Kashmir's mighty rivers are a source of strife on the subcontinent.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
September 21, 2009
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — Atop the disputed Baglihar Dam in the mountains of Kashmir, the Chenab River roars like a 747 as its silvery waters churn the dam's massive turbines and boil out over the ravine in a tremendous, spiraling white waterfall.
The air is moist, and a massive cloud of mist floats downstream toward the roadway, where moments ago a dozen busloads of soldiers headed for posts along India's border with Pakistan have rumbled across a narrow bridge.
“Even today, soldiers are moving up and down all the time,” says my translator and guide, Rashid Dangola, a white-haired houseboat owner from Srinagar who tells me that in the heyday of India-administered Kashmir's armed struggle for independence he would buy his booze from the army and his hashish from the militants.
These troop movements are indeed a constant part of daily life in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where the Indian army stations 600,000 to 800,000 soldiers — more than double the number deployed for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. A fragile cease-fire has held here since November 2003, but Kashmir remains one of the most dangerous places in the world. Anger over the bloody partition that divided India and Pakistan in 1947 and a bitter feud over the ownership of this majestic portion of the Himalayas have led the two subcontinental powers to three full-fledged wars and a perilous standoff in 2002, when many world powers feared the dispute would go nuclear.
There are many reasons for the Kashmir conflict. But perhaps the most important of them is the water that spews into the sky at my feet.
When the British drew the borders partitioning India and Pakistan, their cartographers failed to consider the run of the rivers that would feed the two countries. Kashmir's accession to India granted New Delhi control over the headwaters of the Indus — the lifeline of civilization in what is now Pakistan since 2600 B.C. And although a treaty for sharing the water was worked out in 1960, its foundation has begun to crack under the pressure of the two countries rapidly growing populations and the specter of climate change.
Shortly before he led Pakistan's troops into the Kargil War, a then-unknown Pakistani general named Pervez Musharraf wrote in his dissertation at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London that the issue of the distribution of the waters of Kashmir between India and Pakistan has “the germs of future conflict.” Because water is the one resource that neither India nor Pakistan can do without, many experts fear that one day the dispute over the Indus — already an incessant source of diplomatic skirmishes — will propel these two nuclear weapons states into an all-out war.
Battles over water are already mounting in number around the world, according to Peter Gleick, an expert at the Pacific Institute. But Kashmir could be the most dangerous flash point. According to a recent United Nations report, Pakistan's water supply has dropped from about 5,000 cubic meters per person in the 1950s to 1,420 cubic meters today — perilously close to the threshold at which water shortage becomes an impediment to economic development and a serious hazard to human health. India, at 1,750 cubic meters per person, is not much better off. Both countries' huge populations are still growing, and because most of the available water comes from the disappearing glaciers of the Himalayas they are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
“We already see evidence that the climate is changing water availability and water quality,” Gleick said. “Kashmir is a place where water may not be the worst of the problem, but like the Sudan, or like the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers or like the Nile, it's a growing factor in what is already a conflict situation.”
Perhaps worse still, it appears that hawks on both sides are attempting to use water to create an insurmountable impasse in the dispute over Kashmir, rather than acknowledging that the sharing of rivers forms a framework for the two enemies to cooperate. This unease was underscored just last week, when India objected to a Pakistani proposal to build a new dam in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, with the help of the Chinese.
In Srinagar's Cafe Arabica, I met with two Kashmiri journalists, Parvaiz Bukhari of the Mail Today and Muzamil Jaleel of the Indian Express. In most respects, the two seasoned reporters could not be more different. Bukhari, a former TV journalist, is a handsome, bearded man with a grave voice, and an eloquent turn of phrase. “In an abnormal situation, the normal becomes news,” he told me, referring to countless New Delhi newspaper articles that featured the cafe where we were meeting as evidence that Kashmir's long-curfewed nightlife was picking up.
Jaleel, by contrast, is ebullient and manic, and gushes with gossip. He stormed into our bull session shouting out his order to the barista across the room.
Both of them, however, were united in their cynicism about the saber rattling over water in India and Pakistan.
On the Indian side, Jaleel pointed out, right-wing politicians have sought to turn Kashmir into a Hindu holy land of sorts to make ceding any of its territory non-negotiable. This is the impulse behind the strong political support for the Amarnath Yatra, a new pilgrimage to a cave in the mountains above Srinagar where an ice formation resembles a lingam — a Hindu religious symbol representing the phallus of the god Shiva. The same motive lies behind a new festival called the Sindhu Darshan, which casts the Indus as a Hindu river, though it was the cradle of ancient civilizations in what is today Pakistan, long before Hinduism existed. “India is trying to turn the rivers of Kashmir into religious symbols,” Jaleel said.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the opponents of detente cast the battle for Kashmir as a struggle for survival to prevent governments there from giving any ground, according to a new report by Mumbai's Strategic Foresight Group. Recalling the standoff on the border in 2002, the report's authors argue that Pakistani ideologues immediately leaped to the conclusion that India planned to use water as a weapon without any prompting from New Delhi, and predicted that such a move would ultimately lead to a Pakistani nuclear strike. At the same time, a leader from an umbrella organization of Pakistani jihadi groups told a local newspaper: “Kashmir is the source from where all of Pakistan's water resources originate. If Pakistan loses this battle against India, it will become a desert.”
Though Indians tend to dismiss this kind of rhetoric as senseless paranoia, Pakistan's fears are not completely unfounded. Almost immediately after Partition, India diverted the Ravi and Sutlej rivers, depriving the city of Lahore and Pakistan's irrigation canals of water during the spring sowing season. Now, whenever a new Indian dam comes up, Pakistani commentators see the project as another move to starve them out. One Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, for instance, lumped Baglihar in with 50 others built “in gross violation of the Indus Waters Treaty,” lamenting “India simply cut off waters flowing into Pakistan, dealing a big blow to our agriculture and economy.”
Kashmiris on both sides of the border — or Line of Control, as it is known locally — are caught in the middle. The Indus Waters Treaty, drawn up in 1960, has prevented India and Pakistan from going to war over the rivers of the Himalayas for almost 50 years by granting India exclusive use of the three eastern tributaries of the Indus, the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers, and granting Pakistan exclusive rights to the three western tributaries, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab.
But it has also prevented development of irrigation and hydroelectric projects in Kashmir itself. The treaty caps the amount of land Kashmir can irrigate and sets strict regulations on how and where water can be stored — making hydropower projects on the Chenab, like the Baglihar dam, difficult to execute. And, increasingly, the limitations imposed on India by the treaty are becoming a motivating force in Indian-administered Kashmir's struggle for independence.
“It is the irony of history that the waters belonging to Kashmiris are being decided by India and Pakistan. They have robbed us of our own natural resources,” said Shabir Ahmad Dar, the diminutive but passionate chief superintendent of the Hurriyat Conference — an alliance of separatist parties. “They have signed a treaty that is leading us to war.”
As to why this is so, conspiracy theories abound among the common people of Kashmir who I came across while traveling around Srinagar and its environs with Sajaad Hussain, an activist who chairs an NGO called the J&K Research Development Trust. A fair-skinned Kashmiri with long, dirty-blond hair, Hussain, too, was outraged that India's most water-rich state was struggling to meet its own needs.
As cup after cup of salted tea flowed from the samovar in Hussain's house in Srinagar's politically volatile downtown region, an interesting picture emerged of the common Kashmiri's perspective on India's water dispute with Pakistan. Motivated in part by wishful thinking, the consensus here was that India uses the dispute with Pakistan as an excuse not to invest in Kashmir's infrastructure, because it fears it may one day have to give up its claims on the territory.
“They (India) say that Kashmir is an unbreakable part of India,” exclaimed one of the tea drinkers. “But they do not treat it that way.”
The next day, Haseeb Drabu, who as chairman of the Jammu & Kashmir Bank has struggled to finance many hydroelectric power projects in the state, told me a somewhat different story. “There are all kinds of conspiracy theories, but the fact of the matter is that the state government doesn't have any money.” Nevertheless, Drabu, too — however optimistic he is about the Indian-administered Kashmir's ability to exploit its water resources — firmly believes that water will increasingly become a source of conflict. “Water will be the most potent political weapon by which India will screw Pakistan, because they have a huge problem as it is,” Drabu told me. “[Eventually] they will sign off on whatever we say, and say give it [water] to me, because they have such big problems.”
Downstream from the Baglihar Dam, the executive engineer on the project explained over stacks of toast and mango chutney how serious the threat of conflict has already become. Not two weeks before, an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist captured near the border by the Indian army had reportedly revealed plans to attack the dam — which Pakistan has opposed from the outset, approaching the World Bank for arbitration in 2005. “Everything in this place is under threat,” the engineer said. “What can we do? We continue our work.”
Most Kashmiris feel the same resignation. But in their mouths it leaves a bitter taste.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
india's hidden war heats up
As New Delhi steps up its fight against Maoist rebels, casualties mount
By Jason Overdorf
NEW DELHI, India — Deep in the jungles of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, commandos from the police force's elite “Cobra” division launched a devastating surprise attack on an encampment of Maoist rebels last week.
Providing a wordless rebuttal to the prime minister's admission that India is failing in the protracted battle against the would-be revolutionaries, the police action took the commandos deep into Maoist-occupied territory. And together with a new blitz of government propaganda countering the rebels' claims to be fighting for justice for the common people, the push likely signals that India plans to step up action against rebels that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has identified as a graver threat to law and order than Kashmiri militants or terrorist infiltrators from across the border in Pakistan.
Simmering for nearly a decade, India's low-level war against these communist revolutionaries has been fought mostly under the radar, since the battleground lies in the remote jungles of some of the country's least developed states — like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa — where indigenous tribal peoples comprise a substantial part of the population. But as Singh pointed out in a recent speech to a gathering of police chiefs from the country's 26 states, the rebels have leveraged official complacency and local resentments to steadily gain ground against the state.
"I have consistently held that left wing extremism is, perhaps, the gravest internal security threat we face,” Singh said on Sept. 15, admitting that efforts to contain the rebels have failed to yield significant results.
Two days later, the subsequent one-two punch of the surge-like commando strike and the propaganda campaign — full page newspaper ads featuring photos of seven innocents allegedly killed by the Maoists and the slogan “Naxals (Maoists) are nothing but cold-blooded murderers” — hints at the strategy the government plans to adopt as the mostly hidden war heats up.
But it remains to be seen whether deploying crack commando units, whose numbers are limited, can generate real results against the Maoist's guerilla army, or whether media propaganda will be effective in diminishing support for the rebels among the dispossessed — for whom newspapers and television are often unknown luxuries.
Without a doubt, India needs a new strategy. According to the latest data released by the home ministry, roughly 220 districts across 20 of India's 26 states are variously affected by Maoist activity — a fourfold increase since 2001. At the same time, the Maoist struggle has surpassed Kashmir as the deadliest conflict on Indian soil, and the number of fatalities per year continues to grow.
The reason, says Ajai Sahni, an expert on terrorism at the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, is that India has yet to come up with a sustained, coherent response to the revolutionary threat. Political sensitivity has prevented the government from launching full scale, military-type actions against the rebels, and the piecemeal efforts to fight them with small units and civilian militias have been disastrous.
“How can you send men out in a 12-man force or 20-man force when you know that the Maoists are going to come in the hundreds, if not the thousands to overwhelm these posts? You cannot say to people, 'I've recruited you as a policeman, now go commit suicide.'”
At the same time, public and political sympathy is relatively strong for the Maoist cause — unlike the cause of Kashmiri separatists, for instance — because the inequalities and injustices of society are blatantly obvious and the Maoists have been very effective at tapping into resentments of controversial government actions like the acquisition of tribal land for mining projects.
“There is a bottom 7 to 10 percent of the population which has been treated very badly by Indian policy makers,” explained Ashis Nandy, a sociologist with the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.
Though a revolution is not on the cards anytime soon, the constant gains made by the Maoists over the past decade are of grave concern, because the disruption of public services in remote areas threatens to have a snowball effect.
“If they can create substantial disruptive activities across India, the government will be confronted with a situation that will get more and more difficult as time goes by,” said Sahni. “We cannot come to a situation such as what happened in Nepal, where they had no government anywhere except in Kathmandu.”
By Jason Overdorf
NEW DELHI, India — Deep in the jungles of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, commandos from the police force's elite “Cobra” division launched a devastating surprise attack on an encampment of Maoist rebels last week.
Providing a wordless rebuttal to the prime minister's admission that India is failing in the protracted battle against the would-be revolutionaries, the police action took the commandos deep into Maoist-occupied territory. And together with a new blitz of government propaganda countering the rebels' claims to be fighting for justice for the common people, the push likely signals that India plans to step up action against rebels that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has identified as a graver threat to law and order than Kashmiri militants or terrorist infiltrators from across the border in Pakistan.
Simmering for nearly a decade, India's low-level war against these communist revolutionaries has been fought mostly under the radar, since the battleground lies in the remote jungles of some of the country's least developed states — like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa — where indigenous tribal peoples comprise a substantial part of the population. But as Singh pointed out in a recent speech to a gathering of police chiefs from the country's 26 states, the rebels have leveraged official complacency and local resentments to steadily gain ground against the state.
"I have consistently held that left wing extremism is, perhaps, the gravest internal security threat we face,” Singh said on Sept. 15, admitting that efforts to contain the rebels have failed to yield significant results.
Two days later, the subsequent one-two punch of the surge-like commando strike and the propaganda campaign — full page newspaper ads featuring photos of seven innocents allegedly killed by the Maoists and the slogan “Naxals (Maoists) are nothing but cold-blooded murderers” — hints at the strategy the government plans to adopt as the mostly hidden war heats up.
But it remains to be seen whether deploying crack commando units, whose numbers are limited, can generate real results against the Maoist's guerilla army, or whether media propaganda will be effective in diminishing support for the rebels among the dispossessed — for whom newspapers and television are often unknown luxuries.
Without a doubt, India needs a new strategy. According to the latest data released by the home ministry, roughly 220 districts across 20 of India's 26 states are variously affected by Maoist activity — a fourfold increase since 2001. At the same time, the Maoist struggle has surpassed Kashmir as the deadliest conflict on Indian soil, and the number of fatalities per year continues to grow.
The reason, says Ajai Sahni, an expert on terrorism at the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, is that India has yet to come up with a sustained, coherent response to the revolutionary threat. Political sensitivity has prevented the government from launching full scale, military-type actions against the rebels, and the piecemeal efforts to fight them with small units and civilian militias have been disastrous.
“How can you send men out in a 12-man force or 20-man force when you know that the Maoists are going to come in the hundreds, if not the thousands to overwhelm these posts? You cannot say to people, 'I've recruited you as a policeman, now go commit suicide.'”
At the same time, public and political sympathy is relatively strong for the Maoist cause — unlike the cause of Kashmiri separatists, for instance — because the inequalities and injustices of society are blatantly obvious and the Maoists have been very effective at tapping into resentments of controversial government actions like the acquisition of tribal land for mining projects.
“There is a bottom 7 to 10 percent of the population which has been treated very badly by Indian policy makers,” explained Ashis Nandy, a sociologist with the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.
Though a revolution is not on the cards anytime soon, the constant gains made by the Maoists over the past decade are of grave concern, because the disruption of public services in remote areas threatens to have a snowball effect.
“If they can create substantial disruptive activities across India, the government will be confronted with a situation that will get more and more difficult as time goes by,” said Sahni. “We cannot come to a situation such as what happened in Nepal, where they had no government anywhere except in Kathmandu.”
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
now available in high-def.... well, on the internet, anyway
Obsessed fans can now catch me in pixellated digital video. That's right: They've decided that I am destined for oversimplification and simpering, as well as great taglines like "Cute chicken" and "Sad story." Yes, folks. TV. Well, Internet TV. But that's just a million small steps away from the real thing. Anyway, everybody will be watching on his computer pretty soon, right?
Seriously. If you're curious, check this out to see how a good camerawoman and editor can make a rank neophyte look downright semi-professional:
http://www.globalpost.com/video/commerce/090918/finalindia91909overdorftengaccident
You won't be surprised to learn that this is the first time anybody has asked me to work IN FRONT of the camera. Well, apart from The Rising. But it doesn't count if you wear a fake beard.
Seriously. If you're curious, check this out to see how a good camerawoman and editor can make a rank neophyte look downright semi-professional:
http://www.globalpost.com/video/commerce/090918/finalindia91909overdorftengaccident
You won't be surprised to learn that this is the first time anybody has asked me to work IN FRONT of the camera. Well, apart from The Rising. But it doesn't count if you wear a fake beard.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Want to grow rich in India? Think poor.
Economic crisis has turned the attention of India's corporate honchos to some of the country's biggest challenges.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 26, 2009 06:29 ET
NEW DELHI — In India, the economic crisis may actually be good news.
During the salad days of the past decade, India's entrepreneurs grew fat selling gas guzzlers and palatial homes to the country's new rich, while ignoring the needs of the biggest segment of Indian consumers: the poor. It was an expatriate Indian, the University of Michigan's C.K. Prahalad, who first posited that there were millions to be made selling to the “bottom of the pyramid.”
Now that's starting to happen.
The rich aren't buying, and Indian businessmen are finally starting to look at the teeming masses as something more than cheap labor. The result could be the solution of some of India's most persistent problems — an abysmal housing shortage, chronic underemployment and an unsustainable rate of rural-urban migration, for instance.
“The slowdown was a great thing to happen to India,” affirmed management consultant Harish Bijoor, who said the downturn has encouraged companies to look beyond the “low-hanging fruit” in the urban market to the vast multitude of consumers in India's rural heartland — which still accounts for more than two-thirds of the country's population and some 60 percent of its gross domestic product.
“There are a whole slew of energy products, both solar and thermal, and cook stoves and all types of things, all of which are aimed at reducing fuel consumption or replacing traditional fuels,” said Vijay Mahajan, founder of BASIX, a microfinance company that provides credit to more than a million poor customers. “And there's a whole slew of clean drinking water products. These have both health and economic benefits.”
The best example of the upside of the downturn, so far, comes from the real estate sector. Throughout the boom years, posh high rises were the name of the game in Indian real estate. But as the buyers for $200,000 to $1 million apartments have dried up and falling property values have left builders scrambling to finance the completion of existing projects, a dozen-odd companies have begun to take interest in building housing for the nearly endless market represented by the urban poor.
Led by Tata Housing's so-called “Nano homes,” which will go for as little as $8,000, these ventures represent the entrance of respected business leaders into the low-income housing market, including figures like Jaithirth Rao (founder of outsourcing heavyweight Mphasis), Ramesh Ramanathan (founder of the citizen's action group Janaagraha) and established companies like Bangalore's CSC Constructions. The trust factor that these players bring has given this sector new viability, according to Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's.
“The focus on the base of the pyramid to create scale businesses was overdue,” Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao said. “You can sell millions of homes in this category, whereas in the upscale category you can only sell tens of thousands.”
But real estate isn't the only sector where the financial crisis has had an unexpected upside for India's future. Almost every type of business — from refrigerators to motorcycles to computers to mobile phones — is now looking to the vast market represented by India's urban poor and the legions living in its villages. By increasing competition, this expansion lowers prices, connects the dispossessed to the broader economy and makes new, income-generating products affordable.
“Telecom is a great example. The kind of price at which a rural poor person can now talk to their migrated family members and so on is incredible,” said Mahajan. “That's all happened because of the penetration rush and price competition, and the same thing is beginning to happen in microfinance, it's beginning to happen in solar energy. The volumes attract new suppliers and as more suppliers come in, then competition sets in, and it's a win-win for all sides.”
The push to widen the footprint of broadband internet and boost the average revenue per user from low-income mobile subscribers, for instance, has put more muscle behind the network-based computing devices like Novatium's NetPC — which provides a computer, broadband access, software and support to consumers for a bundled price as low as $25 a month. Recently Airtel, India's largest integrated telecommunications company, launched a similar service, while Nokia has rolled out its Nokia Life Tools range of agriculture, education and entertainment services for consumers in small towns and rural areas. Samsung has launched Solar Guru, a solar-powered mobile phone.
The sales network for fast-moving consumer goods and products like motorcycles and refrigerators is also expanding into the rural hinterland. Motorcycle maker Hero Honda, for instance, has boosted its “touch points” in rural areas from 2,000 in 2006 to 3,500 in 2008, while Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. will appoint 1,500 wholesalers in small towns and villages this year, up from 500 last year.
Eventually, Godrej plans a presence in 50,000 of India's 650,000 villages. And the impact of this expansion on Indian villagers goes beyond simply being able to buy a greater range of products closer to home. With the purchase of a motorcycle or mobile phone, for instance, a rural Indian gets much more than a leg up on the Kapurs next door. He gets a “prosperity creator” that connects him to the job market 28 miles away, said Bijoor.
Next on the docket: clean drinking water, cheap electricity, basic healthcare and other bottom of the pyramid products and services that may attract the attention of big firms, as marketers “rob the rich” for premium products so they can also sell basic necessities to the poor.
“It's a Robin Hood marketing which is going to capture the hearts and the emotive imaginations of the largest numbers of consumers in this country,” Bijoor said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 27, 2009 21:40 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090813/indias-economy-grow-rich-think-poor
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 26, 2009 06:29 ET
NEW DELHI — In India, the economic crisis may actually be good news.
During the salad days of the past decade, India's entrepreneurs grew fat selling gas guzzlers and palatial homes to the country's new rich, while ignoring the needs of the biggest segment of Indian consumers: the poor. It was an expatriate Indian, the University of Michigan's C.K. Prahalad, who first posited that there were millions to be made selling to the “bottom of the pyramid.”
Now that's starting to happen.
The rich aren't buying, and Indian businessmen are finally starting to look at the teeming masses as something more than cheap labor. The result could be the solution of some of India's most persistent problems — an abysmal housing shortage, chronic underemployment and an unsustainable rate of rural-urban migration, for instance.
“The slowdown was a great thing to happen to India,” affirmed management consultant Harish Bijoor, who said the downturn has encouraged companies to look beyond the “low-hanging fruit” in the urban market to the vast multitude of consumers in India's rural heartland — which still accounts for more than two-thirds of the country's population and some 60 percent of its gross domestic product.
“There are a whole slew of energy products, both solar and thermal, and cook stoves and all types of things, all of which are aimed at reducing fuel consumption or replacing traditional fuels,” said Vijay Mahajan, founder of BASIX, a microfinance company that provides credit to more than a million poor customers. “And there's a whole slew of clean drinking water products. These have both health and economic benefits.”
The best example of the upside of the downturn, so far, comes from the real estate sector. Throughout the boom years, posh high rises were the name of the game in Indian real estate. But as the buyers for $200,000 to $1 million apartments have dried up and falling property values have left builders scrambling to finance the completion of existing projects, a dozen-odd companies have begun to take interest in building housing for the nearly endless market represented by the urban poor.
Led by Tata Housing's so-called “Nano homes,” which will go for as little as $8,000, these ventures represent the entrance of respected business leaders into the low-income housing market, including figures like Jaithirth Rao (founder of outsourcing heavyweight Mphasis), Ramesh Ramanathan (founder of the citizen's action group Janaagraha) and established companies like Bangalore's CSC Constructions. The trust factor that these players bring has given this sector new viability, according to Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's.
“The focus on the base of the pyramid to create scale businesses was overdue,” Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao said. “You can sell millions of homes in this category, whereas in the upscale category you can only sell tens of thousands.”
But real estate isn't the only sector where the financial crisis has had an unexpected upside for India's future. Almost every type of business — from refrigerators to motorcycles to computers to mobile phones — is now looking to the vast market represented by India's urban poor and the legions living in its villages. By increasing competition, this expansion lowers prices, connects the dispossessed to the broader economy and makes new, income-generating products affordable.
“Telecom is a great example. The kind of price at which a rural poor person can now talk to their migrated family members and so on is incredible,” said Mahajan. “That's all happened because of the penetration rush and price competition, and the same thing is beginning to happen in microfinance, it's beginning to happen in solar energy. The volumes attract new suppliers and as more suppliers come in, then competition sets in, and it's a win-win for all sides.”
The push to widen the footprint of broadband internet and boost the average revenue per user from low-income mobile subscribers, for instance, has put more muscle behind the network-based computing devices like Novatium's NetPC — which provides a computer, broadband access, software and support to consumers for a bundled price as low as $25 a month. Recently Airtel, India's largest integrated telecommunications company, launched a similar service, while Nokia has rolled out its Nokia Life Tools range of agriculture, education and entertainment services for consumers in small towns and rural areas. Samsung has launched Solar Guru, a solar-powered mobile phone.
The sales network for fast-moving consumer goods and products like motorcycles and refrigerators is also expanding into the rural hinterland. Motorcycle maker Hero Honda, for instance, has boosted its “touch points” in rural areas from 2,000 in 2006 to 3,500 in 2008, while Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. will appoint 1,500 wholesalers in small towns and villages this year, up from 500 last year.
Eventually, Godrej plans a presence in 50,000 of India's 650,000 villages. And the impact of this expansion on Indian villagers goes beyond simply being able to buy a greater range of products closer to home. With the purchase of a motorcycle or mobile phone, for instance, a rural Indian gets much more than a leg up on the Kapurs next door. He gets a “prosperity creator” that connects him to the job market 28 miles away, said Bijoor.
Next on the docket: clean drinking water, cheap electricity, basic healthcare and other bottom of the pyramid products and services that may attract the attention of big firms, as marketers “rob the rich” for premium products so they can also sell basic necessities to the poor.
“It's a Robin Hood marketing which is going to capture the hearts and the emotive imaginations of the largest numbers of consumers in this country,” Bijoor said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 27, 2009 21:40 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090813/indias-economy-grow-rich-think-poor
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
csi: new delhi
At India's first private forensic laboratory, business is booming.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 19, 2009 07:11 ET
NEW DELHI — For Dr. KPC Gandhi, a former police inspector, the truth is an obsession.
He believes it's a fundamental human right that India's legal system is too overburdened to guarantee. That's why, in 2007, Gandhi set up India's first private forensic investigation laboratory, Truth Labs, a firm that will soon have offices in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur.
“Crime can be stopped by involving and engaging and enabling and empowering the common people,” said Gandhi, who resigned from the police force after a 40-year career in forensic investigation to start Truth Labs. “Within one-and-a-half years, we started getting cases from the courts, including the high court, from the police, and from a large number of subordinate courts. I get calls from four or five people every day, asking for some consultancy about fraud or forgery.”
As India modernizes, more disputes are arising over inheritance, forgery, impersonation, marital infidelity and even corporate espionage. But because India has one of the world's smallest police forces, and because the civil and criminal courts face a backlog that runs into literally millions of cases, getting to the bottom of mysteries and resolving conflicts through the legal system is fraught with problems.
A simple dispute over a forged will, for instance, might take 25 or 30 years to resolve in court. Using techniques now world famous thanks to C.S.I., Gandhi promises a solution in 24 hours: the truth.
Truth Labs charges a little more than $100 per investigation, and the company waives even that nominal fee for destitute or deserving clients — like a teacher who lost his job because his superior had forged his initials on a document used to pilfer government funds.
“We're interested only in the people's welfare, finding the truth, and rendering them justice,” said Gandhi, who explained that Truth Labs primarily acts as a facilitator in the arbitration of disputes, rather than providing evidence for use in legal proceedings.
The cases that Truth Labs has solved range from paternity and inheritance disputes to criminal cases of forgery and fraud. In one case, an industrialist family from Mumbai approached Truth Labs for polygraph testing after a young bride confessed that her father-in-law had propositioned her when it was discovered that the husband was infertile and they were planning to have a test tube baby.
In another, DNA testing proved that a husband's suspicions about the paternity of his second child were unfounded — ending years of marital strife. And in a third, Truth Labs document experts verified that a will that had divided a family for more than two generations had been doctored by an unscrupulous cousin.
In all of these cases, like the majority that Truth Labs investigates, the guilty party confessed when he was confronted with scientific proof, and the certainty of the resolution allowed the disputants to move on with their lives.
“We are getting quality cases where a genuine problem arises that has been persisting in a family for generations, and they come to me and within a day or five days their problems are permanently solved,” Gandhi said.
It's a curious business model for India. Though the use of forensic science for preventing fraud was pioneered here during the British Raj by Sir William Herschel — who in 1858 concluded that the fingerprint was a "signature of exceeding simplicity" that defeated even the local genius for forgery — in modern times the Indian legal apparatus is no more known for cutting edge science than the bureaucracy is for its speed and efficiency.
Senior police officers readily admit that the most common form of investigation amounts to rounding up the usual suspects and slapping them around. And in several famous whodunits — like the 2008 murder of Aarushi Talwar, a 14-year-old girl who was found with her throat slit in her family's New Delhi apartment — blatant mishandling of evidence by bumbling constables has virtually precluded a genuine investigation.
According to Jagadeesh Narayanareddy, a professor of forensic medicine at the Vydehi Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Center in Bangalore, India's mortuaries lack basic facilities, a shortage of qualified personnel makes forensic investigation impossible in many cases and cultural prejudices often override science in cases involving rape or disputed paternity.
In rural areas, for instance, officials often skip autopsies for suspicious deaths, either due to medical ignorance or even to keep crime statistics low, while larger hospitals carry out autopsies as a matter of course whether they are needed or not — burdening personnel and putting unnecessary stress on the bereaved.
But it's just that kind of incompetence, along with the public's nearly complete lack of faith in the police and the court system, that makes Truth Labs a booming business.
“At a peak load, we can handle up to 3,000 cases a year,” Gandhi said.
As the backlog of cases in India's court system continues to mount, there's unlimited room for expansion.
“This has a larger role to play, because people are not fully aware of the services we offer. We expect every state will have these Truth Labs in the next 10 years,” Gandhi said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 20, 2009 01:07 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090817/delhi-forensic-lab-investigate
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 19, 2009 07:11 ET
NEW DELHI — For Dr. KPC Gandhi, a former police inspector, the truth is an obsession.
He believes it's a fundamental human right that India's legal system is too overburdened to guarantee. That's why, in 2007, Gandhi set up India's first private forensic investigation laboratory, Truth Labs, a firm that will soon have offices in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur.
“Crime can be stopped by involving and engaging and enabling and empowering the common people,” said Gandhi, who resigned from the police force after a 40-year career in forensic investigation to start Truth Labs. “Within one-and-a-half years, we started getting cases from the courts, including the high court, from the police, and from a large number of subordinate courts. I get calls from four or five people every day, asking for some consultancy about fraud or forgery.”
As India modernizes, more disputes are arising over inheritance, forgery, impersonation, marital infidelity and even corporate espionage. But because India has one of the world's smallest police forces, and because the civil and criminal courts face a backlog that runs into literally millions of cases, getting to the bottom of mysteries and resolving conflicts through the legal system is fraught with problems.
A simple dispute over a forged will, for instance, might take 25 or 30 years to resolve in court. Using techniques now world famous thanks to C.S.I., Gandhi promises a solution in 24 hours: the truth.
Truth Labs charges a little more than $100 per investigation, and the company waives even that nominal fee for destitute or deserving clients — like a teacher who lost his job because his superior had forged his initials on a document used to pilfer government funds.
“We're interested only in the people's welfare, finding the truth, and rendering them justice,” said Gandhi, who explained that Truth Labs primarily acts as a facilitator in the arbitration of disputes, rather than providing evidence for use in legal proceedings.
The cases that Truth Labs has solved range from paternity and inheritance disputes to criminal cases of forgery and fraud. In one case, an industrialist family from Mumbai approached Truth Labs for polygraph testing after a young bride confessed that her father-in-law had propositioned her when it was discovered that the husband was infertile and they were planning to have a test tube baby.
In another, DNA testing proved that a husband's suspicions about the paternity of his second child were unfounded — ending years of marital strife. And in a third, Truth Labs document experts verified that a will that had divided a family for more than two generations had been doctored by an unscrupulous cousin.
In all of these cases, like the majority that Truth Labs investigates, the guilty party confessed when he was confronted with scientific proof, and the certainty of the resolution allowed the disputants to move on with their lives.
“We are getting quality cases where a genuine problem arises that has been persisting in a family for generations, and they come to me and within a day or five days their problems are permanently solved,” Gandhi said.
It's a curious business model for India. Though the use of forensic science for preventing fraud was pioneered here during the British Raj by Sir William Herschel — who in 1858 concluded that the fingerprint was a "signature of exceeding simplicity" that defeated even the local genius for forgery — in modern times the Indian legal apparatus is no more known for cutting edge science than the bureaucracy is for its speed and efficiency.
Senior police officers readily admit that the most common form of investigation amounts to rounding up the usual suspects and slapping them around. And in several famous whodunits — like the 2008 murder of Aarushi Talwar, a 14-year-old girl who was found with her throat slit in her family's New Delhi apartment — blatant mishandling of evidence by bumbling constables has virtually precluded a genuine investigation.
According to Jagadeesh Narayanareddy, a professor of forensic medicine at the Vydehi Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Center in Bangalore, India's mortuaries lack basic facilities, a shortage of qualified personnel makes forensic investigation impossible in many cases and cultural prejudices often override science in cases involving rape or disputed paternity.
In rural areas, for instance, officials often skip autopsies for suspicious deaths, either due to medical ignorance or even to keep crime statistics low, while larger hospitals carry out autopsies as a matter of course whether they are needed or not — burdening personnel and putting unnecessary stress on the bereaved.
But it's just that kind of incompetence, along with the public's nearly complete lack of faith in the police and the court system, that makes Truth Labs a booming business.
“At a peak load, we can handle up to 3,000 cases a year,” Gandhi said.
As the backlog of cases in India's court system continues to mount, there's unlimited room for expansion.
“This has a larger role to play, because people are not fully aware of the services we offer. We expect every state will have these Truth Labs in the next 10 years,” Gandhi said.
Source URL (retrieved on August 20, 2009 01:07 ): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090817/delhi-forensic-lab-investigate
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
the ugly indian
Move over, America. The world has a new rude traveler to detest.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
August 10, 2009
NEW DELHI — The instant that the fasten seat belts light went out aboard Cathay Pacific's inaugural Delhi-Bangkok flight this summer, a chorus of metallic dongs erupted like a romper roomful of Ritalin-deprived 5-year-olds turned loose on an arsenal of xylophones.
The passengers were attacking their call buttons.
In seconds, flight attendants were up and running. By the time they began dishing out the special meals, tempers were beginning to fray.
“Whiskey!” demanded an old man with a white beard when the young Chinese flight attendant tried to put a meal in front of him.
“Sir, we are not serving drinks now,” the flight attendant replied politely. (Dong! Dong-dong! Do-Dong, dongdong!)
In the next row, another man, younger but no less eloquent, reached up to press his call button, and the flustered attendant caved and uncapped the Scotch.
“Arre, such a small peg she's given you,” the old man's companion protested.
Dong!
Once the world loved to hate the Ugly American — fat, loud-mouthed and blissfully superior in his utter cultural ignorance. But since the economic crisis put the kibosh on American and European travel budgets, there's a new kid in town. India's rampaging outbound travel market has thrown a much-needed lifeline to the tourism industry in Southeast Asia, Europe and farther afield.
For those schlepping bags and serving drinks, though, the Ugly Indian can be so demanding that the lifeline sometimes looks like it has a noose at the end of it.
“It's a cultural thing,” said Pankaj Gupta, part-owner of Outbound Travels, a New Delhi-based travel agency. “In India, we have servants to do everything in everybody's houses mostly, so people are just sort of used to getting stuff delivered to them.”
Culture conflict has already resulted in several public relations debacles. In May, for instance, a group of Indian passengers caused a minor sensation in the local press when they leveled allegations of racism against Air France — saying that when their flight was delayed for 28 hours in Paris other passengers were transported to hotels, but the Indians were made to wait in the lounge. (The distinction was not made based on race, but on possession of a valid Schengen visa, the airline maintains).
In a similar incident in 2006, 12 Indian passengers accused Northwest Airlines of racism when they were offloaded and detained in Amsterdam for what flight attendants called “suspicious behavior.”
“Imagine arresting 12 guys just because they were changing seats and talking on their cellphones when the plane was taking off,” wrote Indian humorist Jug Suraiya in his Times of India column. “Everyone does that in India all the time, and no one gets arrested.”
But just as the American tourist's penchant for plaid never stopped France from chasing his dollars, the Indian tourist's insatiable thirst for Scotch hasn't made his rupees any less attractive. Tourism boards from a laundry list of countries have flooded Indian cities with delegations — or simply set up shop here. Airlines and hotels abroad have wooed Indian travel companies with bargain basement rates, and pulled out all stops to compete — throwing open their kitchens to traveling Indian chefs, topping up their in-flight entertainment libraries with Bollywood movies, and fighting tooth and nail for the right to host stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan for the Indian International Film Awards.
The reason is simple. Despite the downturn, India's travel market is still growing. According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, more than 800,000 Indians are expected to visit Singapore this year, more than 669,000 Indians are expected to visit the U.S. and more than 625,000 are expected to visit Malaysia. Moreover, PATA expects the number of Indian visitors to Singapore, Malaysia and the U.S. to continue to grow rapidly through 2011.
“Since the economic crisis began, there has been a reduction in travel, but the reduction in travel by Indians has been very low compared to any other country,” said Gupta. “Indians are still traveling a lot. Maybe some people have downgraded, by say, instead of going to the U.S. traveling closer to home, but they're still traveling abroad.”
Many of these Indian travelers, of course, are erudite, suave, charming, or simply humble and polite — it's just that nobody remembers them. For every passenger aboard Cathay's Delhi-Bangkok run with his finger on the call button, there were three or four who were fast asleep, mummified in blankets, or peacefully guffawing at the mindless in-flight movies.
Most problems result from simple misunderstandings, explained Thomas Thottathil, spokesman for Cox & Kings, one of India's largest tour companies. “We sensitize our customers, our tour guides, and we also explain to our suppliers overseas — the hotels or whatever — that Indian travelers have their own needs, their own particular habits.” Because of that effort, Thottathil said his firm has not faced anything more serious than the occasional complaint that a hotel didn't provide dinner after 9:30 p.m.
Thottathil may well be onto something. A quick lesson about Indians' love of thrift, for instance, might ease international tensions in the air. What's the multicultural secret to a tranquil flight, you ask?
Five dollar whiskeys.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
August 10, 2009
NEW DELHI — The instant that the fasten seat belts light went out aboard Cathay Pacific's inaugural Delhi-Bangkok flight this summer, a chorus of metallic dongs erupted like a romper roomful of Ritalin-deprived 5-year-olds turned loose on an arsenal of xylophones.
The passengers were attacking their call buttons.
In seconds, flight attendants were up and running. By the time they began dishing out the special meals, tempers were beginning to fray.
“Whiskey!” demanded an old man with a white beard when the young Chinese flight attendant tried to put a meal in front of him.
“Sir, we are not serving drinks now,” the flight attendant replied politely. (Dong! Dong-dong! Do-Dong, dongdong!)
In the next row, another man, younger but no less eloquent, reached up to press his call button, and the flustered attendant caved and uncapped the Scotch.
“Arre, such a small peg she's given you,” the old man's companion protested.
Dong!
Once the world loved to hate the Ugly American — fat, loud-mouthed and blissfully superior in his utter cultural ignorance. But since the economic crisis put the kibosh on American and European travel budgets, there's a new kid in town. India's rampaging outbound travel market has thrown a much-needed lifeline to the tourism industry in Southeast Asia, Europe and farther afield.
For those schlepping bags and serving drinks, though, the Ugly Indian can be so demanding that the lifeline sometimes looks like it has a noose at the end of it.
“It's a cultural thing,” said Pankaj Gupta, part-owner of Outbound Travels, a New Delhi-based travel agency. “In India, we have servants to do everything in everybody's houses mostly, so people are just sort of used to getting stuff delivered to them.”
Culture conflict has already resulted in several public relations debacles. In May, for instance, a group of Indian passengers caused a minor sensation in the local press when they leveled allegations of racism against Air France — saying that when their flight was delayed for 28 hours in Paris other passengers were transported to hotels, but the Indians were made to wait in the lounge. (The distinction was not made based on race, but on possession of a valid Schengen visa, the airline maintains).
In a similar incident in 2006, 12 Indian passengers accused Northwest Airlines of racism when they were offloaded and detained in Amsterdam for what flight attendants called “suspicious behavior.”
“Imagine arresting 12 guys just because they were changing seats and talking on their cellphones when the plane was taking off,” wrote Indian humorist Jug Suraiya in his Times of India column. “Everyone does that in India all the time, and no one gets arrested.”
But just as the American tourist's penchant for plaid never stopped France from chasing his dollars, the Indian tourist's insatiable thirst for Scotch hasn't made his rupees any less attractive. Tourism boards from a laundry list of countries have flooded Indian cities with delegations — or simply set up shop here. Airlines and hotels abroad have wooed Indian travel companies with bargain basement rates, and pulled out all stops to compete — throwing open their kitchens to traveling Indian chefs, topping up their in-flight entertainment libraries with Bollywood movies, and fighting tooth and nail for the right to host stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan for the Indian International Film Awards.
The reason is simple. Despite the downturn, India's travel market is still growing. According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, more than 800,000 Indians are expected to visit Singapore this year, more than 669,000 Indians are expected to visit the U.S. and more than 625,000 are expected to visit Malaysia. Moreover, PATA expects the number of Indian visitors to Singapore, Malaysia and the U.S. to continue to grow rapidly through 2011.
“Since the economic crisis began, there has been a reduction in travel, but the reduction in travel by Indians has been very low compared to any other country,” said Gupta. “Indians are still traveling a lot. Maybe some people have downgraded, by say, instead of going to the U.S. traveling closer to home, but they're still traveling abroad.”
Many of these Indian travelers, of course, are erudite, suave, charming, or simply humble and polite — it's just that nobody remembers them. For every passenger aboard Cathay's Delhi-Bangkok run with his finger on the call button, there were three or four who were fast asleep, mummified in blankets, or peacefully guffawing at the mindless in-flight movies.
Most problems result from simple misunderstandings, explained Thomas Thottathil, spokesman for Cox & Kings, one of India's largest tour companies. “We sensitize our customers, our tour guides, and we also explain to our suppliers overseas — the hotels or whatever — that Indian travelers have their own needs, their own particular habits.” Because of that effort, Thottathil said his firm has not faced anything more serious than the occasional complaint that a hotel didn't provide dinner after 9:30 p.m.
Thottathil may well be onto something. A quick lesson about Indians' love of thrift, for instance, might ease international tensions in the air. What's the multicultural secret to a tranquil flight, you ask?
Five dollar whiskeys.
Monday, August 03, 2009
the stones of srinagar
On the streets of this political hotspot, chucking rocks at the police is the most cherished form of free speech.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 3, 2009 06:43 ET
SRINAGAR, India — In Srinagar's Lal Chowk, or “red corner,” a hotbed of social unrest in a city that many residents believe to be occupied by a hostile Indian military, 26-year-old “Mohammad” is primed for the next call to action.
A handsome, muscular youth with a beard that would pass muster in Kabul and incongruously gelled hair, he has been a stone pelter — what locals here call the young men who engage in rock-chunking skirmishes with the police and security forces nearly every Friday — since he was 15 years old.
“I saw so many young boys had been killed by the security forces, so I said, 'Let me join this protest also,'” Mohammad says.
The protests that Mohammad — who did not want to reveal his real name for fear of retribution — is talking about have become part of daily life in Srinagar, the center of political life in the Indian part of Kashmir. Marches and the inevitable skirmishes that follow them are so common that the shopkeepers in Lal Chowk have grown accustomed to a three- or four-day work week. And stone pelting has become so inseparable from political demonstrations that the police themselves carry slingshots for firing back. The government even employs a special brigade of street cleaners to make sure that the pavement is cleared of ammunition.
To be sure, Kashmir is a state still reeling under insurgency, where militants strike at the government and melt back into the forest, and these angry, habitual protesters tell only their side of the story. But a talk with the proverbial man on the street shows that there's more to Srinagar's stone battles than simple hooliganism.
Despite India's claims to have won the hearts and minds of Kashmiris since the armed rebellion by militant separatists that raged from 1989 to 2003 declined to a simmer, the anger over what locals term the Indian occupation — and hatred for the police and the army — still run hot and deep.
“I became a stone thrower in 2004,” says 24-year-old Imran (also using a pseudonym). Dressed in a white Oxford-style shirt, he looks more like a middle class college student than a street thug. “That day, the troops had pulled some women out of their houses in my neighborhood and beat them up. So when the boys came out onto the streets, I joined them.” Since then, he's only grown more committed. “A boy I know is in a coma because he was hit in the head by a teargas shell,” he says.
From Delhi, the complex mire that is called “the Kashmir conflict” looks very different. The days when newspapers chastised the Indian army for human rights abuses and cataloged the long roster of “disappeared persons” are over. Today those reports have been replaced by repeated claims that “peace has returned to the valley,” premature announcements that Kashmir tourism is on the verge of bouncing back, and patriotic paeans to the ordinary soldier. Last year's election, in which voter turnout was high for the first time in many years, was also interpreted as a sign that the people were ready to accept India's dominion.
On the ground, though, Kashmir looks and sounds more like a territory already under occupation than one besieged by a foreign power. For one thing, the Indian army — some 600,000 soldiers, nearly one soldier for every ten civilians — is everywhere, not just on the border with Pakistan. For another, nobody here considers India's troops to be heroes. “If you talk to the people,” said Sajaad Hussain, an activist who heads an NGO called the J&K Research Development Trust, “You'll find 80 percent want independence. Maybe 20 percent want to go with Pakistan. Nobody is for India.”
That's likely an exaggeration. But in my brief wanderings, I wasn't able to turn up a single person who had good things to say about the Indian government. Almost everyone said they wanted Kashmir to be independent. Some of the more practical Kashmiris demanded autonomy — both political and economic — since that is a measure India has at least declared itself willing to consider. And others, still more jaded, simply hoped for demilitarization. This was not at all what I had expected. But in some ways, it made perfect sense.
For many years, watchdog groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the Indian army for human rights violations in Kashmir, where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives the military the right to arrest civilians, seize property and shoot to kill and the Public Safety Act allows security forces to detain suspects for as long as two years without any sanction from the court.
In Srinagar, the security presence is unmistakable. Armed soldiers direct traffic at intersections. Flak-jacketed mine sweeping units patrol the roadside with sniffer dogs. Bunkers built from sandbags and razor wire blanket the city at strategic corners. And the stone pelters of Lal Chowk say they abuse these powers — storming into homes, beating protesters, and threatening activists with arbitrary detention under the Public Safety Act — to crush independence activists' freedom of expression. From that enforced silence, they say, comes the stone.
For 45 days prior to my visit, Kashmir had been rocked by protests over the alleged rape and murder of two young women from Shopian, a town located about 50 kilometers from Srinagar. Initially, local police and government officials, including the state's fresh-faced chief minister, Omar Abdullah, dismissed the case as an ordinary drowning. But the people of Shopian alleged that the two women had been raped and murdered — which was later confirmed after the protests forced the administration to conduct an autopsy — and claimed that the police forces had conspired to cover up the crime. After a month and a half of protests that stopped all economic activity in the area, four police officials were arrested for allegedly suppressing evidence.
Nothing has been proven in the Shopian case yet. “There have been some unfortunate incidents in the past, in some cases action was taken promptly and in one or two cases there is a perception of avoidable delay,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram has told the press. “Our intentions are good and there will be proper action. The state government will to go through investigations and punish the guilty.”
But for the disgusted local populace, no further investigation is necessary. Over the 20-odd years since militancy began, during which the army and police have enjoyed almost absolute power in Kashmir, these kinds of allegations are so common, one local resident told me, that for every one that makes news there are another dozen that never make national headlines. “Even the Shopian story took a week to come into the national papers,” explains Parvaiz Bukhari, a local journalist.
All of the young men I interviewed say that police officers have come to their homes and threatened to arrest them under the public safety act, under which alleged offenders can be jailed for as long as two years without formal charges.
“We say, 'Give us freedom,' and they say, 'You are a terrorist.'” said Aftab, another youth. “But we have no guns. Only stones.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: August 3, 2009 06:43 ET
SRINAGAR, India — In Srinagar's Lal Chowk, or “red corner,” a hotbed of social unrest in a city that many residents believe to be occupied by a hostile Indian military, 26-year-old “Mohammad” is primed for the next call to action.
A handsome, muscular youth with a beard that would pass muster in Kabul and incongruously gelled hair, he has been a stone pelter — what locals here call the young men who engage in rock-chunking skirmishes with the police and security forces nearly every Friday — since he was 15 years old.
“I saw so many young boys had been killed by the security forces, so I said, 'Let me join this protest also,'” Mohammad says.
The protests that Mohammad — who did not want to reveal his real name for fear of retribution — is talking about have become part of daily life in Srinagar, the center of political life in the Indian part of Kashmir. Marches and the inevitable skirmishes that follow them are so common that the shopkeepers in Lal Chowk have grown accustomed to a three- or four-day work week. And stone pelting has become so inseparable from political demonstrations that the police themselves carry slingshots for firing back. The government even employs a special brigade of street cleaners to make sure that the pavement is cleared of ammunition.
To be sure, Kashmir is a state still reeling under insurgency, where militants strike at the government and melt back into the forest, and these angry, habitual protesters tell only their side of the story. But a talk with the proverbial man on the street shows that there's more to Srinagar's stone battles than simple hooliganism.
Despite India's claims to have won the hearts and minds of Kashmiris since the armed rebellion by militant separatists that raged from 1989 to 2003 declined to a simmer, the anger over what locals term the Indian occupation — and hatred for the police and the army — still run hot and deep.
“I became a stone thrower in 2004,” says 24-year-old Imran (also using a pseudonym). Dressed in a white Oxford-style shirt, he looks more like a middle class college student than a street thug. “That day, the troops had pulled some women out of their houses in my neighborhood and beat them up. So when the boys came out onto the streets, I joined them.” Since then, he's only grown more committed. “A boy I know is in a coma because he was hit in the head by a teargas shell,” he says.
From Delhi, the complex mire that is called “the Kashmir conflict” looks very different. The days when newspapers chastised the Indian army for human rights abuses and cataloged the long roster of “disappeared persons” are over. Today those reports have been replaced by repeated claims that “peace has returned to the valley,” premature announcements that Kashmir tourism is on the verge of bouncing back, and patriotic paeans to the ordinary soldier. Last year's election, in which voter turnout was high for the first time in many years, was also interpreted as a sign that the people were ready to accept India's dominion.
On the ground, though, Kashmir looks and sounds more like a territory already under occupation than one besieged by a foreign power. For one thing, the Indian army — some 600,000 soldiers, nearly one soldier for every ten civilians — is everywhere, not just on the border with Pakistan. For another, nobody here considers India's troops to be heroes. “If you talk to the people,” said Sajaad Hussain, an activist who heads an NGO called the J&K Research Development Trust, “You'll find 80 percent want independence. Maybe 20 percent want to go with Pakistan. Nobody is for India.”
That's likely an exaggeration. But in my brief wanderings, I wasn't able to turn up a single person who had good things to say about the Indian government. Almost everyone said they wanted Kashmir to be independent. Some of the more practical Kashmiris demanded autonomy — both political and economic — since that is a measure India has at least declared itself willing to consider. And others, still more jaded, simply hoped for demilitarization. This was not at all what I had expected. But in some ways, it made perfect sense.
For many years, watchdog groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the Indian army for human rights violations in Kashmir, where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives the military the right to arrest civilians, seize property and shoot to kill and the Public Safety Act allows security forces to detain suspects for as long as two years without any sanction from the court.
In Srinagar, the security presence is unmistakable. Armed soldiers direct traffic at intersections. Flak-jacketed mine sweeping units patrol the roadside with sniffer dogs. Bunkers built from sandbags and razor wire blanket the city at strategic corners. And the stone pelters of Lal Chowk say they abuse these powers — storming into homes, beating protesters, and threatening activists with arbitrary detention under the Public Safety Act — to crush independence activists' freedom of expression. From that enforced silence, they say, comes the stone.
For 45 days prior to my visit, Kashmir had been rocked by protests over the alleged rape and murder of two young women from Shopian, a town located about 50 kilometers from Srinagar. Initially, local police and government officials, including the state's fresh-faced chief minister, Omar Abdullah, dismissed the case as an ordinary drowning. But the people of Shopian alleged that the two women had been raped and murdered — which was later confirmed after the protests forced the administration to conduct an autopsy — and claimed that the police forces had conspired to cover up the crime. After a month and a half of protests that stopped all economic activity in the area, four police officials were arrested for allegedly suppressing evidence.
Nothing has been proven in the Shopian case yet. “There have been some unfortunate incidents in the past, in some cases action was taken promptly and in one or two cases there is a perception of avoidable delay,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram has told the press. “Our intentions are good and there will be proper action. The state government will to go through investigations and punish the guilty.”
But for the disgusted local populace, no further investigation is necessary. Over the 20-odd years since militancy began, during which the army and police have enjoyed almost absolute power in Kashmir, these kinds of allegations are so common, one local resident told me, that for every one that makes news there are another dozen that never make national headlines. “Even the Shopian story took a week to come into the national papers,” explains Parvaiz Bukhari, a local journalist.
All of the young men I interviewed say that police officers have come to their homes and threatened to arrest them under the public safety act, under which alleged offenders can be jailed for as long as two years without formal charges.
“We say, 'Give us freedom,' and they say, 'You are a terrorist.'” said Aftab, another youth. “But we have no guns. Only stones.”
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
the futility of peace talks
It's hard to speak out against peace. So when Manmohan Singh defended himself Wednesday over a foreign policy snafu in Egypt that everybody from the opposition to backstabbers within Singh's own Congress party had been calling a “sellout” to Pakistan, I was prepared to be convinced. Singh is a good guy. He's smart. And he's not the sort who shouts and carries on to gain political mileage.
For those of you outside India, the snafu resulted over a joint statement that was issued after Singh met his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, where Singh agreed to resume so-called peace talks with Pakistan and appeared to agree to discuss the borders of Kashmir and admit to Pakistan's charges that India foments unrest in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
Most people read the blunder as more evidence that India's foreign policy department—despite lots of talk that the US wants to offer India a bigger role on the world stage—simply isn't ready for prime time.
Some of the things that Singh told Parliament in his defense made sense, but I'm still wondering about India's decision to resume the so-called “peace process” with Pakistan. And I'm still completely positive that the wonks in charge of Indian foreign policy are groping blindly in the dark—knowing neither what India's role in foreign affairs should be, nor what stance they will take on the US, China, Russia, Pakistan, etc, nor how they might achieve their goals if they managed to define them.
The essence of the PM's speech was twofold. One, Pakistan had provided him a dossier outlining the evidence against the Pakistani terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks which was more extensive and damning than any proof India's old enemy has offered before in this slow-and-tired dance around the issue of the “proxy war” Islamabad has waged against India for decades. This, Singh says, was enough to convince him that Pakistan is sincere in its efforts to rein in groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, which strike India from bases on Pakistani soil. So India's attitude must be “trust but verify.” Two, there is really no alternative to dialogue, because it's a question of resuming peace talks or moving inexorably toward war.
Sound convincing? Maybe.
But I'm not sure either point is valid. To Singh's first point, Pakistan's arrests so far have not been too impressive, and some of Islamabad's actions and public statements have appeared to be obfuscations and excuses for inaction, rather than progress reports. To his second point, the opposition of resuming the peace talks and returning to war is a false dichotomy. In fact, India was not at war with Pakistan between 1999 and 2003, when the so-called peace process began, and the two nations have not been at war since India halted the process after the Mumbai attacks. Nor, quite frankly, has it seemed that they are slipping ever closer to shots fired in anger. It appears more likely to me that both nations have concluded that full-scale war is not an option.
And that begs a peculiar question: What are the India-Pakistan peace talks meant to achieve?
Neither side is shooting at the other. From the Indian side, negotiations of the borders of Kashmir aren't on the table, and never will be. And from the Pakistan side, giving up claims to India-administered Kashmir is also an impossibility.
Is the sole purpose of the talks, then, to induce Pakistan to stop supporting terrorists that attack India?
In that case, they seem more like peace begging than peace negotiations. There's no carrot, and there's no stick. All that's under discussion are a few meaningless bus routes across the border and a useless cross-border trade that a senior Kashmiri journalist told me recently “benefits no one.”
For those of you outside India, the snafu resulted over a joint statement that was issued after Singh met his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, where Singh agreed to resume so-called peace talks with Pakistan and appeared to agree to discuss the borders of Kashmir and admit to Pakistan's charges that India foments unrest in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
Most people read the blunder as more evidence that India's foreign policy department—despite lots of talk that the US wants to offer India a bigger role on the world stage—simply isn't ready for prime time.
Some of the things that Singh told Parliament in his defense made sense, but I'm still wondering about India's decision to resume the so-called “peace process” with Pakistan. And I'm still completely positive that the wonks in charge of Indian foreign policy are groping blindly in the dark—knowing neither what India's role in foreign affairs should be, nor what stance they will take on the US, China, Russia, Pakistan, etc, nor how they might achieve their goals if they managed to define them.
The essence of the PM's speech was twofold. One, Pakistan had provided him a dossier outlining the evidence against the Pakistani terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks which was more extensive and damning than any proof India's old enemy has offered before in this slow-and-tired dance around the issue of the “proxy war” Islamabad has waged against India for decades. This, Singh says, was enough to convince him that Pakistan is sincere in its efforts to rein in groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, which strike India from bases on Pakistani soil. So India's attitude must be “trust but verify.” Two, there is really no alternative to dialogue, because it's a question of resuming peace talks or moving inexorably toward war.
Sound convincing? Maybe.
But I'm not sure either point is valid. To Singh's first point, Pakistan's arrests so far have not been too impressive, and some of Islamabad's actions and public statements have appeared to be obfuscations and excuses for inaction, rather than progress reports. To his second point, the opposition of resuming the peace talks and returning to war is a false dichotomy. In fact, India was not at war with Pakistan between 1999 and 2003, when the so-called peace process began, and the two nations have not been at war since India halted the process after the Mumbai attacks. Nor, quite frankly, has it seemed that they are slipping ever closer to shots fired in anger. It appears more likely to me that both nations have concluded that full-scale war is not an option.
And that begs a peculiar question: What are the India-Pakistan peace talks meant to achieve?
Neither side is shooting at the other. From the Indian side, negotiations of the borders of Kashmir aren't on the table, and never will be. And from the Pakistan side, giving up claims to India-administered Kashmir is also an impossibility.
Is the sole purpose of the talks, then, to induce Pakistan to stop supporting terrorists that attack India?
In that case, they seem more like peace begging than peace negotiations. There's no carrot, and there's no stick. All that's under discussion are a few meaningless bus routes across the border and a useless cross-border trade that a senior Kashmiri journalist told me recently “benefits no one.”
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
a heaven on earth? not so much
With the tourists frightened away by Kashmir's separatist struggle, the famous Dal Lake is slowly succumbing to pollution.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: July 28, 2009 07:36 ET
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — From the shores of Srinagar's Dal Lake, once described as heaven on earth, the water looks dull and brackish. The storied houseboats that were the summer playgrounds of India's British colonizers are lined up across what from this vantage appears to be a weed-choked pond, no larger than a football field.
The boats' garish decorations and cheery names — “New Australia,” “Sansouci,” “Young Dreams,” “The Golden Fleece” — hint at a Gatsbyish heyday of long, lazy afternoons and parties that echoed across the water through the night. But packed chock-a-block, in all their faded grandeur, most of the boats lie empty.
Dal Lake is dying, and along with it a remarkable culture.
“If you had seen Kashmir 20 years back, 30 years back, then half of the population lived in boats,” Rashid Dangola, owner of a houseboat named “Hilton Kashmir” tells me. “In the next 20 years, day by day, this culture will go.”
In fact, the football field-sized parcel where the Hilton Kashmir lies moored is only a tiny portion of the real Dal Lake, which spreads over six square miles but which over the last 30 years has shrunk to half its original size. It has been reclaimed by weeds and eventually land, paved over by the government in an effort to improve roadways and accommodate Srinagar's growing population, or simply converted to real estate and farmland by people in need of a place to live.
Only a small part of the remaining lake can be seen from the shore, because at its heart it is a sort of floating, rural Venice — a maze of canals, vegetable gardens and lotus-root farms where houseboats have been converted into souvenir stores and papier mache factories, and islands have been reclaimed to erect towering colonial brick houses.
These islands, and the “floating land” that an estimated 40,000 farmers use to grow eggplant, squash and tomatoes, multiplies every year. So do the people. And so does the waste they create. Garbage spills into the water from the Dal's banks, and a thick green scum covers canals that 20 years ago were splashing playgrounds for local children.
“[The] Dal has become a vegetable garden; where is the water body?” an exasperated high court Chief Justice Bashir Ahmad Khan reflected recently, as he issued a stern warning to the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA) and the Srinagar Development Authority (SDA), which have failed to arrest the lake's decline despite investments of some $125 million over the years.
As a rented shikhara — India's version of the gondola — ferries us through the lake's floating villages, Dangola tells me: “I was proud to bring people to this side, so they would understand how we live. But now it is all spoiled.”
Conventional wisdom once blamed the pollution problem on the lake's 1,200 houseboats, but in reality these boats account for only about 3 percent of the waste released into the lake. The real culprits are a succession of poor planners and the city of Srinagar itself — with a population of about a million — which releases tons of raw sewage into the waters of the Dal through 15 different drains along the shore. Moreover, due to a poorly thought out decision to pave over the network of canals that once linked the Dal Lake to several other bodies of water surrounding Srinagar and the fast-flowing River Jhellum, the waters here are now stagnant.
In June, Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh committed another $225 million — $60 million of which the central government has already rubber stamped — to build sewage treatment plants, purchase de-weeding machines and resettle nearly 10,000 families who live on the lakes network of islands. But Kashmir has been throwing money at the problem for years, and resettling the families who live in the lake would be tantamount to destroying it.
A two-hour shikhara ride along the shore and through the winding canals reveals that while claims of the lake's great beauty are somewhat exaggerated — it is by no means a crystal clear, glacial teardrop like Lake Tahoe — it boasts a unique and vibrant culture.
The enormity of the task at hand is also clear. Everywhere, clawing weeds choke the passages, and the water is covered with tiny specks of green algae, massing like something out of B-grade science fiction. The reason the plant life is so prolific — excessive fertilizer in the water — is evident, too.
From secluded pipes that are easy to spot from inside the lake, the coffee brown sewage of the city of Srinagar glugs untreated into the water. Though some years ago 6,000 families deemed to be “encroachers” without legitimate claim to houses in the lake were pushed out, the cleanup effort now appears to be limited to half-a-dozen dredging and weeding platforms — which patrol the waters, belching smoke, when the whim strikes their operators.
According to locals, it's a haphazard, rearguard action with little hope of success. The 6,000 displaced families have been replaced by some 20,000. The city's much discussed sewage system shows no signs of building itself. And even the dubiously expensive deweeding machines, parked in convenient proximity to shore while I was in town, seem to remain idle most of the day.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: July 28, 2009 07:36 ET
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — From the shores of Srinagar's Dal Lake, once described as heaven on earth, the water looks dull and brackish. The storied houseboats that were the summer playgrounds of India's British colonizers are lined up across what from this vantage appears to be a weed-choked pond, no larger than a football field.
The boats' garish decorations and cheery names — “New Australia,” “Sansouci,” “Young Dreams,” “The Golden Fleece” — hint at a Gatsbyish heyday of long, lazy afternoons and parties that echoed across the water through the night. But packed chock-a-block, in all their faded grandeur, most of the boats lie empty.
Dal Lake is dying, and along with it a remarkable culture.
“If you had seen Kashmir 20 years back, 30 years back, then half of the population lived in boats,” Rashid Dangola, owner of a houseboat named “Hilton Kashmir” tells me. “In the next 20 years, day by day, this culture will go.”
In fact, the football field-sized parcel where the Hilton Kashmir lies moored is only a tiny portion of the real Dal Lake, which spreads over six square miles but which over the last 30 years has shrunk to half its original size. It has been reclaimed by weeds and eventually land, paved over by the government in an effort to improve roadways and accommodate Srinagar's growing population, or simply converted to real estate and farmland by people in need of a place to live.
Only a small part of the remaining lake can be seen from the shore, because at its heart it is a sort of floating, rural Venice — a maze of canals, vegetable gardens and lotus-root farms where houseboats have been converted into souvenir stores and papier mache factories, and islands have been reclaimed to erect towering colonial brick houses.
These islands, and the “floating land” that an estimated 40,000 farmers use to grow eggplant, squash and tomatoes, multiplies every year. So do the people. And so does the waste they create. Garbage spills into the water from the Dal's banks, and a thick green scum covers canals that 20 years ago were splashing playgrounds for local children.
“[The] Dal has become a vegetable garden; where is the water body?” an exasperated high court Chief Justice Bashir Ahmad Khan reflected recently, as he issued a stern warning to the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA) and the Srinagar Development Authority (SDA), which have failed to arrest the lake's decline despite investments of some $125 million over the years.
As a rented shikhara — India's version of the gondola — ferries us through the lake's floating villages, Dangola tells me: “I was proud to bring people to this side, so they would understand how we live. But now it is all spoiled.”
Conventional wisdom once blamed the pollution problem on the lake's 1,200 houseboats, but in reality these boats account for only about 3 percent of the waste released into the lake. The real culprits are a succession of poor planners and the city of Srinagar itself — with a population of about a million — which releases tons of raw sewage into the waters of the Dal through 15 different drains along the shore. Moreover, due to a poorly thought out decision to pave over the network of canals that once linked the Dal Lake to several other bodies of water surrounding Srinagar and the fast-flowing River Jhellum, the waters here are now stagnant.
In June, Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh committed another $225 million — $60 million of which the central government has already rubber stamped — to build sewage treatment plants, purchase de-weeding machines and resettle nearly 10,000 families who live on the lakes network of islands. But Kashmir has been throwing money at the problem for years, and resettling the families who live in the lake would be tantamount to destroying it.
A two-hour shikhara ride along the shore and through the winding canals reveals that while claims of the lake's great beauty are somewhat exaggerated — it is by no means a crystal clear, glacial teardrop like Lake Tahoe — it boasts a unique and vibrant culture.
The enormity of the task at hand is also clear. Everywhere, clawing weeds choke the passages, and the water is covered with tiny specks of green algae, massing like something out of B-grade science fiction. The reason the plant life is so prolific — excessive fertilizer in the water — is evident, too.
From secluded pipes that are easy to spot from inside the lake, the coffee brown sewage of the city of Srinagar glugs untreated into the water. Though some years ago 6,000 families deemed to be “encroachers” without legitimate claim to houses in the lake were pushed out, the cleanup effort now appears to be limited to half-a-dozen dredging and weeding platforms — which patrol the waters, belching smoke, when the whim strikes their operators.
According to locals, it's a haphazard, rearguard action with little hope of success. The 6,000 displaced families have been replaced by some 20,000. The city's much discussed sewage system shows no signs of building itself. And even the dubiously expensive deweeding machines, parked in convenient proximity to shore while I was in town, seem to remain idle most of the day.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
working on the chain gang
According to a new report, India isn't doing enough to combat human trafficking.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 21, 2009
FARIDABAD, India —Teerath Ram came to Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, to work in one of its many stone quarries. Recruited by a labor contractor who promised he'd earn much higher wages here than he could ever make in his native state of Chhattisgarh, Teerath Ram took a notional "advance" of a few thousand rupees to pay the contractor for getting him the job and agreed to work in the quarry to repay his debt. Fifteen years later, he's still there.
The high wages he was meant to receive never materialized, and at the end of the month when the rock he had risked his neck to blast out of the ground was weighed against the dynamite he'd "bought" from the company store, the owner told him that his wages were just enough to cover the interest on his debt.
"They just kept records of what they loaned me in a notebook," he said. And because Teerath Ram is illiterate as well as desperately poor, "They could change the figures anytime they wanted."
There are literally millions like Teerath Ram in India, which has failed to meet minimum standards to combat human trafficking, according to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report released by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week.
"India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation," according to the report.
Because it has been on the “tier two” watch list — the second-worst category of offenders — for two years, India now faces the prospect of being moved to the “tier three” blacklist of egregious violators next year if it fails to improve its record in fighting human trafficking. Those countries face sanctions under which the U.S. can withhold non-humanitarian aid and oppose aid projects from agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Band, though it is likely India would receive a presidential waiver.
The sad thing for India is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Though they are still being cheated and exploited, laborers like Teerath Ram, for instance, don't even understand that they were the victims of trafficking, since nobody clubbed them on the head and threw them in the back of a truck. Nor do the police.
“The word trafficking has not been defined in India,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with the New Delhi-based Global March Against Child Labor. “There is no comprehensive definition, despite the fact that trafficking in human beings has been banned as [violating] a fundamental right.” That means when people are duped into migrating for work, rather than kidnapped, India's law enforcement agencies rarely recognize them as the victims of traffickers.
Technically, Teerath Ram is now no longer a bonded laborer. He knows exactly how much money he owes the quarry owner and the rate of interest on his debt. He can leave anytime, provided he finds someone else — which would mean another labor contractor — to grant him another loan to pay off his debt. But he still has to pay for the blasting equipment he uses from the quarry to which he's indebted, and the owner and debt-holder still assesses the value of the rock Teerath Ram blasts out of the ground. Naturally, the price of dynamite always seems to climb, while the price for stone plunges.
The quarry workers of Faridabad — only a 15-minute drive from the heart of Delhi — are victims of what some Indian economists are terming "modern bonded labor."
Unlike in the past, when agricultural laborers were forced to work because of traditional feudal ties to landlords or debts that went back generations, these modern bonded laborers migrate to new farms or industrial sites where wages are higher. They enter "freely" into loan agreements with their employers and sometimes even pay off what they owe at the end of the year. This has prompted some economists to argue that the laborers aren't the victims of traffickers, and that they opt to take these jobs because they are better than the alternatives available to them elsewhere, said Professor Ravi Srivastava, a labor economist at Jawarhalal Nehru University.
But, as Teerath Ram knows, the reality is very different. "This is the way the new bonded labor relationships are emerging," Srivastava said. These relationships are not purely economic contracts, even though employees may enter them due to necessity, rather than compulsion. And once employees enter into these relationships, there are high exit costs that the employees did not understand at the outset.
Bonded labor has been illegal in India since the enactment of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act in 1976, and a series of progressive Supreme Court judgments expanded India's definition of bonded labor to make it more comprehensive.
India's highest court ruled in Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. the Union of India (1984) that all laborers who are working for below the nationally mandated minimum wage should be presumed to be bonded to their employers. The ruling recognized that economic compulsions can be as powerful as historical feudal relationships and even the threat of physical harm, and that proving exploitation can be a knotty problem when employers keep all the records and their workers are illiterate and mathematically ignorant.
While this law doesn't go so far as to define anybody who is working for less than minimum wage to be a bonded laborer, it shifts the burden onto the employer to prove that his employees are there of their own volition. But despite this progressive interpretation of the law, forced labor, debt servitude and even slavery persist, according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector.
Numbers are hard to come by. The Bandhua Mukti Morcha (or Bonded Labor Liberation Front) claims that as many as 300 million Indian workers should be presumed to be bonded laborers, based on the Supreme Court's definition.
The working conditions for such laborers are grim. They handle hazardous chemicals — and even explosives — without any safety equipment. Crippling and fatal accidents are routine. The work is backbreaking, and the pay is miserable. For instance, the “rapaswala,” a kiln worker who buries the bricks before firing, earns only 8 rupees (or about 20 cents) for every thousand bricks he produces.
Things are no better for Teerath Ram and the other the “modern” bonded laborers of Faridabad, even though they have fought long and hard for their rights, and, according to some definitions, they're free.
Organized by the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labor Liberation Front) in 1984, they have secured a school and access to electricity at the cost of the life of one of their own — allegedly at the hands of company goons. But they still have yet to receive the legally mandated minimum wage for their labor. They handle dynamite and blasting caps without proper safety equipment because their employer requires them to pay for their gear themselves, and fatal accidents are so commonplace no one has an accurate count.
"I owe 20,000 rupees ($500), which I borrowed to buy dynamite and other equipment," said Resham Lal, another quarry worker. "Every month, I repay 250 rupees. Nobody has told me how long it will take me to pay off my debt at this rate, and I keep working and spending more money on equipment and the interest on my loan keeps growing."
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 21, 2009
FARIDABAD, India —Teerath Ram came to Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, to work in one of its many stone quarries. Recruited by a labor contractor who promised he'd earn much higher wages here than he could ever make in his native state of Chhattisgarh, Teerath Ram took a notional "advance" of a few thousand rupees to pay the contractor for getting him the job and agreed to work in the quarry to repay his debt. Fifteen years later, he's still there.
The high wages he was meant to receive never materialized, and at the end of the month when the rock he had risked his neck to blast out of the ground was weighed against the dynamite he'd "bought" from the company store, the owner told him that his wages were just enough to cover the interest on his debt.
"They just kept records of what they loaned me in a notebook," he said. And because Teerath Ram is illiterate as well as desperately poor, "They could change the figures anytime they wanted."
There are literally millions like Teerath Ram in India, which has failed to meet minimum standards to combat human trafficking, according to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report released by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week.
"India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation," according to the report.
Because it has been on the “tier two” watch list — the second-worst category of offenders — for two years, India now faces the prospect of being moved to the “tier three” blacklist of egregious violators next year if it fails to improve its record in fighting human trafficking. Those countries face sanctions under which the U.S. can withhold non-humanitarian aid and oppose aid projects from agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Band, though it is likely India would receive a presidential waiver.
The sad thing for India is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Though they are still being cheated and exploited, laborers like Teerath Ram, for instance, don't even understand that they were the victims of trafficking, since nobody clubbed them on the head and threw them in the back of a truck. Nor do the police.
“The word trafficking has not been defined in India,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with the New Delhi-based Global March Against Child Labor. “There is no comprehensive definition, despite the fact that trafficking in human beings has been banned as [violating] a fundamental right.” That means when people are duped into migrating for work, rather than kidnapped, India's law enforcement agencies rarely recognize them as the victims of traffickers.
Technically, Teerath Ram is now no longer a bonded laborer. He knows exactly how much money he owes the quarry owner and the rate of interest on his debt. He can leave anytime, provided he finds someone else — which would mean another labor contractor — to grant him another loan to pay off his debt. But he still has to pay for the blasting equipment he uses from the quarry to which he's indebted, and the owner and debt-holder still assesses the value of the rock Teerath Ram blasts out of the ground. Naturally, the price of dynamite always seems to climb, while the price for stone plunges.
The quarry workers of Faridabad — only a 15-minute drive from the heart of Delhi — are victims of what some Indian economists are terming "modern bonded labor."
Unlike in the past, when agricultural laborers were forced to work because of traditional feudal ties to landlords or debts that went back generations, these modern bonded laborers migrate to new farms or industrial sites where wages are higher. They enter "freely" into loan agreements with their employers and sometimes even pay off what they owe at the end of the year. This has prompted some economists to argue that the laborers aren't the victims of traffickers, and that they opt to take these jobs because they are better than the alternatives available to them elsewhere, said Professor Ravi Srivastava, a labor economist at Jawarhalal Nehru University.
But, as Teerath Ram knows, the reality is very different. "This is the way the new bonded labor relationships are emerging," Srivastava said. These relationships are not purely economic contracts, even though employees may enter them due to necessity, rather than compulsion. And once employees enter into these relationships, there are high exit costs that the employees did not understand at the outset.
Bonded labor has been illegal in India since the enactment of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act in 1976, and a series of progressive Supreme Court judgments expanded India's definition of bonded labor to make it more comprehensive.
India's highest court ruled in Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. the Union of India (1984) that all laborers who are working for below the nationally mandated minimum wage should be presumed to be bonded to their employers. The ruling recognized that economic compulsions can be as powerful as historical feudal relationships and even the threat of physical harm, and that proving exploitation can be a knotty problem when employers keep all the records and their workers are illiterate and mathematically ignorant.
While this law doesn't go so far as to define anybody who is working for less than minimum wage to be a bonded laborer, it shifts the burden onto the employer to prove that his employees are there of their own volition. But despite this progressive interpretation of the law, forced labor, debt servitude and even slavery persist, according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector.
Numbers are hard to come by. The Bandhua Mukti Morcha (or Bonded Labor Liberation Front) claims that as many as 300 million Indian workers should be presumed to be bonded laborers, based on the Supreme Court's definition.
The working conditions for such laborers are grim. They handle hazardous chemicals — and even explosives — without any safety equipment. Crippling and fatal accidents are routine. The work is backbreaking, and the pay is miserable. For instance, the “rapaswala,” a kiln worker who buries the bricks before firing, earns only 8 rupees (or about 20 cents) for every thousand bricks he produces.
Things are no better for Teerath Ram and the other the “modern” bonded laborers of Faridabad, even though they have fought long and hard for their rights, and, according to some definitions, they're free.
Organized by the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labor Liberation Front) in 1984, they have secured a school and access to electricity at the cost of the life of one of their own — allegedly at the hands of company goons. But they still have yet to receive the legally mandated minimum wage for their labor. They handle dynamite and blasting caps without proper safety equipment because their employer requires them to pay for their gear themselves, and fatal accidents are so commonplace no one has an accurate count.
"I owe 20,000 rupees ($500), which I borrowed to buy dynamite and other equipment," said Resham Lal, another quarry worker. "Every month, I repay 250 rupees. Nobody has told me how long it will take me to pay off my debt at this rate, and I keep working and spending more money on equipment and the interest on my loan keeps growing."
Friday, June 19, 2009
everybody was kung fu fighting
South Indian prostitutes learn martial arts to protect against creeps and other bad customers.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost (www.globalpost.com)
Published: June 19, 2009
CHENNAI — Scorned by society and ignored by the police, sex workers in the South Indian city of Chennai are learning karate to protect themselves against the beatings, robberies and rapes they say are part of a prostitute's daily life here.
“Sometimes I make an agreement with one customer, and then later he tries to bring his friends along as well,” said Kalaiarasi, a woman who works as a prostitute near the Chennai neighborhood of Anna Nagar. “Other times they want to have sex with me and they beat me up so they don't have to pay.”
According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India has about 3 million prostitutes. But other organizations, like Human Rights Watch, suggest that the figure could be as much as five times higher than that.
Because of desperate poverty, high rates of unemployment and the low status of women in Indian society, these sex workers have few options. Prostitution is illegal, and, recently, efforts have been made to decriminalize prostitution and make clients — instead of just the prostitutes — liable to prosecution. But these efforts have had little impact.
Kalaiarasi is all too aware that it is rape, not business, when a client brings along his friends. But in the past she has never been able to do anything about it because the local police are not interested in the legal rights of a woman who takes money in exchange for sex. In fact, if the allegations of local sex workers and activists are true, the police officers charged with upholding the law are the worst offenders.
“The law never says the policemen can beat them up, they can rape the women, they can abuse them,” said AJ Hariharan, founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a nonprofit that aims to protect the rights of sex workers and homosexuals. “The law doesn't say that. But the people implementing the law are taking advantage of it ... So no one can go and complain to the police.”
That's why, along with 75 other sex workers here, Kalaiarasi is learning karate so she can fight back. So far, Kalaiarasi has only taken a 15-day crash course. But as she and her fellow students kick and punch in imitation of their instructor, you can already see how the basic knowledge of karate — together with the recognition that they have the right to protect themselves — has given them a huge surge in confidence.
Dressed in white karate uniforms and wearing Spiderman masks to hide their faces from my camera, these women are clearly having fun. At one point, Valli, another sex worker, attacks Kalaiarasi with a wooden knife — haieeya! Kalaiarasi blocks the thrust with her nunchaku, or “numchuks,” catching Valli's wrist with the chain connecting the wooden sticks and twisting it painfully so her would-be attacker is forced to drop the knife. Everyone's Spiderman mask shakes with laughter.
While most karate students will probably never have to use their skills on a real attacker, the prostitutes' precarious position in society makes an assault almost certain.
“The clients feel that the women are vulnerable,” Hariharan said. “If they pay, they can do anything [they believe]. We want to pass on a message that this is enough. That the women will protect themselves.”
“I have to keep going out after dark [because of my job],” Valli said. “Sometimes clients misbehave. Sometimes they refuse to pay. What we want is to be able to protect ourselves from hooligans.”
Hariharan hopes that learning karate will not only help protect these women from abuse, but also raise awareness about their plight and cause others to realize that sex workers, too, deserve basic human rights.
“When you look at the [total] number of sex workers, the number who know self-defense is very less,” he said. “But we want to send this message across the country, (to) women in Kanyakumari and other districts of Tamil Nadu, or elsewhere in the country, maybe Rajasthan or Delhi or Gujarat. We want this message to be taken that sex workers can equip themselves to prevent violence against them.”
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost (www.globalpost.com)
Published: June 19, 2009
CHENNAI — Scorned by society and ignored by the police, sex workers in the South Indian city of Chennai are learning karate to protect themselves against the beatings, robberies and rapes they say are part of a prostitute's daily life here.
“Sometimes I make an agreement with one customer, and then later he tries to bring his friends along as well,” said Kalaiarasi, a woman who works as a prostitute near the Chennai neighborhood of Anna Nagar. “Other times they want to have sex with me and they beat me up so they don't have to pay.”
According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India has about 3 million prostitutes. But other organizations, like Human Rights Watch, suggest that the figure could be as much as five times higher than that.
Because of desperate poverty, high rates of unemployment and the low status of women in Indian society, these sex workers have few options. Prostitution is illegal, and, recently, efforts have been made to decriminalize prostitution and make clients — instead of just the prostitutes — liable to prosecution. But these efforts have had little impact.
Kalaiarasi is all too aware that it is rape, not business, when a client brings along his friends. But in the past she has never been able to do anything about it because the local police are not interested in the legal rights of a woman who takes money in exchange for sex. In fact, if the allegations of local sex workers and activists are true, the police officers charged with upholding the law are the worst offenders.
“The law never says the policemen can beat them up, they can rape the women, they can abuse them,” said AJ Hariharan, founder of the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a nonprofit that aims to protect the rights of sex workers and homosexuals. “The law doesn't say that. But the people implementing the law are taking advantage of it ... So no one can go and complain to the police.”
That's why, along with 75 other sex workers here, Kalaiarasi is learning karate so she can fight back. So far, Kalaiarasi has only taken a 15-day crash course. But as she and her fellow students kick and punch in imitation of their instructor, you can already see how the basic knowledge of karate — together with the recognition that they have the right to protect themselves — has given them a huge surge in confidence.
Dressed in white karate uniforms and wearing Spiderman masks to hide their faces from my camera, these women are clearly having fun. At one point, Valli, another sex worker, attacks Kalaiarasi with a wooden knife — haieeya! Kalaiarasi blocks the thrust with her nunchaku, or “numchuks,” catching Valli's wrist with the chain connecting the wooden sticks and twisting it painfully so her would-be attacker is forced to drop the knife. Everyone's Spiderman mask shakes with laughter.
While most karate students will probably never have to use their skills on a real attacker, the prostitutes' precarious position in society makes an assault almost certain.
“The clients feel that the women are vulnerable,” Hariharan said. “If they pay, they can do anything [they believe]. We want to pass on a message that this is enough. That the women will protect themselves.”
“I have to keep going out after dark [because of my job],” Valli said. “Sometimes clients misbehave. Sometimes they refuse to pay. What we want is to be able to protect ourselves from hooligans.”
Hariharan hopes that learning karate will not only help protect these women from abuse, but also raise awareness about their plight and cause others to realize that sex workers, too, deserve basic human rights.
“When you look at the [total] number of sex workers, the number who know self-defense is very less,” he said. “But we want to send this message across the country, (to) women in Kanyakumari and other districts of Tamil Nadu, or elsewhere in the country, maybe Rajasthan or Delhi or Gujarat. We want this message to be taken that sex workers can equip themselves to prevent violence against them.”
Saturday, June 06, 2009
How I – and 138 million in his target audience – missed Obama's historic speech
I have always been a bit skeptical about the existence of the “Arab street” that some of my colleagues keep talking about. But I can tell you for certain that the “Indian street” doesn't exist. This country is just too big, and too diverse, to sum up as having a single opinion. This afternoon I went looking for it anyway. My task: Find a bunch of typical Indian Muslims with whom I could watch Obama's historic speech.
My translator, Salman, an Indian Muslim himself, wasn't too optimistic. “To be honest,” he said, “we can find some cafe or something and round up some people, but we're not just going to find somebody who is watching it.”
There were several reasons. India is not a Muslim country. And even though its 13% Muslim minority means it has the world's third-largest Muslim population, with some 138 million believers, after Indonesia and Pakistan, Indian Muslims have never really considered themselves part of “the Muslim world.” As a minority that faces discrimination, Indian Muslims are less interested in the much-discussed clash between Islam and the West than they are with the more immediate problems they face at home. And because of the recent election and the furious pace with which the new government is unveiling big-ticket policies – including a speech by the Indian president to reveal Manmohan Singh's 100-day agenda today – Obama's superspeech kinda slipped under the radar. There were no big previews, just some agency copy on the international pages, buried deep in the newspaper.
Therefore, we needed politically aware, educated Muslims, Salman declared. So we decided our best chance was on the campus of Jamia Millia Islamic University, a school that, as its name suggests, has a good number of Muslim scholars, but is also known for its cutting edge film and multimedia department. Outside the Islamic Studies department, we spoke with 25-year-old Muhammad Yafiruddin, a bearded MA student dressed in a traditional salwar kameez and wearing a skull cap.
“Are you planning to watch Obama's speech to the Muslim world?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I'm not interested in what he has to say. He's just another oil and war hungry American. He's only doing this to keep America's interests safe. His Muslim identity is only a disguise.”
“As an Indian Muslim, do you think that this speech is addressed to you?” I asked.
“His speech is directed at the heads of state and bureaucrats in the audience; it's not meant for common Muslims on the street like me, nor are we interested. The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama has a clean past and Muslim ancestry. One I hate, and the other I'm indifferent to.”
It sounds pretty bad when I write it down like that, but it wasn't the ravings of a fanatic. More like the typical political fire you'd get from a politically active college student anywhere. Muhammad was a friendly guy, and happy to talk with me. He just wasn't going to watch Obama's speech – no matter how we tempted him with getting his name on the Internet.
He did, however, know where we could find a cafe with a TV where a lot of Indian Muslims hang around. “La Jawab Coffee House,” he said. It turned out the place was in the neighborhood famous for last year's so-called “Batla house encounter,” in which several young Muslim men, suspected of being terrorists, were gunned down by the police. The community has called for an independent probe into the incident.
Unfortunately, though, it hasn't turned La Jawab Coffee House into a hotbed of political discourse. When my buddy Salman and I got there, a Hindi film called Gayab had just started on TV, and nobody wanted to miss it to watch Obama make history. 27-year-old Rizwan had dibs on the TV, and he refused to back down. The movie is a comedy about a nerd who turns invisible so he can get a girl, fails to make her love him, and becomes a superhero instead. So naturally I understood where they were coming from. But this was yet another time I wished I had a TV camera—even a fake one. People will do whatever you want if you tell them they're going to be on TV. They'd have switched over to Obama in an instant.
As it was, by the time Salman finished his pitch, Obama's speech was half over, and we'd come up empty.
Instead, I had to walk across the road to the Madrassa, where I met Maulana Mohinuddin Zulfi, the imam and speaker of the mosque. He was in charge of about 50 eight and nine year old kids who were apparently learning to shout at the top of their lungs, so he wasn't planning to watch Obama's speech either. But I was somewhat cheered that he planned to watch the highlights later. I'm a highlights guy, too, I thought. What is this nonsense about a clash of civilizations?
So we asked him what he thought.
“Bush was a devil, but Obama is the exact opposite—as of now,” he said. “Now we must wait and see what he does. George Bush's bad deeds have given a bad name to America, and that's why a lot of Muslims hate America.”
“Well, I can see you're busy now, but it sounds like you're interested in hearing what Obama has to say, right?”
“I'm looking forward to it. I will read every detail of what Obama says in the newspapers. I hope he speaks well. He is a man of good intentions, and he has a good chance of succeeding in bridging the gaps caused by hatred by telling the world that America is not essentially anti-Islam.”
“What about American culture? Are you afraid that your way of life is under attack by Western influences like MTV?”
“There's no fear,” the imam said. “But we feel a certain disgust about these things. It would be better if MTV were closed down, but it caters to a certain audience. So we can just tell our people not to follow that culture.”
Salman and I slunk out of the Madrassa with the stink of failure surrounding us. Not only had we not been able to find any Muslims glued to their televisions—well, except the guys watching Gayab (the invisible superhero). But also we had missed Obama's speech ourselves.
From the highlights, though (yep, I watched 'em), it appears that Obama may, indeed, have gone a good distance to satisfy exactly the demands of India's politically aware Muslim community. At Jamia, I'd asked Yafiruddin to tell me what he wished Obama would say in his speech—even if he wasn't going to watch it. “The first thing Obama should do is apologize for what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. Another MA student, 25-year-old Rashid Aziz, said, “The first thing he should do is stop the settlements and the destruction of Palestine—especially the use of white phosphorus.”
You guys all caught that live while I was arguing about Hindi movies. But I believe he came pretty close to doing both.
My translator, Salman, an Indian Muslim himself, wasn't too optimistic. “To be honest,” he said, “we can find some cafe or something and round up some people, but we're not just going to find somebody who is watching it.”
There were several reasons. India is not a Muslim country. And even though its 13% Muslim minority means it has the world's third-largest Muslim population, with some 138 million believers, after Indonesia and Pakistan, Indian Muslims have never really considered themselves part of “the Muslim world.” As a minority that faces discrimination, Indian Muslims are less interested in the much-discussed clash between Islam and the West than they are with the more immediate problems they face at home. And because of the recent election and the furious pace with which the new government is unveiling big-ticket policies – including a speech by the Indian president to reveal Manmohan Singh's 100-day agenda today – Obama's superspeech kinda slipped under the radar. There were no big previews, just some agency copy on the international pages, buried deep in the newspaper.
Therefore, we needed politically aware, educated Muslims, Salman declared. So we decided our best chance was on the campus of Jamia Millia Islamic University, a school that, as its name suggests, has a good number of Muslim scholars, but is also known for its cutting edge film and multimedia department. Outside the Islamic Studies department, we spoke with 25-year-old Muhammad Yafiruddin, a bearded MA student dressed in a traditional salwar kameez and wearing a skull cap.
“Are you planning to watch Obama's speech to the Muslim world?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I'm not interested in what he has to say. He's just another oil and war hungry American. He's only doing this to keep America's interests safe. His Muslim identity is only a disguise.”
“As an Indian Muslim, do you think that this speech is addressed to you?” I asked.
“His speech is directed at the heads of state and bureaucrats in the audience; it's not meant for common Muslims on the street like me, nor are we interested. The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama has a clean past and Muslim ancestry. One I hate, and the other I'm indifferent to.”
It sounds pretty bad when I write it down like that, but it wasn't the ravings of a fanatic. More like the typical political fire you'd get from a politically active college student anywhere. Muhammad was a friendly guy, and happy to talk with me. He just wasn't going to watch Obama's speech – no matter how we tempted him with getting his name on the Internet.
He did, however, know where we could find a cafe with a TV where a lot of Indian Muslims hang around. “La Jawab Coffee House,” he said. It turned out the place was in the neighborhood famous for last year's so-called “Batla house encounter,” in which several young Muslim men, suspected of being terrorists, were gunned down by the police. The community has called for an independent probe into the incident.
Unfortunately, though, it hasn't turned La Jawab Coffee House into a hotbed of political discourse. When my buddy Salman and I got there, a Hindi film called Gayab had just started on TV, and nobody wanted to miss it to watch Obama make history. 27-year-old Rizwan had dibs on the TV, and he refused to back down. The movie is a comedy about a nerd who turns invisible so he can get a girl, fails to make her love him, and becomes a superhero instead. So naturally I understood where they were coming from. But this was yet another time I wished I had a TV camera—even a fake one. People will do whatever you want if you tell them they're going to be on TV. They'd have switched over to Obama in an instant.
As it was, by the time Salman finished his pitch, Obama's speech was half over, and we'd come up empty.
Instead, I had to walk across the road to the Madrassa, where I met Maulana Mohinuddin Zulfi, the imam and speaker of the mosque. He was in charge of about 50 eight and nine year old kids who were apparently learning to shout at the top of their lungs, so he wasn't planning to watch Obama's speech either. But I was somewhat cheered that he planned to watch the highlights later. I'm a highlights guy, too, I thought. What is this nonsense about a clash of civilizations?
So we asked him what he thought.
“Bush was a devil, but Obama is the exact opposite—as of now,” he said. “Now we must wait and see what he does. George Bush's bad deeds have given a bad name to America, and that's why a lot of Muslims hate America.”
“Well, I can see you're busy now, but it sounds like you're interested in hearing what Obama has to say, right?”
“I'm looking forward to it. I will read every detail of what Obama says in the newspapers. I hope he speaks well. He is a man of good intentions, and he has a good chance of succeeding in bridging the gaps caused by hatred by telling the world that America is not essentially anti-Islam.”
“What about American culture? Are you afraid that your way of life is under attack by Western influences like MTV?”
“There's no fear,” the imam said. “But we feel a certain disgust about these things. It would be better if MTV were closed down, but it caters to a certain audience. So we can just tell our people not to follow that culture.”
Salman and I slunk out of the Madrassa with the stink of failure surrounding us. Not only had we not been able to find any Muslims glued to their televisions—well, except the guys watching Gayab (the invisible superhero). But also we had missed Obama's speech ourselves.
From the highlights, though (yep, I watched 'em), it appears that Obama may, indeed, have gone a good distance to satisfy exactly the demands of India's politically aware Muslim community. At Jamia, I'd asked Yafiruddin to tell me what he wished Obama would say in his speech—even if he wasn't going to watch it. “The first thing Obama should do is apologize for what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. Another MA student, 25-year-old Rashid Aziz, said, “The first thing he should do is stop the settlements and the destruction of Palestine—especially the use of white phosphorus.”
You guys all caught that live while I was arguing about Hindi movies. But I believe he came pretty close to doing both.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
india's new government takes shape
The bar has been set high for Prime Minister Singh's first 100 days.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 20:03 ET
NEW DELHI, India — Most of the time, nobody expects too much out of the government in India.
The business of politics is business as usual, and the entrenched bureaucracy and revolving-door leadership seems designed to perpetuate the moribund status quo. But this election's surprise result has raised hopes so high that the shine could come off Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's big victory in as little as three months.
On the eve of swearing in the rest of his cabinet to complete the formation of the government Tuesday, Singh comes to power at a very difficult time. India is proving to be less immune to the global economic crisis than was originally supposed, stimulus packages and populist policies have left the country with a disturbingly high deficit, and observers from the left and right poles of the ideological spectrum are expecting bold, decisive actions in the new government's first 100 days — a ridiculously brief moment of time for an Indian administration.
“Even if you can't get a lot done in a hundred days, you can at least lay out a set of priorities that will be focused on in each ministry,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “If it doesn't come, the judgment repercussions will be fairly significant. The hope will start to die quite quickly.”
Most people will be expecting more than that. During the campaign, Singh himself promised to come out with a new economic stimulus within his first 100 days in office, and greedy appetites have been whetted by the action plans leaked by various government departments.
The 100-day actions being bandied about by bankers, economists and editorial writers comprise a wish list of social welfare measures and economic reforms that would be a tall order for a five year term. Thanks to the perception that the new government won't face opposition from allies, it includes items like starting a national urban poverty mission to complement the last term's rural employment guarantee scheme, boosting government revenue by divesting bloated state-owned enterprises, and further slashing bank lending rates for farmers and the poor. It also involves releasing some of the $8.5 billion of government money for infrastructure projects that has been stuck in the pipeline, and a host of other measures.
The initial signs look promising. For instance, the ministry of road transport, highways and shipping is reportedly planning to review and correct the implementation problems that derailed the national highways development program during Singh's first term, when the department failed to award contracts for road projects worth some $10 billion.
Similarly, the telecom ministry has vowed to finally get moving on the auction of 3G and Wimax licenses to spur further growth in the broadband Internet business. And reports are surfacing that the finance ministry is preparing for initial public offerings of state-owned companies like hydropower firm NHPC, Oil India Limited and infrastructure consultancy Rail India Technical and Economic Services, which would provide much needed revenue for the treasury.
Observers have also interpreted Singh's first moves in appointing cabinet ministers, announced Saturday, as a good sign. In the six key ministries that have been allotted — finance, home, external affairs, agriculture, defence, and railways — he has brought back experienced loyalists with reputations for efficiency, and managed to cede only the railways to an ally with the potential to be mercurial. The rest of the cabinet posts were yet to be announced at the time this article was published.
In many other areas, this government already has a course chalked out for it by the various commissions and study groups Singh set up during his first term, which the Congress party mentioned specifically in its election manifesto. These groups include bodies devoted to reforming the bureaucracy; addressing social security for the millions of workers employed by tiny, unregulated sweatshops; restructuring commodities pricing and other policies to boost the agricultural sector; and improving the quality and availability of education from the primary to postgraduate level. There are some 34 bills pending from the last parliamentary session, many of them stemming from these bodies.
But level-headed observers of India's political system say India has always been brilliant at forming committees and making plans; it's the actual doing that's the weakness. They also suggest that making hard choices may be nearly as difficult for this government as it was for the previous one. To start with, the economic crisis has rejuvenated the hoary old socialists of the Congress (at its nadir inspiring Sonia Gandhi to laud the nationalization of banks). But more importantly, the difficult economic times will mean that everybody is looking for handouts and that money will be tighter than ever.
“In the immediate future, there are fiscal issues,” said Gokarn. “How do you create resources that will sustain an infrastructure investment program, particularly as foreign investment inflows look to be rather sporadic and not very large over the next couple years? The other agendas will start to flow from that, depending on whether you have enough resources for the government to play a role or not.”
That means, like always, it will be easy to give things away—whether in the form of price subsidies or job programs—by increasing deficit spending. But it will remain difficult to initiate real change. What could be worse for Singh, is that there won't be anybody to blame for lack of progress this time around—the handy role of the Left last time--and the electorate's high expectations means that tolerance for business as usual will be especially low.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 20:03 ET
NEW DELHI, India — Most of the time, nobody expects too much out of the government in India.
The business of politics is business as usual, and the entrenched bureaucracy and revolving-door leadership seems designed to perpetuate the moribund status quo. But this election's surprise result has raised hopes so high that the shine could come off Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's big victory in as little as three months.
On the eve of swearing in the rest of his cabinet to complete the formation of the government Tuesday, Singh comes to power at a very difficult time. India is proving to be less immune to the global economic crisis than was originally supposed, stimulus packages and populist policies have left the country with a disturbingly high deficit, and observers from the left and right poles of the ideological spectrum are expecting bold, decisive actions in the new government's first 100 days — a ridiculously brief moment of time for an Indian administration.
“Even if you can't get a lot done in a hundred days, you can at least lay out a set of priorities that will be focused on in each ministry,” said Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Asia Pacific. “If it doesn't come, the judgment repercussions will be fairly significant. The hope will start to die quite quickly.”
Most people will be expecting more than that. During the campaign, Singh himself promised to come out with a new economic stimulus within his first 100 days in office, and greedy appetites have been whetted by the action plans leaked by various government departments.
The 100-day actions being bandied about by bankers, economists and editorial writers comprise a wish list of social welfare measures and economic reforms that would be a tall order for a five year term. Thanks to the perception that the new government won't face opposition from allies, it includes items like starting a national urban poverty mission to complement the last term's rural employment guarantee scheme, boosting government revenue by divesting bloated state-owned enterprises, and further slashing bank lending rates for farmers and the poor. It also involves releasing some of the $8.5 billion of government money for infrastructure projects that has been stuck in the pipeline, and a host of other measures.
The initial signs look promising. For instance, the ministry of road transport, highways and shipping is reportedly planning to review and correct the implementation problems that derailed the national highways development program during Singh's first term, when the department failed to award contracts for road projects worth some $10 billion.
Similarly, the telecom ministry has vowed to finally get moving on the auction of 3G and Wimax licenses to spur further growth in the broadband Internet business. And reports are surfacing that the finance ministry is preparing for initial public offerings of state-owned companies like hydropower firm NHPC, Oil India Limited and infrastructure consultancy Rail India Technical and Economic Services, which would provide much needed revenue for the treasury.
Observers have also interpreted Singh's first moves in appointing cabinet ministers, announced Saturday, as a good sign. In the six key ministries that have been allotted — finance, home, external affairs, agriculture, defence, and railways — he has brought back experienced loyalists with reputations for efficiency, and managed to cede only the railways to an ally with the potential to be mercurial. The rest of the cabinet posts were yet to be announced at the time this article was published.
In many other areas, this government already has a course chalked out for it by the various commissions and study groups Singh set up during his first term, which the Congress party mentioned specifically in its election manifesto. These groups include bodies devoted to reforming the bureaucracy; addressing social security for the millions of workers employed by tiny, unregulated sweatshops; restructuring commodities pricing and other policies to boost the agricultural sector; and improving the quality and availability of education from the primary to postgraduate level. There are some 34 bills pending from the last parliamentary session, many of them stemming from these bodies.
But level-headed observers of India's political system say India has always been brilliant at forming committees and making plans; it's the actual doing that's the weakness. They also suggest that making hard choices may be nearly as difficult for this government as it was for the previous one. To start with, the economic crisis has rejuvenated the hoary old socialists of the Congress (at its nadir inspiring Sonia Gandhi to laud the nationalization of banks). But more importantly, the difficult economic times will mean that everybody is looking for handouts and that money will be tighter than ever.
“In the immediate future, there are fiscal issues,” said Gokarn. “How do you create resources that will sustain an infrastructure investment program, particularly as foreign investment inflows look to be rather sporadic and not very large over the next couple years? The other agendas will start to flow from that, depending on whether you have enough resources for the government to play a role or not.”
That means, like always, it will be easy to give things away—whether in the form of price subsidies or job programs—by increasing deficit spending. But it will remain difficult to initiate real change. What could be worse for Singh, is that there won't be anybody to blame for lack of progress this time around—the handy role of the Left last time--and the electorate's high expectations means that tolerance for business as usual will be especially low.
the whiskey diaries
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
May 26, 2009 06:28 ET
NEW DELHI — A funny thing happened while Scottish whiskey makers were fighting to pry open India's tightly controlled, protectionist liquor market: A mass market Indian booze maker in Bangalore decided to develop its own premium, small-batch single malt — and launch it worldwide.
What's more, the stuff is pretty darned good.
Indian owned and operated Amrut Distilleries has been distilling malt whiskey since the early 1980s, because India's excise laws prevented it from sourcing it abroad, and the company needed malt to mix with molasses-based alcohol to produce what's known in the trade as “Indian whiskey.”
As Indian consumers grew more sophisticated, though, the company started aging its malts longer and longer. And then one day, the patriarch of the family-owned business, chairman Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, pulled the trigger. “It was around '98 or '99, when we had enough [quantity] of matured malt whisky, that we thought, 'Why can't we look at the possibility of producing our own single malt?'” Jagdale said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.
Drawing on the expertise of Scottish consultants and a large network of professional tasters, the company spent the next four years developing its first single malt, and another two years developing a marketing plan. The first bottles hit shelves in the United Kingdom in 2004 with little fanfare. But over time, the Indian distillery — which produces nearly a million cases of mid-range Indian whiskey for every case of single malt — has slowly been collecting accolades. So far, it has won silver and bronze medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, at the Wine & Spirits Magazine International Spirits Challenge, and last year its Blackadder single malt was awarded the top prize in the sub-50 euros categories by Malt Maniacs.
Frankly, nobody was more surprised than the Indians. “Being an Indian and having tasted only molasses-based Indian whiskies for decades, you normally scoff when somebody says that India has produced a decent dram,” said Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad resident who has rated more than 1,000 single malts from Scotland, Japan and other countries as a member of Malt Maniacs. “[But] Amrut's whiskey is as good as any SMSW (single malt Scotch whiskey) that is produced any where in the world.”
And like Japanese Scotch makers, Amrut is succeeding. “Currently we are selling in the UK, where we have our global office, as well as in France, Germany, Belgium, a little bit of Italy and Holland as well,” Jagdale said. “The only major market that we have yet to enter is the United States.”
And India.
It may sound weird, but Amrut's single malts are only for export. That's because India has to be the strangest liquor market in the world. Due in part to the famous “Patiala peg” (the frightening large serving favored in the Punjab), India is the globe's biggest whiskey consumer — downing about 90 million cases a year. But that doesn't mean it always goes down smooth. Thanks to Gandhi's ideas on prohibition, booze is banned in Gujarat and attracts punitive taxes in other states. The sugar lobby has ensured that traditional tipples (a.k.a. “country liquor”) remain illegal. And though the premium market segment is growing fast, ludicrously high taxes on imported spirits still ensure that so-called Indian-Made Foreign Liquor — the locally produced, molasses-based, artificially flavored versions of vodka, gin and whiskey known in these parts as IMFL — remains the unrivaled king of the hill.
Now, that looks set to change. Scotch exports to India rose 19 percent to a value of £7 million in 2008, according to Scotch Whiskey Association estimates, even though genuine Scotch made up less than 1 percent of India's spirits market and the association has approached the European Union about making an official complaint to the World Trade Organization over India's prohibitive taxes. Single malts, too, are on the rise. Forecasting near 50 percent growth rates in single malt consumption, Bacardi launched Dewar's White Lable, Dewar's 12, Dewar’s Signature, Aberfeldy 12 and Aberfeldy 21 in India last year, and there's plenty of competition.
“There's a lot of room for growth, because the alcohol industry itself is changing from lower quality spirits and country liquor to higher quality alcohols,” said Jagdale, who also revealed that Amrut plans to start selling its own single malts in India by the beginning of next year.
That said, the jury is still out on whether Amrut will be able to call its single malts and other whiskeys “Scotch.” Last year, under pressure from the Scotch Whiskey Association, China agreed to prohibit any whiskey makers whose products are made outside of Scotland from calling their beverages Scotch, and a similar campaign is underway in India — which might be more amenable to the Scots' argument if its own claims on Basmati rice had been successful.
But to Jagdale, a malt by any other name, if it's a top-quality one that is, would smell as sweet.
“We are in the position to make high-quality malt whiskey which is equal and comparable to any malt whiskey in the world today,” he said. “Having been in the business so long — I am the second generation, and my son is the third generation — there is a bit of satisfaction that we all feel. I feel very happy that we are able to be in that class.”
Sunday, May 24, 2009
from the network that brought you MTV: child marriage
Can a TV sensation in modern India change an ancient tradition?
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
May 24, 2009
NEW DELHI — Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers — notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law — the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network — a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India's “distressed daughters.”
“What started out as a 0.8 rating on Balika took us about 13 weeks to get to 8,” said Rajesh Kamat, Colors' chief executive officer. That means 8 percent of the entire television audience is watching the show. “Typically an episode that peaks for us would touch about 17 million people,” Kamat said. “If you were to take a monthly average, it would be in the 72 million zone.”
Development workers are pleased, but skeptical about the impact such shows can have from a cable television platform that doesn't reach the poor people depicted on screen. “In the rural population very few people are watching this kind of serial,” said Sharmistha Basu, a consultant at New Delhi's International Center for Research on Women.
“Hardly any people have a television set, and especially not a channel like Colors that comes only on cable or dish TV. But in the rural-urban transition zone, people are watching it, and it is starting a dialogue about child marriage. If migrant laborers from rural areas are coming to work in these areas, they can take back those words to their villages.”
This isn't the first time Indian television has flirted with shows about serious issues. In 2005, USAID helped fund a family drama that focused on the still-pervasive problem of aborting female fetuses to try for sons. Before that the BBC World Service Trust teamed up with Doordarshan, India's state-owned, free-to-air television channel, to create a detective series that raised awareness about HIV/AIDS. But this is the first time such shows are being launched for profit, and the first time that they are striking a chord with such a wide swath of cable viewers who aren't captive to state-owned television.
And it marks a huge change. For nearly a decade, India's lucrative cable market was dominated by a single soap opera — "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" ("Because a mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law, too") — and a host of imitators. Dressed in glam saris and sparkling with jewelry, the women of these shows plotted and schemed, remade themselves through cosmetic surgery and returned from the dead, all the while promoting the regressive message that women's only source of value and power came through marriage and childbirth.
“Normally we said it was very regressive, and at one level it was, because it was always in a joint family setup where the women never did anything except fight with each other, and were bound by tradition,” said Shailaja Bajpai, longtime television critic for the Indian Express newspaper.
Because as much as 50 percent of the television audience comprises women, programming can potentially play an important role in inspiring new thinking about the way daughters — and unborn girls — should be treated. For example, though child marriage is illegal and the average age at which marriages take place is rising in India, its rural backwaters still account for almost half of the world's prepubescent brides, according to UNICEF.
Apart from taking away their childhoods, these unions also frequently take away their lives, as UNICEF calculates girls between 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as women between 20 and 24 — a fact that may contribute to India's high maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are also five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
“There is a legal measure here and our government is also trying to do a lot of incentive schemes for delaying marriage,” Basu said. “But the main problem is the internalization of these values by the people.” In villages, she says, people believe marrying their daughters off before they hit puberty is the only way to be sure they go to their weddings as virgins — which is essential to the family honor. “The government is not able to crack this norm.”
Only time will tell if television can achieve what the government can't.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
give it a good shake
By Jason Overdorf
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Outlook Magazine
May 25, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, India’s latest election was just more proof that somebody needs to pick this country up by the ears and give it a good shake. There are too many parties, too many leaders, too many analysts, too much alphabet soup—do we really need DMK, PMK, AIADMK and DMDK? Can anyone really tell them apart? Also, the whole election thing takes way too long. Even an old-fashioned cricket match can be resolved in five days—and none of those days are dry days.
Nobody seemed to know what this election was about—reservation, the economy, terrorism, development, Hinduness or who gets to be the boss. Everyone was looking for a back door into 10 Janpath—er, 7 Race Course Road. The poor voted in droves, though they knew it wouldn’t make a difference to them who wins. The rich didn’t vote at all for the same reason. And I couldn’t find any party workers giving away free booze in my neighbourhood.
It’s over now, of course. But it’s hard to believe anything will be different. Once upon a time, Indian elections were supposedly ruled by anti-incumbency. But an Indian politician’s career is never dead, even if he’s caught red-handed taking payoffs from defence contractors or convicted of murder. Anybody thrown out manages to weasel his way back in, so rather than making government accountable, the democratic process has become a sort of revolving door. You walk through, put a stop to everything your predecessor was doing, start your own schemes, steal everything you can, and walk out again. For those on the sidelines, it’s like being forced to watch the first four episodes of American Idol—the ones with all the talentless buffoons—over and over again. Or a series of cricket matches that continually end in draws.
As a dumb American, I didn’t get a vote (which is probably lucky for everybody), but I am not going to stand on ceremony, or some hokey journalist’s creed, to remain objective. Even though Narendra Modi seemed the most likely to solve the problem of overpopulation that I complain about so much, I was pulling for Mayawati, or Laloo to somehow become PM. I usually root for the underdog when I don’t have a stake in a fight. But my real reasons were selfish: I might be forced to interview the winner.
I know that if my wish ever came true, I’d have to put up with an awful lot of stuff about India’s Obama, an endless rehash of every sting, scam and fiasco of the past two decades, and another interminable debate on reservations—all more boring than back-to-back episodes of The Big Fight. But there would be compensations. Laloo and Mayawati are terribly funny.
Everybody understands that about Laloo. He is like the class clown who constantly failed his exams. But like every trickster, and every class clown, he still manages to prove himself cleverer than everybody else. Mayawati’s jokes are deadpan—erecting dozens of statues of herself, making Brahmins part of her low-caste constituency, and holding an enormous birthday party financed by, she says, the gifts she has received from her many followers. But when you think of all the cant we get from the rest of the crop, you start to see that Mayawati’s straight-faced spoofs are even funnier than Laloo’s smirking ones.
So, if Laloo or Mayawati ever took the PM’s chair, it would matter. The old hobby horses of political debate—corruption, development, reservation—would be turned inside out. And those who have been taking turns at the top would have to do more than wait a few years for their turn to come around. They might have to change. In short, India would get a good shake!
Monday, May 04, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
an oldie but a goodie: in india, love hurts
With an increased emphasis on romantic love, and greater opportunities for women, more Indian marriages are breaking down.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: April 21, 2009
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
At least among Internet users, the problem knows no geographical boundaries. About 60 percent of the 50,000 customers who have registered with SecondShaadi.com, an online matchmaking service for divorced Indians that launched a year ago, live outside India's five largest cities; more than a third live outside the 20 largest cities. “In a few years, we may not even be talking about divorce and remarriage as a stigma anymore,” says Vivek Pahwa, the company's chief executive.
For men and women trapped in bad marriages, that's wonderful news. Rani, a 23-year-old woman from the provincial town of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, for instance, applied for the courts after her husband sent her back to her parents a year into their marriage with a demand for a dowry supplement of 50,000 rupees (the equivalent of a year's salary in these parts). And when she gave birth to a daughter, her husband didn't even come to look at the baby. After three years of legal wrangling over the dowry — prohibited since 1961, though the law is widely flouted — she now says, “I want to be divorced this minute!”
But the state is flailing helplessly as it tries to balance tradition with modernity when it comes to the legal and law enforcement responses to marital discord.
Because a court-ordered divorce can take 15 years, women's attorneys often advise them to file dowry or domestic violence cases against their husbands instead, says Geeta Luthra, a lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues. The criminal courts are equally slow, but the threat of being arrested and spending time behind bars while their lawyer argues for bail exerts pressure on men to settle. That's unfortunate, Luthra says, because the “eight false cases” are making the one genuine dowry petitioner more difficult to believe.
The domestic violence act of 2005 poses another kind of threat: An abused wife can be awarded any “matrimonial home” that she resided in during her marriage — whether or not her husband holds the deed. “The idea is that by scaring the husband and his family they'll force them to settle. And the settlement basically means money,” Banerjee says. “The law is certainly being abused. That's not my assessment, that's the assessment of the high court and the supreme court.”
For men like Rakesh, a middle-class Delhi resident, this means almost weekly trips to court and the police station's special cell for women.
After he refused his wife's demand to move into a second home that his family owned and rented to tenants, his wife filed a police case against him and threatened to have him, his aging mother, his two brothers and their wives thrown in jail for dowry violations he maintains are completely fictitious. He tried to come up with a compromise — he even rented a house for the couple to live in separate from his family. But when nothing worked he filed for divorce.
Now when he's not at the special police division devoted to women's issues suffering verbal abuse in the guise of police-enforced couples counseling, he spends his time wondering whether today is the day he'll get the warning he's going to be arrested and should seek anticipatory bail.
Still, the terms of the debate over dowry and domestic violence cases sometimes suggest what's at stake is a disagreement over the traditions of marriage.
For instance, a web site designed to help men victimized by false cases asks, “Wife forcing you to live separately? Wife does not respect you and is discourteous to your parents?”
This sort of thing cuts both ways, says Luthra. Perhaps understandably, women are less tolerant and more demanding than ever before. But it's not uncommon for a man to sue for divorce on the grounds that his wife refuses to do the housework, fails to play the good hostess when his friends drop by, or is impolite to her in-laws. On the other hand, Luthra says that these days, among couples who don't live with the husband's parents, the wife's mother may call with advice 10 times a day.
That's a problem any culture — traditional or modern — can understand.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: April 21, 2009
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
At least among Internet users, the problem knows no geographical boundaries. About 60 percent of the 50,000 customers who have registered with SecondShaadi.com, an online matchmaking service for divorced Indians that launched a year ago, live outside India's five largest cities; more than a third live outside the 20 largest cities. “In a few years, we may not even be talking about divorce and remarriage as a stigma anymore,” says Vivek Pahwa, the company's chief executive.
For men and women trapped in bad marriages, that's wonderful news. Rani, a 23-year-old woman from the provincial town of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, for instance, applied for the courts after her husband sent her back to her parents a year into their marriage with a demand for a dowry supplement of 50,000 rupees (the equivalent of a year's salary in these parts). And when she gave birth to a daughter, her husband didn't even come to look at the baby. After three years of legal wrangling over the dowry — prohibited since 1961, though the law is widely flouted — she now says, “I want to be divorced this minute!”
But the state is flailing helplessly as it tries to balance tradition with modernity when it comes to the legal and law enforcement responses to marital discord.
Because a court-ordered divorce can take 15 years, women's attorneys often advise them to file dowry or domestic violence cases against their husbands instead, says Geeta Luthra, a lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues. The criminal courts are equally slow, but the threat of being arrested and spending time behind bars while their lawyer argues for bail exerts pressure on men to settle. That's unfortunate, Luthra says, because the “eight false cases” are making the one genuine dowry petitioner more difficult to believe.
The domestic violence act of 2005 poses another kind of threat: An abused wife can be awarded any “matrimonial home” that she resided in during her marriage — whether or not her husband holds the deed. “The idea is that by scaring the husband and his family they'll force them to settle. And the settlement basically means money,” Banerjee says. “The law is certainly being abused. That's not my assessment, that's the assessment of the high court and the supreme court.”
For men like Rakesh, a middle-class Delhi resident, this means almost weekly trips to court and the police station's special cell for women.
After he refused his wife's demand to move into a second home that his family owned and rented to tenants, his wife filed a police case against him and threatened to have him, his aging mother, his two brothers and their wives thrown in jail for dowry violations he maintains are completely fictitious. He tried to come up with a compromise — he even rented a house for the couple to live in separate from his family. But when nothing worked he filed for divorce.
Now when he's not at the special police division devoted to women's issues suffering verbal abuse in the guise of police-enforced couples counseling, he spends his time wondering whether today is the day he'll get the warning he's going to be arrested and should seek anticipatory bail.
Still, the terms of the debate over dowry and domestic violence cases sometimes suggest what's at stake is a disagreement over the traditions of marriage.
For instance, a web site designed to help men victimized by false cases asks, “Wife forcing you to live separately? Wife does not respect you and is discourteous to your parents?”
This sort of thing cuts both ways, says Luthra. Perhaps understandably, women are less tolerant and more demanding than ever before. But it's not uncommon for a man to sue for divorce on the grounds that his wife refuses to do the housework, fails to play the good hostess when his friends drop by, or is impolite to her in-laws. On the other hand, Luthra says that these days, among couples who don't live with the husband's parents, the wife's mother may call with advice 10 times a day.
That's a problem any culture — traditional or modern — can understand.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
tigers of india: fearful symmetry
BANDHAVGAR AND PANNA, India — One sunny afternoon in March, officers of the Madhya Pradesh forest department crept up on a majestic Bengal tiger relaxing in the Bandhavgar National Park and shot it with a tranquilizer dart.
The tigress was then loaded into a truck and driven 150 miles — a trip of eight hours or so on India's rough roads — to the Panna Tiger Reserve.
The move was billed as one of the most modern and proactive steps that India's forest department has taken to protect the country's fast disappearing tigers.
But leading conservationists here say the truck might as well have driven the tranquilized beast all the way to China — the final destination of almost all the tigers that are killed by poachers. The Panna Reserve is no great place for tigers: Poachers abound, researchers claim the management there is inept, and the park has lost about 40 tigers the past five years.
--read on at www.globalpost.com--
The tigress was then loaded into a truck and driven 150 miles — a trip of eight hours or so on India's rough roads — to the Panna Tiger Reserve.
The move was billed as one of the most modern and proactive steps that India's forest department has taken to protect the country's fast disappearing tigers.
But leading conservationists here say the truck might as well have driven the tranquilized beast all the way to China — the final destination of almost all the tigers that are killed by poachers. The Panna Reserve is no great place for tigers: Poachers abound, researchers claim the management there is inept, and the park has lost about 40 tigers the past five years.
--read on at www.globalpost.com--
Monday, March 23, 2009
bjp - can it be all things to all people?
The BJP yesterday unveiled a neither-here-nor-there strategy on the issue of Varun Gandhi's hate speech, according to Indian press reports.
The BJP says that Varun Gandhi’s hate speech directed at non-Hindus represented his personal views, rather than the party's. But it also said it is not considering dumping him as a candidate, according to CNN/IBN.
The wishy-washy response to a video recording that depicts the grandson of Indira Gandhi and great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru threatening to cut off the hands of Muslims reveals the larger dilemma faced by the right-wing Hindu party.
On one hand, their only way to differentiate themselves from the Congress is to trumpet their decades-old argument that "the Muslims" threaten India's Hindu majority by reproducing too quickly and secretly maintaining a treacherous loyalty to Pakistan — both claims that have been proven false again and again, incidentally.
But on the other hand, the party will never win enough parliamentary seats to form the government on its own — or at least not anytime soon — and so must maintain a moderate face to soothe the fears of potential coalition partners. (Incidentally, Varun Gandhi still maintains the video was doctored and he didn't refer specifically to Muslims, only anti-social elements. But he has stopped short of condemning such statements or avowing that Muslims are free and equal citizens of India).
Unless something dramatic happens to inspire more of the population with the jingoistic sentiments near and dear to leaders like BJP's Narendra Modi — or India's murky political scenario throws up a terrible surprise this go-around — that means that the "fear of a saffron planet" that keeps Indians awake at night probably isn't in the cards.
From 1998 to 2003, the saffron party managed to be all things to all people by presenting two, or even three, faces: the cuddly, secular-seeming Atal Behari Vajpayee, the firebrand veteran of the campaign to destroy the Babri mosque LK Advani and the even more fiery Narendra Modi.
Now, though, Vajpayee has retired and Advani — not long ago considered a deeply committed radical — is the "friendly face" of the party. And this go-around, it appears from the flight of some of the BJP's former allies that a coalition of the not-too-radical right may be a non-starter.
Perhaps I'm too hopeful. But after the Mumbai attacks failed to generate any swing toward the radical right, and instead initiated a strong backlash against Hindu radicals who themselves indulge in thuggery and terrorism, I'm beginning to entertain hopes that the era of race-baiting and hatred in Indian politics may be coming to an end.
But I have my sleepless nights, too.
The BJP says that Varun Gandhi’s hate speech directed at non-Hindus represented his personal views, rather than the party's. But it also said it is not considering dumping him as a candidate, according to CNN/IBN.
The wishy-washy response to a video recording that depicts the grandson of Indira Gandhi and great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru threatening to cut off the hands of Muslims reveals the larger dilemma faced by the right-wing Hindu party.
On one hand, their only way to differentiate themselves from the Congress is to trumpet their decades-old argument that "the Muslims" threaten India's Hindu majority by reproducing too quickly and secretly maintaining a treacherous loyalty to Pakistan — both claims that have been proven false again and again, incidentally.
But on the other hand, the party will never win enough parliamentary seats to form the government on its own — or at least not anytime soon — and so must maintain a moderate face to soothe the fears of potential coalition partners. (Incidentally, Varun Gandhi still maintains the video was doctored and he didn't refer specifically to Muslims, only anti-social elements. But he has stopped short of condemning such statements or avowing that Muslims are free and equal citizens of India).
Unless something dramatic happens to inspire more of the population with the jingoistic sentiments near and dear to leaders like BJP's Narendra Modi — or India's murky political scenario throws up a terrible surprise this go-around — that means that the "fear of a saffron planet" that keeps Indians awake at night probably isn't in the cards.
From 1998 to 2003, the saffron party managed to be all things to all people by presenting two, or even three, faces: the cuddly, secular-seeming Atal Behari Vajpayee, the firebrand veteran of the campaign to destroy the Babri mosque LK Advani and the even more fiery Narendra Modi.
Now, though, Vajpayee has retired and Advani — not long ago considered a deeply committed radical — is the "friendly face" of the party. And this go-around, it appears from the flight of some of the BJP's former allies that a coalition of the not-too-radical right may be a non-starter.
Perhaps I'm too hopeful. But after the Mumbai attacks failed to generate any swing toward the radical right, and instead initiated a strong backlash against Hindu radicals who themselves indulge in thuggery and terrorism, I'm beginning to entertain hopes that the era of race-baiting and hatred in Indian politics may be coming to an end.
But I have my sleepless nights, too.
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