India's new Muslim baby boom

A thriving domestic market for in vitro fertilization has made India the go-to spot for patients from Africa, Afghanistan and beyond.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - September 13, 2012)

NEW DELHI, India — Business is booming at Dheerendra Singh's New Delhi-based medical tourism outfit, CureMax. But his biggest client base — Afghanistan — might come as something of a surprise.

“Every month, we do IVF [in vitro fertilization] for around 50 patients from Afghanistan,” Singh said. “They also come for other infertility-related procedures. And in the peak [winter] season [when the weather is more comfortable], we have 60-70 patients a month.”

Afghanistan isn't the half of it. Though infertility is commonly associated with the changing lifestyles of the West — where more and more women are putting off childbirth until their late 30s — India's IVF clinics are testimony that the trend is growing in developing countries and conservative societies as well.

Along with the much-talked-about medical tourist trade from the US and Europe, India is seeing an influx of patients from Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East, thanks to a thriving, low-cost domestic fertility industry and cultural connections that make India a comfortable place for conservative Muslims, medical tourism professionals say.

More from GlobalPost: Designer babies, with an Indian twist

Statistics aren't readily available on the total number of patients coming to India for fertility treatments from predominantly Muslim countries. But anecdotal evidence from various doctors and other agents like Singh — as well as a thriving business in the Afghan refugee colony in New Delhi — suggests that the phenomenon is significant.

According to India's Outlook magazine, for instance, fertility experts like Dr. Kaberi Banerjee number their patients from places like Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan and Tanzania in the hundreds. Meanwhile, companies like Care Medical say they see 10-15 foreign patients from Islamic countries every month, according to managing director D. Mahendran.

“Overall, we see [medical tourism] growth of about 15-20 percent annually, and I believe roughty the same kind of number holds for IVF,” said P.R. Ramesh, the chief executive of Aaarex Medical Services, another medical tourism firm. “But we're seeing a larger number of Muslim people than previously, including Muslims from Arabic countries and Muslims from countries like Nigeria and Tanzania and so on.”

Various factors help explain the baby boom. Because of India's massive population, and the cultural importance of bearing children here, private fertility clinics have mushroomed in recent years — until there's an IVF signboard on virtually every street in the upscale neighborhoods of New Delhi.

Reputable clinics offer a high standard of care for a small fraction of the cost of IVF in the West. A typical IVF procedure, for instance, runs to $3,000 in India, compared with $8,000 in the US or Europe, said CureMax's Singh. And patients receive more attention from doctors.

More from GlobalPost: Infertile Indian couples demand high-caste 'Brahmin' sperm

To regulate fly-by-night outfits that have begun sprouting up, the Indian Council of Medical Research recently drafted regulations and began to crack down.

“Here in India, people take IVF very serious, and they give personalized care,” said Mahendran.

But there are other reasons India is attracting patients from Muslim countries.

Proximity and historical ties link India with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries of Central Asia in ways that are impossible for other medical tourism hotspots, like Thailand, to match. Standards of dress and behavior are similar, for instance. And the long dominance ofBollywood movies in the target region means that patients there are comfortable with Indian culture, and, especially in Afghanistan, can often already speak Hindi.

Because fertility treatments can be time consuming, the low cost of living, and the ease of blending in and finding halal meat and other familiar foods, is also a factor. In New Delhi, for instance, CureMax and other medical tourism outfits connect IVF patients with landlords operating serviced apartments in neighborhoods in Lajpat Nagar and Jangpura, which are already home to Afghan refugees who migrated here to escape the fighting at home. By cooking their own meals — and buying Afghani naan from the local shop — they avoid exorbitant hotel costs.

More from India: First comes fraud, then comes marriage

Similarly, certain Iranian and African communities have ties with India that make it a more familiar destination than its competitors.

“India has got a large Muslim population, and there are many communities in Africa which relate very closely to their counterparts in India,” said Aaarex's Ramesh.

“For example, there is a community called the Ithna Asheri community in Tanzania, with strong connections to the same community in India. Many of these communities are Indian in origin. To some extent there are also family links.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120911/IVF-in-vitro-fertilization-muslim-baby-boom-medical-tourism

India: First comes fraud, then comes marriage

In Punjab, a humble passport officer strikes back against “holiday marriages.”

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - September 9, 2012)

JALANDHAR, Punjab — Seated in the regional passport office in Jalandhar, a provincial city at the heart of India's breadbasket, 39-year-old Sarabjit Kaur tells a harrowing story.

For more than a decade, she has endured a miserable sham marriage. Soon after she married, her husband fled to the UK. To force her parents to pay an illegal dowry, her in-laws have allegedly beaten her, forced her to do menial chores, denied her food, and cut off the electricity to her room.

At first, Kaur's in-laws refused to acknowledge the birth of their granddaughter at all. Today, having nominally disowned their son, they force Kaur and her daughter, now 10, to live as unwelcome guests in a tiny room, sequestered from the rest of the house.

“I'm not allowed to put my clothes on the wire for drying,” Kaur said. “I'm not allowed to use the water pump. My daughter is not allowed inside the garden for cycling. I'm not allowed to wash my clothes in the washing machine — which has been given by my parents!”

Kaur is one of thousands of women in Punjab who have fallen victim to such marriage scams.

Armed with a passport and a plane ticket, unscrupulous men and their families exploit the value of a green card or foreign work permit to extort exorbitant dowries from their brides. They marry and then flee.

More from India: Is China right about the internet?

They may take on second wives to obtain a virtual slave. Or they may simply make a trip to India for a so-called “holiday marriage” — complete with a big party, lavish gifts, and a week of free sex.

According to India's National Commission for Women, as many as 20,000 brides have not even seen their husbands since their supposed honeymoon.

Recently, however, these women have received a lifeline from an unlikely hero: Passport officer Parneet Singh.

Using an obscure footnote in Indian law, Singh has begun canceling the passports of runaway husbands — forcing them to face the music or go into hiding abroad as illegal aliens. And it's already working.

“We have been able to solve about 60 or 70 cases with this experiment,” said Singh.

More from India: The story of a highway

For decades, the Doaba region of the Punjab — the fertile lands between the Beas and Sutlej rivers — has been known for offering its daughters in marriage to “non-resident Indians” or “NRIs” working in Canada, the UK and the US. Fraud seems nearly as common as love in these arranged unions.

“We have a real problem here in our region. There are 30,000 women [with problem NRI marriages] in Punjab,” said Singh. “NRIs come here, they marry those innocent girls, and they leave for abroad. The girls are mostly from poor backgrounds, and the guys are rich. When they leave this country, they are not bothered. And the girls are left to their fate.”

Out of those 30,000, Singh says some 15,000 come from his region, which comprises four districts: Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and SBS Nagar.

For women like Kaur, who is still fighting in court to force her husband to take financial responsibility for their daughter, there was virtually nowhere to go for help. Due to the low status afforded to women in most Indian communities, the police generally side with the husband's family.

India's courts are notoriously slow, and extradition from the US or Canada for murder — much less a marital dispute — is virtually out of the question. And the social stigma associated with being divorced, or even returning home to live with their parents, leaves many women with no choice but to endure.

As Officer Singh discovered, however, where the NRIs' ability to run for foreign shores helped husbands to cheat with impunity, unless they'd been granted foreign citizenship, their freedom and their livelihood depended on their ability to get and maintain a valid Indian passport.

“When the passport is canceled, what are the problems they have? First, if they are in this country, they'll not be able to leave,” Singh said. “Second, if people come to visit their relatives here in India, when they land at the airport their passport is taken by the immigration authorities. Third, suppose a person is staying in Chicago. His passport gets expired. If we have already canceled this passport, he will not be able to get it renewed. He has two choices: either to stay illegally in that country or to come back.”

For most men, that creates a huge incentive to resolve their marital disputes as swiftly as possible.

Navdeep, a 29-year-old doctor from Jalandhar, had been married to a marine engineer for nine months before he and his family started to insult her and demand money — even going so far as to throw her from a speeding car and attempt to strangle her on two separate occasions.

“This is not a good country for women,” Navdeep told GlobalPost in Singh's office. “You can beat her like an animal, and she won't be able to do anything.”

Today, Navdeep is divorced. But that's thanks to Singh's passport office, rather than the court system.

“If a husband [involved in a dowry or divorce case] holds a passport with a foreign visa, he's supposed to surrender it in court,” Navdeep said. “But none of the courts, not the high court, not the civil court, asked him to surrender his passport.”

Her husband was on his way out of the country when Navdeep rushed to Singh's office to lodge a complaint that he was trying to flee from a merchant ship leaving one of India's dozens of ports. Soon, though, he was back in Jalandhar.

“Because his passport was impounded, I got justice," said Navdeep. "I got divorced.”

Kaur's husband is still abroad. But she's confident that Singh's move to cancel the man's passport has turned the tide in her fight, too. Because of Singh, her husband has not been able to renew his visa, so he has been living illegally in the UK since 2010 — unable to work as a university professor.

And just the day before she met with GlobalPost, she won a court judgment saying that she had the right to live in the matrimonial home, regardless of whether the deed says it belongs to her husband or to his parents.

She believes that a financial settlement for her daughter can't be far down the road.

“Parneet Singh has totally changed the scenario of the case,” Kaur said. “I was begging shelter and maintenance for me and my daughter. Now, they are begging in front of me — 'Please, do not do this to our son.'”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120907/marriage-scam-fraud-womens-rights

In a country plagued by woefully inadequate infrastructure, the Yamuna Expressway could well transform the economy of the capital region.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - September 5, 2012)

PATTA, Uttar Pradesh — This August, India's multibillion dollar Jaypee Group flagged off a sparkling, six-lane expressway.

The new roadway cuts in half the travel time from New Delhi to Agra, the city that is home to India's top tourist attraction, the Taj Mahal.

The company responsible for bringing Formula One racing to India last year, the Jaypee Group has never been short of ambition. Far more than a simple highway, the Yamuna Expressway project — which extends the suburbs of New Delhi deep into Uttar Pradesh — encompasses high-rise condominiums, universities and technical institutes, an exhibition center, a “sports city” of golf courses, cricket grounds and other facilities surrounding the Formula One speedway, as well as a second international airport to serve the capital area (yet to be built).

Moreover, its planners project that the promise of speedy travel will draw multinational firms like Honda, Daewoo, and Samsung — which already have factories in a township outside New Delhi called Greater Noida — deeper into Uttar Pradesh.

“The economic impact is going to be huge in the coming years,” said Sachin Gaur, chief financial officer of Jaypee Infratech, the unit that built the expressway.

“Uttar Pradesh, till now, was not developing as fast as it could. Today, with Agra just an hour-and-a-half away, slowly this entire area between Greater Noida and Agra will work like a satellite city for [the capital region].”

In a country plagued by woefully inadequate infrastructure, the project could well transform the economy of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and one of its least developed.

But despite the project's powerful potential, it took more than a decade to bring local stakeholders on board, acquire the land for the highway from farmers, and complete construction — illustrating both the challenges and the opportunities behind India's notorious infrastructure deficit.

More from GlobalPost: India's economic boom widens gap between rich and poor

First announced by then-Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kumari Mayawati in 2001, the expressway was derailed when her government fell in 2003, resurrected when she regained power in 2007, and only came to fruition shortly after she was again ousted by elections this May. In the early stages, land acquisition proceeded smoothly — accomplished by the government on Jaypee's behalf, using India's laws of eminent domain.

But as the state sought to capitalize on the project by acquiring more farmland for development alongside the highway, the Yamuna Expressway became a flashpoint.

In May 2011, farmers from the village of Bhatta-Parsaul, about 50 miles from New Delhi along the planned highway, kidnapped three officials from the Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation in the area to conduct a land survey. A three-hour gun battle ensued when police moved in to rescue the hostages, and two villagers and two policemen were killed. After a number of farmers were arrested, the protest swelled. Violence continued, and the state deployed as many as 2,000 police to restore order.

Remarkably, the expressway was not derailed — though Jaypee was unfairly tarred for the conflict, which involves real estate acquisitions by the state-owned Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority.

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“Bhatta-Parsaul is probably two to three kilometers from where the expressway was built up,” said Gaur, whose father, Jaiprakash Gaur, is the founder and chairman of the Jaypee Group. “When [the protest and police firing] happened, the entire land acquisition of the expressway was over two years before that. Just because the area was near the Yamuna Expressway, people linked it with Jaypee.”

Even today, farmers continue to demand a renegotiation of land prices, toll-free travel on the expressway, the construction of new underpasses to make it easier to pass from one village to another, and on and on.

The struggle for land

Land acquisition remains the largest hurdle to industrial development in densely populated India.

Over the past decade, opposition has mounted to government drives to create special economic zones for industry — which critics say netted billions of dollars for politicians and business tycoons at the expense of small farmers. But despite a bloody conflict in Nandigram and Singur, West Bengal — which was the catalyst for the end of the 30-year reign of the Communist Party of India-Marxist in that state — the government has yet to push through aland acquisition bill intended to streamline the process and ensure fairness.

On a recent afternoon in Bhatta-Parsaul, 60-year-old Saukin, a wizened farm laborer, was bathing in a vacant lot near the rutted village road. Shot in the shin bone by police during last year's altercation, he still wears a painful-looking steel brace on his withered leg, screws twisted into his tibia.

Pouring a bucket of water over his head, he propped his injured leg on a lawn chair in an attempt to prevent his bandage from getting soaked.

“I can't work any more, so the village people are supporting me, and my wife and daughters are working,” he said.

After he was shot, the government awarded Saukin with 50,000 rupees (about $1,000) in compensation, he says. But the operation to repair his leg cost double that amount, and the doctor is asking another 80,000 rupees to finish the job. A wealthier villager has floated him a loan, but it will accrue 3 percent in interest every month until Saukin gets back on his feet. And by that time, there may not be many farms left in Bhatta-Parsaul.

Along with more than 100 villages and towns, Patta has already sacrificed acres and acres of farmland to the state government. And though the ensuing residential and commercial developments are projected to create an economic boom, locals like 61-year-old Maumchand, a farmer who was forced to give up his 2.5 acre farm, fear their lives will never be the same.

“Many people will lose everything due to this expressway,” says Maumchand, who was once Saukin's employer.

The successful completion of the toll road could be an important milestone in India's long battle to improve its woefully inadequate transport infrastructure — the key to jumpstarting the country's moribund manufacturing sector and putting millions of people to work. But just as the opening of the highway promises hope for investors and developers keen to cash in on India's massive domestic market and the super cheap labor available outside its major cities, the story of Saukin and other villagers like him illustrates the tremendous challenge involved in transforming a country of farms into a country of factories.

“The big people and the government have taken this land by an emergency clause for industrial purposes, but they're selling it to builders for residential projects,” says another villager, who refuses to give his name, noting that several others who were involved in last year's protests are still behind bars.

“The economic boom will help rich people, not us. We will have to leave this place.”

Villagers say that the government paid land owners 880 rupees (about $16) per square meter in compensation for any land that was acquired for the project, which was arguably a fair price for isolated farm plots. But once those plots were lumped together, and the expressway neared completion, prices skyrocketed to 6200 rupees per square meter for residential property and 22,000 rupees for commercial plots, displaced locals say.

The promise of infrastructure

Across the expressway in Atta Gujran, though, villagers have already built two- and three-story homes with money they received for their farmland. Satellite dishes festoon the rooftops, and nearly every compound has an expensive new car parked out front. Farther down the highway, in the town of Tappal, a group of locals gathered outside a bank, are excited about the promise of new economic opportunities that comes with modern infrastructure.

“This area was totally undeveloped, really rural,” said Rang Lal Attari, a bald retiree dressed in a white kurta pajama and seated on a rope bed by the roadside. “Now some development will come here.”

According to a 2009 report on India's infrastructure problems by the consultancy McKinsey & Co., India then boasted one of the world's largest road networks, but only a quarter of its supposed “national highways” had even two lanes, and nearly 90 percent of India's highways are “structurally inadequate” to support the 11.2 ton per axle that trucks are allowed to carry.

Nothing much has changed in three years. A typical highway journey means plunging through yawning potholes and weaving around bullock carts, not to mention school children, working elephants and the odd farmer chasing a herd of rawboned cattle to market. So it's not surprising that transport delays cost Indian industry an estimated $725 million per year, according to a new report from the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways.

“Before, traveling from here to New Delhi took six hours one way,” said Neeraj Sharma, a property dealer who has profited from escalating land prices. “Now, it takes four hours roundtrip. Property values have increased by more than 10 times.”

Because of the infrastructure deficit elsewhere, the impact here — and all along the expressway to Agra — could indeed be dramatic, according to experts like Parvesh Minocha, group managing director of Feedback Infrastructure, a consulting firm.

The expressway slashes travel time from New Delhi to Agra — where leather factories and other industries will benefit from the faster connection to one of the country's most lucrative markets. But, more importantly, it passes through one of India's richest agricultural zones and links area towns and villages to the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor — a $90 billion, dedicated freight corridor comprising 24 planned cities.

“Because of the corridor, the growth will probably be far more than it would be for a general road anywhere else,” said Minocha.

“I'm not only depending on the tourist traffic to Agra. That's only going to be a small component. Industry, freight, logistics — the connectivity for the rest of western Uttar Pradesh could actually grow very drastically, and therefore it could have a much bigger impact than one would have imagined even a few years ago.” 

India: Is China right about the Internet?

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

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - August 25, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others say the government's actions went further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting sands of regulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little Cuba: India's boxing Mecca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from GlobalPost: China: Team USA uniform brouhaha 'blasphemy on the Olympic spirit"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

India: Food rots as people starve

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - July 16, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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