How the shiny “agate” stones in jewelry and rosary beads are killing workers

Much of the inexpensive jewelry in US malls features polished “agate” stones, which are leaving a trail of death in India.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - March 21, 2013)

KHAMBHAT, India — A few years ago, when occupational safety activists came to Hydersha Diwan's village here, 300 miles north of Mumbai, he drove them away with threats and bluster.

Today, he wishes that he'd listened.

Doctors say the 50-year-old is dying of silicosis, a wasting lung disease that he contracted inhaling deadly silica dust as a grinder of agates — colorful, semi-precious stones exported to the United States and other Western countries, and commonly used in silver and brass jewelry, rosary beads and home decorations.

“I was a supervisor for a grinding and polishing unit for 10 years or so,” says Diwan. “But when the workers stopped coming, I did the grinding myself for three or four years.”

Once a proud, muscular man, Diwan is hollow-eyed and emaciated, unable to sleep and hardly able to eat because of a relentless, hacking cough.

Throughout a GlobalPost interview with his family members, he slumps on the stoop of his home and coughs. The sound of it is horrible: a dry, futile rasp that yields no relief. It goes on and on, forcing a listener to imagine the sand that fills his lungs. Finally, he reels forward and spits a long, viscous trail of saliva onto the pavement, making it clear why he has positioned himself on the edge of the stoop.

Then the coughing overcomes him again.

Some may call it poetic justice, given Diwan’s hostile reaction to the occupational safety activists.

Diwan's workers “stopped coming” when the deaths of friends of co-workers made it impossible to deny that their jobs were killing them. Some failed to show up because they were dying themselves.

But silicosis is a fate too horrible to wish on anyone, and Diwan only bears a small portion of the blame for the disease that, mercifully, took his life as well, 10 days after he met with GlobalPost.

Agates at a mall near you

An opaque, semi-precious stone, an agate would be familiar to almost any American, even if the mineral’s name isn’t.

Agates vary in color from bright blue to glowing amber and deep black. They yield beautiful striped patterns when cut and polished. In addition to jewelry and rosary beads, they are used for decorative eggs, hearts and spheres and the like. New Age merchants market them as having the power to protect from stress, stomach pain, “energy drains” and even bad dreams. “This is the stone that everyone should have,” asserts one web retailer.

But the stone's silica content means that grinders and polishers are highly susceptible to silicosis, or “grinder's asthma” — an incurable, tuberculosis-like occupational disease. 

That's especially true in India, where agate workers typically earn less than a dollar a day, and exploitative employment conditions prevent them from adopting even basic safety measures.

According to investigations by the Vadodara-based People's Training and Research Center(PTRC) and the Ahmedabad-based National Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH), agate grinding and polishing here ranks among the world’s most dangerous work. 

As many as a third of Khambhat agate workers develop silicosis.

Since the grinding and polishing work takes place in sheds and empty lots located in residential areas, it also claims one out of ten of the workers’ children and family members, who breathe the same deadly air.

Because of India's disastrous preference for tiny, unregulated sweatshops over formal sector industries, there's no visible target like Foxconn to shoulder the blame — even though Khambhat exports hundreds of thousands of pounds of polished agate to be sold by US retailers each year.

And virtually nobody in India or abroad is doing anything to stop the killing of Khambhat's stone polishers.

“It's not exactly rocket science. The cause of silicosis among gem cutters is known, and the means to prevent it are readily accessible,” said Brian Leber, chief executive of Chicago-based Leber Jeweler Inc. Leber has done extensive advocacy work to eliminate dangerous and exploitative labor practices in the colored gemstones industry worldwide.

An ancient trade

Once known as Cambay, Khambhat has been an important center for gem and agate processing for hundreds of years. Although the city's traders now source the raw stones from as far away as Africa, and though silt has choked the local river, closing the ancient port, in some ways the agate polishing industry has hardly changed.

Instead of building factories here and in other locations across the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, agate traders buy raw stones and supply them to so-called artisans who chip them to size, cut and grind them into shape and polish them to a smooth, shiny glow.

Exporters boast of modern manufacturing methods on their websites, or on business-to-business portals like Alibaba.com. But most, if not all of them, use this ancient system of outsourcing.

This enables them to avoid implementing safety standards that would be required under Indian law if they located their equipment under one roof and hired their workers under contract, according to Jagdish Patel, the occupational safety expert who founded PTRC in 1992.

It’s a stretch to call these laborers self-employed. PTRC's survey of nearly 5,000 agate workers found that three-quarters do not own the machines they use. Fewer than one percent buy their raw stones or sell the finished agate. And many take advance payment, or “baki,” that effectively leaves them in thrall to an agate trader, even though all forms of bonded labor are illegal in India.

“Self-employment in agate work is a deceit,” Sudarshan Iyengar, vice chancellor of Ahmedabad-based Gujarat Vidyapith University wrote in a monograph to the PTRC study.

The result is disastrous.

To make agate grinding and polishing safe, manufacturers need to use a combination of water and suction to knock down the deadly silica dust and prevent workers from breathing it.

Because Khambhat's workers are paid a piece rate that averages about $1 a day, they're unable to buy basic safety gear, such as a dust mask. The margins are so thin that even middlemen who employ five or six workers cannot afford the electricity for water pumps and exhaust systems.

“The relationship between traders and workers is temporary,” said Khushman Patel, secretary of an area traders' organization called the Cambay Agate Association. “But we have made some recommendations to the workers about safety.”

According to the agate trader, it is hard to find workers today. “Even the poor send their kids to school and you can't find unskilled laborers,” he said. As a result, local firms are shifting away from products such as rosary beads that require a lot of grinding — the most dangerous process — to more natural shapes that can be created by chipping and polishing.

Throughout Khambhat, however, workers still grind stones into beads by the hundreds of thousands, by pressing them against a clattering vertical wheel that produces a cloud of silica dust. Sometimes they work without even a bandana over their mouths for protection.

Conducting a house-to-house survey in 2010, PTRC identified nearly 5,000 of these cottage industry workers, including around 1,200 workers drilling holes for stringing beads and 700 grinders — who run the highest risk of contracting silicosis.

When GlobalPost visited some of these grinders, a snowy coat of silica dust covered the machines. We could see and taste the silica in the air. Worse still, the processing was being done amid villages where hundreds of people live, often just outside workers' homes.

In one village, 50 paces from a house where another grinder had recently died, two women were grinding agate for beads without water or an exhaust system to collect the dust. Dressed in cheap cotton saris and rubber flip-flops, all they had for protection were the bandanas covering their noses and mouths. A drum polisher, which tumbles the stones together with abrasive materials, sat idle beside them. The air tasted of ozone, and a milky cloud of silica dust caught the sunlight.

“My whole family is doing this work,” one of the women said, desperately. “Do something for us.”

Industry apathy

Jagdish Patel, of PTRC, worked for years to force local traders and government bodies like the Gems and Jewelry Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) to acknowledge that the industry was killing workers. (The secretary of the Cambay Agate Association and the PTRC activist are not related; Patel is a common surname here).

A balding chemical engineer whose cherubic face belies the dogged temperament of a trade union activist, Jagdish Patel traveled to Hong Kong, Geneva and Basel, to protest at trade fairs and meet with officials from the International Labor Organization (ILO) and World Health Organization (WHO).

Only after a damning 2010 report on silicosis in the Indian agate industry by the US-based National Labor Committee did the GJEPC finally visit Khambhat to address the issue.

But when GJEPC finally organized a public meeting to discuss silicosis, it was monopolized by traders who refused to accept that their industry was causing the disease.

According to the activist, nothing substantial has changed.

“We wanted the [gem] council to shoulder some responsibility for this,” Jagdish Patel said. “You do not have any moral right to promote the export of these products unless you shoulder the responsibility for the death and disease. But they are still not doing anything positive.”

A 2010 GJEPC plan to build a safe, common facility for workers, funded by agate traders, could eliminate the worst effects of the industry's loosely regulated outsourcing practices.

But the PTRC activist laments that it has not gotten off the drawing board.

GJEPC says work is progressing.

“The Council is sensitizing the workers of Khambhat with the hazards of the technology which they are using,” Sanjay Singh, regional director, GJEPC Jaipur, told GlobalPost by email.

“A center of excellence is being set up in Khambhat with the help of Government of India and State Government of Gujarat where workers will be trained on machines of non hazardous technology. At this center the workers will be allowed to use the machines for manufacturing the agate gems of their own on payment of nominal user charges. ... The land allotment is in process. It is expected that it will start in a year’s time.”

For many workers and their family members, that will be too late.

A deadly epidemic

Silicosis is virtually inevitable after years of inhaling silica dust, which scars and inflames the lungs. But as little as a few weeks of exposure to high concentrations of silica dust can cause the disease. Once contracted, silicosis itself is incurable and the acute form is fatal. 

Moreover, it has been shown to cause lung cancer and it makes its sufferers three times more likely to contract tuberculosis, which is endemic in India.

Since PTRC began screening agate workers for silicosis in 2007 in conjunction with doctors at Karamsad Medical College, the non-profit has documented about 200 cases of silicosis among about 700 workers who submitted themselves for testing. More than 70 of those 200 have already died of the disease, forming the basis of an ongoing complaint to India's 

National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). But there has been little or no relief.

The anecdotal evidence is also grim.

In interviews with GlobalPost in Khambat, agate polishers recounted an epidemic of death among their families and co-workers — telling of manufacturing sites where as many as 15 out of 20 workers employed over the years have died from silicosis.

“Over 10 years, I might have employed 20 or 30 workers off and on,” said 43-year-old Karimsha Husseinsha Diwan. “Most of them have died.”

“Maybe 100 of my colleagues and relatives have died of this over the past 20 or 25 years,” said 51-year-old Bashir Nur Mohammed Malik, an agate grinder who was diagnosed with silicosis in 2012. “Seven members of my immediate family [who worked in the industry] have died — my father, my mother, two brothers and both of their wives, and one sister.”

“Both my father and brother died of silicosis, and my mother has been diagnosed,” said 35-year-old Prakash. “At least 30 or 40 workers from the same 'factory' must have died over the years.”

PTRC's research provides a depressing explanation of why they keep coming back — sometimes even after being diagnosed with silicosis. Almost all of the workers are Muslims or Dalits (once known as “untouchables”) or hail from the underprivileged castes known in Indian legalese as the “Other Backward Classes.” Only 10 percent have any other skill, such as driving a rickshaw or weaving.

Buyer beware

GJEPC's director in Jaipur concedes that there is a problem in Khambhat. But he says that silicosis is not a problem at “other centers” of manufacturing, which are using “different technology.”

While it's impossible to say that there are no safe facilities anywhere in India, activists say that they are rare, at best. And no Indian agate manufacturer appears to be claiming high safety standards for its workers in a bid to attract business from Western companies that deal in “fair trade” or “ethical” jewelry.

Jagdish Patel's PTRC has yet to discover a facility in Khambhat that provides adequate safety measures, after more than a decade of advocacy on behalf of agate workers.

“I've been in the industry 37 years, and to my knowledge there is no [Indian] factory in those beads and cabochons and the type of products you're describing,” adds Eric Braunwart, chief executive of Columbia Gems, who has investigated shifting his production from China to India. “I could be wrong. There might be one in India. But I would be surprised.”

That’s not to say all agate sold in the West is suspect.

In China, Braunwart worked with his Chinese manufacturing partner to develop a low-cost, wet-process exhaust system to protect their grinders. And when Jagdish Patel visited China to document the industry's best practices for traders back home, he also witnessed large-scale agate polishing units that have adopted wet-process grinding techniques and employed exhaust systems to dispose of silica dust.

But agate and gem polishers at other units from China to South Africa are at grave risk of silicosis, according to reports by organizations like Labor Action China, which won a 2.6 million yuan (~ $419,000 USD) settlement in 2010 for Chinese grinders.

Meanwhile, neither the gem nor the agate industry has a mechanism like the Kimberly Process, which certifies “conflict-free” diamonds, or Goodweave (formerly Rugmark), which guarantees that carpets and other products have been manufactured without child labor. So once those stones hit display cases in stores across the US and Europe, it's “buyer beware.”

Exports to the West

Nobody keeps official statistics for India's total agate exports. But a GlobalPost analysis of GJEPC export statistics suggests that perhaps as much as $110 million worth of colored gemstones were shipped to the US between April 2012 and January 2013. By dollar value, the bulk of that comprised emeralds, sapphires and rubies, according to a GJEPC official. But cheap, semi-precious stones like agate may well have accounted for most of the tonnage.

According to documents Patel obtained from Piers Trade Intelligence, a subscription-only database of US waterborne trade activity, and showed to GlobalPost, US-based traders imported around 140,000 pounds of polished agate and similar semi-precious stones from India over five months in 2009. This included nearly 50,000 pounds of polished stones from Khambhat-based Krishna Agate.

Those stones almost certainly end up in malls across America. Some of the country’s biggest retailers, as well as many online merchants and specialty shops, offer agate-based products.

But consumers lack the information to know if a polished agate has contributed to the painful death of workers. Under US law, stores are required to label merchandise with the country of manufacture. Those rules don’t require companies to provide detailed information about where their immediate suppliers source the materials they use in the manufacturing. And traders in this competitive market keep their supply chains confidential. So a product labeled “made in California” may well contain agate that was processed in India.

GlobalPost requested supply chain and safety information from online shops and major retailers selling agate in the US. Some of these companies have strict internal policies against the exploitation of workers, wherever they may live. But most of them did not respond to repeated inquiries, and none provided sufficient information to allow an outsider to verify that they had eliminated dangerous practices from their supply chain.

“Even when it comes to finished jewelry items that lay claims to being 'ethical', things aren't always so cut-and-dry,” said Leber, the jeweler and advocate for better labor conditions in the gem industry.

“For instance, we've seen items being sold by a well-known 'fair trade' retailer that, while they may have been made by a women's co-op in the developing world, utilize gemstone beads that were almost certainly cut ... by cutters who in a couple years will contract silicosis and likely die at a young age.”

India: No babies for gay couples

New regulations bar gays from India's booming market for surrogate mothers.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - March 17, 2013)

NEW DELHI, India — When 39-year-old Michael Kuykendall approached the Indian consulate for a visa last year, he faced no real problems.

Sure, he had to re-apply for a medical visa instead of a tourist permit when he revealed that he was traveling to New Delhi to fertilize a donor egg for a local surrogate mother. But in those days, that was just a formality.

When it came to take his 6-week-old daughter, Isabella, home last month, however, everything had changed. In January, India adopted new regulations to govern the booming surrogacy business.

The new rules effectively bar gay couples and single parents from the trade — mandating that only heterosexual couples who have been married for at least two years are eligible for the newly created surrogacy visa.

“I felt like they were almost hostile towards me,” Kuykendall, who is gay, said about his exit interview at New Delhi's Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) last month.

“You go to an interview with some lady, and she really grills you. She belittles you. She makes you feel small about yourself.”

A police officer back home in Milwaukee, Wisc., Kuykendall didn't take too much of that before he pulled out Isabella's US passport and told the immigration officer in no uncertain terms that she might be able to delay his exit, but there was no way she was going to stop him. The circumstances of his private life were “none of her business,” he said.

Not everybody is that confident of his rights. “The guy ahead of me was in there for more than an hour, and he came out in tears,” Kuykendall said. “I told myself, 'That's not going to be me.'”

Surrogacy professionals in India say the government remains flexible with regard to patients who had transferred embryos to surrogates before the rule change. But the changes nevertheless pose a huge threat to one of India's fastest growing medical tourism offerings.

“The new home ministry rules have come as quite a surprise to doctors, the medical fraternity and clients who are overseas,” said Amit Karkhanis, a lawyer whose practice focuses on the surrogacy industry.

“It's definitely going to have an impact on the surrogacy market in India. The immediate fallout is that a lot of people are going to Thailand now. A lot of foreigners are reconsidering their decision to come to India.”

Official data is not available. But industry estimates suggest that some 50,000 people visit India annually seeking surrogate mothers, resulting in around 2,000 births per year. Gay couples and singles previously accounted for more than a third of that trade.

“There's no official study,” said Ramasubramanian. “At least 30-50 percent of the patients who come to India for surrogacy will be affected. The reason is because we are looking at large volumes of single and gay parents who are coming to India for surrogacy.”

One of the largest surrogacy clinics has a waiting list of more than 200 people who say that they are keen to come to India for surrogacy if the new regulations barring gays and singles are relaxed. And there are hundreds of babies already on the way and scores of surrogates waiting for embryo transfers.

“The situation has already arisen where parents [who have already engaged a surrogate] want to come to India to pick up their children but their visa is refused initially,” said Hari G Ramasubramanian, a partner at the Chennai-based Indian Surrogacy Law Center. “What we've seen is that on an appeal basis most of the cases are allowed to come back.”

The new visa rules mark a step backward for gay rights in India, which decriminalized gay sex in 2009 and has witnessed a steady, albeit slow, growth in the acceptance of homosexuality.

But they will also cost India a significant source of foreign exchange and cut a deep slash in one of the few industries that gives poor women without marketable skills an opportunity to earn the kind of money that can help them propel their children into the middle class.

From start to finish, a surrogacy procedure in India runs nearly $30,000 — about a third of what it might cost in the United States. The low costs mean higher volumes, especially for the larger, dedicated players, such as the New Delhi-based Surrogacy Center of India and the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Anand, Gujarat.

“We do about 60 [embryo] transfers for surrogacy every month,” the center's head Shivani Sachdev Gour said. Although not every transfer results in a completed pregnancy, that's serious volume.

“We had 291 babies delivered by surrogacy last year, and we've delivered more than 550 babies by surrogacy to date,” he added, suggesting that her clinic shared in nearly $9 million in revenue from the surrogate business in the year before the rule change.

Doctors aren't the only ones to benefit.

Some have suggested the so-called “rent-a-womb” industry exploits poor women, but it's lucrative enough that many surrogates opt to do it more than once. They even recommend it to other women who badly need money to change their lives.

Surrogates employed by the surrogacy center, for example, earn around $6,000 for bringing babies to term, as well as room and board during their pregnancies.

That amounts to about 50 percent more per month than two such mothers had been earning as cooks, and then enough to cover their living expenses for a year after the baby's birth. But many surrogate mothers leverage the extra income to offer a better opportunity for their own children.

“I'm using the money for my son's studies,” said 25-year-old Manisha Thapa, who is eight-months pregnant. “My son is in the fourth grade. The private school where I'm sending him costs around $100 to $150 including fees, books and tutoring.”

And that's the real secret of the surrogacy trade. It's not trading one life for another. It's delivering one life to make many lives better.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130305/india-surrogacy-surrogate-mothers-gay-single-parents

India: Pirates! Caught on tape!

Legitimate traders ran their own sting to catch software pirates in the act. The only problem is that nobody cares.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - March 3, 2013)

NEW DELHI, India — In an alcove underneath signs for Dell computers, Sandisk storage media and placards advertising printer cartridge repair and refilling, half a dozen boys between 14 and 18 years old have set up shop.

They hold typewritten sheets in their hands, pages and pages long, listing the pirated software they have for sale. And they're not shy about it.

“Hello, software, software, Adobe, Microsoft Office, Windows 7, Autocad, any name software,” a boy in a blue T-shirt shouts. “Microsoft, Mac, software, games. Hundred rupees [$2] any software.”

Welcome to Nehru Place, India's largest market for software and computers — and one of the top 30 most notorious hubs of piracy in the world, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative.

According to the Association of Indian Software Companies, this filthy and chaotic cluster of office buildings — each one housing a warren of tiny shops — accounts for as much as half of the $2.5 billion worth of legal software sold in India every year.

But the real volume is in the fake stuff, where the sprawling hub is also responsible for almost 60 percent of the pirated market, including high-end software, operating systems and movies.

That's why a traders' association recently took matters into its own hands.

“Our market gets a bad name because of piracy while not one shop owner is involved,” said Mahinder Aggarwal, president of the All Delhi Computer Traders' Association (ADCTA). “Those hawkers down on the pavement, those 13-, 14-year-old kids, are the ones involved in piracy.”

Earlier this month, members of the ADCTA broke out cellphones and video cameras to catch pirates on tape, posting the evidence onYouTube and providing detailed footage to police that allegedly depicts pirates hawking illegal software, harassing women and abusing drugs.

But they say the police has refused to act, even though their evidence reveals the kingpin of one of the world's largest piracy markets. Maybe that's because the tapes allegedly show cops taking money from the pirates, too.

“[We got] no response,” said ADCTA President Mahinder Aggarwal. “Police only responds, 'Money, money, money.' Otherwise, no response.”

The Delhi police reportedly never received the complaint, and a spokesman told the Times of India that the police will investigate and “pirates will not be spared.”

But the trade is so open that video evidence is hardly required.

A few hours picking through the outdoor stalls selling off-brand jeans and T-shirts confirms that the police approach the young pirates with little more than a wink and a nod. Every few minutes on a typical Friday afternoon, teams of two or three constables stroll through the stalls.

But as five officers relax in the shade of a Delhi Police observation tower, the sonorous call of the boys from Neverland rings out: “Software, software, software lo [take], software sir, software.”

Juveniles don't have much to fear from police, said one boy selling pirated goods at Nehru Place.

“They're 20 or 30 of us doing this work,” he said, adding that he's been hawking “only pirated” software for the past three years.

He explains in a mix of Hindi and English that the worst that happens to juveniles is a little “dishum, dishum” (the Bollywood-trained ear's slang for the on-screen sound of a character getting slapped around). But “after 19, jail.”

Maybe the police are just tired of running after the boys, only to see them or their replacements back at it the next day. But the owners of legitimate shops are fed up. Not to mention the salesmen.

“It causes a lot of problems,” says Prabhat, a salesman presiding over an empty ground floor shop that sells official versions of the same software that the pirates are hawking right outside his door.

That's an understatement, considering that licensed software costs at least 30 times more than the pirated stuff.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130301/india-piracy-crime

Analysis: Hyderabad bombings raise specter of Hindu-Muslim violence

With elections approaching, terror attack could lay foundations for riots.

By Jason Overdorf

(GlobalPost - February 22, 2013)

NEW DELHI, India — Almost as soon as the bombs ripped through a crowded Hyderabad street on Thursday, fingers started pointing at Pakistan. 

Given the recent execution by Indian authorities of Kashmiri militant Mohammed Afzal Guru, many assumed a Pakistan-based terror outfit like Lashkar e Toiba was seeking revenge. Many braced for heightened cross-border tensions.

But, some say, the real fallout may be new conflict between Hindus and Muslims within India, rather than a further deterioration of New Delhi's relations with Islamabad, especially with 2014 national elections looming.

“Investigations have just begun,” said Hashmi, “but the media is already saying it is the [Lashkar e Toiba-backed] Indian Mujahideen, and taking all these names."

"There's almost an atmosphere of terror where Muslims live together. Nobody knows whose son will be picked up for this.”

Crackdowns on young Muslims in the wake of 2007 bombings that struck the Mecca Masjid mosque in Hyderabad have left the minority population angry and suspicious of the government.

Neither the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai nor subsequent incidents like the August 2012 bombings in a shopping center in Pune, Maharashtra, or the September 2011 bombing of the Delhi High Court have triggered Hindu-Muslim riots.

But some observers fear that such a backlash grows more likely as 2014 national elections get closer, since Indian politicians have long used interreligious violence to win votes. Most famously, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first rose to national power in the wake of Hindu-Muslim violence over the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992.

“None of those guilty of communal violence have ever been punished," said Manisha Sethi, president of the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (JTSA).

"There is a general systemic tolerance of crimes of communal violence and this impunity creates possibilities of further violence.”

In the leadup to Thursday's blasts, Hyderabad had been aboil over hate speech by Muslim politician Akbaruddin Owaisi of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM). Released on bail on Friday, Owaisi allegedly sparked outrage by suggesting at a rally that Muslims should attack Hindus, though he has denied those charges.

Subsequently, Pravin Togadia of the far-right Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) retaliated with some inflammatory comments of his own, bringing the issue to national prominence and further alienating the Muslim population.

And there are countless disputes over religious sites in the offing in other locations like the Kamal Maula Masjid in Madhya Pradesh, where Hindu extremists claim that a Hindu center of learning once stood, and the Bhagyalakshmi temple, which is located in the Muslim area of Hyderabad and which some claim threatens the city's most famous historical site, the(Muslim) Charminar.

Activists who work on behalf of India's Muslims worry these developments could spell danger for the minority group in the leadup to polls — especially following the bombings in Hyderabad on Thursday.

“There have been several low intensity riots at least since last year across the country,” said Sethi.

“This will certainly only rise in the run up to 2014, as both BJP and Congress compete for the right wing space.”

Already, more lives were lost to interreligious riots in 2012 than in any year since 2004, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came to power, according to India's Hindustan Times newspaper. Nearly 185 people were killed in so-called communal violence over the first 10 months of last year for which statistics are available.

Sethi, Hashmi and others suggest that most of these incidents are not spontaneous eruptions of anger, but orchestrated by right wing political groups like the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Those charges have not been proven, and RSS national spokesman Ram Madhav categorically denied that the organization encourages violence of any kind.

“Allegations of Sangh groups trying to stir up communal tensions are false and [politically] motivated,” Madhav told GlobalPost via email. “We appeal for calm and we want [the government] to act tough with terrorists and their sponsors.”

But whether orchestrated or spontaneous, a series of terrorist incidents, violent altercations and police reprisals hints at a disturbing disintegration of religious harmony in India.

Over the past several months small-scale riots have flared up across India in Faizabad and Kosi in Uttar Pradesh, Gopalgarh in Rajasthan and Dhule in Maharashtra — with the last incident generating disturbing video evidence suggesting that police may have purposefully targeted Muslims when bullets were fired to disperse the rioters.

Meanwhile, from Delhi to Hyderabad, local Muslims and activist groups say police have arbitrarily rounded up, detained and even tortured young Muslims in the wake of bombings or terrorist threats, resulting in the further alienation and demonization of the community.

A report by Sethi's JTSA, for instance, documented 16 cases in which the so-called Special Cell of the Delhi police arrested young Muslims on charges related to terrorism, only to see the cases against them collapse for want of evidence — after the accused had spent as much as 14 years behind bars.

Similarly, doubts still linger about the killing of two young Muslims in a supposed shootout with police in the “Batla House encounter” following five serial bomb blasts in New Delhi in in 2008.

And in Hyderabad itself, blame for the 2007 Mecca mosque bombing, which killed 14 people, shifted from local Muslim boys allegedly affiliated with a foreign terrorist cell to members of a homegrown, Hindu nationalist group called Abhinav Bharat when a former RSS activist named Swami Asseemanand allegedly confessed to the crime. (He later recanted).

“We consider the allegations as baseless,” said RSS spokesman Madhav. “All the cases are still at the investigation level. Initially more than 100 Muslim youths were arrested for the terror acts. They had confessed to their involvement too. But later the investigators started claiming that Hindu youths were responsible.... The RSS neither supports, nor sponsors violence and terrorism.”

But the idea that both Hindu and Muslim groups might gain from terrorist attacks — and from the associated intercommunity tensions and violence they engender — could bode ill for next year's campaign.

“The point is that any such strike only allows the cementing of a jingoistic hardline ‘nationalism’,” said Sethi. “It’s anybody’s guess who this helps.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130222/hyderabad-india-bombings-pakistan-hindu-muslim-tensions

India: 'Love Commandos' fight back against honor killings

As inter-caste 'love marriages' become increasingly common, a Guardian Angels-style vigilante group has emerged to protect young couples.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - February 14, 2013)

NEW DELHI, India — Forbidden love is blooming in India. But so is war. And the“Love Commandos” are fighting on the front lines.

“Today, on our heads there is a bounty of around 20 lakh rupees [$40,000] from different khap panchayats,” said Love Commandos' founder Sanjoy Sachdeva, referring to the illegal village councils that are notorious for sanctioning the so-called “honor killings” of young couples who violate social taboos to marry across caste lines.

He's not exaggerating. Young Indians are fast adopting Western lifestyles. But as the parallel forces of affirmative action and women's empowerment increasingly bring young people from different castes and religious backgrounds together in colleges and call centers, defying the country's centuries-old tradition of arranged marriages can get you tortured, arrested, or even killed.

Official statistics aren't available. But Shakti Vahini, a non-profit, documented 560 such cases across India between 2007 and 2010. And other experts have estimated that at least 1,000 honor killings take place in India every year.

That's where Sachdeva's “Love Commandos” come in.

Started in 2010, the Love Commandos rescue and shelter young couples who face threats from their families because they've chosen to defy barriers of caste and religion for the sake of love.

Operating a help line, secret shelters, and a kind of underground railroad for India's Romeos and Juliets, the Love Commandos rescue and protect couples from their parents, the police and, all too often, the courts — as filing false cases of kidnapping and abduction and even rape is one of the angry parents' first responses to forbidden love.

Fielding an average of 300 calls a day, so far, the group has helped as many as 30,000 couples to marry.

“It is a war against fundamentalists,” said Sachdeva. “It is a war against orthodox people — whether they are Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians or of any other religion. No religion preaches to hate love.”

Take 28-year-old Rahul Acharya and 23-year-old Puja Singh — a couple opposed by their parents because Acharya belongs to the priestly Brahmin caste and Singh the warrior Rajput caste.

After meeting Singh at a wedding in Kolkata, where her family lives, Acharya returned to his life in Mumbai. But the couple maintained a long-distance love affair in secret, on Facebook and their cellphones.

When Rahul eventually proposed, however, Singh's parents took away her phone, banned her from the computer, and put her under house arrest. For six months, with the help of another cellphone smuggled to Singh by a friend, the couple planned their escape.

But the family never let Singh out of the house alone. Finally, when she took her younger brother to his after-school tutor, she saw her chance. As soon as the boy was inside studying, she called Acharya and the two of them hopped on a plane to New Delhi — where Sachdeva's Love Commandos immediately secreted them away in one of the outfit's seven shelters.

Singh's father, an important businessman in Kolkata, immediately filed charges of kidnapping and abduction, and soon flew to Mumbai with the Kolkata police to visit the bank where Acharya was working. All they knew was that he'd taken his vacation days.

But the visit soured them on their romantic employee — even if the three months he's spent in hiding in Delhi might not have. And his job prospects will no doubt dim somewhat without the network of family connections that usually help middle-class Indians get ahead.

“We got married on Nov. 26 and sent an intimation to the police and our parents that if any cases are there against us, they are to be closed,” said Acharya. “But the [charges] are still there.”

“I will try to convince the rest of my family to accept him,” said Singh. “But my father will never come around.”

Married life so far has been tough. The shelter where Acharya and Singh have spent their honeymoon is little more than a concrete cell atop the Love Commandos' headquarters in a crowded Delhi slum. They have no income, and no money to spend, and even if they did, they're not allowed to leave the shelter unescorted — for fear that Singh may be snatched back by someone hired by her father or that Acharya may be nabbed by the police for the kidnapping case against him.

“It's just like a prison,” said Acharya. “The only difference is that it's for our security.”

Not every Romeo is so lucky. Or so courageous. Consider a story from the city of Agra, Uttar Pradesh — home to the Taj Mahal, sometimes called the world's greatest monument to love.

When another young woman staying at the Love Commandos shelter, 23-year-old Archana, fell in love with a young man from a lower caste, her mother and four brothers allegedly tied her to the bed and beat her with a curtain rod until it broke — then folded the two pieces in half and beat her some more.

They then kept her prisoner from March to September 2012, she claims, bribing police sent to investigate a claim that her boyfriend lodged with the National Commission for Women (NCW) to file a report that she was living happily with her brothers.

By that time, sadly, her Romeo had given up.

“On Nov. 28, I took all my school certificates and my ID proof and ran away,” Archana said.

“I called him as soon as I could, and he said he would take care of everything, and asked me to meet him at the bus stop. But when I got off the bus, my uncle and my brothers were standing there with him waiting for me, because he had called them.”

Tied to the bed and tortured once more, Archana plotted another attempt.

“I thought, 'Now they already made a fake police report, they don't let me out of the house, they keep beating me, someday they may do something really wrong [a euphemism for rape]. If I can get just one chance to escape, even if I die trying, I have to get out of here.”

Finally, she sustained injuries from her daily beatings that were serious enough that she was able to convince her mother to take her to the hospital — where she walked in the front door and out the back.

Then she called the Love Commandos, whose local Agra network spirited her to New Delhi, where she and Sachdeva are pursuing her case with the NCW.

“If they ever find me, they won't ask why I ran away a second time,” said Archana, who claims that one of her brothers has powerful police connections. “They will kill me. They can pay someone any amount to have me killed.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130213/india-love-commandos-honor-killings-love-marriages-valentines-day

India: War on whistleblowers

Over the past five years, some 150 whistleblowers have allegedly been harassed or jailed for exposing corruption. As many as 20 have been killed.

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - February 4, 2013)

NEW DELHI, India — In India, the truth might set you free. Or it might land you behind bars. Or even dead.

Take the case of Naveen Sorinjee, a TV reporter jailed in Karnataka for exposing an assault on young couples by a far-right Hindu group. Sorinjee has inspired a hunger strike and a slew of editorials. But more than a two months after his arrest, he's still in the slammer. And he's not alone.

India this year plunged to its lowest ranking on Reporters Without Borders'world press freedom index since 2002, falling to 140 out of 179 countries, as governments around the country cracked down on free speech and allowed criminals, political “workers” and armed groups to attack journalists with impunity.

Meanwhile, since the right to information law gave rise to the anti-corruption movement, the number of bureaucrats, activists, and even policemen who were harassed, beaten, jailed and murdered for daring to expose government and corporate malfeasance has continued to grow, according to the Asia Center for Human Rights (ACHR).

Though they're rarely considered together, India's crackdown on free speech and its assault on muckraking activists are both part of an escalating war on whistleblowers that is intended to squash any objection to the near-absolute power of the state.

Over the past five years, some 150 whistleblowers have allegedly been harassed or jailed for exposing corruption, while as many as 20 have been killed.

The latest trend: State and local governments are exploiting India's notoriously slow court system to land activists behind bars or saddle them with criminal charges that may take decades to resolve.

Even the national government has joined the fray, going after aid groups that receive international funding in a smear campaign intended to discredit them as anti-national and then starve them of cash.

“The government is absolutely complicit in these activities,” said ACHR's director Suhas Chakma. “Without the cooperation of the local authorities, these cases can never be done. In some cases you will see the complicity even of the judiciary.”

A reporter for a local channel called Kasturi Newz24, Sorinjee ran afoul of the authorities in Karnataka after a report on an incident in July in which members of a far-right group called the Hindu Jagarana Vedike allegedly attacked and beat up several young men and women for daring to attend a birthday party unchaperoned.

Though he'd exposed the incident — one of a string of alleged assaults perpetrated by far-right groups in Mangalore in the name of moral policing — Sorinjee was charged with participating in it.

According to India's Hindu newspaper, in November he was arrested and charged with“rioting with deadly weapons,” criminal conspiracy, unlawful assembly, and using criminal force on a woman with the intention of outraging her modesty, in Indian legal-speak. Citing the obvious video evidence, Sorinjee and his supporters say those were the activities his news report depicted — not anything he did himself.

In January, a group of reporters, editors and activists held a three-day hunger strike to highlight Sorinjee's plight. But nearly a month later, he's still languishing in jail. And even if Twitter rumors that the authorities are poised to drop the charges against him prove true, he will have spent nearly a quarter of the year behind bars. And, again due to the glacial pace of India's legal system, he will have virtually no recourse to the law for compensation for false arrest.

The case is not unique to Mangalore, to Karnataka, or to the Hindu right.

“It happens all over the country,” said Chakma. “It can happen anywhere, any day.”

So it seems, according to a random sampling.

In August 2011, 35-year-old activist Shehla Mahsood — who'd filed countless right-to-information applications and leveled allegations of corruption against local politicians associated with illegal diamond mining — was shot dead on her way to an anti-corruption protest in Madhya Pradesh.

In February 2012, 42-year-old Premnath Jha, who'd filed right-to-information applications regarding several construction projects in Maharashtra, was gunned down while riding home on his motorcycle.

In Gujarat in 2009, 50-year-old Purshottam Chauhan, who'd sought information about a costly project that the local village council had purportedly undertaken with government funds, was badly beaten by a gang of thugs.

Meanwhile, in October 2011 in Haryana, journalist Ramesh Singla, who'd been writing articles about the illegal mining business in the state, was killed in a suspected hit and run. And in September 2011, cub reporter Lingaram Kodopi, a member of one of Chhattisgarh's indigenous tribes, was arrested as a so-called middleman between nefarious activists and the Maoist rebels waging a simmering insurrection in his troubled home state.

And the list goes on.

The catalyst for these false (or dubious) prosecutions, assaults and murders was the passage of the groundbreaking Right to Information Act (RTI) in 2005.

By giving ordinary citizens the right to access virtually any government document, the law cracked open a tortuous, bureaucratic system that had been a virtual black box since the days of India's colonization. It made refusal to divulge information a jailable offense. And, even if it did not result in a rash of convictions, it began to make the corrupt nexus among politicians, career bureaucrats and corporations politically untenable.

Now that nexus is striking back — not only against right-to-information activists, but against all forms of scrutiny and dissent.

Cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, novelist-turned-activist Arundhati Roy and Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, among others, have been charged with sedition for political speech that authorities deemed to be “anti-India.”

Right-wing gadflies have reported mysterious server failures for their Twitter accounts and blogs, following a government crackdown that was supposedly limited to the suppression of specific offensive or inflammatory images.

Anybody with something to say, it seems, is an enemy of the state.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130201/india-whistleblowers-activists-free-speech

Inside baseball: Why Nandy's mistake matters

An Indian sociologist's remarks on caste and corruption should shine a light on stereotypes

By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - February 2, 2013)

When the inside baseball of Indian politics makes it to the pages of the New York Times and the website of the New Yorker, it's time to weigh in. Leaving the background to the hyperlinks, here's my take:

Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy's remarks at Jaipur, and his later clarification, are not important simply because the attempt to prosecute him for insulting Indians from lower castes represents yet another attack on freedom of speech in the name of “sensitivity,” as Manu Joseph aptly lampoons in the New York Times andBasharat Peer ably explains for the New Yorker.

The main issue is the content of his statement, which sneakily confirms as “fact” a widely held public perception for which there is no hard evidence, and, in truth, seems patently false based on common sense.

The statement in question?

“It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes and as long as this is the case, Indian republic will survive.”

Much has been made of the context for that statement, which you can read in full here. But in my reading of it nothing undercuts the essential assertion.

Nandy is sincere and sympathetic. He is saying that the corruption of India's lower castes is justified, even desirable. And Nandy admits that corruption of a kind is common among the elites. But it's interesting, to say the least, that he compares the assistance of an old boys' network in getting into Oxford or Harvard to the “millions of rupees” amassed by “the only unrecognized billionaire in India today” Madhu Koda – which were allegedly earned through illegal manipulation of the mining laws and perhaps selling his support, by turns, to the Bharatiya Janata Party and later the Congress. (So much for the context).

Nevertheless, whether Nandy means well or not is immaterial. So is whether or not he suffers from some unwitting prejudices, even as he thinks he is being radical. The most important thing here is that he claims something as “fact” for which he offers no evidence and that he cannot support. Namely, he says that most of the corruption in India can now be attributed to the lower castes, which comprise the mid-level Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the formerly untouchable Dalits or Scheduled Castes. (Yes, there's also the Scheduled Tribes, but only so much inside baseball for one blog post).

This is a widely held perception that I suggest is based solely on a handful of high-profile prosecutions: the notorious “fodder scam” case against Bihar's Lalu Prasad Yadav, the “Taj corridor scam” case against Uttar Pradesh's Kumari Mayawati and, more recently, the “2G telecom spectrum scam” case against former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja.

That's called “believing is seeing” – you only process the evidence that suits your preconceptions, if you bother with evidence at all.  Surely there were corruption cases against high-caste Indians as well.  And if they didn't generate as much heat, one might say with equal authority that Mayawati & co were targeted for serious criminal investigations, and the others ignored, precisely because of their respective castes.

As far as I know, there has never been any effort to cross-reference caste and corruption scientifically. Meanwhile, it is also commonly believed that all politicians are corrupt, so the premise that the lower castes are the “most corrupt” seems to based on the perception that they steal in higher amounts, or have fewer concerns about actually doing their jobs – which I suggest would be even more difficult to prove.

Another unproven but widely accepted belief is that India's large industrial houses – Mukesh and Anil Ambani's Reliance Group, ,Shashi and Ravi Ruia's Essar Group, Ratan Tata's Tata Group, and so on and so on – routinely make payoffs to politicians and bureaucrats so that they can skirt environmental laws and the like. I'm not suggesting that's true or false here. But if, as many Indians do, you hold that belief, then what are the castes of the Ambanis, Ruias, Tatas, and so on? And who are they supposedly paying? Only the low-caste leaders and bureaucrats? That would be a mysterious bit of selectivism. And how would the low-caste leaders get away with this corruption if their high-caste counterparts were so scrupulously honest?

Yes, you say (Manu Joseph), but India's lower castes make up 59 percent of the population, so it is imminently logical that they account for 59 percent of its corruption. Professor Nandy was simply delivering a lesson in demographics. Really?

They say power corrupts, and that may be true. But what is definitely a fact is that you have to have power to indulge in corruption. Nobody will pay you a bribe if you can't do him any favors. And you can't extort money to do your duty as a government representative if those duties are confined to fetching tea and coffee. So how corrupt are the Dalits and OBCs? I suggest that they can only be corrupt in proportion to their representation in positions of power.

It's notable that it isn't easy to find a breakdown of the Indian parliament by caste, even though caste-and-creed mathematics is the key to winning elections here. But accounting for some margin of error, there's likely 300+ upper caste Hindus, 200- lower caste Hindus, 20-odd Muslims and a dozen or so Christians and Sikhs. So, if every member has equal power and is equally dishonest, the lower castes don't account for 59 percent of India's parliamentary corruption, they account for 37 percent, compared with the upper castes' 59 percent. And I'd wager if we look at the real power of the members, in terms of the committees they chair, ministries they control, and so on, then that percentage would have to be tweaked even further.

Yes, but most of the corruption happens at the bureaucratic level....?

Okay: What's the power breakdown in the bureaucracy? I invite you to help me update these figures, but the only numbers that I was able to turn up in a rather painstaking searchare from 1995, and limited to the Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and not the Other Backward Classes. Here goes:

In Class I positions – in other words top decision makers – the percentage of Dalits holding the seats has increased from less than 1 percent in 1953 to a little more than 10 percent in 1995. Let's say OBCs have down three times as well – for 30 percent of the positions. That still means two-thirds of the positions of real power, where you can really line pockets, are held by the upper castes.

In Class II positions, the percentage of Dalits has increased from 1.3 percent to 13 percent. So by my liberal guess, OBCs might account for 39 percent, leaving half of the wealth-generating posts to the upper castes.

In Class III positions, where you might turn up a few earning opportunities, Dalits have gone from 4.5 percent to 15.5 percent. So here Dalits and OBCs might account for a two-thirds majority.

And in the lowly Class IV positions, where the only corruption you can indulge in is deciding who gets tea first, or how clean the toilets might be? Dalits' share of the posts remained static at about 21 percent. So maybe 80 percent of the posts can be attributed to Dalits and OBCs.

What other numbers can we tap?

The only real information we have about corruption is the voluntary declarations of financial assets that India's politicians must make before contesting elections. They don't necessarily provide a smoking gun: A politician is allowed to get rich through legal means, as well as corrupt ones. But for the sake of argument, let's accept the commonly held perception that all Indian politicians are dirty, and look at some of the only numbers we have at our disposal. Unfortunately, we're also constrained because the candidates don't declare their castes when they file their affidavits, so we'll make some assumptions based on party affiliation: For the sake of argument, we'll assume all Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidates to be Dalits, all Samajwadi Party (SP) candidates to be OBC, and all BJP and Congress candidates to be upper caste Hindus – though in fact only the majority of the candidates fielded by those parties would fit the bill.

Upper caste:
Among the BJP candidates who contested for Lok Sabha seats in both 2004 and 2009, the listed increases in assets include one MP with a whopping 6000% increase in his net worth, another with a 2000% increase, and a third with a 1500% increase – among a lot where a brief scan suggests the average increase in assets is in the realm of 300-400%. (I wasn't able to convert the file to the right format to do the math).

Among the Congress candidates, there are MPs whose assets increased 1200%, 1700% and 3000%, and the average looks to be in the realm of 200-300%.

Lower caste:
Among the SP candidates there are MPs whose assets increased 1500% and 1000%, but the average increase looks to be substantially lower – perhaps only 100-150%.

Among the BSP candidates there are MPs whose assets increased 9000%, 1000% and 800%, but again the average appears to be lower (especially if you throw out the guy who boosted his wealth 90 times over).

So is it a “fact” that the lower castes are the most corrupt? The truth of the matter is that nobody knows. But it's irresponsible to make such claims based on prejudices and assumptions.