyer argues for bail exerts pressure on men to settle. That's unfortunate, Luthra says, because the “eight false cases” are making the one genuine dowry petitioner more difficult to believe.
The domestic violence act of 2005 poses another kind of threat: An abused wife can be awarded any “matrimonial home” that she resided in during her marriage — whether or not her husband holds the deed. “The idea is that by scaring the husband and his family they'll force them to settle. And the settlement basically means money,” Banerjee says. “The law is certainly being abused. That's not my assessment, that's the assessment of the high court and the supreme court.”
For men like Rakesh, a middle-class Delhi resident, this means almost weekly trips to court and the police station's special cell for women.
After he refused his wife's demand to move into a second home that his family owned and rented to tenants, his wife filed a police case against him and threatened to have him, his aging mother, his two brothers and their wives thrown in jail for dowry violations he maintains are completely fictitious. He tried to come up with a compromise — he even rented a house for the couple to live in separate from his family. But when nothing worked he filed for divorce.
Now when he's not at the special police division devoted to women's issues suffering verbal abuse in the guise of police-enforced couples counseling, he spends his time wondering whether today is the day he'll get the warning he's going to be arrested and should seek anticipatory bail.
Still, the terms of the debate over dowry and domestic violence cases sometimes suggest what's at stake is a disagreement over the traditions of marriage.
For instance, a web site designed to help men victimized by false cases asks, “Wife forcing you to live separately? Wife does not respect you and is discourteous to your parents?”
This sort of thing cuts both ways, says Luthra. Perhaps understandably, women are less tolerant and more demanding than ever before. But it's not uncommon for a man to sue for divorce on the grounds that his wife refuses to do the housework, fails to play the good hostess when his friends drop by, or is impolite to her in-laws. On the other hand, Luthra says that these days, among couples who don't live with the husband's parents, the wife's mother may call with advice 10 times a day.
That's a problem any culture — traditional or modern — can understand.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: April 21, 2009
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
At least among Internet users, the problem knows no geographical boundaries. About 60 percent of the 50,000 customers who have registered with SecondShaadi.com, an online matchmaking service for divorced Indians that launched a year ago, live outside India's five largest cities; more than a third live outside the 20 largest cities. “In a few years, we may not even be talking about divorce and remarriage as a stigma anymore,” says Vivek Pahwa, the company's chief executive.
For men and women trapped in bad marriages, that's wonderful news. Rani, a 23-year-old woman from the provincial town of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, for instance, applied for the courts after her husband sent her back to her parents a year into their marriage with a demand for a dowry supplement of 50,000 rupees (the equivalent of a year's salary in these parts). And when she gave birth to a daughter, her husband didn't even come to look at the baby. After three years of legal wrangling over the dowry — prohibited since 1961, though the law is widely flouted — she now says, “I want to be divorced this minute!”
But the state is flailing helplessly as it tries to balance tradition with modernity when it comes to the legal and law enforcement responses to marital discord.
Because a court-ordered divorce can take 15 years, women's attorneys often advise them to file dowry or domestic violence cases against their husbands instead, says Geeta Luthra, a lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues. The criminal courts are equally slow, but the threat of being arrested and spending time behind bars while their lawyer argues for bail exerts pressure on men to settle. That's unfortunate, Luthra says, because the “eight false cases” are making the one genuine dowry petitioner more difficult to believe.
The domestic violence act of 2005 poses another kind of threat: An abused wife can be awarded any “matrimonial home” that she resided in during her marriage — whether or not her husband holds the deed. “The idea is that by scaring the husband and his family they'll force them to settle. And the settlement basically means money,” Banerjee says. “The law is certainly being abused. That's not my assessment, that's the assessment of the high court and the supreme court.”
For men like Rakesh, a middle-class Delhi resident, this means almost weekly trips to court and the police station's special cell for women.
After he refused his wife's demand to move into a second home that his family owned and rented to tenants, his wife filed a police case against him and threatened to have him, his aging mother, his two brothers and their wives thrown in jail for dowry violations he maintains are completely fictitious. He tried to come up with a compromise — he even rented a house for the couple to live in separate from his family. But when nothing worked he filed for divorce.
Now when he's not at the special police division devoted to women's issues suffering verbal abuse in the guise of police-enforced couples counseling, he spends his time wondering whether today is the day he'll get the warning he's going to be arrested and should seek anticipatory bail.
Still, the terms of the debate over dowry and domestic violence cases sometimes suggest what's at stake is a disagreement over the traditions of marriage.
For instance, a web site designed to help men victimized by false cases asks, “Wife forcing you to live separately? Wife does not respect you and is discourteous to your parents?”
This sort of thing cuts both ways, says Luthra. Perhaps understandably, women are less tolerant and more demanding than ever before. But it's not uncommon for a man to sue for divorce on the grounds that his wife refuses to do the housework, fails to play the good hostess when his friends drop by, or is impolite to her in-laws. On the other hand, Luthra says that these days, among couples who don't live with the husband's parents, the wife's mother may call with advice 10 times a day.
That's a problem any culture — traditional or modern — can understand.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
the greatest show on earth
Voting begins in India — yes, the world's largest democracy. Here's what you need to know.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
April 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — Half circus, half marathon, India's mammoth general election began Thursday, with some 140 million voters casting their ballots in a free-for-all that has so far defied pundits for a prediction.
After a campaign season that saw candidates climbing trees, hefting dumbbells, and delivering vitriolic speeches to draw attention, on the first day of polling, election officials transported electronic voting machines across mountain creek beds on horseback while candidates rolled up to file their nomination papers in imported luxury cars, rickshaws, horse-drawn carriages — even riding atop a funeral bier shouldered by supporters. It is little wonder that local reporters have taken to calling India's elections “the greatest show on earth.”
Apart from all the tamasha – or hoopla – the sheer scale of the enterprise is daunting. Because India is fighting simmering wars with Maoist rebels, Kashmiri separatists, and a host of other groups that routinely threaten violent retaliation if voters ignore calls to boycott the polls — and to curb the once-widespread practice of “booth capturing” by party strongmen — the election will take place in five phases between April 16 and May 13 so that some 2 million soldiers and police officers can be deployed to protect voters.
More than 700 million voters will eventually cast their ballots, choosing candidates from among more than 30 different political parties, before the results are announced May 16. And with the two main national parties — the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi and current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Lal Krishna Advani — waning in influence, there's a bigger role than ever for bit players and would-be king- and queen-makers of all shapes and sizes.
“What this election is going to decide is the future of coalition politics, and to what extent parties other than the Congress and the BJP can position their own alliance system,” said political analyst Praful Bidwai.
The contest already has dished up some interesting surprises. Varun Gandhi, a descendant of Jawaharlal Nehru, who defected from the family bastion Congress Party, emerged as the poster boy of the BJP's anti-Muslim agenda. Sajjad Gani Lone became the first major Kashmiri separatist leader to enter the electoral fray. And the Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 26-odd Kashmiri separatist parties, for the first time decided not to issue a call to boycott the polls. Nobody knows what happens next.
Burned by the Congress Party's unexpected victory in 2004, few pundits are willing to make any predictions about this contest, which looks to be decided on a bewildering array of local issues in the absence of any galvanizing national debate. But an ear to the ground verifies that most poll watchers tacitly agree with the forecast laid out by local bookies, who have, naturally, been unable to resist laying odds on the outcome, though all forms of gambling are illegal here.
On the eve of phase one, odds makers were offering even money that the Congress will take at least 142 of the 543 parliamentary seats, a tally that would leave them more than 100 seats short of the majority needed to form a government and select the prime minister on their own, but put them in the driver's seat for any coalition that may emerge following the polls.
Despite the economic downturn and the previous government's perceived failures in its response to the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, the odds on the BJP are less favorable, with bookies offering even money that the Hindu nationalist party will win around 120 seats. The other possibility, though it appears remote, is that a so-called “third front” led by a block of communist parties and regional satraps could cobble together a majority piecemeal — something that has only happened once before in Indian history.
“We've only had one such experience in the past, in '96 to '98,” said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan. “Can one look at a coalition where the center of gravity shifts toward the smaller parties? Or will there be a coalition consisting primarily of the smaller, regional parties, supported by one of the larger parties? Either way, I think there is a shift of the center of gravity that is an underlying issue of this election.”
So far, though, it is also difficult to gauge exactly what is at stake. Recent electoral contests between the Congress and BJP have been seen here as a struggle between the model of secularism favored by the Congress — which offers a vision of a multicultural India that protects and supports the religious and ethnic practices of its diverse population — and the BJP's ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, which in its strongest form advocates the suppression of the minority Muslim population and the conversion of India into a Hindu state.
However, this contest has so far suggested that whatever the beliefs of its hard core supporters, the BJP has decided to soft-pedal its more radical policies with an eye to wooing future coalition partners from among regional parties that lack strong ideologies but are uncomfortable with the open espousal of anti-minority policies.
Similarly — though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has accused the BJP's Advani of “weeping in a corner” while the mob he whipped into a frenzy destroyed a historic mosque and Sonia Gandhi has accused him of taking orders from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a proto-fascist Hindu outfit with millions of members — the voters have heard this material so many times they know the script by heart.
As a result, the real battle will be fought at the ground level, on myriad local issues ranging from the suicides of debt-laden farmers to what road or bridge gets built where. And the result could throw up one of the most fractured and diverse coalitions ever to govern this limitlessly complex country.
“I think in some ways it is one of the most unpredictable elections that India has ever seen,” Bidwai said. "The regional parties and the state-level and sub-state parties now have something like 36 percent of the vote, whereas 25 years ago they had just about 10 or 11 percent. They have emerged as far more important, and that introduces a new kind of uncertainty.”
Some worry that a weak coalition government could be disastrous for India, coming in the midst of an economic crisis that calls for swift and decisive action. Manmohan Singh himself (a trained economist whose primary concern has always been India's rate of economic growth) on Wednesday told members of the Editors Guild of India that growing regionalism — and the weak coalitions it engenders — should be seen as a problem on par with terrorism and Maoist extremism.
But while it is true that past governments formed without a dominant party have crumbled swiftly, making an endless season of polls and repolls a disturbing possibility, experts point out that some short-term governments lacking clear popular mandates have been instrumental in pushing through crucial policies.
The coalition government led by the populist Janata Dal party's VP Singh, for instance, managed to push through a resolution on the demolition of the Babri mosque and a society-defining expansion of the job quota system to include the so-called “other backward classes” as well as the erstwhile untouchables, while Atal Behari Vajpayee's 13-day government of 1998 pushed ahead with India's first nuclear weapons test.
“Of course, that kind of government will be able to focus on only one or two or three tasks,” Rangarajan said. “It can't spread its energy across the board. But I have no doubt that the economy will be right at the top of the agenda [whoever wins]. Whichever government you have, there will have to be a broad stimulus, and I think there you will see some continuity.”
For now, all that is left to do is wait and watch — and place a call to the bookie.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
April 16, 2009
NEW DELHI — Half circus, half marathon, India's mammoth general election began Thursday, with some 140 million voters casting their ballots in a free-for-all that has so far defied pundits for a prediction.
After a campaign season that saw candidates climbing trees, hefting dumbbells, and delivering vitriolic speeches to draw attention, on the first day of polling, election officials transported electronic voting machines across mountain creek beds on horseback while candidates rolled up to file their nomination papers in imported luxury cars, rickshaws, horse-drawn carriages — even riding atop a funeral bier shouldered by supporters. It is little wonder that local reporters have taken to calling India's elections “the greatest show on earth.”
Apart from all the tamasha – or hoopla – the sheer scale of the enterprise is daunting. Because India is fighting simmering wars with Maoist rebels, Kashmiri separatists, and a host of other groups that routinely threaten violent retaliation if voters ignore calls to boycott the polls — and to curb the once-widespread practice of “booth capturing” by party strongmen — the election will take place in five phases between April 16 and May 13 so that some 2 million soldiers and police officers can be deployed to protect voters.
More than 700 million voters will eventually cast their ballots, choosing candidates from among more than 30 different political parties, before the results are announced May 16. And with the two main national parties — the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi and current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Lal Krishna Advani — waning in influence, there's a bigger role than ever for bit players and would-be king- and queen-makers of all shapes and sizes.
“What this election is going to decide is the future of coalition politics, and to what extent parties other than the Congress and the BJP can position their own alliance system,” said political analyst Praful Bidwai.
The contest already has dished up some interesting surprises. Varun Gandhi, a descendant of Jawaharlal Nehru, who defected from the family bastion Congress Party, emerged as the poster boy of the BJP's anti-Muslim agenda. Sajjad Gani Lone became the first major Kashmiri separatist leader to enter the electoral fray. And the Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 26-odd Kashmiri separatist parties, for the first time decided not to issue a call to boycott the polls. Nobody knows what happens next.
Burned by the Congress Party's unexpected victory in 2004, few pundits are willing to make any predictions about this contest, which looks to be decided on a bewildering array of local issues in the absence of any galvanizing national debate. But an ear to the ground verifies that most poll watchers tacitly agree with the forecast laid out by local bookies, who have, naturally, been unable to resist laying odds on the outcome, though all forms of gambling are illegal here.
On the eve of phase one, odds makers were offering even money that the Congress will take at least 142 of the 543 parliamentary seats, a tally that would leave them more than 100 seats short of the majority needed to form a government and select the prime minister on their own, but put them in the driver's seat for any coalition that may emerge following the polls.
Despite the economic downturn and the previous government's perceived failures in its response to the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, the odds on the BJP are less favorable, with bookies offering even money that the Hindu nationalist party will win around 120 seats. The other possibility, though it appears remote, is that a so-called “third front” led by a block of communist parties and regional satraps could cobble together a majority piecemeal — something that has only happened once before in Indian history.
“We've only had one such experience in the past, in '96 to '98,” said Delhi University professor Mahesh Rangarajan. “Can one look at a coalition where the center of gravity shifts toward the smaller parties? Or will there be a coalition consisting primarily of the smaller, regional parties, supported by one of the larger parties? Either way, I think there is a shift of the center of gravity that is an underlying issue of this election.”
So far, though, it is also difficult to gauge exactly what is at stake. Recent electoral contests between the Congress and BJP have been seen here as a struggle between the model of secularism favored by the Congress — which offers a vision of a multicultural India that protects and supports the religious and ethnic practices of its diverse population — and the BJP's ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, which in its strongest form advocates the suppression of the minority Muslim population and the conversion of India into a Hindu state.
However, this contest has so far suggested that whatever the beliefs of its hard core supporters, the BJP has decided to soft-pedal its more radical policies with an eye to wooing future coalition partners from among regional parties that lack strong ideologies but are uncomfortable with the open espousal of anti-minority policies.
Similarly — though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has accused the BJP's Advani of “weeping in a corner” while the mob he whipped into a frenzy destroyed a historic mosque and Sonia Gandhi has accused him of taking orders from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a proto-fascist Hindu outfit with millions of members — the voters have heard this material so many times they know the script by heart.
As a result, the real battle will be fought at the ground level, on myriad local issues ranging from the suicides of debt-laden farmers to what road or bridge gets built where. And the result could throw up one of the most fractured and diverse coalitions ever to govern this limitlessly complex country.
“I think in some ways it is one of the most unpredictable elections that India has ever seen,” Bidwai said. "The regional parties and the state-level and sub-state parties now have something like 36 percent of the vote, whereas 25 years ago they had just about 10 or 11 percent. They have emerged as far more important, and that introduces a new kind of uncertainty.”
Some worry that a weak coalition government could be disastrous for India, coming in the midst of an economic crisis that calls for swift and decisive action. Manmohan Singh himself (a trained economist whose primary concern has always been India's rate of economic growth) on Wednesday told members of the Editors Guild of India that growing regionalism — and the weak coalitions it engenders — should be seen as a problem on par with terrorism and Maoist extremism.
But while it is true that past governments formed without a dominant party have crumbled swiftly, making an endless season of polls and repolls a disturbing possibility, experts point out that some short-term governments lacking clear popular mandates have been instrumental in pushing through crucial policies.
The coalition government led by the populist Janata Dal party's VP Singh, for instance, managed to push through a resolution on the demolition of the Babri mosque and a society-defining expansion of the job quota system to include the so-called “other backward classes” as well as the erstwhile untouchables, while Atal Behari Vajpayee's 13-day government of 1998 pushed ahead with India's first nuclear weapons test.
“Of course, that kind of government will be able to focus on only one or two or three tasks,” Rangarajan said. “It can't spread its energy across the board. But I have no doubt that the economy will be right at the top of the agenda [whoever wins]. Whichever government you have, there will have to be a broad stimulus, and I think there you will see some continuity.”
For now, all that is left to do is wait and watch — and place a call to the bookie.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
tigers of india: fearful symmetry
BANDHAVGAR AND PANNA, India — One sunny afternoon in March, officers of the Madhya Pradesh forest department crept up on a majestic Bengal tiger relaxing in the Bandhavgar National Park and shot it with a tranquilizer dart.
The tigress was then loaded into a truck and driven 150 miles — a trip of eight hours or so on India's rough roads — to the Panna Tiger Reserve.
The move was billed as one of the most modern and proactive steps that India's forest department has taken to protect the country's fast disappearing tigers.
But leading conservationists here say the truck might as well have driven the tranquilized beast all the way to China — the final destination of almost all the tigers that are killed by poachers. The Panna Reserve is no great place for tigers: Poachers abound, researchers claim the management there is inept, and the park has lost about 40 tigers the past five years.
Relocations like these aren't inherently disastrous. Wildlife scientists recognize that moving individual animals can be essential to protecting the population. Some experts from the commercial wildlife industry — like Les Carlisle, a conservation manager — think they will have to play an integral part in India's future conservation plans.
“Unless India changes from a passive management system where they sit and record what happens to an active management system where they try and intervene and prevent local extinctions and reintroduce species,” Carlisle said, “I don't believe the future of the tiger is great at all.”
But according to independent wildlife scientists who have studied Panna carefully, that's precisely the problem. Because neither the park management in Panna, nor anything about the way it is run has been changed, there is little reason to hope that the relocated tigress — or any of the others the forest department has committed to moving into Panna — will last much longer.
"Not a single tiger is left in Panna and it is imperative that the reasons for disappearance of tigers in the reserve are identified, and the causes of the tragic decline eliminated, before the re-introduction of any tigers from Bandhavgarh or Kanha," a panel of eight independent tiger experts wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month.
The signatories are still incensed. “This whole sorry incident has proved without doubt that what we need is a dedicated, trained wildlife service,” said Belinda Wright, a former National Geographic photographer who now leads the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “This is playing with fire. Without taking the advice of tiger experts with decades of experience, they [the forest department officers] are just basically doing their own thing.”
It's not news that the tiger is critically endangered around the world. The majestic cat's numbers have declined to only about 3,500, from upwards of 40,000 at the beginning of the century, with subspecies such as the South China Tiger and Sumatran Tiger facing imminent extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
But in recent years, the situation has been revealed to be much more dire than previously believed — in large part due to an apparent crisis plaguing India's “Project Tiger.”
For its last tiger census, India adopted a new way of estimating the surviving population. Instead of a simple method that extrapolated numbers from counting tiger tracks, the new census used satellite remote sensing, geographic information system, and global positioning system technology — in combination with camera trapping and other techniques — to estimate tiger and prey populations.
The results were stunning: Instead of the 3,600 tigers estimated to be living in India's forests in 2002, the more sophisticated census found there are really only about 1,400. In other words, either half of India's tigers (and a quarter of the world's total) were killed over the past five years, or they had never existed anywhere but on paper to begin with.
The unvoiced question became: Was Project Tiger, hailed as one of the world's most successful wildlife conservation programs since it was founded by Indira Gandhi in 1972, just an exercise in inventing numbers?
At first, according to researcher, Raghunandan Chundawat, the program worked. “From 1995 to 2002, in six years, we saw one of the finest recovery of tiger populations in Panna. It was one of the most successful stories in tiger conservation in the last three or four decades,” Chundawat said.
Why did it work? “It was partly due to the management at that time, and partly due to our presence. The guy who was [in charge] there [during those years] provided all the necessary support, and we were providing all the breeding tigers with radio collars and monitored them. We looked at every kill. When you have radio collars and you're watching the tiger 24 hours [a day] you provide a kind of security that's not possible any other way.”
The result was a survival rate of 90 percent for cubs, and, eventually, about seven tigers per square kilometer in the area.
Then, Chundawat alleges, a disaster happened. “In 2001, we had a change in the [park] management,” he said. “They started curtailing our activities, so we were not able to monitor the tigers 24 hours a day the way we should have. We lost a couple of tigers because of that, and when we raised the issue with the management, instead of working with us to determine why these tiger deaths happened and working it out, they canceled our permission [to work in the park altogether.]”
Chundawat was banned from the park for nearly a year, he said, during which time Panna lost more than 20 tigers, and the carnage continued in the absence of the intensive surveillance that his research project provided. But the official numbers — based on the same old method of counting tiger tracks — didn't change.
H.S. Pabla, chief conservator of forests for Madhya Pradesh, makes light of these charges. “There was a depletion in tiger numbers, but the reason was there was no breeding,” he said. “If there are no young ones coming from the bottom then the population is likely to go extinct. So naturally the only solution was to somehow start breeding in that area. We noticed there were some males there, but no females, so the hope was that if we brought in some females that they would start breeding.”
As far as independent tiger experts are concerned, that decision to relocate female tigers from Bandhavgarh to Panna is the proverbial smoking gun. As late as April 2008, the chief wildlife warden claimed in an article in Sanctuary Magazine that Panna had between 20 and 32 tigers and promised, “I would like to assure the world that the tiger density in the park has never been better.”
A month later his department wrote to the national authorities asking for permission to relocate two females. “In a month's time, how can this happen?” Chundawat said. “Now, I believe they have also written a letter to request the transfer of a male tiger. We lost females, we lost males, so what is left there?”
And with the authorities focused on hiding the problem, rather than fixing it, there is little hope that anything will change. “Panna has lost up to 40 tigers,” Wright said. “They've vanished into thin air. Until that is investigated and the reason for their disappearance is addressed, it is pointless to move tigers there. It's downright irresponsible.”
The tigress was then loaded into a truck and driven 150 miles — a trip of eight hours or so on India's rough roads — to the Panna Tiger Reserve.
The move was billed as one of the most modern and proactive steps that India's forest department has taken to protect the country's fast disappearing tigers.
But leading conservationists here say the truck might as well have driven the tranquilized beast all the way to China — the final destination of almost all the tigers that are killed by poachers. The Panna Reserve is no great place for tigers: Poachers abound, researchers claim the management there is inept, and the park has lost about 40 tigers the past five years.
Relocations like these aren't inherently disastrous. Wildlife scientists recognize that moving individual animals can be essential to protecting the population. Some experts from the commercial wildlife industry — like Les Carlisle, a conservation manager — think they will have to play an integral part in India's future conservation plans.
“Unless India changes from a passive management system where they sit and record what happens to an active management system where they try and intervene and prevent local extinctions and reintroduce species,” Carlisle said, “I don't believe the future of the tiger is great at all.”
But according to independent wildlife scientists who have studied Panna carefully, that's precisely the problem. Because neither the park management in Panna, nor anything about the way it is run has been changed, there is little reason to hope that the relocated tigress — or any of the others the forest department has committed to moving into Panna — will last much longer.
"Not a single tiger is left in Panna and it is imperative that the reasons for disappearance of tigers in the reserve are identified, and the causes of the tragic decline eliminated, before the re-introduction of any tigers from Bandhavgarh or Kanha," a panel of eight independent tiger experts wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month.
The signatories are still incensed. “This whole sorry incident has proved without doubt that what we need is a dedicated, trained wildlife service,” said Belinda Wright, a former National Geographic photographer who now leads the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “This is playing with fire. Without taking the advice of tiger experts with decades of experience, they [the forest department officers] are just basically doing their own thing.”
It's not news that the tiger is critically endangered around the world. The majestic cat's numbers have declined to only about 3,500, from upwards of 40,000 at the beginning of the century, with subspecies such as the South China Tiger and Sumatran Tiger facing imminent extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
But in recent years, the situation has been revealed to be much more dire than previously believed — in large part due to an apparent crisis plaguing India's “Project Tiger.”
For its last tiger census, India adopted a new way of estimating the surviving population. Instead of a simple method that extrapolated numbers from counting tiger tracks, the new census used satellite remote sensing, geographic information system, and global positioning system technology — in combination with camera trapping and other techniques — to estimate tiger and prey populations.
The results were stunning: Instead of the 3,600 tigers estimated to be living in India's forests in 2002, the more sophisticated census found there are really only about 1,400. In other words, either half of India's tigers (and a quarter of the world's total) were killed over the past five years, or they had never existed anywhere but on paper to begin with.
The unvoiced question became: Was Project Tiger, hailed as one of the world's most successful wildlife conservation programs since it was founded by Indira Gandhi in 1972, just an exercise in inventing numbers?
At first, according to researcher, Raghunandan Chundawat, the program worked. “From 1995 to 2002, in six years, we saw one of the finest recovery of tiger populations in Panna. It was one of the most successful stories in tiger conservation in the last three or four decades,” Chundawat said.
Why did it work? “It was partly due to the management at that time, and partly due to our presence. The guy who was [in charge] there [during those years] provided all the necessary support, and we were providing all the breeding tigers with radio collars and monitored them. We looked at every kill. When you have radio collars and you're watching the tiger 24 hours [a day] you provide a kind of security that's not possible any other way.”
The result was a survival rate of 90 percent for cubs, and, eventually, about seven tigers per square kilometer in the area.
Then, Chundawat alleges, a disaster happened. “In 2001, we had a change in the [park] management,” he said. “They started curtailing our activities, so we were not able to monitor the tigers 24 hours a day the way we should have. We lost a couple of tigers because of that, and when we raised the issue with the management, instead of working with us to determine why these tiger deaths happened and working it out, they canceled our permission [to work in the park altogether.]”
Chundawat was banned from the park for nearly a year, he said, during which time Panna lost more than 20 tigers, and the carnage continued in the absence of the intensive surveillance that his research project provided. But the official numbers — based on the same old method of counting tiger tracks — didn't change.
H.S. Pabla, chief conservator of forests for Madhya Pradesh, makes light of these charges. “There was a depletion in tiger numbers, but the reason was there was no breeding,” he said. “If there are no young ones coming from the bottom then the population is likely to go extinct. So naturally the only solution was to somehow start breeding in that area. We noticed there were some males there, but no females, so the hope was that if we brought in some females that they would start breeding.”
As far as independent tiger experts are concerned, that decision to relocate female tigers from Bandhavgarh to Panna is the proverbial smoking gun. As late as April 2008, the chief wildlife warden claimed in an article in Sanctuary Magazine that Panna had between 20 and 32 tigers and promised, “I would like to assure the world that the tiger density in the park has never been better.”
A month later his department wrote to the national authorities asking for permission to relocate two females. “In a month's time, how can this happen?” Chundawat said. “Now, I believe they have also written a letter to request the transfer of a male tiger. We lost females, we lost males, so what is left there?”
And with the authorities focused on hiding the problem, rather than fixing it, there is little hope that anything will change. “Panna has lost up to 40 tigers,” Wright said. “They've vanished into thin air. Until that is investigated and the reason for their disappearance is addressed, it is pointless to move tigers there. It's downright irresponsible.”
Friday, March 13, 2009
india: taking a bite out of politics
A host of new nonprofit election watchdogs and citizens' groups are starting to make a dent in middle class apathy.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 13, 2009
DELHI — When Anil Bairwal boots up his computer and scours the newspapers each morning, he may be doing more for the pursuit of justice than any Indian cop.
By training, he's a software engineer, not a police officer. But he and the other members of his team — a network of activists and organizations known as the National Election Watch — have dedicated themselves to making sure criminals don't end up in charge of the government.
Bairwal is at the forefront of a new, and surprising, trend that could have significant implications for the world's largest democracy.
India's middle class — which is still too small to be a decisive voice at the polls — is famous for political apathy.
Campaigns don't come down to issues, but instead often rely on mobilizing party workers to pass out free booze to voters in the slums. In some states, criminal gangs intimidate poor farmers into voting for their leader, while in others party cadres allegedly harass and threaten non-sympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter registration cards. Money and muscle has become so important that every major party relies on candidates charged in criminal cases to deliver the vote.
The situation has become so dismal that nearly a quarter of the legislators in India's recently dissolved parliament had criminal cases pending against them — and not just for white-collar crimes. The charges included 84 cases of murder, along with other violent offenses.
But just as Indian democracy seems to be hitting its lowest ebb, educated Indians are beginning to strike back. Crime and corruption — it turns out — is a strong catalyst.
It all started in 1999 when Trilochan Sastry, then a professor at the respected Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, approached some of his colleagues with a half-baked idea for a guerrilla hit on the nation's unresponsive political parties. Everybody knows that Indian politics is teeming with crooks, he said. But nobody does anything about it.
Sastry suggested filing a lawsuit demanding that candidates divulge their financial assets and criminal records when the parties file their nominations. His friends and fellow professors tried to talk him out of it. After all, they were academics — politics was beneath them. But Sastry recalls that he “didn't see any other way out, any other way to bring about change in the system."
About a year later a Delhi court ruled in their favor. And Sastry and several colleagues — now calling themselves the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) — received the first sign that, despite all evidence to the contrary, common sense might sometimes prevail in Indian politics.
But the feeling was short-lived. Political parties tried to squash the bill, forcing ADR all the way to the Supreme Court before the new rules went into effect in 2003.
Along the way, Sastry's partner in the fight, another business school professor named Jagdeep Chhokar, found time to earn a law degree so they'd be better equipped for the battle. “What shocked us the most was the way the whole process was rationalized by seemingly very decent, upright, law-abiding people in the political establishment,” Chhokar says.
Not surprisingly, therefore, litigation wasn't enough. Even after they were required to disclose their criminal records, all the major parties fielded a host of candidates with pending criminal cases in 2004, with the result that 128 out of 543 members of the last legislature faced ongoing criminal cases while they were in office. At least two were serving life sentences for murder.
“The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability.' Not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues.” explains Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. “In this way, people you would not give a job to — in fact you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization — have become part of the legislature.”
That's where footsoldiers like Bairwal, who gave up a top-level job with a multinational software company to become ADR's national coordinator, come in.
Because requiring politicians to divulge the most dubious facts about themselves didn't stop them from running for office — or winning — ADR set up the National Election Watch to make sure that the press and the voters know exactly how many robberies, kidnappings and murders their honorable member of parliament is alleged to have committed.
The group has mobilized 1,200 organizations and thousands of volunteers to track the activities of dozens of political parties in the run-up to elections, allowing them to spring into action as soon as a candidate is announced. Researchers comb through past affidavits to see whether the candidate has declared criminal cases in the past, and whether there has been any major change in his or her financial assets. Then they name names.
This year they are not only lobbying the press and holding public rallies. Soon they will begin sending weekly text messages with details of politicians' criminal records to voters. “You would think that political parties would do proper background checking of the candidates and then field somebody who would be good for the people, who would be good for the society,” says Bairwal, who over the past two weeks has traveled to nine states and met with more than 100 partner organizations. “But as you can see from the records, that's not the case.”
So far, results have been mixed.
In the last state election that ADR tracked, the number of candidates with alleged criminal pasts dropped to about 12 percent from 25 percent, but the number of alleged criminals who actually won seats remained flat.
The Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government named Shibu Soren coal minister, even though he was on trial for multiple murders (he was later convicted, then acquitted on appeal). And neither of the two party heavyweights have managed to purge alleged (or even convicted) criminals from their ranks. “[BJP leader] L.K. Advani made a statement on the 18th of October that they will not give tickets to people with criminal backgrounds, even if they are winning candidates,” says Chhokar. “And then in the four or five state [subsequent] assembly elections, there were criminals galore.”
But the man who started it all remains optimistic. “The parties have publicly announced that they're not going to put up candidates with criminal records,” Sastry says. “They have not kept that promise, no doubt. But at least they have started reacting.”
The real tipping point will come when voters do the same.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 13, 2009
DELHI — When Anil Bairwal boots up his computer and scours the newspapers each morning, he may be doing more for the pursuit of justice than any Indian cop.
By training, he's a software engineer, not a police officer. But he and the other members of his team — a network of activists and organizations known as the National Election Watch — have dedicated themselves to making sure criminals don't end up in charge of the government.
Bairwal is at the forefront of a new, and surprising, trend that could have significant implications for the world's largest democracy.
India's middle class — which is still too small to be a decisive voice at the polls — is famous for political apathy.
Campaigns don't come down to issues, but instead often rely on mobilizing party workers to pass out free booze to voters in the slums. In some states, criminal gangs intimidate poor farmers into voting for their leader, while in others party cadres allegedly harass and threaten non-sympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter registration cards. Money and muscle has become so important that every major party relies on candidates charged in criminal cases to deliver the vote.
The situation has become so dismal that nearly a quarter of the legislators in India's recently dissolved parliament had criminal cases pending against them — and not just for white-collar crimes. The charges included 84 cases of murder, along with other violent offenses.
But just as Indian democracy seems to be hitting its lowest ebb, educated Indians are beginning to strike back. Crime and corruption — it turns out — is a strong catalyst.
It all started in 1999 when Trilochan Sastry, then a professor at the respected Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, approached some of his colleagues with a half-baked idea for a guerrilla hit on the nation's unresponsive political parties. Everybody knows that Indian politics is teeming with crooks, he said. But nobody does anything about it.
Sastry suggested filing a lawsuit demanding that candidates divulge their financial assets and criminal records when the parties file their nominations. His friends and fellow professors tried to talk him out of it. After all, they were academics — politics was beneath them. But Sastry recalls that he “didn't see any other way out, any other way to bring about change in the system."
About a year later a Delhi court ruled in their favor. And Sastry and several colleagues — now calling themselves the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) — received the first sign that, despite all evidence to the contrary, common sense might sometimes prevail in Indian politics.
But the feeling was short-lived. Political parties tried to squash the bill, forcing ADR all the way to the Supreme Court before the new rules went into effect in 2003.
Along the way, Sastry's partner in the fight, another business school professor named Jagdeep Chhokar, found time to earn a law degree so they'd be better equipped for the battle. “What shocked us the most was the way the whole process was rationalized by seemingly very decent, upright, law-abiding people in the political establishment,” Chhokar says.
Not surprisingly, therefore, litigation wasn't enough. Even after they were required to disclose their criminal records, all the major parties fielded a host of candidates with pending criminal cases in 2004, with the result that 128 out of 543 members of the last legislature faced ongoing criminal cases while they were in office. At least two were serving life sentences for murder.
“The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability.' Not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues.” explains Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. “In this way, people you would not give a job to — in fact you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization — have become part of the legislature.”
That's where footsoldiers like Bairwal, who gave up a top-level job with a multinational software company to become ADR's national coordinator, come in.
Because requiring politicians to divulge the most dubious facts about themselves didn't stop them from running for office — or winning — ADR set up the National Election Watch to make sure that the press and the voters know exactly how many robberies, kidnappings and murders their honorable member of parliament is alleged to have committed.
The group has mobilized 1,200 organizations and thousands of volunteers to track the activities of dozens of political parties in the run-up to elections, allowing them to spring into action as soon as a candidate is announced. Researchers comb through past affidavits to see whether the candidate has declared criminal cases in the past, and whether there has been any major change in his or her financial assets. Then they name names.
This year they are not only lobbying the press and holding public rallies. Soon they will begin sending weekly text messages with details of politicians' criminal records to voters. “You would think that political parties would do proper background checking of the candidates and then field somebody who would be good for the people, who would be good for the society,” says Bairwal, who over the past two weeks has traveled to nine states and met with more than 100 partner organizations. “But as you can see from the records, that's not the case.”
So far, results have been mixed.
In the last state election that ADR tracked, the number of candidates with alleged criminal pasts dropped to about 12 percent from 25 percent, but the number of alleged criminals who actually won seats remained flat.
The Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government named Shibu Soren coal minister, even though he was on trial for multiple murders (he was later convicted, then acquitted on appeal). And neither of the two party heavyweights have managed to purge alleged (or even convicted) criminals from their ranks. “[BJP leader] L.K. Advani made a statement on the 18th of October that they will not give tickets to people with criminal backgrounds, even if they are winning candidates,” says Chhokar. “And then in the four or five state [subsequent] assembly elections, there were criminals galore.”
But the man who started it all remains optimistic. “The parties have publicly announced that they're not going to put up candidates with criminal records,” Sastry says. “They have not kept that promise, no doubt. But at least they have started reacting.”
The real tipping point will come when voters do the same.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
the house in ill repute
New rules have exposed just how many thieves and murderers sit in India's Parliament.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
March 16, 2009
Indian members of Parliament went home last week amid hoots and howls, derided as the sorriest lot ever to disgrace the halls of the world's largest democracy. The 14th Lok Sabha, or People's House, met for only 46 days in the past year—the fewest ever—because of disruptions caused by its many dubious members. One in 10 members didn't participate in a single debate. Eleven M.P.s were expelled for taking bribes. The coal minister was compelled to step down when he was convicted of murder (though he was later acquitted on appeal). And when the opposition called for a confidence vote, several members had to be transported to the People's House from the big house—where two of them are serving life sentences for murder—to participate. As the legislators adjourned last week, House Speaker Somnath Chatterjee wished them good riddance: "You do not deserve one paisa [cent] of public money," he scolded. "I hope all of you are defeated in the next election."
That's not likely. Parties in India have long used allies with shady pasts to influence voters. But as the power of the national parties waned—accelerating in the late 1990s—because of the rise of caste- and ethnicity-based regional players, alleged and convicted criminals began to play a broader role. No single party has won enough parliamentary seats to govern alone since the Congress party did so in 1984, and the number of seats won by India's six national parties—which include the Congress, the BJP and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—fell from 477 in 1991 to 388 in 2004. Now, in many constituencies, there are four or five significant parties, and the share of the vote needed to win a seat has fallen as low as 15 percent. As a result, criminal strongmen no longer need to throw their support behind a leading politician, because the number of votes they need is small enough that they can win elected office themselves. With regional players well positioned for the next general election on April 16, there is some chance that a politician who has undergone a criminal investigation could become the prime minister.
The 14th Lok Sabha was the first in which it was crystal clear just how many members were alleged crooks. Thanks to new rules pushed into law by a group of fed-up college professors after years of resistance from dozens of political parties, candidates for the Lok Sabha for the first time had to disclose their assets and criminal records. The disclosures seemed to have little impact on the 2004 election: 128 of the 543 winners had faced criminal charges, including 84 cases of murder, 17 cases of robbery and 28 cases of theft and extortion. Many face multiple criminal counts—including one M.P. who faces 17 separate murder charges—and no major party is beyond reproach. Because the disclosure requirement is new, it's impossible to plot a trend line, but most experts say the situation is deteriorating. "The general opinion is that the influence of criminals in politics is steadily increasing," says Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition.
Indian law bars convicted criminals, not alleged criminals, from running for office, but a loophole allows even convicts to continue in politics as long as the case is under appeal. In India, that can mean 25 or 30 years, the course of an entire career. And the problem goes well beyond alleged criminals who hold elected office.
Due to a fractured electorate and rampant flouting of campaign-spending limits, gangsters have muscled into positions of influence close to Parliament, and the problem is spreading. While the middle class protests, party workers distribute liquor and cash to woo voters in the slums. In lawless states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, thugs intimidate poor farmers into toeing the line. In riot-torn Gujarat and West Bengal, party cadres are alleged to harass and threaten nonsympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter-registration cards. And elsewhere, aspirants like Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena—known for beating up migrants coming to Mumbai to hunt for jobs—use vandalism masked as street demonstrations to raise their political profiles. "Whether you call them goons or you call them political activists," says Jha, "it is becoming a blurred line."
The havoc created by India's criminal politicians is wide-ranging. Criminals seek political office to enrich themselves and gain protection from prosecution, and they easily pervert the police and the administration to their private purposes. When police officers or magistrates attempt to enforce the law, a powerful M.P. can engineer their transfer; in 2005 M.P. and convicted murderer Mohammed Shahabuddin of Bihar arranged the transfer of a magistrate who had sought to bar Shahabuddin from the district as a threat to public order.
Even on a matter as vital as last year's nuclear pact with the U.S., the alleged criminality of key politicians is believed to have made a crucial difference in the path India chose. When Singh and the Congress party opted to go ahead with the pact, their allies from the left parties withdrew their support for the government, forcing a confidence vote. After some frenzied horse-trading, the legislators of the Samajwadi Party—whose leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was under scrutiny for corruption by the Central Bureau of Investigation—switched positions to support the nuclear pact and volunteered to replace the left parties in the coalition. The government survived, and the pact went through. But soon after, stories of mysterious briefcases full of cash traveling from party offices to the homes of M.P.s began to circulate. The CBI—often criticized for acting as a political tool of the ruling party—dropped its case against the Samajwadi Party leader. And the probe into the "cash for votes" scandal fizzled before it even started.
The major parties are not above all this. In the outgoing Parliament, 26 Congress M.P.s and 29 BJP M.P.s faced criminal charges. About a fifth of the representatives of the two major parties were under investigation. Nor has either party been shy about giving ministerial posts to politicians accused of serious crimes. For example, Congress installed Shibu Soren as coal minister even though he was at the time under trial for the alleged kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary and the alleged massacre of 11 people in sectarian violence. (He was later acquitted in both cases.) "The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability,' not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues," says Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the BJP. "In this way, people you would not give a job to—in fact, you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization—have become part of the legislature."
Come April, experts agree, the list of candidates competing for office is likely once again to be significantly shorter than the list of criminal charges against them. Even the mainstream political parties have resisted change. When the college profs first mobilized as the Association for Democratic Reforms in 1999, filing suit to force candidates to disclose criminal records, it sailed through the Delhi courts. Then the BJP, the Congress and 20 other political parties united to stymie the new rules through legal technicalities, delaying implementation for years. ADR member Jagdish Chhokar says the official resistance proved two things: that "the political establishment can be united" on an issue they care about and "that the government can be efficient," at least in defense of thugs in office.
Standards have indeed fallen so low that neither the BJP nor the Congress have pledged to eliminate even violent offenders from their rosters and instead must rely on the argument that their criminals are cleaner on average than others'.
"Neither the Congress nor the BJP have people with serial, cognizable offenses," says BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy, arguing for a distinction "between crimes of moral turpitude" and "heinous" crimes. Congress spokesman Satyavrat Chaturvedi says, "I can't say there's never been a case where a criminal has been given a ticket, [but] professional criminals, habitual criminals, those people will not get tickets."
It makes one wonder: How many murder charges are required before you're considered unfit to represent the good people of India?
With Sudip Mazumdar in Kolkata
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188166
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
March 16, 2009
Indian members of Parliament went home last week amid hoots and howls, derided as the sorriest lot ever to disgrace the halls of the world's largest democracy. The 14th Lok Sabha, or People's House, met for only 46 days in the past year—the fewest ever—because of disruptions caused by its many dubious members. One in 10 members didn't participate in a single debate. Eleven M.P.s were expelled for taking bribes. The coal minister was compelled to step down when he was convicted of murder (though he was later acquitted on appeal). And when the opposition called for a confidence vote, several members had to be transported to the People's House from the big house—where two of them are serving life sentences for murder—to participate. As the legislators adjourned last week, House Speaker Somnath Chatterjee wished them good riddance: "You do not deserve one paisa [cent] of public money," he scolded. "I hope all of you are defeated in the next election."
That's not likely. Parties in India have long used allies with shady pasts to influence voters. But as the power of the national parties waned—accelerating in the late 1990s—because of the rise of caste- and ethnicity-based regional players, alleged and convicted criminals began to play a broader role. No single party has won enough parliamentary seats to govern alone since the Congress party did so in 1984, and the number of seats won by India's six national parties—which include the Congress, the BJP and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—fell from 477 in 1991 to 388 in 2004. Now, in many constituencies, there are four or five significant parties, and the share of the vote needed to win a seat has fallen as low as 15 percent. As a result, criminal strongmen no longer need to throw their support behind a leading politician, because the number of votes they need is small enough that they can win elected office themselves. With regional players well positioned for the next general election on April 16, there is some chance that a politician who has undergone a criminal investigation could become the prime minister.
The 14th Lok Sabha was the first in which it was crystal clear just how many members were alleged crooks. Thanks to new rules pushed into law by a group of fed-up college professors after years of resistance from dozens of political parties, candidates for the Lok Sabha for the first time had to disclose their assets and criminal records. The disclosures seemed to have little impact on the 2004 election: 128 of the 543 winners had faced criminal charges, including 84 cases of murder, 17 cases of robbery and 28 cases of theft and extortion. Many face multiple criminal counts—including one M.P. who faces 17 separate murder charges—and no major party is beyond reproach. Because the disclosure requirement is new, it's impossible to plot a trend line, but most experts say the situation is deteriorating. "The general opinion is that the influence of criminals in politics is steadily increasing," says Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition.
Indian law bars convicted criminals, not alleged criminals, from running for office, but a loophole allows even convicts to continue in politics as long as the case is under appeal. In India, that can mean 25 or 30 years, the course of an entire career. And the problem goes well beyond alleged criminals who hold elected office.
Due to a fractured electorate and rampant flouting of campaign-spending limits, gangsters have muscled into positions of influence close to Parliament, and the problem is spreading. While the middle class protests, party workers distribute liquor and cash to woo voters in the slums. In lawless states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, thugs intimidate poor farmers into toeing the line. In riot-torn Gujarat and West Bengal, party cadres are alleged to harass and threaten nonsympathizers, sometimes confiscating their voter-registration cards. And elsewhere, aspirants like Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena—known for beating up migrants coming to Mumbai to hunt for jobs—use vandalism masked as street demonstrations to raise their political profiles. "Whether you call them goons or you call them political activists," says Jha, "it is becoming a blurred line."
The havoc created by India's criminal politicians is wide-ranging. Criminals seek political office to enrich themselves and gain protection from prosecution, and they easily pervert the police and the administration to their private purposes. When police officers or magistrates attempt to enforce the law, a powerful M.P. can engineer their transfer; in 2005 M.P. and convicted murderer Mohammed Shahabuddin of Bihar arranged the transfer of a magistrate who had sought to bar Shahabuddin from the district as a threat to public order.
Even on a matter as vital as last year's nuclear pact with the U.S., the alleged criminality of key politicians is believed to have made a crucial difference in the path India chose. When Singh and the Congress party opted to go ahead with the pact, their allies from the left parties withdrew their support for the government, forcing a confidence vote. After some frenzied horse-trading, the legislators of the Samajwadi Party—whose leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was under scrutiny for corruption by the Central Bureau of Investigation—switched positions to support the nuclear pact and volunteered to replace the left parties in the coalition. The government survived, and the pact went through. But soon after, stories of mysterious briefcases full of cash traveling from party offices to the homes of M.P.s began to circulate. The CBI—often criticized for acting as a political tool of the ruling party—dropped its case against the Samajwadi Party leader. And the probe into the "cash for votes" scandal fizzled before it even started.
The major parties are not above all this. In the outgoing Parliament, 26 Congress M.P.s and 29 BJP M.P.s faced criminal charges. About a fifth of the representatives of the two major parties were under investigation. Nor has either party been shy about giving ministerial posts to politicians accused of serious crimes. For example, Congress installed Shibu Soren as coal minister even though he was at the time under trial for the alleged kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary and the alleged massacre of 11 people in sectarian violence. (He was later acquitted in both cases.) "The sole criterion for a candidate has become what they call 'winnability,' not his character, not his performance, not his competence, not his ability to assess national issues," says Arun Shourie, a former journalist who is now a leading member of the BJP. "In this way, people you would not give a job to—in fact, you'd make sure that they don't come near your organization—have become part of the legislature."
Come April, experts agree, the list of candidates competing for office is likely once again to be significantly shorter than the list of criminal charges against them. Even the mainstream political parties have resisted change. When the college profs first mobilized as the Association for Democratic Reforms in 1999, filing suit to force candidates to disclose criminal records, it sailed through the Delhi courts. Then the BJP, the Congress and 20 other political parties united to stymie the new rules through legal technicalities, delaying implementation for years. ADR member Jagdish Chhokar says the official resistance proved two things: that "the political establishment can be united" on an issue they care about and "that the government can be efficient," at least in defense of thugs in office.
Standards have indeed fallen so low that neither the BJP nor the Congress have pledged to eliminate even violent offenders from their rosters and instead must rely on the argument that their criminals are cleaner on average than others'.
"Neither the Congress nor the BJP have people with serial, cognizable offenses," says BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy, arguing for a distinction "between crimes of moral turpitude" and "heinous" crimes. Congress spokesman Satyavrat Chaturvedi says, "I can't say there's never been a case where a criminal has been given a ticket, [but] professional criminals, habitual criminals, those people will not get tickets."
It makes one wonder: How many murder charges are required before you're considered unfit to represent the good people of India?
With Sudip Mazumdar in Kolkata
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188166
under an indian sun
Can an upstart Indian DVD maker beat Google to the punch in solar energy?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 7, 2009
NEW DELHI — Ratul Puri, the 35-year-old executive director of Moser Baer India, looks like Adrian Brody's kid brother and talks like he swallowed the last four volumes of the Harvard Business Review. But he's no puffed up heir to the throne of daddy's business.
Since Puri returned to India from college in the United States in 1994, he's helped transform Moser Baer from a rinky-dink maker of floppy disks into a $400 million high-tech company that straddles business as diverse as the optical media, home entertainment, consumer electronics and solar energy sectors.
Today, Moser Baer is among the world's top five makers of blank CDs and DVDs, and virtually owns the Indian market for storage media. In 2007, after the company discovered a method of making pre-recorded DVDs at about half the price of existing technologies, Puri spearheaded a move into home entertainment that has already revolutionized the Indian market — where the company has acquired more than 10,000 titles and slashed the retail price of DVD movies to about $1 from $10-$15 before it entered the sector. And in 2008 it began unveiling a range of DVD players, LCD TVs and other consumer electronics products that independent observers have said offer the same features and quality of leading international brands for a tenth of the cost.
But the company's most exciting move is its venture into making thin-film solar energy panels, where its expertise in shaving down costs has the potential to spark a revolution in this power-starved country. “India has a massive opportunity in solar. Five, ten, fifteen years down the road it can be amongst the world's largest markets,” Puri told GlobalPost in a recent interview.
That enthusiasm might seem unrealistic from an Indian company that until a couple of years ago was known exclusively for stamping out blank DVDs, especially now that lower oil prices and financial turmoil have stilled some of the clamor for clean energy. But Puri claims that his enormous CD and DVD volumes actually give him more experience in coating thin-film silicon — the essential technology that Moser Baer's solar cells will employ — than virtually any other company in the world. “We plan to have 600-odd megawatts of capacity by 2010,” he said, “which will get us to the magic $1 a watt [that it will take to compete with conventional power].”
Moser Baer plans investments of nearly $3.2 billion in research, development and manufacturing of solar power products — the "thin film modules" and other silicon bits and pieces that make solar power work.
The key to success, Puri says, will be the company's expertise in lowering manufacturing costs. One of the first Indian manufacturers to successfully compete internationally, Moser Baer entered high-tech manufacturing at a time when the general consensus was that Indian manufacturing was a basket case.
In one of the dustiest places on the planet, the company built a massive “clean room” for disk manufacture that required an air conditioning unit that takes up the entire second floor of the factory, and installed their own diesel-fueled power generation facility, since even a brief electricity outage would spoil the melted silicon. And that was at a time when nobody believed blank CDs could be made cheaply enough to replace floppies. “There isn't one big factor [to cutting costs], it's a lot of little factors,” Puri said. “Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to believe that you could have a DVD that you could sell for 10 cents a disk and make money, but today it's real. So similar to that in the solar space.”
Already, touching $1 a watt would put the Indian firm in some pretty elite company. Only a handful of firms claim to have reached that price point so far, including U.S.-based First Solar and Nanosolar, which has received financial backing from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Nanosolar uses — attention science fans — copper indium gallium diselenide to build its solar cells, while First Solar uses cadmium telluride-based cells. For its part, Moser Baer uses amorphous silicon. All three technologies have their proponents.
But making DVDs has convinced Puri that he can lower the costs of producing amorphous silicon cells again and again. “We're designing new anti-reflective coatings which then impact the light, we've driven the thickness of the glass down, we've tried to design a better system of components around the basic panel to take costs out, we've innovated a lot on the process recipes, which allows much higher throughput for the facilities,” he said. “It's a lot of little things that contribute to that road map to a sub $1 a watt price point.”
If the company gets there by 2010, that could help India leapfrog to clean energy the way it bypassed terrestrial telephone networks and went straight to cellular, which would be good news for the rest of the world. Despite the much-heralded nuclear deal with the United States, even 20 years down the road, nuclear energy will supply only a tiny fraction of India's power needs. “What does that mean for India, or more importantly, what does it mean for the rest of the world? Where will India get its energy from? It will get it from coal,” Puri said. And that means as many as 300 coal-fired power plants spewing a giant brown cloud over Asia.
But if solar gets here first, that could be different. “Maybe instead of 300 coal plants, it will only have to build 150. That might be an acceptable path.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
March 7, 2009
NEW DELHI — Ratul Puri, the 35-year-old executive director of Moser Baer India, looks like Adrian Brody's kid brother and talks like he swallowed the last four volumes of the Harvard Business Review. But he's no puffed up heir to the throne of daddy's business.
Since Puri returned to India from college in the United States in 1994, he's helped transform Moser Baer from a rinky-dink maker of floppy disks into a $400 million high-tech company that straddles business as diverse as the optical media, home entertainment, consumer electronics and solar energy sectors.
Today, Moser Baer is among the world's top five makers of blank CDs and DVDs, and virtually owns the Indian market for storage media. In 2007, after the company discovered a method of making pre-recorded DVDs at about half the price of existing technologies, Puri spearheaded a move into home entertainment that has already revolutionized the Indian market — where the company has acquired more than 10,000 titles and slashed the retail price of DVD movies to about $1 from $10-$15 before it entered the sector. And in 2008 it began unveiling a range of DVD players, LCD TVs and other consumer electronics products that independent observers have said offer the same features and quality of leading international brands for a tenth of the cost.
But the company's most exciting move is its venture into making thin-film solar energy panels, where its expertise in shaving down costs has the potential to spark a revolution in this power-starved country. “India has a massive opportunity in solar. Five, ten, fifteen years down the road it can be amongst the world's largest markets,” Puri told GlobalPost in a recent interview.
That enthusiasm might seem unrealistic from an Indian company that until a couple of years ago was known exclusively for stamping out blank DVDs, especially now that lower oil prices and financial turmoil have stilled some of the clamor for clean energy. But Puri claims that his enormous CD and DVD volumes actually give him more experience in coating thin-film silicon — the essential technology that Moser Baer's solar cells will employ — than virtually any other company in the world. “We plan to have 600-odd megawatts of capacity by 2010,” he said, “which will get us to the magic $1 a watt [that it will take to compete with conventional power].”
Moser Baer plans investments of nearly $3.2 billion in research, development and manufacturing of solar power products — the "thin film modules" and other silicon bits and pieces that make solar power work.
The key to success, Puri says, will be the company's expertise in lowering manufacturing costs. One of the first Indian manufacturers to successfully compete internationally, Moser Baer entered high-tech manufacturing at a time when the general consensus was that Indian manufacturing was a basket case.
In one of the dustiest places on the planet, the company built a massive “clean room” for disk manufacture that required an air conditioning unit that takes up the entire second floor of the factory, and installed their own diesel-fueled power generation facility, since even a brief electricity outage would spoil the melted silicon. And that was at a time when nobody believed blank CDs could be made cheaply enough to replace floppies. “There isn't one big factor [to cutting costs], it's a lot of little factors,” Puri said. “Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to believe that you could have a DVD that you could sell for 10 cents a disk and make money, but today it's real. So similar to that in the solar space.”
Already, touching $1 a watt would put the Indian firm in some pretty elite company. Only a handful of firms claim to have reached that price point so far, including U.S.-based First Solar and Nanosolar, which has received financial backing from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Nanosolar uses — attention science fans — copper indium gallium diselenide to build its solar cells, while First Solar uses cadmium telluride-based cells. For its part, Moser Baer uses amorphous silicon. All three technologies have their proponents.
But making DVDs has convinced Puri that he can lower the costs of producing amorphous silicon cells again and again. “We're designing new anti-reflective coatings which then impact the light, we've driven the thickness of the glass down, we've tried to design a better system of components around the basic panel to take costs out, we've innovated a lot on the process recipes, which allows much higher throughput for the facilities,” he said. “It's a lot of little things that contribute to that road map to a sub $1 a watt price point.”
If the company gets there by 2010, that could help India leapfrog to clean energy the way it bypassed terrestrial telephone networks and went straight to cellular, which would be good news for the rest of the world. Despite the much-heralded nuclear deal with the United States, even 20 years down the road, nuclear energy will supply only a tiny fraction of India's power needs. “What does that mean for India, or more importantly, what does it mean for the rest of the world? Where will India get its energy from? It will get it from coal,” Puri said. And that means as many as 300 coal-fired power plants spewing a giant brown cloud over Asia.
But if solar gets here first, that could be different. “Maybe instead of 300 coal plants, it will only have to build 150. That might be an acceptable path.”
Monday, March 02, 2009
women on top -- india
By Jason Overdorf
Monocle (March 2009)
For almost 30 years, you couldn’t get married in north India without a Bajaj Chetak scooter. The reason: no dowry was complete without the classic workhorse. But today, India’s scooter business – like the country – is in the throes of a revolution. Stricter laws are slowly wiping out the dowry system. And it is future brides, not grooms, who have become the scooter makers’ target audience.
In the early 1990s, women on scooters were so rare that riding one earned my wife the nickname “scooter walli madam”. Nobody would have predicted that top scooter companies such as TVS Motor, Hero Honda and Kinetic Motors would soon be wooing India’s newly liberated women with snappy jingles, women-only showrooms, and a battery of colours as extensive as any lipstick rack. “At stage one it was establishing the relevance of the product,” says McCann- Erickson’s Dileep Ashoka, who leads the ad team for TVS Scooty. “Then it moved into a more emotional territory of being the girls’ ‘first keys to freedom’ and then into a more assured attitude to appeal to free- spirited girls.”
In one 2006 Scooty ad, a group of roadside Romeos taunt Bollywood actress Preity Zinta’s character on the way to college because she is riding a pink scooter. When they arrive at class, they find that Zinta is the professor. “Never underestimate the power of pink,” she says.
Publicis Ambience raised the stakes in its ad in 2007 for the Kinetic Flyte made by Kinetic Motors in association with Taiwan’s SYM (managing director of Kinetic, Sulajja Firodia Motwani, is pictured above on the right, with executive vice-president of SYM, Harrison Liu). Bollywood actress Bipasha Basu fronted the campaign which spoofed the Scooty with pink-clad Barbies singing, “We’re bubbly like our scooters, we’re girlie like our scooters.” Basu tells viewers: “Today’s women aren’t girlie like dolls, they’re smart and confident.”
Hero Honda’s Pleasure has pushed the envelope even further. The ads for the Pleasure hint at the fact that owning a scooter means freedom from chaperones. For instance, the bride and groom exit their western- style wedding ceremony to find a robin’s-egg blue Pleasure. This time, though, the bride takes the handlebars and the groom straddles the pillion. The message is clear. The days of the dowry are fading fast. And where scooters are concerned, women are on top.
http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Magazine-Articles/Women-on-top/
Monocle (March 2009)
For almost 30 years, you couldn’t get married in north India without a Bajaj Chetak scooter. The reason: no dowry was complete without the classic workhorse. But today, India’s scooter business – like the country – is in the throes of a revolution. Stricter laws are slowly wiping out the dowry system. And it is future brides, not grooms, who have become the scooter makers’ target audience.
In the early 1990s, women on scooters were so rare that riding one earned my wife the nickname “scooter walli madam”. Nobody would have predicted that top scooter companies such as TVS Motor, Hero Honda and Kinetic Motors would soon be wooing India’s newly liberated women with snappy jingles, women-only showrooms, and a battery of colours as extensive as any lipstick rack. “At stage one it was establishing the relevance of the product,” says McCann- Erickson’s Dileep Ashoka, who leads the ad team for TVS Scooty. “Then it moved into a more emotional territory of being the girls’ ‘first keys to freedom’ and then into a more assured attitude to appeal to free- spirited girls.”
In one 2006 Scooty ad, a group of roadside Romeos taunt Bollywood actress Preity Zinta’s character on the way to college because she is riding a pink scooter. When they arrive at class, they find that Zinta is the professor. “Never underestimate the power of pink,” she says.
Publicis Ambience raised the stakes in its ad in 2007 for the Kinetic Flyte made by Kinetic Motors in association with Taiwan’s SYM (managing director of Kinetic, Sulajja Firodia Motwani, is pictured above on the right, with executive vice-president of SYM, Harrison Liu). Bollywood actress Bipasha Basu fronted the campaign which spoofed the Scooty with pink-clad Barbies singing, “We’re bubbly like our scooters, we’re girlie like our scooters.” Basu tells viewers: “Today’s women aren’t girlie like dolls, they’re smart and confident.”
Hero Honda’s Pleasure has pushed the envelope even further. The ads for the Pleasure hint at the fact that owning a scooter means freedom from chaperones. For instance, the bride and groom exit their western- style wedding ceremony to find a robin’s-egg blue Pleasure. This time, though, the bride takes the handlebars and the groom straddles the pillion. The message is clear. The days of the dowry are fading fast. And where scooters are concerned, women are on top.
http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Magazine-Articles/Women-on-top/
Thursday, February 26, 2009
the bhopal disaster: 25 years later
Will the notorious chemical tragedy in India claim a third generation of victims?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 26, 2009
BHOPAL, Madhya Pradesh, India — In the dim light of her two-room shack opposite the site of one of the world's worst industrial disasters, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, Leelabai Ahirwar delivers a quiet account of the event that ruined her life.
“I myself am still affected by the gas,” the 45-year-old mother of four says. “I suffer from chest pains, and I often feel like I'm about to die. But my children are worse off. My daughter is anemic and her body swells up mysteriously, and my son, Jagdish, never grew properly, so he looks like he is only 14 years old, even though he is almost 22.”
A few minutes into our discussion, Ahirwar calls Jagdish, her stunted son, in from the other room. His elfin features and tiny stature make him look more like a nine year old than the 14 or 15 his mother claimed. But he produces a birth certificate that proves he's 21. “We took him to the doctor many times,” says Ahirwar. “But they don't listen.”
That's no surprise. Jagdish isn't the only young person in this Bhopal slum to suffer from an unexplained ailment. Though there has been no official study of the longterm effects of the gas leak and lingering environmental damage, anecdotal evidence suggests that the residents who remain trapped in the disaster zone live in serious peril. A 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women living near the factory. A 2003 survey by the Sambhavan Clinic found that half of the residents of this neighborhood suffer from respiratory problems, anemia, headaches and nausea. The clinic also found a higher than average number of birth defects.
At five minutes past midnight on Dec. 3, 1984, some 30 tons of toxic chemicals spewed into the air from an insecticide factory — then owned by Union Carbide — not a stone's throw from Ahirwar's home. Within minutes, poison gas billowed over this poverty-stricken slum community while residents slept. Ahirwar, then 20 years old, and her husband hid under a blanket, only finding out what had transpired the next morning. Up to 8,000 people died over the next few weeks, and as many as 20,000 more in the subsequent months. And that was only the beginning. Unable to relocate due to poverty, residents have continued to drink contaminated water and breathe acrid-tasting air for two generations — with horrifying consequences.
Subsequent investigations revealed that Union Carbide had not taken adequate safety precautions, and the company cut corners to reduce operation costs. Eventually, in an out-of-court settlement reached in 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million for damages caused in the Bhopal disaster, 15 percent of the original $3 billion claimed in the lawsuit. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200 — a piddling amount that echoed an argument made by a Carbide defense lawyer: "How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?"
And after Union Carbide was sold to Dow Chemical in 2001, the new owners denied they were liable for the site, and have refused to clean up the area or pay additional compensation to the new victims — now in the second and even third generation.
“The contaminated water issue was never part of the settlement, even though Union Carbide knew about it in 1984,” says Rachna Dhingra, a 31-year-old Indian-American activist who works with the Sambhavna Trust. “About 30,000 people living behind the factory are still drinking that water.”
As a visitor, you can't deny that living conditions here are miserable. Union Carbide pumped industrial waste into two solar evaporation ponds just across the street from this overcrowded residential area. Though many years have passed, activists say that the ponds still leak contaminants into the drinking water supply.
And as late as 2005 — 20 years too late — some 340 tons of toxic waste was collected from a locked warehouse on the old factory grounds. I tasted the difference in the air immediately when I stepped out of my taxi from the nicer part of town — where Bhopal surrounds a surprisingly large, clean-looking lake.
Twenty-five years after the gas leak, there may be some hope on the horizon. In November, a New York appeals court reinstated plaintiffs’ claims against Union Carbide Corporation for contaminating water around the Bhopal plant, reversing a lower court’s dismissal of the case. And — pending a new financial settlement — local activists' commitment is paying off. After two marches from Bhopal to Delhi, a distance of some 750 kilometers, the victims of the gas tragedy are seeing some action on items they have been demanding since 1987.
“We got an empowered commission on Bhopal to look into the medical, social and environmental rehabilitation of the area,” says Dhingra. “It will have independent powers and representatives from various service organizations as well as the government.” Dhingra hopes that will mean effective programs instead of feel-good boondoggles. It would be a big change. “Till now, more than 80 crores ($16 million) has been spent on creating jobs, but they've not been able to create even 80 jobs,” says Dhingra.
Today, there's one sign of change that's visible to all: Construction is underway on a network of pipes to provide clean water to the area. “Within three months, the pipeline will be laid,” says Dhingra. “For me, that's a big thing.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090226/the-bhopal-disaster-25-years-later
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 26, 2009
BHOPAL, Madhya Pradesh, India — In the dim light of her two-room shack opposite the site of one of the world's worst industrial disasters, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, Leelabai Ahirwar delivers a quiet account of the event that ruined her life.
“I myself am still affected by the gas,” the 45-year-old mother of four says. “I suffer from chest pains, and I often feel like I'm about to die. But my children are worse off. My daughter is anemic and her body swells up mysteriously, and my son, Jagdish, never grew properly, so he looks like he is only 14 years old, even though he is almost 22.”
A few minutes into our discussion, Ahirwar calls Jagdish, her stunted son, in from the other room. His elfin features and tiny stature make him look more like a nine year old than the 14 or 15 his mother claimed. But he produces a birth certificate that proves he's 21. “We took him to the doctor many times,” says Ahirwar. “But they don't listen.”
That's no surprise. Jagdish isn't the only young person in this Bhopal slum to suffer from an unexplained ailment. Though there has been no official study of the longterm effects of the gas leak and lingering environmental damage, anecdotal evidence suggests that the residents who remain trapped in the disaster zone live in serious peril. A 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women living near the factory. A 2003 survey by the Sambhavan Clinic found that half of the residents of this neighborhood suffer from respiratory problems, anemia, headaches and nausea. The clinic also found a higher than average number of birth defects.
At five minutes past midnight on Dec. 3, 1984, some 30 tons of toxic chemicals spewed into the air from an insecticide factory — then owned by Union Carbide — not a stone's throw from Ahirwar's home. Within minutes, poison gas billowed over this poverty-stricken slum community while residents slept. Ahirwar, then 20 years old, and her husband hid under a blanket, only finding out what had transpired the next morning. Up to 8,000 people died over the next few weeks, and as many as 20,000 more in the subsequent months. And that was only the beginning. Unable to relocate due to poverty, residents have continued to drink contaminated water and breathe acrid-tasting air for two generations — with horrifying consequences.
Subsequent investigations revealed that Union Carbide had not taken adequate safety precautions, and the company cut corners to reduce operation costs. Eventually, in an out-of-court settlement reached in 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million for damages caused in the Bhopal disaster, 15 percent of the original $3 billion claimed in the lawsuit. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200 — a piddling amount that echoed an argument made by a Carbide defense lawyer: "How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?"
And after Union Carbide was sold to Dow Chemical in 2001, the new owners denied they were liable for the site, and have refused to clean up the area or pay additional compensation to the new victims — now in the second and even third generation.
“The contaminated water issue was never part of the settlement, even though Union Carbide knew about it in 1984,” says Rachna Dhingra, a 31-year-old Indian-American activist who works with the Sambhavna Trust. “About 30,000 people living behind the factory are still drinking that water.”
As a visitor, you can't deny that living conditions here are miserable. Union Carbide pumped industrial waste into two solar evaporation ponds just across the street from this overcrowded residential area. Though many years have passed, activists say that the ponds still leak contaminants into the drinking water supply.
And as late as 2005 — 20 years too late — some 340 tons of toxic waste was collected from a locked warehouse on the old factory grounds. I tasted the difference in the air immediately when I stepped out of my taxi from the nicer part of town — where Bhopal surrounds a surprisingly large, clean-looking lake.
Twenty-five years after the gas leak, there may be some hope on the horizon. In November, a New York appeals court reinstated plaintiffs’ claims against Union Carbide Corporation for contaminating water around the Bhopal plant, reversing a lower court’s dismissal of the case. And — pending a new financial settlement — local activists' commitment is paying off. After two marches from Bhopal to Delhi, a distance of some 750 kilometers, the victims of the gas tragedy are seeing some action on items they have been demanding since 1987.
“We got an empowered commission on Bhopal to look into the medical, social and environmental rehabilitation of the area,” says Dhingra. “It will have independent powers and representatives from various service organizations as well as the government.” Dhingra hopes that will mean effective programs instead of feel-good boondoggles. It would be a big change. “Till now, more than 80 crores ($16 million) has been spent on creating jobs, but they've not been able to create even 80 jobs,” says Dhingra.
Today, there's one sign of change that's visible to all: Construction is underway on a network of pipes to provide clean water to the area. “Within three months, the pipeline will be laid,” says Dhingra. “For me, that's a big thing.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090226/the-bhopal-disaster-25-years-later
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
the real slumdogs
According to Indian street kids, charges that "Slumdog Millionaire" is offensive are more hype than substance.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 17, 2009
DELHI — When the cast of the faux-Bollywood hit "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the
red carpet for the Oscars Feb. 22, the film's Indian distributors will have one eye on another contest underway in India, which serves as the movie's backdrop. This one will take place Feb. 25 in Mumbai's Andheri Sessions Court, where Slumdog faces charges that it is offensive.
But try telling that to some of India's real street kids — like 13-year-old Faisal, who lives in a group home for wayward boys near the New Delhi railway station — and you quickly find out that there's more hype than substance to the charges.
"It's a nice film," Faisal told me after I took him and three other "slumdogs" to see the movie. "Some of the things it shows are right, some things are wrong. It's a movie."
As the Andheri court case suggests, Slumdog's optimistic love story has been surprisingly controversial here, where many see it as yet more evidence that the West continues to view India as a land of filth and poverty and incomprehensible religious violence.
But that's not how real street kids see it. At a seedy theater on the outskirts of Old Delhi where director Danny Boyle's Bollywood tribute was showing in Hindi, the four former street kids, now in their teens, laughed with glee when the young Jamal jumped into the open latrine so he wouldn't miss his chance to get an autograph from film star Amitabh Bachchan.
From the grin on his face, it was clear beyond doubt that 17-year-old Sanjay's favorite part of the movie was the sequence shot in and around the Taj Mahal, where Jamal and Salim earn an excellent living as guides, scamming tourists with ludicrous made-up tales about the tomb's historical origins. "There were some funny dialogues," he sheepishly explained later. It was obviously a familiar scenario.
The Andheri case is only one among several that have sought to censor the India-inspired Oscar candidate — which is up for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture.
In addition to the case lodged against the film's title in Andheri, a Bihar slum-dwellers' organization has filed a defamation case against composer A.R. Rahman and star Anil Kapoor in Patna.
Meanwhile, a Gujarat-based non-governmental organization has filed for a stay on the film's release due to its title.
"We have raised a question whether we Indians are dogs," said advocate Meena Jagtap, who is a founding member of the organization. Still another group, the right-wing Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, has petitioned the Indian censor board to ban the film because of its depiction of a pogrom against Muslims by followers of the Hindu god Ram.
But for Faisal and Sanjay — along with 19-year-old Brijesh and 17-year-old Iqbal, my other two guests — "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts a fantasy version of a very real chance to escape dead-end lives of petty crime and mind-numbing jobs. Today, Brijesh and Faisal earn pocket money as tour guides for foreign tourists interested in understanding New Delhi's crowded slums. Far from considering "Slumdog Millionaire" an affront, they're pleased with its simultaneously gritty and glamorous depiction of kids like themselves.
It's easy to see why. As Dickensian as it must seem to movie audiences in the West, the hardscrabble existence that "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts is eerily familiar to these kids.
Brijesh, for example, ran away from his aunt's house when he was just 9 years old. "They used me like a slave," he says. He hopped a passenger train without knowing where it was headed, slept all night seated on the toilet with the bathroom door locked because he didn't have a ticket, and finally jumped off again in the grim industrial town of Kanpur, in Uttar Pradesh. "I was crying under a railway bridge because I was hungry, and this boy came along and asked me if I had run away."
A fellow runaway, the boy taught Brijesh how to earn a living by collecting empty water bottles, refilling them from the railway station's bathroom tap and selling them on the platform for half the price of genuine purified water.
"After one year, I was sniffing glue and smoking cigarettes, and I'd been sent to prison," he says — referring to a juvenile detention center. "The first time, I was locked up for 14 days. The next time, it was 42 days." In India, this meant spending all day locked in a small room with 25 other boys.
Today Brijesh and company aren't exactly millionaires.
But in a sense, they have hit the jackpot — perhaps ironically — due to another film about Indian street kids, called "Salaam Bombay," that also drew criticism when it was released. All four boys were "rescued" from Delhi's streets by a non-governmental organization called the Salaam Balak Trust, which was started by director Mira Nair after she made "Salaam Bombay." The former street kids got counseling, protection and a place to live. And a chance at a better life. Brijesh, for instance, has finished high school and is now studying for a college degree in tourism. And Faisal has already acted in a feature film — a fact that became screamingly obvious when I asked him how "Slumdog" differed from a Bollywood movie.
"An Indian director would only use two or three cameras, at most," he says authoritatively. "Danny Boyle used at least four or five."
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 17, 2009
DELHI — When the cast of the faux-Bollywood hit "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the
red carpet for the Oscars Feb. 22, the film's Indian distributors will have one eye on another contest underway in India, which serves as the movie's backdrop. This one will take place Feb. 25 in Mumbai's Andheri Sessions Court, where Slumdog faces charges that it is offensive.
But try telling that to some of India's real street kids — like 13-year-old Faisal, who lives in a group home for wayward boys near the New Delhi railway station — and you quickly find out that there's more hype than substance to the charges.
"It's a nice film," Faisal told me after I took him and three other "slumdogs" to see the movie. "Some of the things it shows are right, some things are wrong. It's a movie."
As the Andheri court case suggests, Slumdog's optimistic love story has been surprisingly controversial here, where many see it as yet more evidence that the West continues to view India as a land of filth and poverty and incomprehensible religious violence.
But that's not how real street kids see it. At a seedy theater on the outskirts of Old Delhi where director Danny Boyle's Bollywood tribute was showing in Hindi, the four former street kids, now in their teens, laughed with glee when the young Jamal jumped into the open latrine so he wouldn't miss his chance to get an autograph from film star Amitabh Bachchan.
From the grin on his face, it was clear beyond doubt that 17-year-old Sanjay's favorite part of the movie was the sequence shot in and around the Taj Mahal, where Jamal and Salim earn an excellent living as guides, scamming tourists with ludicrous made-up tales about the tomb's historical origins. "There were some funny dialogues," he sheepishly explained later. It was obviously a familiar scenario.
The Andheri case is only one among several that have sought to censor the India-inspired Oscar candidate — which is up for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture.
In addition to the case lodged against the film's title in Andheri, a Bihar slum-dwellers' organization has filed a defamation case against composer A.R. Rahman and star Anil Kapoor in Patna.
Meanwhile, a Gujarat-based non-governmental organization has filed for a stay on the film's release due to its title.
"We have raised a question whether we Indians are dogs," said advocate Meena Jagtap, who is a founding member of the organization. Still another group, the right-wing Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, has petitioned the Indian censor board to ban the film because of its depiction of a pogrom against Muslims by followers of the Hindu god Ram.
But for Faisal and Sanjay — along with 19-year-old Brijesh and 17-year-old Iqbal, my other two guests — "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts a fantasy version of a very real chance to escape dead-end lives of petty crime and mind-numbing jobs. Today, Brijesh and Faisal earn pocket money as tour guides for foreign tourists interested in understanding New Delhi's crowded slums. Far from considering "Slumdog Millionaire" an affront, they're pleased with its simultaneously gritty and glamorous depiction of kids like themselves.
It's easy to see why. As Dickensian as it must seem to movie audiences in the West, the hardscrabble existence that "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts is eerily familiar to these kids.
Brijesh, for example, ran away from his aunt's house when he was just 9 years old. "They used me like a slave," he says. He hopped a passenger train without knowing where it was headed, slept all night seated on the toilet with the bathroom door locked because he didn't have a ticket, and finally jumped off again in the grim industrial town of Kanpur, in Uttar Pradesh. "I was crying under a railway bridge because I was hungry, and this boy came along and asked me if I had run away."
A fellow runaway, the boy taught Brijesh how to earn a living by collecting empty water bottles, refilling them from the railway station's bathroom tap and selling them on the platform for half the price of genuine purified water.
"After one year, I was sniffing glue and smoking cigarettes, and I'd been sent to prison," he says — referring to a juvenile detention center. "The first time, I was locked up for 14 days. The next time, it was 42 days." In India, this meant spending all day locked in a small room with 25 other boys.
Today Brijesh and company aren't exactly millionaires.
But in a sense, they have hit the jackpot — perhaps ironically — due to another film about Indian street kids, called "Salaam Bombay," that also drew criticism when it was released. All four boys were "rescued" from Delhi's streets by a non-governmental organization called the Salaam Balak Trust, which was started by director Mira Nair after she made "Salaam Bombay." The former street kids got counseling, protection and a place to live. And a chance at a better life. Brijesh, for instance, has finished high school and is now studying for a college degree in tourism. And Faisal has already acted in a feature film — a fact that became screamingly obvious when I asked him how "Slumdog" differed from a Bollywood movie.
"An Indian director would only use two or three cameras, at most," he says authoritatively. "Danny Boyle used at least four or five."
Friday, February 13, 2009
india: a million romeos, a million juliets
What happens when love is stronger than caste?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 13, 2009
NEW DELHI — Not long ago in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, television viewers
were treated to a real-life soap opera as newscasters interrupted the regular TV programming to broadcast the elopement of 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela and 23-year-old Shirish Bharadwaj — just one of the millions of Romeo-and-Juliet couples who are hammering cracks into the foundation of Indian society.
Because the youngsters came from different sub-castes and different economic backgrounds, Sreeja's father — a hugely popular South Indian film star named Chiranjeevi — had forbidden them from dating and kept Sreeja under virtual house arrest for more than a year.
But Chiranjeevi's untold wealth, police connections and implicit authority as a superstar were nothing compared with the power of love.
They didn't catch a glimpse of one another for all that time, but Shirish and Sreeja kept the flame burning by exchanging notes, passed once a month through a friend. Then Shirish popped the question. After Sreeja's father forced her to drop out of college, there was no longer any reason to wait.
"When she was coming to college, we never thought we could marry for another three or four years," Shirish recalls. "But once she was house arrested, we knew if something had to be done now. Through the letters, she communicated that she was getting marriage proposals [for arranged marriages]."
It wouldn't be easy. In India, the fundamentalist thugs who terrorize young couples every Valentine's Day aren't the only forces aligned against romance. With the traditional institution of the arranged marriage under pressure — threatening to break down the boundaries of caste and creed — teachers, neighbors, the police and even sometimes the courts conspire to make sure young people follow their parents' wishes.
Though intercaste and intercommunity marriages have been legal since 1872 — almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 U.S. states — over time the law designed to facilitate these civil unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has come to be used to prevent self-arranged marriages. Thanks to a 1954 amendment, the couple must announce their impending nuptials, provide the names and addresses of their parents, and wait 30 days while the police verify with their families that neither person is already married. The delay helps parents locate runaway couples and retrieve them by filing false kidnapping and abduction cases (which have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women since 2002).
The police track the couple down, throw the groom in jail and return the bride to her parents. The courts, too, are often complicit, as judges reject the girl's own testimony as proof of consent and reject the usual legal documents as proof that she is of marriageable age. Among communities that place a high premium on their izzat, or honor, like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the reaction is stronger still. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."
Shirish and Sreeja knew all about the obstacles they would face. But they also knew that sometimes, love does conquer all. Through their secret communiques, the couple made plans to elope. Sreeja would tell her parents that she was going to her aunt's house, but instead she'd meet Shirish on a nearby street corner, abandon her car, and go directly to the temple to get married. That wasn't all, though.
Because parents often use false abduction cases against grooms to recapture runaway brides, the couple used Chiranjeevi's fame against him and called the news media to their wedding ceremony. The live broadcast made the marriage indisputable. But it also alerted Chiranjeevi and his passionate fans to what was going on. "We actually wanted to go to the registrar's office after we were married at [the temple]," says Shirish. "But there were lots of people and police waiting there." Frightened, the couple kept driving — first across the country to Goa and then all the way north to Delhi, where they sought court protection from "the illegal and malafide actions" of the girl's father.
Slowly, public opinion began to shift in their favor. Progressive editorials in local and national newspapers argued that the youngsters were both adults and had married by mutual consent, so any actions to stop them violated their rights. The Delhi high court — following the lead of a 2006 Supreme Court judgment in favor of protecting love marriages — also expressed its support. Eventually, the young couple were able to return to their lives in Hyderabad, where today they live with Shirish's family.
But it's not entirely "happily ever after." Many months after the elopement story had died down, one of Sreeja's close relatives passed away. Word came that her father had decided that she could attend the funeral, but Shirish would have to wait outside. As more than an hour passed, he grew more and more worried that — like many families — his in-laws had decided to keep Sreeja prisoner until she agreed to an annulment.
Finally, though, she reappeared, looking flustered and upset, at the entrance of the wedding hall. Shirish gave a sigh of relief. She'd been forced to endure an hour and a half of browbeating. But she'd stood up for herself. "They kept saying, 'We don't think it's right. It's time to realize for yourself. If at all you realize, we'll always welcome you back — alone," Sreeja recalls. "They just tried brainwashing. So I got out of the situation."
With or without the sanction of the film star and his family, Sreeja and Shirish say nothing will drive them apart. "All these obstacles have made us even closer," Sreeja says.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 13, 2009
NEW DELHI — Not long ago in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, television viewers
were treated to a real-life soap opera as newscasters interrupted the regular TV programming to broadcast the elopement of 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela and 23-year-old Shirish Bharadwaj — just one of the millions of Romeo-and-Juliet couples who are hammering cracks into the foundation of Indian society.
Because the youngsters came from different sub-castes and different economic backgrounds, Sreeja's father — a hugely popular South Indian film star named Chiranjeevi — had forbidden them from dating and kept Sreeja under virtual house arrest for more than a year.
But Chiranjeevi's untold wealth, police connections and implicit authority as a superstar were nothing compared with the power of love.
They didn't catch a glimpse of one another for all that time, but Shirish and Sreeja kept the flame burning by exchanging notes, passed once a month through a friend. Then Shirish popped the question. After Sreeja's father forced her to drop out of college, there was no longer any reason to wait.
"When she was coming to college, we never thought we could marry for another three or four years," Shirish recalls. "But once she was house arrested, we knew if something had to be done now. Through the letters, she communicated that she was getting marriage proposals [for arranged marriages]."
It wouldn't be easy. In India, the fundamentalist thugs who terrorize young couples every Valentine's Day aren't the only forces aligned against romance. With the traditional institution of the arranged marriage under pressure — threatening to break down the boundaries of caste and creed — teachers, neighbors, the police and even sometimes the courts conspire to make sure young people follow their parents' wishes.
Though intercaste and intercommunity marriages have been legal since 1872 — almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 U.S. states — over time the law designed to facilitate these civil unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has come to be used to prevent self-arranged marriages. Thanks to a 1954 amendment, the couple must announce their impending nuptials, provide the names and addresses of their parents, and wait 30 days while the police verify with their families that neither person is already married. The delay helps parents locate runaway couples and retrieve them by filing false kidnapping and abduction cases (which have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women since 2002).
The police track the couple down, throw the groom in jail and return the bride to her parents. The courts, too, are often complicit, as judges reject the girl's own testimony as proof of consent and reject the usual legal documents as proof that she is of marriageable age. Among communities that place a high premium on their izzat, or honor, like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the reaction is stronger still. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."
Shirish and Sreeja knew all about the obstacles they would face. But they also knew that sometimes, love does conquer all. Through their secret communiques, the couple made plans to elope. Sreeja would tell her parents that she was going to her aunt's house, but instead she'd meet Shirish on a nearby street corner, abandon her car, and go directly to the temple to get married. That wasn't all, though.
Because parents often use false abduction cases against grooms to recapture runaway brides, the couple used Chiranjeevi's fame against him and called the news media to their wedding ceremony. The live broadcast made the marriage indisputable. But it also alerted Chiranjeevi and his passionate fans to what was going on. "We actually wanted to go to the registrar's office after we were married at [the temple]," says Shirish. "But there were lots of people and police waiting there." Frightened, the couple kept driving — first across the country to Goa and then all the way north to Delhi, where they sought court protection from "the illegal and malafide actions" of the girl's father.
Slowly, public opinion began to shift in their favor. Progressive editorials in local and national newspapers argued that the youngsters were both adults and had married by mutual consent, so any actions to stop them violated their rights. The Delhi high court — following the lead of a 2006 Supreme Court judgment in favor of protecting love marriages — also expressed its support. Eventually, the young couple were able to return to their lives in Hyderabad, where today they live with Shirish's family.
But it's not entirely "happily ever after." Many months after the elopement story had died down, one of Sreeja's close relatives passed away. Word came that her father had decided that she could attend the funeral, but Shirish would have to wait outside. As more than an hour passed, he grew more and more worried that — like many families — his in-laws had decided to keep Sreeja prisoner until she agreed to an annulment.
Finally, though, she reappeared, looking flustered and upset, at the entrance of the wedding hall. Shirish gave a sigh of relief. She'd been forced to endure an hour and a half of browbeating. But she'd stood up for herself. "They kept saying, 'We don't think it's right. It's time to realize for yourself. If at all you realize, we'll always welcome you back — alone," Sreeja recalls. "They just tried brainwashing. So I got out of the situation."
With or without the sanction of the film star and his family, Sreeja and Shirish say nothing will drive them apart. "All these obstacles have made us even closer," Sreeja says.
Friday, February 06, 2009
gandhi the whipping boy
One of India's most revered figures is losing some of his posthumous influence.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 29, 2009
NEW DELHI — Jan. 30 is the 61st anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi. As that date approaches, the reputation of the Mahatma, or “great soul”, has seen better days.
Sure, when a British magazine publishes a cartoon of the emaciated and bespectacled figure getting pummeled by a muscle man India erupts in outrage. And when a Bollywood hero embraces nonviolent resistance in a slapstick masala movie the youth are suddenly fired with enthusiasm for candlelit marches. But in the sphere of politics, the man known as the father of the nation has in recent years become its whipping boy.
Though Gandhi worked to eliminate the practice of untouchability, the leaders of caste-based parties castigate him for his stalwart defense of Hinduism and for blocking India's oppressed castes demand for special voting rights. And despite Gandhi's efforts to prevent a rift between Jawaharlal Nehru's Indian National Congress and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League in the leadup to India's independence in 1947, ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum today blame Gandhi for the bloody partitioning of India that killed as many as a million people and laid the foundations for 60 years of bitter strife between India and Pakistan.
“Because Indian politics today is about competing sectarian identities — on language, on region, on religion, on caste — you have people attacking Gandhi and blaming him for all kinds of errors, real and imagined,” says historian Ram Guha, author of India After Gandhi. “In the first ten years of independence, he may have been a holy cow. But now there's open season.”
Consider the condemnation offered by a former chief of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS). "While Gandhi succeeded in creating and leading a people's movement, he committed two mistakes: supporting the Khilafat movement and making Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the prime minister. The end result was that two enemies, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were created forever."
Apologists from the Hindu right have long sought to justify the assassination of Gandhi — who was killed by a Hindu nationalist and former RSS member named Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948 — by arguing that the Mahatma had betrayed his country by supporting the proposal for an independent Pakistan and encouraging a policy of Muslim “appeasement.” Every year on the anniversary of Godse's execution his relatives still gather to celebrate his grim achievement. But this year the stakes grew much higher, as an organization run by the assassin's niece — allegedly the country's first Hindu nationalist terrorist cell — was linked to a series of bombings of Muslim sites.
The partition of India itself remains at the heart of the conflict between India and Pakistan. More than the territorial dispute over Kashmir, partition instilled deep fear and distrust — even hatred. Some 18 million people were forced to migrate to areas where they would be in the religious majority. As many as a million, from both sides, were butchered en route. And the arbitrary dividing line, which granted India 90 percent of the subcontinent's industrial capacity and its three most important cities, encouraged an inferiority complex in Pakistan that has had disastrous consequences.
However, Gandhi's actual role in the division of India is ambiguous. On the one hand, despite his propagation of an early form of multiculturalism, Gandhi's religious idealism bordered on the obsessive, and probably encouraged doubts among the Muslim League about their role in an independent but united India. But on the other, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly, “the real actors were Jinnah, [Viceroy Louis] Mountbatten, [Congress leader Vallabhbhai] Patel and Nehru.” And no one was more upset than Gandhi by the religious divide that eventually tore India in two. Says Ganguly: “Remember that he wrote, 'On this day of independence and partition, my heart is divided; let others rejoice, leave me alone to shed my tears.'”
“Of all the major leaders of the time, he's certainly the least culpable,” says political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research. And the question of how to share power among Hindus and Muslims was an impossible quandary. “One historian once said Partition was a non-solution to an insoluble problem,” says Bhanu Mehta. But that hasn't shielded Gandhi from blame, partly because the partition had such tragic and long-lasting consequences, and partly because Gandhi is the only one of his contemporaries who still holds enough relevance to justify an attack.
The simmering conflict in Kashmir, the disturbing emergence of a Hindu nationalist terrorist cell, and the devastating attacks in Mumbai on November 26 drive home the need for Gandhi's idealism. “Worldwide you see a rise of competitive religious fundamentalisms,” says Guha. “What Gandhi does is he provides a way out of this.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
January 29, 2009
NEW DELHI — Jan. 30 is the 61st anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi. As that date approaches, the reputation of the Mahatma, or “great soul”, has seen better days.
Sure, when a British magazine publishes a cartoon of the emaciated and bespectacled figure getting pummeled by a muscle man India erupts in outrage. And when a Bollywood hero embraces nonviolent resistance in a slapstick masala movie the youth are suddenly fired with enthusiasm for candlelit marches. But in the sphere of politics, the man known as the father of the nation has in recent years become its whipping boy.
Though Gandhi worked to eliminate the practice of untouchability, the leaders of caste-based parties castigate him for his stalwart defense of Hinduism and for blocking India's oppressed castes demand for special voting rights. And despite Gandhi's efforts to prevent a rift between Jawaharlal Nehru's Indian National Congress and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League in the leadup to India's independence in 1947, ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum today blame Gandhi for the bloody partitioning of India that killed as many as a million people and laid the foundations for 60 years of bitter strife between India and Pakistan.
“Because Indian politics today is about competing sectarian identities — on language, on region, on religion, on caste — you have people attacking Gandhi and blaming him for all kinds of errors, real and imagined,” says historian Ram Guha, author of India After Gandhi. “In the first ten years of independence, he may have been a holy cow. But now there's open season.”
Consider the condemnation offered by a former chief of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS). "While Gandhi succeeded in creating and leading a people's movement, he committed two mistakes: supporting the Khilafat movement and making Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the prime minister. The end result was that two enemies, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were created forever."
Apologists from the Hindu right have long sought to justify the assassination of Gandhi — who was killed by a Hindu nationalist and former RSS member named Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948 — by arguing that the Mahatma had betrayed his country by supporting the proposal for an independent Pakistan and encouraging a policy of Muslim “appeasement.” Every year on the anniversary of Godse's execution his relatives still gather to celebrate his grim achievement. But this year the stakes grew much higher, as an organization run by the assassin's niece — allegedly the country's first Hindu nationalist terrorist cell — was linked to a series of bombings of Muslim sites.
The partition of India itself remains at the heart of the conflict between India and Pakistan. More than the territorial dispute over Kashmir, partition instilled deep fear and distrust — even hatred. Some 18 million people were forced to migrate to areas where they would be in the religious majority. As many as a million, from both sides, were butchered en route. And the arbitrary dividing line, which granted India 90 percent of the subcontinent's industrial capacity and its three most important cities, encouraged an inferiority complex in Pakistan that has had disastrous consequences.
However, Gandhi's actual role in the division of India is ambiguous. On the one hand, despite his propagation of an early form of multiculturalism, Gandhi's religious idealism bordered on the obsessive, and probably encouraged doubts among the Muslim League about their role in an independent but united India. But on the other, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly, “the real actors were Jinnah, [Viceroy Louis] Mountbatten, [Congress leader Vallabhbhai] Patel and Nehru.” And no one was more upset than Gandhi by the religious divide that eventually tore India in two. Says Ganguly: “Remember that he wrote, 'On this day of independence and partition, my heart is divided; let others rejoice, leave me alone to shed my tears.'”
“Of all the major leaders of the time, he's certainly the least culpable,” says political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research. And the question of how to share power among Hindus and Muslims was an impossible quandary. “One historian once said Partition was a non-solution to an insoluble problem,” says Bhanu Mehta. But that hasn't shielded Gandhi from blame, partly because the partition had such tragic and long-lasting consequences, and partly because Gandhi is the only one of his contemporaries who still holds enough relevance to justify an attack.
The simmering conflict in Kashmir, the disturbing emergence of a Hindu nationalist terrorist cell, and the devastating attacks in Mumbai on November 26 drive home the need for Gandhi's idealism. “Worldwide you see a rise of competitive religious fundamentalisms,” says Guha. “What Gandhi does is he provides a way out of this.”
the man who killed gandhi
The mysteries, complexities and surprising ideas behind of one of India's darkest moments.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 5, 2009
NEW DELHI — On Jan. 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse, a young, clean-cut Indian newspaper editor, left the waiting room at the Delhi railway station to attend the daily prayer meeting held by Mohandas K. Gandhi. As the meeting began, the young man bowed reverently before the emaciated leader known universally as the Mahatma, or great soul, and known in India as the father of the nation. Then Godse rose, produced a Beretta semi-automatic pistol, and shot Gandhi three times in the chest.
Today, as then, the ruthless assassination of a leader so firmly committed to nonviolence is so abhorrent, so repulsive, that it is tempting to dismiss its perpetrator as a deranged lunatic. But the truth, as Indian political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out, is far more complicated. And over the past six months, a series of unsettling revelations have suggested that while Gandhi's ideology of nonviolence and tolerance may be fading, the ideology of violent Hindu nationalism that motivated Godse — though it goes by many names — remains as powerful as ever.
“You can disagree with Godse very deeply and find what he did reprehensible,” says Bhanu Mehta. “But I think as even some of the Gandhians have argued — like Ashis Nandy — there was a kind of internal integrity to what he was doing. If you read his speech at his trial, it's hard not to be in some senses fascinated by the internal integrity of the argument.”
Godse remains a better foil for the Mahatma than his perennial adversaries like the low-caste leader B.R. Ambedkar or Pakistan-founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Far from being an insane fanatic, Godse perceived that Gandhi's fast unto death — the ultimate expression of passive resistance — was not nonviolence, but violence turned inward against the self. Ambedkar and Jinnah had recognized this, too.
But Godse stands apart because he was able to respond in kind. “Many people thought that [Gandhi's] politics were irrational,” Godse said before his execution. “But they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked.”
No politician could afford to let Gandhi kill himself, but Godse understood that by murdering him he would martyr himself as well — achieving his own ends as ruthlessly and inexorably as the Mahatma. “I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred ... if I were to kill Gandhiji,” he observed. “But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.” It is not a flattering mirror.
Godse's assassination of Gandhi, which was traced back to Hindu nationalist groups including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — though the ties of evidence were not strong enough for criminal charges — sequestered these groups on the fringe of Indian politics for almost 30 years.
Eventually, though, the nationalist ideology that motivated Gandhi's killer managed to work its way back into the mainstream. In 2003, the Bharatiya Janata Party even ventured to put a portrait of Veer Savarkar — who had been accused with Godse but never convicted of conspiracy — on display directly opposite Gandhi's in the hall of parliament, implying that the two are equal in status.
“In [Gandhi's] lifetime, the Hindus had moved away from Savarkar toward Gandhi,” explains historian Ramachandra Guha, author of "India After Gandhi." “But posthumously many Hindus, such as those in the BJP and RSS, see merit in Savarkar's more aggressive Hindutva.”
Then perhaps India should not have been surprised when — shortly before the terrorist attacks on Mumbai — a bizarre Hindu terrorist cell emerged that was fascinated by Godse's repugnant logic. Following leads developed over two years, the elite police unit swept down on a previously unknown group of Hindu nationalist fanatics for allegedly planning and executing a series of terrorist strikes in Muslim neighborhoods throughout the country — which had previously been attributed to internecine rivalries among the faithful. Among the accused were a retired army colonel, a Hindu nun and several self-styled gurus who'd hardly ventured outside the bastions of the lunatic nationalist fringe.
But the head of the organization that united them — a woman named Hemani Savarkar who was not charged in the police case — had a very well-known name indeed. She was the daughter of Godse's brother and was married to the nephew of Veer Savarkar — the Hindu nationalist who developed the fascism-inspired ideology of Hindutva, or Hinduness.
Even though Indian journalists have long been aware that Godse's descendants gather each year in Pune on the anniversary of the assassin's execution to commemorate his “achievement,” it was always believed that they were too absurd to matter. Now the evidence suggests — though the court case is still pending — that they were very serious indeed. According to the ATS (Maharastra Anti-Terrorism Squad), they planted at least one bomb in Malegaon that killed six and injured 70 people in 2006. They may also have been involved in other terrorist attacks, the ATS says, such as the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express “friendship train” linking India and Pakistan, which killed 68 people.
“They're all offshoots of the thing that Gandhi predicted, that deification of the nation state would have the consequence of communalism,” says Bhanu Mehta.
Like any group of cloistered fanatics, the isolation of Godse's descendants has given them the freakishness of the hopelessly inbred. Consider the wisdom that Hemani Savarkar offered India's Outlook magazine: “Why can’t we have a blast for a blast? (The alleged Hindu nationalist terrorists) are patriots who love their country. But the government is now trying to declare them guilty to weaken the Hindus,” she said. “We must declare ourselves a Hindu (nation) where everyone is a Hindu. Anyone who isn’t should be declared a second-class citizen and denied voting rights. Those who have problems with this should leave and settle in other countries.”
Those are exactly the sentiments that Gandhi was killed for opposing. But from the moment that his murderer was executed — despite Gandhi's deep abhorrence for the death penalty — it was clear that his dream of nonviolence and religious tolerance would not come true.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
February 5, 2009
NEW DELHI — On Jan. 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse, a young, clean-cut Indian newspaper editor, left the waiting room at the Delhi railway station to attend the daily prayer meeting held by Mohandas K. Gandhi. As the meeting began, the young man bowed reverently before the emaciated leader known universally as the Mahatma, or great soul, and known in India as the father of the nation. Then Godse rose, produced a Beretta semi-automatic pistol, and shot Gandhi three times in the chest.
Today, as then, the ruthless assassination of a leader so firmly committed to nonviolence is so abhorrent, so repulsive, that it is tempting to dismiss its perpetrator as a deranged lunatic. But the truth, as Indian political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out, is far more complicated. And over the past six months, a series of unsettling revelations have suggested that while Gandhi's ideology of nonviolence and tolerance may be fading, the ideology of violent Hindu nationalism that motivated Godse — though it goes by many names — remains as powerful as ever.
“You can disagree with Godse very deeply and find what he did reprehensible,” says Bhanu Mehta. “But I think as even some of the Gandhians have argued — like Ashis Nandy — there was a kind of internal integrity to what he was doing. If you read his speech at his trial, it's hard not to be in some senses fascinated by the internal integrity of the argument.”
Godse remains a better foil for the Mahatma than his perennial adversaries like the low-caste leader B.R. Ambedkar or Pakistan-founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Far from being an insane fanatic, Godse perceived that Gandhi's fast unto death — the ultimate expression of passive resistance — was not nonviolence, but violence turned inward against the self. Ambedkar and Jinnah had recognized this, too.
But Godse stands apart because he was able to respond in kind. “Many people thought that [Gandhi's] politics were irrational,” Godse said before his execution. “But they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked.”
No politician could afford to let Gandhi kill himself, but Godse understood that by murdering him he would martyr himself as well — achieving his own ends as ruthlessly and inexorably as the Mahatma. “I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred ... if I were to kill Gandhiji,” he observed. “But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.” It is not a flattering mirror.
Godse's assassination of Gandhi, which was traced back to Hindu nationalist groups including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — though the ties of evidence were not strong enough for criminal charges — sequestered these groups on the fringe of Indian politics for almost 30 years.
Eventually, though, the nationalist ideology that motivated Gandhi's killer managed to work its way back into the mainstream. In 2003, the Bharatiya Janata Party even ventured to put a portrait of Veer Savarkar — who had been accused with Godse but never convicted of conspiracy — on display directly opposite Gandhi's in the hall of parliament, implying that the two are equal in status.
“In [Gandhi's] lifetime, the Hindus had moved away from Savarkar toward Gandhi,” explains historian Ramachandra Guha, author of "India After Gandhi." “But posthumously many Hindus, such as those in the BJP and RSS, see merit in Savarkar's more aggressive Hindutva.”
Then perhaps India should not have been surprised when — shortly before the terrorist attacks on Mumbai — a bizarre Hindu terrorist cell emerged that was fascinated by Godse's repugnant logic. Following leads developed over two years, the elite police unit swept down on a previously unknown group of Hindu nationalist fanatics for allegedly planning and executing a series of terrorist strikes in Muslim neighborhoods throughout the country — which had previously been attributed to internecine rivalries among the faithful. Among the accused were a retired army colonel, a Hindu nun and several self-styled gurus who'd hardly ventured outside the bastions of the lunatic nationalist fringe.
But the head of the organization that united them — a woman named Hemani Savarkar who was not charged in the police case — had a very well-known name indeed. She was the daughter of Godse's brother and was married to the nephew of Veer Savarkar — the Hindu nationalist who developed the fascism-inspired ideology of Hindutva, or Hinduness.
Even though Indian journalists have long been aware that Godse's descendants gather each year in Pune on the anniversary of the assassin's execution to commemorate his “achievement,” it was always believed that they were too absurd to matter. Now the evidence suggests — though the court case is still pending — that they were very serious indeed. According to the ATS (Maharastra Anti-Terrorism Squad), they planted at least one bomb in Malegaon that killed six and injured 70 people in 2006. They may also have been involved in other terrorist attacks, the ATS says, such as the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express “friendship train” linking India and Pakistan, which killed 68 people.
“They're all offshoots of the thing that Gandhi predicted, that deification of the nation state would have the consequence of communalism,” says Bhanu Mehta.
Like any group of cloistered fanatics, the isolation of Godse's descendants has given them the freakishness of the hopelessly inbred. Consider the wisdom that Hemani Savarkar offered India's Outlook magazine: “Why can’t we have a blast for a blast? (The alleged Hindu nationalist terrorists) are patriots who love their country. But the government is now trying to declare them guilty to weaken the Hindus,” she said. “We must declare ourselves a Hindu (nation) where everyone is a Hindu. Anyone who isn’t should be declared a second-class citizen and denied voting rights. Those who have problems with this should leave and settle in other countries.”
Those are exactly the sentiments that Gandhi was killed for opposing. But from the moment that his murderer was executed — despite Gandhi's deep abhorrence for the death penalty — it was clear that his dream of nonviolence and religious tolerance would not come true.
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