Schools in Pakistan a step to regional peace
Calgary HeraldAugust 14, 2009 9:53 AM
Canada's pledge to support public education and social development in Pakistan is an encouraging evolution in NATO's war with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The move is in harmony with the Obama administration's newly articulated "regional" approach, that recognizes terrorists recruit on both sides of the border and that it is thus as important to develop alternatives for local populations in Pakistan, as well as in Afghanistan. Canada announced Wednesday it will now make public education in Pakistan a priority, and expand financial aid to include $25 million for food, water and emergency shelter in the Swat Valley, badly damaged in recent counter-insurgency operations conducted by the Pakistani army. Refugees who fled the military offensive are now returning, straining resources and reconstruction efforts.
In particular, Pakistan's notoriously weak public school system needs improvement, lest the social factors that fuel religious extremism continue to flourish unchallenged.
Education reduces poverty and ignorance, and opens the door to improved quality of life, (especially when women, whose education was banned under Taliban rule, are included. But Pakistan's impoverished school system --especially in remote rural villages -- is often blamed for the growing influence of Muslim clerics. The situation has made it easy for Islamist extremists to fund their own schools--known as madrassas -- that offer free education but lace it with their own interpretation of Islam.
When the poor have the option of a good, free, well-rounded education, the madrassa will look much less attractive. Not that it will be easy. Extremists, after all, aren't really interested in an educated population, and burn down schools they don't like: Just this week, the Taliban just destroyed seven primary schools in northwest Pakistan -- three boys' and four girls' schools.
But, the effort must be made: Education, economic prosperity and above all security are the best ways to loosen the terrorists' grip on the people.
If peace is ever to be achieved in Afghanistan, Pakistan must have it too.
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ASIA
Education in Hunza
Hunza’s success story shows that difficulties can be overcome if the leadership has political will.
By Dr Shahid Siddiqui
NO doubt Hunza, known for its fruit orchards, lofty mountains, panoramic meadows and breathtaking beauty, is a major tourist attraction, but it is equally interesting to explore the educational initiatives that have empowered the local community there and set an example for other areas.
Those who are familiar with the difficult terrain and relatively scarce resources in Hunza would be pleasantly surprised to know that the literacy rate in Hunza is around 77 per cent. This must have been unthinkable when the first primary school was established there in 1913 by the British in India. The single-most important factor that transformed the educational scene in Hunza was the contribution of Aga Khan III, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, who convinced the then Mirs of Hunza state to place greater emphasis on education.
It was in 1946 that some 16 schools were established. They were called the Diamond Jubilee schools and they set the right momentum for bringing changes to education in Hunza.
The second important initiative came when the Pakistan government started opening public schools in the Northern Areas, including Hunza. The demand for education grew but the number of schools did not meet educational requirements. With people finding that schooling was accessible two more problems were becoming visible: the quality of education and education for girls.
The third important initiative in Hunza was the establishment of a quality school for girls whose sole criterion of admission was merit. The Academy, with hostel facilities, was founded in 1983 when Karim Aga Khan laid the foundation of the academy. He said he hoped that the Academy would, “provide a genuine foundation for self-generating progress in the future”. The establishment of the Academy was a strong motiva tion for the opening of private schools focusing on the quality of education.
The fourth initiative to have an impact on educational life in Hunza was the establishment of community schools. These schools were a welcome addition as they gave the local community a sense of participation and ownership. In 1991 a model community school, Al-Amyn Model School, was established in Gulmit, a beautiful village of Hunza. This school helped re-establish the broken linkage between school and home. Here parents and grandparents are invited to share their wisdom with the younger generation. Parents come to know that their knowledge is not obsolete and that the younger generation can benefit from it. The success of AlAmyn heralded the establishment of a number of community schools over the years.
The fifth initiative was the establishment of the Karakoram University in Gilgit. A number of students of Hunza are benefiting. The university may also create jobs for the local population.
The sixth factor contributing to the quality of education is the role of the different Aga Khan organisations that have played an effective role in the improvement of education by establishing schools and empowering them through capacitybuilding measures, and by facilitating students through scholarship. One initiative was the establishment of the Professional Development Centre in Gilgit. The centre helped train a number of teachers from Hunza by offering short- and long-term courses.
The seventh factor is the rising awareness among the local people who have come to view education as the passport to enhanced opportunities in life. There seems to be urgency in terms of acquiring education. Parents in Hunza are convinced that the best thing they can do for their children is to help them get a good education. There is a growing interest in higher education for girls. Parents are willing to send their daughters to distant cities e.g. Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar etc. for quality education. It is an approach that distinguishes Hunza from the rest of the Northern Areas.
Lastly, there is a cordial relationship among the different stakeholders. There seems to be a good working relationship between the directorate of education, the Aga Khan organisations, the local community and foreign funding agencies. It is this collaborative approach that makes things happen.
Hunza’s educational story has many lessons for other areas of Pakistan where talent is not properly exploited. It shows us that difficulties and challenges can be overcome if the leadership has political will and if the community is trusted and involved in planning and the execution of educational plans. ¦ The writer is director of Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore School of Economics and author of Rethinking Education in Pakistan.
http://epaper.dawn.com/artMailDisp.aspx ... _014&typ=0
Hunza’s success story shows that difficulties can be overcome if the leadership has political will.
By Dr Shahid Siddiqui
NO doubt Hunza, known for its fruit orchards, lofty mountains, panoramic meadows and breathtaking beauty, is a major tourist attraction, but it is equally interesting to explore the educational initiatives that have empowered the local community there and set an example for other areas.
Those who are familiar with the difficult terrain and relatively scarce resources in Hunza would be pleasantly surprised to know that the literacy rate in Hunza is around 77 per cent. This must have been unthinkable when the first primary school was established there in 1913 by the British in India. The single-most important factor that transformed the educational scene in Hunza was the contribution of Aga Khan III, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, who convinced the then Mirs of Hunza state to place greater emphasis on education.
It was in 1946 that some 16 schools were established. They were called the Diamond Jubilee schools and they set the right momentum for bringing changes to education in Hunza.
The second important initiative came when the Pakistan government started opening public schools in the Northern Areas, including Hunza. The demand for education grew but the number of schools did not meet educational requirements. With people finding that schooling was accessible two more problems were becoming visible: the quality of education and education for girls.
The third important initiative in Hunza was the establishment of a quality school for girls whose sole criterion of admission was merit. The Academy, with hostel facilities, was founded in 1983 when Karim Aga Khan laid the foundation of the academy. He said he hoped that the Academy would, “provide a genuine foundation for self-generating progress in the future”. The establishment of the Academy was a strong motiva tion for the opening of private schools focusing on the quality of education.
The fourth initiative to have an impact on educational life in Hunza was the establishment of community schools. These schools were a welcome addition as they gave the local community a sense of participation and ownership. In 1991 a model community school, Al-Amyn Model School, was established in Gulmit, a beautiful village of Hunza. This school helped re-establish the broken linkage between school and home. Here parents and grandparents are invited to share their wisdom with the younger generation. Parents come to know that their knowledge is not obsolete and that the younger generation can benefit from it. The success of AlAmyn heralded the establishment of a number of community schools over the years.
The fifth initiative was the establishment of the Karakoram University in Gilgit. A number of students of Hunza are benefiting. The university may also create jobs for the local population.
The sixth factor contributing to the quality of education is the role of the different Aga Khan organisations that have played an effective role in the improvement of education by establishing schools and empowering them through capacitybuilding measures, and by facilitating students through scholarship. One initiative was the establishment of the Professional Development Centre in Gilgit. The centre helped train a number of teachers from Hunza by offering short- and long-term courses.
The seventh factor is the rising awareness among the local people who have come to view education as the passport to enhanced opportunities in life. There seems to be urgency in terms of acquiring education. Parents in Hunza are convinced that the best thing they can do for their children is to help them get a good education. There is a growing interest in higher education for girls. Parents are willing to send their daughters to distant cities e.g. Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar etc. for quality education. It is an approach that distinguishes Hunza from the rest of the Northern Areas.
Lastly, there is a cordial relationship among the different stakeholders. There seems to be a good working relationship between the directorate of education, the Aga Khan organisations, the local community and foreign funding agencies. It is this collaborative approach that makes things happen.
Hunza’s educational story has many lessons for other areas of Pakistan where talent is not properly exploited. It shows us that difficulties and challenges can be overcome if the leadership has political will and if the community is trusted and involved in planning and the execution of educational plans. ¦ The writer is director of Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore School of Economics and author of Rethinking Education in Pakistan.
http://epaper.dawn.com/artMailDisp.aspx ... _014&typ=0
Water, not Pakistan, india's biggest challenge
By Tim Giannuzzi,
For The Calgary Herald
August 20, 2009 9:05 AM
If there were any doubts about the ephemeral nature of human concerns, a report this month from Nature on water supplies in India ought to put them to rest. Rather than being a yawner for hydrologists, the report makes it clear the world's largest democracy faces a test it is spectacularly ill-equipped to pass.
That test will be water shortages in the face of a rising population, increasing consumption and an endlessly pressing drive for development. Suddenly, the tricky questions of relations with Pakistan, the fight against terrorism (from which India suffers on many sides), the future of the disputed region of Kashmir and the balance of Muslim-Hindu relations seem to dwindle almost to triviality. Without ready access to fresh water, India's careful stability, the product of complex coalition-building between a mind-boggling assortment of castes, ethnic groups, states, ideologies and faiths, will dissolve into anarchy.
According to Nature, India is draining its groundwater resources at a prodigious rate. The number of districts overexploiting water resources has nearly quadrupled in the past 15 years to 15 per cent. India will be annually short by 320 billion cubic feet of water by mid-century. This is grave news for an underdeveloped and highly diverse nation which is already home to around a sixth of humanity and is projected to surpass China as the world's most-populous nation at roughly the same time as the aforementioned crippling water shortage.
Averting such an impending catastrophe is on a lot of minds, but the effort is complicated by the same structures that enable Indians to keep their sprawling country in one piece. Indian governments are, of necessity, huge and ungainly creatures composed of a mixture of parties from across the political spectrum, often with competing interests. These often manage to stumble along awkwardly by catering to each other's pet projects, but even this degree of co-ordination comes at a price. Achieving a timely, unified consensus often verges on the impossible-- someone's interests gets trampled and nearly endless talks are required to iron things out.
And even unambiguous agreement is a potential problem for Indian water conservation. At the national level, India's political scene is dominated by a pair of rivals: the centrist Congress Party (led by Gandhi's descendants) and the right-leaning Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), both of which must resort to this sort of coalition-building.
One of the few major policies the two parties and their array of lesser partners can all support is the need for continued development to lift as many Indians as possible out of poverty. Indeed, large blocs of mostly poor voters routinely offer support in exchange for local development and favours.
However, not only will development increase water consumption, it will stymie attempts at long-term planning for water conservation. Parties large and small will not want to risk support and swing votes in crucial areas by forcing anyone to go short, meaning yet more talks and endless searching on how to spread the pain of restricted development at the lowest possible cost to politicians.
Expect Indian politicians to further complicate the issue. In this spring's general elections, roughly a fifth of candidates had criminal charges pending against them, as did a quarter of sitting members of parliament. So entrenched is corruption that many politicians are utterly flagrant about it, wasting money in plain view while retaining support among voters by painting themselves as Robin Hoods fighting for the poor. Kumari Mayawati, a leader from the untouchable caste and Chief Minister of one of India's poorest states, has spent more than $400 million building giant statues of herself and other untouchables in the midst of a drought as part of what she calls "the politics of dignity."
India needs to make tough decisions to avoid disaster, but looks more as if it will do anything to avoid them.
Timothy Giannuzzi Is A Calgarybased Writer Specializing In Foreign Affairs.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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By Tim Giannuzzi,
For The Calgary Herald
August 20, 2009 9:05 AM
If there were any doubts about the ephemeral nature of human concerns, a report this month from Nature on water supplies in India ought to put them to rest. Rather than being a yawner for hydrologists, the report makes it clear the world's largest democracy faces a test it is spectacularly ill-equipped to pass.
That test will be water shortages in the face of a rising population, increasing consumption and an endlessly pressing drive for development. Suddenly, the tricky questions of relations with Pakistan, the fight against terrorism (from which India suffers on many sides), the future of the disputed region of Kashmir and the balance of Muslim-Hindu relations seem to dwindle almost to triviality. Without ready access to fresh water, India's careful stability, the product of complex coalition-building between a mind-boggling assortment of castes, ethnic groups, states, ideologies and faiths, will dissolve into anarchy.
According to Nature, India is draining its groundwater resources at a prodigious rate. The number of districts overexploiting water resources has nearly quadrupled in the past 15 years to 15 per cent. India will be annually short by 320 billion cubic feet of water by mid-century. This is grave news for an underdeveloped and highly diverse nation which is already home to around a sixth of humanity and is projected to surpass China as the world's most-populous nation at roughly the same time as the aforementioned crippling water shortage.
Averting such an impending catastrophe is on a lot of minds, but the effort is complicated by the same structures that enable Indians to keep their sprawling country in one piece. Indian governments are, of necessity, huge and ungainly creatures composed of a mixture of parties from across the political spectrum, often with competing interests. These often manage to stumble along awkwardly by catering to each other's pet projects, but even this degree of co-ordination comes at a price. Achieving a timely, unified consensus often verges on the impossible-- someone's interests gets trampled and nearly endless talks are required to iron things out.
And even unambiguous agreement is a potential problem for Indian water conservation. At the national level, India's political scene is dominated by a pair of rivals: the centrist Congress Party (led by Gandhi's descendants) and the right-leaning Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), both of which must resort to this sort of coalition-building.
One of the few major policies the two parties and their array of lesser partners can all support is the need for continued development to lift as many Indians as possible out of poverty. Indeed, large blocs of mostly poor voters routinely offer support in exchange for local development and favours.
However, not only will development increase water consumption, it will stymie attempts at long-term planning for water conservation. Parties large and small will not want to risk support and swing votes in crucial areas by forcing anyone to go short, meaning yet more talks and endless searching on how to spread the pain of restricted development at the lowest possible cost to politicians.
Expect Indian politicians to further complicate the issue. In this spring's general elections, roughly a fifth of candidates had criminal charges pending against them, as did a quarter of sitting members of parliament. So entrenched is corruption that many politicians are utterly flagrant about it, wasting money in plain view while retaining support among voters by painting themselves as Robin Hoods fighting for the poor. Kumari Mayawati, a leader from the untouchable caste and Chief Minister of one of India's poorest states, has spent more than $400 million building giant statues of herself and other untouchables in the midst of a drought as part of what she calls "the politics of dignity."
India needs to make tough decisions to avoid disaster, but looks more as if it will do anything to avoid them.
Timothy Giannuzzi Is A Calgarybased Writer Specializing In Foreign Affairs.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Earthly matters: Welcome to ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’
Rina saeed khan
Sunday, 26 Jul, 2009 | 12:52 AM PST |
I found myself back in the Northern Areas of Pakistan recently — not to be confused with the vague sounding ‘north of Pakistan’ where the army is currently fighting the Taliban. The Northern Areas territory is far away from Swat and Buner and is an oasis of peace in these troubled times. In fact, the people of the Northern Areas are lobbying to have their territory renamed ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’.
Thanks to the community development pioneered by the Aga Khan Development Network in the early 1980s, the local people have learnt about community participation first hand and since there is a large, progressive-minded Ismaili community living here, there is no sympathy or support for the intolerant and backward Taliban.
I was invited by the Aga Khan Cultural Service-Pakistan and our mission was to visit the renovated forts in Shigar, Khaplu and Hunza (all projects undertaken by the AKCSP in recent years). A veritable treasure house of ancient forts, the Northern Areas of Pakistan lost most of their heritage in the 19th century as a result of destructive attacks by the Maharajah of Kashmir (who eventually ended up ruling this area until the partition of the subcontinent when the local population rebelled and decided to join Pakistan).
In fact, the fort we visited in Khaplu near Skardu was actually moved down the mountain to its present location on the insistence of the Dogras, who ruled from Kashmir. They compelled all the mountain rajahs to bring down their forts and live in the main towns so that they may not be able to revolt against them. Hence, the Raja of Khaplu had to rebuild his fort as a palace at the present location in the town with little modifications. The AKCSP is now renovating this dilapidated fort and turning it into a hotel along the lines of the Shigar Fort Residence Hotel, which is also located in Baltistan.
We met up with several ambassadors (of Norway, Germany and Argentina) and the Aga Khan network officials in Shigar earlier. I was accompanied by Masood Khan (the lead architect responsible for most of the renovations) and travel writer Salman Rashid. We reached Shigar from Islamabad in the Aga Khan’s new helicopter and there is no better view of the mountains than out of the window of a chopper as it weaves its way through the Indus gorge up to Skardu. The journey takes an hour or so and the helicopter soon touched down in a rocky field located near the river — all around us were rugged peaks. Shigar, a picturesque valley around thirty minutes’ drive from Skardu, the capital of Baltistan, lies on the way to the Baltoro glacier and K-2.
In Shigar, the AKCSP has restored the local Raja’s fort palace, converting it into an exclusive hotel. But unlike other commercial hotels, the Shigar Fort Residence ploughs back its profits into the local community. Already, Shigar Valley is benefiting from this project as locals are trained and employed (20 out of the 22 employees are from Shigar) and local handicrafts are sourced for use in the hotel. This up-market hotel had great success last year when it was turned over to the Serena chain of hotels for their experienced management. The hotel is now doing very well and continues to attract tourists to this culturally rich region, which is also home to some of the tallest mountains on earth. Recently it was given the UNESCO award for excellence for preserving heritage as a “living thing… for future generations with the participation of the local communities”.
From Baltistan, we flew over the mountains to Hunza, landing in a terraced field below the town of Karimabad (the capital of Hunza). The mountain kingdom of Hunza became a part of Pakistan in 1974 and the Mirs’ (rulers) traditional seat was the Baltit Fort in Karimabad, which has been renovated and converted into a museum. Prince Karim Aga Khan initiated the restoration efforts for Baltit Fort in 1991 when Mir Ghazanfar Ali Khan (now the Chief Executive of the Northern Areas) agreed to donate the fort to the Baltit Heritage Trust, a public charity formed for the purpose of owning and maintaining the fort. The AKCSP carried out extensive work on the fort, which took six years to complete. Baltit Fort was inaugurated in a glamorous ceremony that took place in 1996, with the Aga Khan and President Farooq Leghari in attendance.
Baltit Fort was the property of the Mirs for several centuries and it was certainly a wise decision by the current Mir of Hunza to hand it over to the public, for now it is the main tourist attraction in the area. Unfortunately, there are not that many tourists in Hunza these days. Mir Ghazanfar told me on this visit, “You must tell people how peaceful this area is. There are no Taliban here”. The lack of tourists (both foreign and domestic) has affected the economy of Hunza, and the hotels and bazaar lie empty. The last time I was here, Karimabad was full of Japanese tourists!
Hunza is in fact, the perfect get-away with its affordable hotels, stunning views and plenty to do during the day. Aside from visiting the well-maintained Baltit Fort and the bazaar where one can buy goods from China, there is also the lesser-known Altit Fort, also located in the valley. Perched high above the valley on a precarious cliff, the Altit Fort is older than the Baltit Fort. Indeed, Altit was about to topple over the cliff when its owner, Prince Amin Khan (Mir Ghazanfar’s brother) donated it to the AKCSP in 2001. They carried out immediate emergency repairs and now they are restoring the fort, which they plan to hand over to the community to use once it is ready later this year. In return for the fort, they built Prince Amin a new house in the picturesque orchard just below the fort. The AKCSP will soon be opening a café in the orchard where visitors can have tea and rest under the old, shady trees.
Altit Fort is over 800 years old and is said to be the birth place of the Hunza kingdom and the first fort of the region — it is also much smaller than Baltit. The fort clearly has its own natural defence system. When the capital shifted to Karimabad, Altit fort was only used in the summers, and during the British era it became a guest-house. Then around thirty years ago, when the kingdom of Hunza became a part of Pakistan, it was completely abandoned. Like the other forts, it would have decayed and crumbled had the AKCSP not stepped in. Now these renovated forts are helping to revitalise the region.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/daw ... -baltistan
Rina saeed khan
Sunday, 26 Jul, 2009 | 12:52 AM PST |
I found myself back in the Northern Areas of Pakistan recently — not to be confused with the vague sounding ‘north of Pakistan’ where the army is currently fighting the Taliban. The Northern Areas territory is far away from Swat and Buner and is an oasis of peace in these troubled times. In fact, the people of the Northern Areas are lobbying to have their territory renamed ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’.
Thanks to the community development pioneered by the Aga Khan Development Network in the early 1980s, the local people have learnt about community participation first hand and since there is a large, progressive-minded Ismaili community living here, there is no sympathy or support for the intolerant and backward Taliban.
I was invited by the Aga Khan Cultural Service-Pakistan and our mission was to visit the renovated forts in Shigar, Khaplu and Hunza (all projects undertaken by the AKCSP in recent years). A veritable treasure house of ancient forts, the Northern Areas of Pakistan lost most of their heritage in the 19th century as a result of destructive attacks by the Maharajah of Kashmir (who eventually ended up ruling this area until the partition of the subcontinent when the local population rebelled and decided to join Pakistan).
In fact, the fort we visited in Khaplu near Skardu was actually moved down the mountain to its present location on the insistence of the Dogras, who ruled from Kashmir. They compelled all the mountain rajahs to bring down their forts and live in the main towns so that they may not be able to revolt against them. Hence, the Raja of Khaplu had to rebuild his fort as a palace at the present location in the town with little modifications. The AKCSP is now renovating this dilapidated fort and turning it into a hotel along the lines of the Shigar Fort Residence Hotel, which is also located in Baltistan.
We met up with several ambassadors (of Norway, Germany and Argentina) and the Aga Khan network officials in Shigar earlier. I was accompanied by Masood Khan (the lead architect responsible for most of the renovations) and travel writer Salman Rashid. We reached Shigar from Islamabad in the Aga Khan’s new helicopter and there is no better view of the mountains than out of the window of a chopper as it weaves its way through the Indus gorge up to Skardu. The journey takes an hour or so and the helicopter soon touched down in a rocky field located near the river — all around us were rugged peaks. Shigar, a picturesque valley around thirty minutes’ drive from Skardu, the capital of Baltistan, lies on the way to the Baltoro glacier and K-2.
In Shigar, the AKCSP has restored the local Raja’s fort palace, converting it into an exclusive hotel. But unlike other commercial hotels, the Shigar Fort Residence ploughs back its profits into the local community. Already, Shigar Valley is benefiting from this project as locals are trained and employed (20 out of the 22 employees are from Shigar) and local handicrafts are sourced for use in the hotel. This up-market hotel had great success last year when it was turned over to the Serena chain of hotels for their experienced management. The hotel is now doing very well and continues to attract tourists to this culturally rich region, which is also home to some of the tallest mountains on earth. Recently it was given the UNESCO award for excellence for preserving heritage as a “living thing… for future generations with the participation of the local communities”.
From Baltistan, we flew over the mountains to Hunza, landing in a terraced field below the town of Karimabad (the capital of Hunza). The mountain kingdom of Hunza became a part of Pakistan in 1974 and the Mirs’ (rulers) traditional seat was the Baltit Fort in Karimabad, which has been renovated and converted into a museum. Prince Karim Aga Khan initiated the restoration efforts for Baltit Fort in 1991 when Mir Ghazanfar Ali Khan (now the Chief Executive of the Northern Areas) agreed to donate the fort to the Baltit Heritage Trust, a public charity formed for the purpose of owning and maintaining the fort. The AKCSP carried out extensive work on the fort, which took six years to complete. Baltit Fort was inaugurated in a glamorous ceremony that took place in 1996, with the Aga Khan and President Farooq Leghari in attendance.
Baltit Fort was the property of the Mirs for several centuries and it was certainly a wise decision by the current Mir of Hunza to hand it over to the public, for now it is the main tourist attraction in the area. Unfortunately, there are not that many tourists in Hunza these days. Mir Ghazanfar told me on this visit, “You must tell people how peaceful this area is. There are no Taliban here”. The lack of tourists (both foreign and domestic) has affected the economy of Hunza, and the hotels and bazaar lie empty. The last time I was here, Karimabad was full of Japanese tourists!
Hunza is in fact, the perfect get-away with its affordable hotels, stunning views and plenty to do during the day. Aside from visiting the well-maintained Baltit Fort and the bazaar where one can buy goods from China, there is also the lesser-known Altit Fort, also located in the valley. Perched high above the valley on a precarious cliff, the Altit Fort is older than the Baltit Fort. Indeed, Altit was about to topple over the cliff when its owner, Prince Amin Khan (Mir Ghazanfar’s brother) donated it to the AKCSP in 2001. They carried out immediate emergency repairs and now they are restoring the fort, which they plan to hand over to the community to use once it is ready later this year. In return for the fort, they built Prince Amin a new house in the picturesque orchard just below the fort. The AKCSP will soon be opening a café in the orchard where visitors can have tea and rest under the old, shady trees.
Altit Fort is over 800 years old and is said to be the birth place of the Hunza kingdom and the first fort of the region — it is also much smaller than Baltit. The fort clearly has its own natural defence system. When the capital shifted to Karimabad, Altit fort was only used in the summers, and during the British era it became a guest-house. Then around thirty years ago, when the kingdom of Hunza became a part of Pakistan, it was completely abandoned. Like the other forts, it would have decayed and crumbled had the AKCSP not stepped in. Now these renovated forts are helping to revitalise the region.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/daw ... -baltistan
September 5, 2009
Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of Progress
By JIM YARDLEY
PIPRI VILLAGE, India — Two very different recent scenes from India: At a power breakfast in New Delhi for many of the country’s corporate leaders and top economic officials, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee declared that India had “weathered the storm” of the global economic crisis and was witnessing “green shoots” in industry and services that signaled a return to more rapid growth by next year.
Hundreds of miles away in this farming village in Andhra Pradesh, in the south, weeds were the only green shoots sprouting in the black soil that belongs to the widow Chandli Bai. Her field went 12 weeks without rain during India’s annual monsoon season before showers finally arrived on Aug. 23, splattering down too late onto the dry dirt. Her summer crop of lentils was stillborn in the ground.
“We eat once a day,” said Mrs. Bai, 65, explaining how she and her family had survived the lack of rain.
For the past year, as the economic crisis convulsed much of the world, India wobbled but never tumbled over. And now that the world is starting to pull itself out of the mire, India seems poised to resume its rapid economic expansion. Government officials are projecting that growth will reach or surpass 6 percent this year and approach 8 percent next year, almost the pace that established India as an emerging global economic power second only to China.
But the cautious optimism about the broader economy has been tempered by a historic summertime drought that has underscored the stubborn fact that many people are largely untouched by the country’s progress. India’s new economy may be based on software, services and high technology, but hundreds of millions of Indians still look to the sky for their livelihoods; more than half the country’s 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture for a living even though agriculture represents only about 17 percent of the total economy.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world ... &th&emc=th
*****
Economic opportunities in Bangladesh attract interest from the Jamat abroad
Decades ago, Bangladesh — then known as East Pakistan — was home to a thriving Jamat. Ismailis were active in key industries including jute, textiles, steel, aluminum, leather, construction, and food processing, as well as trading, banking, insurance and hotels. The community was spread across the country, including major cities — Chittagong, Dhaka, Khulna, Mymensingh, Narayanganj, Rangpur, and several others.
Layed in 1959, the foundation stone of Karimabad Jamatkhana recalls a thriving Jamat in Dhaka and throughout Bangladesh. Photo: Ayeleen Ajanee Saleh“We had a large and active Jamat and were known as a strong business community,” recounts one long-time resident. Many still remember Mawlana Hazar Imam’s first visit to Dhaka in 1958, which filled up an entire stadium.
But in 1971 war broke out, resulting in the flight of millions of civilian refugees to India and West Pakistan. Some even fled further afield to Canada and the United States.
One member of the Jamat recalls: “I was the only member of my family who stayed behind to look after our house, while my parents, brothers and sisters left for India.” During the war, he provided a shelter to fellow Ismailis whose homes were destroyed or taken away.
After liberation, various industries were nationalised under the economic policies of the government of the day. The impact was felt by many Ismailis, whose businesses were forced to close. The country struggled to rebuild itself and even those Ismailis that remained had few options but to seek a brighter future abroad for themselves and their children. “The combination of the war and the lack of resources to cope with cyclones had crippled the country,” said one member of the Jamat.
Karim Noorddin stands in front of three buses from the transport business that he and his brother established in 2007. Photo: Ayeleen Ajanee Saleh
Despite the difficult challenges of the period, the Ismaili Imamat and the Jamat maintained a presence in Bangladesh. In 1980, the Aga Khan Foundation began working with local partners on projects in rural development, microfinance, and education. The Aga Khan School in Dhaka, founded by the Aga Khan Education Services in 1988, established itself among the top academic institutions in the country. Other civil society institutions such as the Grameen Bank and BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), as well as the enabling policies of the Government of Bangladesh, also contributed to improving the country’s economic conditions.
Today, Bangladesh is re-emerging as an area of economic interest to both the Jamat and the wider international community. With the advent of globalisation, many of the world’s largest corporations have sought to leverage the country’s low-cost labour pool. Foreign remittances have also fuelled the growth of local businesses, raised household disposable income and savings, and drawn the attention of Bangladeshis who had migrated to the West. Ismaili entrepreneurs have begun moving back into the country as well, sometimes with the facilitation of the Ismaili Council for Bangladesh.
Karim Noorddin moved to Dhaka from Cuttack, India in 1998, soon after he graduated from university. He joined his brother Nizar, who had moved to the city three years earlier. Karim was attracted by employment opportunities in Ismaili-run businesses. “Learning Bangla was a challenge,” he recalls, “but factors like Bangladesh’s proximity to India, the opportunity to gain practical experience, and also the success stories and support from friends, made it worthwhile.”
Initially working at an Ismaili business, the brothers went on to start a transportation business in 2007 with the support of the Ismaili Council’s Economic Matters Committee.
A view of the busy factory floor at the Currimbhoy family’s growing garments business. Photo: Zafar Currimbhoy
Former Dhaka resident Nazir Currimbhoy, decided to move back to the country in 1996 to pursue opportunity in the growing garments business. In 2007 he was joined by his son Zafar, a recent MBA graduate from the London Business School.
Walking away from recruiters from corporations in the United Kingdom and the United States, the younger Currimbhoy decided to follow his father’s entrepreneurial path. “Adjusting to the business culture was a challenge,” he says, “but since Dad’s business was already set up, it was much easier to get started.”
One advantage that he brings to the business is that clients in the West can communicate with him easily, and are comfortable dealing with someone who follows professional standards that they are familiar with. The Currimbhoys’ business employs over 130 employees and sources garments from over 70 factories and other suppliers in Asia for clients in Europe and North America.
But no opportunity is without risk. Even for those who have lived in Bangladesh in the past, and who speak the language and understand its business culture, the environment can be challenging.
A view of the Dhaka city skyline. Photo: Amyn SalehOne member of the Jamat who had moved back in 2008 says: “Things often move slowly when dealing with government permissions so you have to be patient.” He continues to push ahead with optimism, but advises people considering Bangladesh to do their research and ensure they are confident before making the move.
More Ismailis have been back to Bangladesh since Mawlana Hazar Imam’s Golden Jubilee visit in 2008. Former residents like Karim Rahim, whose family moved to Los Angeles in 1991 when he was only 10 years old, are seeing the country in a new light.
Driving through the streets of Dhaka, Rahim noted that despite the need for long-term improvements in key areas such as infrastructure and energy, he “saw a completely different Bangladesh.” In parallel with recent projects and investments of the Ismaili Imamat, such as the Aga Khan Academy in Dhaka and a new Ismaili Centre, the country’s development continues to unfold in a promising direction.
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/783/Econo ... mat-abroad
Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of Progress
By JIM YARDLEY
PIPRI VILLAGE, India — Two very different recent scenes from India: At a power breakfast in New Delhi for many of the country’s corporate leaders and top economic officials, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee declared that India had “weathered the storm” of the global economic crisis and was witnessing “green shoots” in industry and services that signaled a return to more rapid growth by next year.
Hundreds of miles away in this farming village in Andhra Pradesh, in the south, weeds were the only green shoots sprouting in the black soil that belongs to the widow Chandli Bai. Her field went 12 weeks without rain during India’s annual monsoon season before showers finally arrived on Aug. 23, splattering down too late onto the dry dirt. Her summer crop of lentils was stillborn in the ground.
“We eat once a day,” said Mrs. Bai, 65, explaining how she and her family had survived the lack of rain.
For the past year, as the economic crisis convulsed much of the world, India wobbled but never tumbled over. And now that the world is starting to pull itself out of the mire, India seems poised to resume its rapid economic expansion. Government officials are projecting that growth will reach or surpass 6 percent this year and approach 8 percent next year, almost the pace that established India as an emerging global economic power second only to China.
But the cautious optimism about the broader economy has been tempered by a historic summertime drought that has underscored the stubborn fact that many people are largely untouched by the country’s progress. India’s new economy may be based on software, services and high technology, but hundreds of millions of Indians still look to the sky for their livelihoods; more than half the country’s 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture for a living even though agriculture represents only about 17 percent of the total economy.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world ... &th&emc=th
*****
Economic opportunities in Bangladesh attract interest from the Jamat abroad
Decades ago, Bangladesh — then known as East Pakistan — was home to a thriving Jamat. Ismailis were active in key industries including jute, textiles, steel, aluminum, leather, construction, and food processing, as well as trading, banking, insurance and hotels. The community was spread across the country, including major cities — Chittagong, Dhaka, Khulna, Mymensingh, Narayanganj, Rangpur, and several others.
Layed in 1959, the foundation stone of Karimabad Jamatkhana recalls a thriving Jamat in Dhaka and throughout Bangladesh. Photo: Ayeleen Ajanee Saleh“We had a large and active Jamat and were known as a strong business community,” recounts one long-time resident. Many still remember Mawlana Hazar Imam’s first visit to Dhaka in 1958, which filled up an entire stadium.
But in 1971 war broke out, resulting in the flight of millions of civilian refugees to India and West Pakistan. Some even fled further afield to Canada and the United States.
One member of the Jamat recalls: “I was the only member of my family who stayed behind to look after our house, while my parents, brothers and sisters left for India.” During the war, he provided a shelter to fellow Ismailis whose homes were destroyed or taken away.
After liberation, various industries were nationalised under the economic policies of the government of the day. The impact was felt by many Ismailis, whose businesses were forced to close. The country struggled to rebuild itself and even those Ismailis that remained had few options but to seek a brighter future abroad for themselves and their children. “The combination of the war and the lack of resources to cope with cyclones had crippled the country,” said one member of the Jamat.
Karim Noorddin stands in front of three buses from the transport business that he and his brother established in 2007. Photo: Ayeleen Ajanee Saleh
Despite the difficult challenges of the period, the Ismaili Imamat and the Jamat maintained a presence in Bangladesh. In 1980, the Aga Khan Foundation began working with local partners on projects in rural development, microfinance, and education. The Aga Khan School in Dhaka, founded by the Aga Khan Education Services in 1988, established itself among the top academic institutions in the country. Other civil society institutions such as the Grameen Bank and BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), as well as the enabling policies of the Government of Bangladesh, also contributed to improving the country’s economic conditions.
Today, Bangladesh is re-emerging as an area of economic interest to both the Jamat and the wider international community. With the advent of globalisation, many of the world’s largest corporations have sought to leverage the country’s low-cost labour pool. Foreign remittances have also fuelled the growth of local businesses, raised household disposable income and savings, and drawn the attention of Bangladeshis who had migrated to the West. Ismaili entrepreneurs have begun moving back into the country as well, sometimes with the facilitation of the Ismaili Council for Bangladesh.
Karim Noorddin moved to Dhaka from Cuttack, India in 1998, soon after he graduated from university. He joined his brother Nizar, who had moved to the city three years earlier. Karim was attracted by employment opportunities in Ismaili-run businesses. “Learning Bangla was a challenge,” he recalls, “but factors like Bangladesh’s proximity to India, the opportunity to gain practical experience, and also the success stories and support from friends, made it worthwhile.”
Initially working at an Ismaili business, the brothers went on to start a transportation business in 2007 with the support of the Ismaili Council’s Economic Matters Committee.
A view of the busy factory floor at the Currimbhoy family’s growing garments business. Photo: Zafar Currimbhoy
Former Dhaka resident Nazir Currimbhoy, decided to move back to the country in 1996 to pursue opportunity in the growing garments business. In 2007 he was joined by his son Zafar, a recent MBA graduate from the London Business School.
Walking away from recruiters from corporations in the United Kingdom and the United States, the younger Currimbhoy decided to follow his father’s entrepreneurial path. “Adjusting to the business culture was a challenge,” he says, “but since Dad’s business was already set up, it was much easier to get started.”
One advantage that he brings to the business is that clients in the West can communicate with him easily, and are comfortable dealing with someone who follows professional standards that they are familiar with. The Currimbhoys’ business employs over 130 employees and sources garments from over 70 factories and other suppliers in Asia for clients in Europe and North America.
But no opportunity is without risk. Even for those who have lived in Bangladesh in the past, and who speak the language and understand its business culture, the environment can be challenging.
A view of the Dhaka city skyline. Photo: Amyn SalehOne member of the Jamat who had moved back in 2008 says: “Things often move slowly when dealing with government permissions so you have to be patient.” He continues to push ahead with optimism, but advises people considering Bangladesh to do their research and ensure they are confident before making the move.
More Ismailis have been back to Bangladesh since Mawlana Hazar Imam’s Golden Jubilee visit in 2008. Former residents like Karim Rahim, whose family moved to Los Angeles in 1991 when he was only 10 years old, are seeing the country in a new light.
Driving through the streets of Dhaka, Rahim noted that despite the need for long-term improvements in key areas such as infrastructure and energy, he “saw a completely different Bangladesh.” In parallel with recent projects and investments of the Ismaili Imamat, such as the Aga Khan Academy in Dhaka and a new Ismaili Centre, the country’s development continues to unfold in a promising direction.
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/783/Econo ... mat-abroad
September 8, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Japan Comes of Age
By RYU MURAKAMI
Tokyo
LAST week, some news outlets called it a revolution when the Democratic Party of Japan unseated the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been in power here almost continuously for a half-century. The old guard was out, replaced by a breath of fresh air. So why don’t people look happier?
The Japanese people are realizing that no government has the power to fix their problems. But this is a good thing — Japan is finally growing up.
Our news media have been dispatching reporters to ask men and women on the street what they hope for from the new administration. Citizens lean into the microphone and answer with simple honesty: “I want them to improve the economy” or “beef up social security” or “solve the unemployment problem.” But the melancholy expressions on their faces belie their stated expectations.
In the past, the government was able to fix our problems. After World War II, Japan’s growth was largely state-directed. The people expected the government to build roads and hospitals, to protect their businesses and to guarantee their employment. Today, in part because of our aging society and our troubled pension system, the government simply doesn’t have the money to make everything better.
Many people in the Liberal Democratic Party seemed to conclude that the Democratic Party didn’t win, the L.D.P. lost. It’s the same sort of distinction a Red Sox fan might make when his team is defeated by the Yankees. Some have yet to grasp the simple fact that the Liberal Democrats can no longer deliver happiness to all the people. Or perhaps it’s a fact that they’re just not willing to face.
The party bought the support of provincial voters by shoveling money to farmers, builders and small- and medium-sized businesses. Early in the postwar era, bringing public and private enterprises to one’s own district through connections and backroom deals seemed to be the main occupation of politicians. They functioned more as lobbyists than as politicians, and it’s hard to imagine a softer job. That’s why they love to have their sons and daughters follow in their footsteps.
The days of plenty eventually disappeared, but competing demands for the government’s largess continued. One group in a given district might want the government to subsidize highway construction while another wishes to see the local hospital rebuilt. A major problem here today, amid the worsening business climate, is that hospitals are under financial stress.
But a landslide victory won’t give the Democratic Party the money to both construct all the roads and finance the hospitals. National and local government finances are on the verge of collapse. The Japanese are not naïve enough to rejoice over a change of administration at a time like this, or foolish enough to believe that their lives are about to improve.
The depressing truth is hitting home. Though one stratum of Japanese society may benefit from the change in government, others may be hurt. Major corporations may be rescued with tax cuts while workers’ wages remain stagnant. If the minimum wage is raised, then corporations will shift production overseas.
The days when everything worked like a dream and everyone’s standard of living kept rising are over, and have been for a long time. Now that there is no longer enough money, the Japanese public has to make some hard choices.
Deep down, we all know this. That’s why the gloomy expressions on the faces of Japanese on the street haven’t changed. But this does not mean we are on the verge of decline or decay. We’re merely experiencing the melancholy that any child goes through as adulthood approaches.
Ryu Murakami is the author of the novels “Coin Locker Babies” and “In the Miso Soup.” This essay was translated by Ralph McCarthy from the Japanese.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Japan Comes of Age
By RYU MURAKAMI
Tokyo
LAST week, some news outlets called it a revolution when the Democratic Party of Japan unseated the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been in power here almost continuously for a half-century. The old guard was out, replaced by a breath of fresh air. So why don’t people look happier?
The Japanese people are realizing that no government has the power to fix their problems. But this is a good thing — Japan is finally growing up.
Our news media have been dispatching reporters to ask men and women on the street what they hope for from the new administration. Citizens lean into the microphone and answer with simple honesty: “I want them to improve the economy” or “beef up social security” or “solve the unemployment problem.” But the melancholy expressions on their faces belie their stated expectations.
In the past, the government was able to fix our problems. After World War II, Japan’s growth was largely state-directed. The people expected the government to build roads and hospitals, to protect their businesses and to guarantee their employment. Today, in part because of our aging society and our troubled pension system, the government simply doesn’t have the money to make everything better.
Many people in the Liberal Democratic Party seemed to conclude that the Democratic Party didn’t win, the L.D.P. lost. It’s the same sort of distinction a Red Sox fan might make when his team is defeated by the Yankees. Some have yet to grasp the simple fact that the Liberal Democrats can no longer deliver happiness to all the people. Or perhaps it’s a fact that they’re just not willing to face.
The party bought the support of provincial voters by shoveling money to farmers, builders and small- and medium-sized businesses. Early in the postwar era, bringing public and private enterprises to one’s own district through connections and backroom deals seemed to be the main occupation of politicians. They functioned more as lobbyists than as politicians, and it’s hard to imagine a softer job. That’s why they love to have their sons and daughters follow in their footsteps.
The days of plenty eventually disappeared, but competing demands for the government’s largess continued. One group in a given district might want the government to subsidize highway construction while another wishes to see the local hospital rebuilt. A major problem here today, amid the worsening business climate, is that hospitals are under financial stress.
But a landslide victory won’t give the Democratic Party the money to both construct all the roads and finance the hospitals. National and local government finances are on the verge of collapse. The Japanese are not naïve enough to rejoice over a change of administration at a time like this, or foolish enough to believe that their lives are about to improve.
The depressing truth is hitting home. Though one stratum of Japanese society may benefit from the change in government, others may be hurt. Major corporations may be rescued with tax cuts while workers’ wages remain stagnant. If the minimum wage is raised, then corporations will shift production overseas.
The days when everything worked like a dream and everyone’s standard of living kept rising are over, and have been for a long time. Now that there is no longer enough money, the Japanese public has to make some hard choices.
Deep down, we all know this. That’s why the gloomy expressions on the faces of Japanese on the street haven’t changed. But this does not mean we are on the verge of decline or decay. We’re merely experiencing the melancholy that any child goes through as adulthood approaches.
Ryu Murakami is the author of the novels “Coin Locker Babies” and “In the Miso Soup.” This essay was translated by Ralph McCarthy from the Japanese.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opini ... nted=print
September 16, 2009
Indian Women Find New Peace in Rail Commute
By JIM YARDLEY
PALWAL, India — As the morning commuter train rattled down the track, Chinu Sharma, an office worker, enjoyed the absence of men. Some of them pinch and grope women on trains, or shout insults and catcalls, she said. Her friend Vandana Rohile agreed and widened her eyes in mock imitation.
“Sometimes they just stare at you,” said Ms. Rohile, 27.
Up and down the jostling train, women repeated the same theme: As millions of women have poured into the Indian work force over the last decade, they have met with different obstacles in a tradition-bound, patriarchal culture, but few are more annoying than the basic task of getting to work.
The problems of taunting and harassment, known as eve teasing, are so persistent that in recent months the government has decided to simply remove men altogether. In a pilot program, eight new commuter trains exclusively for female passengers have been introduced in India’s four largest cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta.
The trains are known as Ladies Specials, and on one recent round trip in which a male reporter got permission to board, the women commuting between the industrial town of Palwal and New Delhi were very pleased.
“It’s so nice here,” said a teacher, Kiran Khas, who has commuted by train for 17 years. Ms. Khas said the regular trains were thronged with vegetable sellers, pickpockets, beggars and lots of men. “Here on this train,” she said, as if describing a miracle, “you can board anywhere and sit freely.”
India would seem to be a country where women have shattered the glass ceiling. The country’s most powerful politician, Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party, is a woman. The country’s current president, a somewhat ceremonial position, is a woman. So are the foreign secretary and the chief minister of the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and the new minister of railways. India’s Constitution guarantees equal rights for women, while Indian law stipulates equal pay and punishment for sexual harassment.
But the reality is very different for the average working woman, many analysts say.
Since India began economic reforms in the early 1990s, women have entered the urban work force, initially as government office workers, but now increasingly as employees in the booming services sector or in professional jobs. Over all, the number of working women has roughly doubled in 15 years.
But violence against women has also increased, according to national statistics. Between 2003 and 2007, rape cases rose by more than 30 percent, kidnapping or abduction cases rose by more than 50 percent, while torture and molestation also jumped sharply.
Mala Bhandari, who runs an organization focused on women and children, said the influx of women into the workplace had eroded the traditional separation between public space (the workplace) and private space (the home). “Now that women have started occupying public spaces, issues will always arise,” she said. “And the first issue is security.”
India’s newspapers are filled with accounts of the frictions wrought by so much social change.
Last week, a husband in Noida was brought in by the police and accused of beating his wife because she had cut her hair in a Western style. In June, four colleges in Kanpur tried to bar female students from wearing blue jeans, saying that they were “indecent” and that they contributed to rising cases of sexual harassment. After protests from female students, state officials ordered the colleges to drop the restriction.
For many years, women traveling by train sat with men, until crowding and security concerns prompted the railroad to reserve two compartments per train for women. But with trains badly overcrowded, men would break into cars for women and claim seats. Mumbai started operating two women-only trains in 1992, yet the program was never expanded. Then, with complaints rising from female passengers, Mamata Banerjee, the new minister of railways, announced the eight new Ladies Specials trains.
“It speaks of their coming of age and assertiveness,” said Mukesh Nigam, a high-ranking railway official.
Many men are not thrilled. Several female passengers said eve teasing was worse here in northern India than elsewhere in the country. As the Ladies Special idled on Track 7 at the station in Palwal, a few men glared from the platform. The Ladies Special was far less crowded, with clean, padded benches and electric fans, compared with the dirty, darkened train on Track 6 filled with sullen men. Vandals sometimes write profanities on the Ladies Special, or worse.
“The local boys will come and use the bathroom on the train,” said Meena Kumari, one of the female ticket collectors in flowing blue saris who patrol the train along with female security officers. “They do it out of contempt. They do not want the train to run.”
As the train began moving, one woman sat meditating. Nearby, an accountant read a Hindu prayer book, while college students gossiped a few rows away.
“If you go to work, then you are independent, you earn some money and can help the family,” said Archana Gahlot, 25. “And if something happens to the marriage, you have something.”
“Even on this train,” Ms. Gahlot continued, “men sometimes board and try to harass the women. Sometimes they openly say, ‘Please close the Ladies Special.’
“Maybe they think the government is helping out women and not men,” she added.
The eight new trains represent a tiny fraction of the nation’s commuter trains. Only one Ladies Special serves New Delhi, though the Railway Ministry has announced future Ladies Special service. Dr. Ranjari Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, said the service was a politically astute move, if not a long-term solution.
“You really need to make every train as safe as the Ladies Specials,” Dr. Kumari said.
Men are hardly the only ones unnerved by the changing role of women in Indian society. Namita Sharma, 39, remembers that her mother advised her to become a teacher to balance between work and family; instead, she chose a career in fashion. Now that Ms. Sharma has a 14-year-old daughter with ideas of her own, she worries about crime.
“She has her own point of view, and I have my own point of view for her,” she said, smiling. “Let’s see who wins. She talks of independence. I am independent.”
But, she added, “Let’s talk of a secure kind of independence.”
Then the train stopped, and Ms. Sharma stood up. Asked what more the government could do for women, she laughed.
“Oh my God, it is a long list,” she said. “But I’m sorry, this is my station.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world ... nted=print
Indian Women Find New Peace in Rail Commute
By JIM YARDLEY
PALWAL, India — As the morning commuter train rattled down the track, Chinu Sharma, an office worker, enjoyed the absence of men. Some of them pinch and grope women on trains, or shout insults and catcalls, she said. Her friend Vandana Rohile agreed and widened her eyes in mock imitation.
“Sometimes they just stare at you,” said Ms. Rohile, 27.
Up and down the jostling train, women repeated the same theme: As millions of women have poured into the Indian work force over the last decade, they have met with different obstacles in a tradition-bound, patriarchal culture, but few are more annoying than the basic task of getting to work.
The problems of taunting and harassment, known as eve teasing, are so persistent that in recent months the government has decided to simply remove men altogether. In a pilot program, eight new commuter trains exclusively for female passengers have been introduced in India’s four largest cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta.
The trains are known as Ladies Specials, and on one recent round trip in which a male reporter got permission to board, the women commuting between the industrial town of Palwal and New Delhi were very pleased.
“It’s so nice here,” said a teacher, Kiran Khas, who has commuted by train for 17 years. Ms. Khas said the regular trains were thronged with vegetable sellers, pickpockets, beggars and lots of men. “Here on this train,” she said, as if describing a miracle, “you can board anywhere and sit freely.”
India would seem to be a country where women have shattered the glass ceiling. The country’s most powerful politician, Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party, is a woman. The country’s current president, a somewhat ceremonial position, is a woman. So are the foreign secretary and the chief minister of the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and the new minister of railways. India’s Constitution guarantees equal rights for women, while Indian law stipulates equal pay and punishment for sexual harassment.
But the reality is very different for the average working woman, many analysts say.
Since India began economic reforms in the early 1990s, women have entered the urban work force, initially as government office workers, but now increasingly as employees in the booming services sector or in professional jobs. Over all, the number of working women has roughly doubled in 15 years.
But violence against women has also increased, according to national statistics. Between 2003 and 2007, rape cases rose by more than 30 percent, kidnapping or abduction cases rose by more than 50 percent, while torture and molestation also jumped sharply.
Mala Bhandari, who runs an organization focused on women and children, said the influx of women into the workplace had eroded the traditional separation between public space (the workplace) and private space (the home). “Now that women have started occupying public spaces, issues will always arise,” she said. “And the first issue is security.”
India’s newspapers are filled with accounts of the frictions wrought by so much social change.
Last week, a husband in Noida was brought in by the police and accused of beating his wife because she had cut her hair in a Western style. In June, four colleges in Kanpur tried to bar female students from wearing blue jeans, saying that they were “indecent” and that they contributed to rising cases of sexual harassment. After protests from female students, state officials ordered the colleges to drop the restriction.
For many years, women traveling by train sat with men, until crowding and security concerns prompted the railroad to reserve two compartments per train for women. But with trains badly overcrowded, men would break into cars for women and claim seats. Mumbai started operating two women-only trains in 1992, yet the program was never expanded. Then, with complaints rising from female passengers, Mamata Banerjee, the new minister of railways, announced the eight new Ladies Specials trains.
“It speaks of their coming of age and assertiveness,” said Mukesh Nigam, a high-ranking railway official.
Many men are not thrilled. Several female passengers said eve teasing was worse here in northern India than elsewhere in the country. As the Ladies Special idled on Track 7 at the station in Palwal, a few men glared from the platform. The Ladies Special was far less crowded, with clean, padded benches and electric fans, compared with the dirty, darkened train on Track 6 filled with sullen men. Vandals sometimes write profanities on the Ladies Special, or worse.
“The local boys will come and use the bathroom on the train,” said Meena Kumari, one of the female ticket collectors in flowing blue saris who patrol the train along with female security officers. “They do it out of contempt. They do not want the train to run.”
As the train began moving, one woman sat meditating. Nearby, an accountant read a Hindu prayer book, while college students gossiped a few rows away.
“If you go to work, then you are independent, you earn some money and can help the family,” said Archana Gahlot, 25. “And if something happens to the marriage, you have something.”
“Even on this train,” Ms. Gahlot continued, “men sometimes board and try to harass the women. Sometimes they openly say, ‘Please close the Ladies Special.’
“Maybe they think the government is helping out women and not men,” she added.
The eight new trains represent a tiny fraction of the nation’s commuter trains. Only one Ladies Special serves New Delhi, though the Railway Ministry has announced future Ladies Special service. Dr. Ranjari Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, said the service was a politically astute move, if not a long-term solution.
“You really need to make every train as safe as the Ladies Specials,” Dr. Kumari said.
Men are hardly the only ones unnerved by the changing role of women in Indian society. Namita Sharma, 39, remembers that her mother advised her to become a teacher to balance between work and family; instead, she chose a career in fashion. Now that Ms. Sharma has a 14-year-old daughter with ideas of her own, she worries about crime.
“She has her own point of view, and I have my own point of view for her,” she said, smiling. “Let’s see who wins. She talks of independence. I am independent.”
But, she added, “Let’s talk of a secure kind of independence.”
Then the train stopped, and Ms. Sharma stood up. Asked what more the government could do for women, she laughed.
“Oh my God, it is a long list,” she said. “But I’m sorry, this is my station.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world ... nted=print
October 1, 2009
On Day for China Pride, Little Interest in Ideology
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Xie Jun, 23, is a modern Chinese patriot. On Thursday, when thousands of soldiers and rows of tanks and caissons move in perfect order past Tiananmen Square to commemorate 60 years of Communist Party rule, his heart will skip a beat and a lump will rise in his throat.
“I’ve learned from textbooks the history of China — how we were invaded in the past by foreigners,” he said this week as he sold bananas and persimmons from a fruit cart in a leafy downtown neighborhood. “How, in order to survive, we had to band together in love of country. I’m proud that China has turned from a backward country into a country with international standing in such short time.”
Few would deny him his pride in China’s miracle. But ask Mr. Xie to explain China’s core values — not what his country achieved, but what it stands for — and he is dumbstruck, a student called on in class to report on the book he forgot to read.
“The ability of China to adapt,” he said after a long silence. “To learn from the West.” And, in a phrase that sounds plucked from a pamphlet, “the diligence and industriousness of the laboring masses.”
China’s ruling Communist Party is throwing itself a huge and meticulously choreographed anniversary party on Thursday, a celebration whose overarching theme echoes the words Mao spoke after forcing the Nationalists to surrender Beijing in 1949. “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation,” Mao said. “We have stood up.”
From the displays of advanced weaponry to the celebration posters highlighting Shanghai’s forest of skyscrapers, the unmistakable message of this celebration is that Mao was right and that the Communist Party is carrying all China to prosperity and worldwide respect.
But prosperity is a condition, not a value. And on the eve of a great patriotic celebration, at least a few Communist leaders must be wondering whether lashing patriotism to eternal prosperity is not, at least a little, like riding a tiger.
“There is no ideology in China anymore,” Zhang Ming, a professor of political science at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The government has no ideology. The people have no ideology. The reason the government is in power is because they can say: ‘I can make your lives better every day. I can give you stability. And I have the power.’ As long as they make people’s lives better, it’s O.K. But what happens on the day when they no longer can?”
The issue is not whether the Chinese people have reason to love their country. Beijing residents, asked this week about why they love their country, frequently talked about its economic strength and rise in global status, but they also often referred to China’s 5,000 years of history, a vibrant culture and the ethnic unity of a nation in which 9 of 10 citizens are of Han descent.
Those are national narratives that bind Chinese just as surely as melting-pot Americans are bound by Thomas Jefferson’s stirring calls for liberty and the transformative experience of the Civil War.
But despite insistent effort — patriotism is a staple of the education system, and citizens are exhorted to equate the state and the homeland — none of the Chinese narrative bears on the Communists and their government.
And the official ideology of socialism and the revolutionary struggle against capitalist roaders, though still taught in universities and factory halls, is treated as dull propaganda by all except a dwindling number of true believers.
Historians and sociologists say that socialist ideology once was a bedrock of Chinese patriotism and support of the government. Paradoxically, it was killed by the reform and opening of China that began 30 years ago and brought the economic miracle of today.
What inspires loyalty today is not ideology, but the government’s competence at raising China from poverty.
“I am not a member of the party,” said Rao Jin, a writer whose Web site, Anti-CNN, is a symbol of Chinese nationalism and rejection of Western criticism. “But I believe that you should love the party at the same time as loving your country. Everything that China has right now is because of the C.C.P.,” the Chinese Communist Party.
“History has proved that no other regime can govern China,” he said. “If you change the ruling entity, if the C.C.P. were suddenly not in power, most people agree that it would be total chaos.”
It is a view embraced by most Chinese patriots interviewed this week, within limits.
“The party is doing a pretty good job of running the country, so we’re pretty happy with it,” Li Yuqian, a 30-year-old student at Capital Sports University, said as he munched French fries in a local McDonald’s. “But what we love is this country — and loving this country is very different thing from loving the party.”
Which didn't mean, he hastened to add, that he was not loyal. “Don’t write that I don’t love the party,” he added. “O.K.?”
Xiyun Yang contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world ... nted=print
On Day for China Pride, Little Interest in Ideology
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Xie Jun, 23, is a modern Chinese patriot. On Thursday, when thousands of soldiers and rows of tanks and caissons move in perfect order past Tiananmen Square to commemorate 60 years of Communist Party rule, his heart will skip a beat and a lump will rise in his throat.
“I’ve learned from textbooks the history of China — how we were invaded in the past by foreigners,” he said this week as he sold bananas and persimmons from a fruit cart in a leafy downtown neighborhood. “How, in order to survive, we had to band together in love of country. I’m proud that China has turned from a backward country into a country with international standing in such short time.”
Few would deny him his pride in China’s miracle. But ask Mr. Xie to explain China’s core values — not what his country achieved, but what it stands for — and he is dumbstruck, a student called on in class to report on the book he forgot to read.
“The ability of China to adapt,” he said after a long silence. “To learn from the West.” And, in a phrase that sounds plucked from a pamphlet, “the diligence and industriousness of the laboring masses.”
China’s ruling Communist Party is throwing itself a huge and meticulously choreographed anniversary party on Thursday, a celebration whose overarching theme echoes the words Mao spoke after forcing the Nationalists to surrender Beijing in 1949. “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation,” Mao said. “We have stood up.”
From the displays of advanced weaponry to the celebration posters highlighting Shanghai’s forest of skyscrapers, the unmistakable message of this celebration is that Mao was right and that the Communist Party is carrying all China to prosperity and worldwide respect.
But prosperity is a condition, not a value. And on the eve of a great patriotic celebration, at least a few Communist leaders must be wondering whether lashing patriotism to eternal prosperity is not, at least a little, like riding a tiger.
“There is no ideology in China anymore,” Zhang Ming, a professor of political science at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The government has no ideology. The people have no ideology. The reason the government is in power is because they can say: ‘I can make your lives better every day. I can give you stability. And I have the power.’ As long as they make people’s lives better, it’s O.K. But what happens on the day when they no longer can?”
The issue is not whether the Chinese people have reason to love their country. Beijing residents, asked this week about why they love their country, frequently talked about its economic strength and rise in global status, but they also often referred to China’s 5,000 years of history, a vibrant culture and the ethnic unity of a nation in which 9 of 10 citizens are of Han descent.
Those are national narratives that bind Chinese just as surely as melting-pot Americans are bound by Thomas Jefferson’s stirring calls for liberty and the transformative experience of the Civil War.
But despite insistent effort — patriotism is a staple of the education system, and citizens are exhorted to equate the state and the homeland — none of the Chinese narrative bears on the Communists and their government.
And the official ideology of socialism and the revolutionary struggle against capitalist roaders, though still taught in universities and factory halls, is treated as dull propaganda by all except a dwindling number of true believers.
Historians and sociologists say that socialist ideology once was a bedrock of Chinese patriotism and support of the government. Paradoxically, it was killed by the reform and opening of China that began 30 years ago and brought the economic miracle of today.
What inspires loyalty today is not ideology, but the government’s competence at raising China from poverty.
“I am not a member of the party,” said Rao Jin, a writer whose Web site, Anti-CNN, is a symbol of Chinese nationalism and rejection of Western criticism. “But I believe that you should love the party at the same time as loving your country. Everything that China has right now is because of the C.C.P.,” the Chinese Communist Party.
“History has proved that no other regime can govern China,” he said. “If you change the ruling entity, if the C.C.P. were suddenly not in power, most people agree that it would be total chaos.”
It is a view embraced by most Chinese patriots interviewed this week, within limits.
“The party is doing a pretty good job of running the country, so we’re pretty happy with it,” Li Yuqian, a 30-year-old student at Capital Sports University, said as he munched French fries in a local McDonald’s. “But what we love is this country — and loving this country is very different thing from loving the party.”
Which didn't mean, he hastened to add, that he was not loyal. “Don’t write that I don’t love the party,” he added. “O.K.?”
Xiyun Yang contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world ... nted=print
October 11, 2009
Racing Time and Taliban to Rebuild in Pakistan
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and IRFAN ASHRAF
NAZARABAD, Pakistan — The fighting is over and the villagers have returned, but life here remains suspended. Villagers’ buffaloes are gone, and their harvests are spoiled. Power is still out in many areas. Schools, blown up by the Taliban, lay in heaps. Even the bricks have been sold.
“We are orphans,” said Akbar Khan, a school principal. “No one has come to ask about us.”
This is the upper Swat Valley, ground zero for the Taliban in northern Pakistan. While urban areas farther south are bustling and back to life, the real test of Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban in Swat will take place here, in the impoverished villages where the militant movement began.
But more than two months after the end of active combat, with winter fast approaching, reconstruction has yet to begin, and little has been accomplished on the ground to win back people’s trust, villagers and local officials say.
The lag, they argue, is risky: It was a sense of near-total abandonment by the government that opened people to the Taliban to begin with, they say, and the longer people are left to fend for themselves, the greater the chance of a relapse.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/world ... ?th&emc=th
Racing Time and Taliban to Rebuild in Pakistan
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and IRFAN ASHRAF
NAZARABAD, Pakistan — The fighting is over and the villagers have returned, but life here remains suspended. Villagers’ buffaloes are gone, and their harvests are spoiled. Power is still out in many areas. Schools, blown up by the Taliban, lay in heaps. Even the bricks have been sold.
“We are orphans,” said Akbar Khan, a school principal. “No one has come to ask about us.”
This is the upper Swat Valley, ground zero for the Taliban in northern Pakistan. While urban areas farther south are bustling and back to life, the real test of Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban in Swat will take place here, in the impoverished villages where the militant movement began.
But more than two months after the end of active combat, with winter fast approaching, reconstruction has yet to begin, and little has been accomplished on the ground to win back people’s trust, villagers and local officials say.
The lag, they argue, is risky: It was a sense of near-total abandonment by the government that opened people to the Taliban to begin with, they say, and the longer people are left to fend for themselves, the greater the chance of a relapse.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/world ... ?th&emc=th
There is a related slide show linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/world ... gewanted=1
October 12, 2009
On Cluttered Ballots of India, Families Proliferate
By JIM YARDLEY
AMRAVATI, India — Rajendra Shekhawat, nicely polished in a pressed white shirt and neatly parted hair, his face sunburned from campaigning in the south Indian sun, says he is running for office as a common man. His pink cheeks suggest otherwise, though, since common men in India usually toil outdoors without requiring sunscreen.
Another clue is the elephant in every room in which he campaigns in this city in the state of Maharashtra: Mom. She is Pratibha Patil, the president of India.
“I’m not using my parents’ name at all,” Mr. Shekhawat, 42, stated in an upstairs office in his parents’ home, which he is indisputably using as a campaign headquarters. “I’m running on my own. But for sure, being in a political family for so many years does help me, and gives me easy accessibility for doing the work of the people.”
Democracy is built on the oft-tarnished ideal that any man or woman can get elected, but in India, home to the world’s biggest democracy, it helps to be part of a political family. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, scions of the governing Congress Party, is India’s version of the Kennedys. But other political dynasties, large and small, have proliferated so rapidly that many analysts believe nepotism is corroding the political system.
India’s chaotic politics can sometimes seem democratic to a fault: the election cycle rarely pauses and the country has roughly 1,050 registered national and regional political parties. But most of the major parties, including the majority Congress Party, are internally undemocratic; there are no primaries and party leaders discourage public dissent. Party bosses select candidates and have shown an increasing tendency to select their own relatives.
Here in Amravati, the decision by Congress Party leaders to run Mr. Shekhawat for Tuesday’s elections in Maharashtra State has provoked an angry backlash. He is running for a state assembly seat in the same district where his parents once held elected office. But to put him there, Congress leaders pushed aside Mr. Sunil Deshmukh, a former radiologist and two-term Congress incumbent with broad local support. Leaders offered Mr. Deshmukh the chance to run elsewhere, but he rebelled and is seeking his own seat as an independent.
“This is a fight against injustice,” declared Mr. Deshmukh, warming to his role as political insurgent. “If he is defeated, that will send a very strong message to all parties, no? If the person is only the son or daughter or a nephew of an important person, you can’t just thrust him on the people.”
Across India, political families are entrenched at every level of government and politics. At least nine of the 32 members of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet either descended from political families or have children seeking or holding office. Parliament is littered with political families; a recent study found that 31 of the 58 women elected had a husband, brother, father or father-in-law in politics.
The trend is even more glaring at the state level. In Maharashtra, analysts estimate that 30 or more party candidates running this month are from political families. The state’s chief minister, the top executive post, is the son of a former chief minister. This is also the case in two other states while the Congress Party is strongly considering replacing the late chief minister of Andhra Pradesh with his son.
“It has gotten into the DNA of the Indian political system,” said Jagdeep Chhokar, a founding member of the Association for Democratic Reform in New Delhi. “To control the workings of the party, the leader depends on trusted people. And one of the traditions of Indian culture is that you trust family members more than outsiders.”
Indian politics have a high turnover rate and voting blocs can be defined by region, religion, caste or community. Yet analysts say Indian voters favor a familiar family pedigree, partly because of a cultural reverence for the family and because of habits in some regions that trace back centuries. Several of the royal families who ruled over feudal states have today evolved into political families.
Modern India’s political marketplace is so crowded with parties and candidates that the “brand” of a familiar family name can bring an advantage, several analysts say. And the closed nature of political parties often perpetuates the dynastic problem; in several cases, rebels who broke from one party have formed their own and installed relatives around them.
Few political families are eager to step away from the power and lucre of office. In the state of Haryana, which has several local political dynasties, a recent study concluded that incumbents running for re-election had increased their personal wealth, on average, by 388 percent during their five years in office.
“Every political family these days is keen to keep someone in the field,” said Suhas Palshikar, who teaches politics at Pune University in Maharashtra. “Lots of resources are involved. Lots of networks are involved. And to put it crudely, a lot of money is involved.”
Mrs. Patil, 74, the Indian president, has less than three years remaining in her term. The position of president is largely ceremonial, with real power invested in the prime minister and his cabinet, though the presidency does command deference. Mrs. Patil’s press officer said the president had not been involved in her son’s candidacy but that the son, like anyone, has a constitutional right to seek office.
Her son’s opponents belittle any suggestion that his family did not orchestrate his candidacy and call him a carpetbagger who has spent much of his life away from Amravati, returning only in the past year after his political ambitions had been kindled.
“His only asset is his mom,” said Dr. Pradeep Shingore, 56, a cardiologist who is the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate for the seat. “Politics is being used as ancestral property.”
On a cloudless morning in one of the city’s slums, the incumbent, Mr. Deshmukh, led supporters on a padyatra, or foot march, a ritual in Indian politicking. Sprinkled in the crowd were the mayor and 20 other local officials from the Congress Party who are defiantly supporting him.
“People are very angry,” said Ashok Dongre, the mayor. “These families are not good for democracy because the common person, the party worker in the field, should be encouraged to go for higher positions. If you do not do that, how will the party succeed?”
Many observers consider Mr. Deshmukh the favorite in the race, though he faces practical obstacles. Every candidate on the ballot is accompanied by a party symbol, which provides a guide for illiterate rural voters. The Congress symbol, an open hand, is iconic in India. But as an independent, Mr. Deshmukh had no symbol; after considering choices offered by the election bureau, he decided upon an image of a television.
“He has come to seek your blessing!” a campaign worker shouted in the slum as others waved banners with the television image. “His symbol is television! Tee-vee! Tee-vee! Tee-vee!”
For his part, Mr. Shekhawat, the president’s son, brushes aside criticism of his candidacy. He is making his first run for office after working for an educational institute controlled by his family and has spent more than a decade working inside the Congress Party. He says Mr. Deshmukh has failed to promote development projects adequately and accuses him of the political sin of disloyalty.
“This kind of defiance shows indiscipline,” Mr. Shekhawat said. “Nobody is above the party. Nobody.”
Nepotism presents an especially complicated question for the Congress Party and the Gandhi dynasty. Rahul Gandhi, the presumptive heir to the party, has been visiting poor villages while promoting the idea of making the party more open and internally democratic. As part of his tour, Mr. Gandhi appeared Friday in Amravati for a rally with local Congress candidates.
On the stage with him was the president’s son.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/world ... gewanted=1
October 12, 2009
On Cluttered Ballots of India, Families Proliferate
By JIM YARDLEY
AMRAVATI, India — Rajendra Shekhawat, nicely polished in a pressed white shirt and neatly parted hair, his face sunburned from campaigning in the south Indian sun, says he is running for office as a common man. His pink cheeks suggest otherwise, though, since common men in India usually toil outdoors without requiring sunscreen.
Another clue is the elephant in every room in which he campaigns in this city in the state of Maharashtra: Mom. She is Pratibha Patil, the president of India.
“I’m not using my parents’ name at all,” Mr. Shekhawat, 42, stated in an upstairs office in his parents’ home, which he is indisputably using as a campaign headquarters. “I’m running on my own. But for sure, being in a political family for so many years does help me, and gives me easy accessibility for doing the work of the people.”
Democracy is built on the oft-tarnished ideal that any man or woman can get elected, but in India, home to the world’s biggest democracy, it helps to be part of a political family. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, scions of the governing Congress Party, is India’s version of the Kennedys. But other political dynasties, large and small, have proliferated so rapidly that many analysts believe nepotism is corroding the political system.
India’s chaotic politics can sometimes seem democratic to a fault: the election cycle rarely pauses and the country has roughly 1,050 registered national and regional political parties. But most of the major parties, including the majority Congress Party, are internally undemocratic; there are no primaries and party leaders discourage public dissent. Party bosses select candidates and have shown an increasing tendency to select their own relatives.
Here in Amravati, the decision by Congress Party leaders to run Mr. Shekhawat for Tuesday’s elections in Maharashtra State has provoked an angry backlash. He is running for a state assembly seat in the same district where his parents once held elected office. But to put him there, Congress leaders pushed aside Mr. Sunil Deshmukh, a former radiologist and two-term Congress incumbent with broad local support. Leaders offered Mr. Deshmukh the chance to run elsewhere, but he rebelled and is seeking his own seat as an independent.
“This is a fight against injustice,” declared Mr. Deshmukh, warming to his role as political insurgent. “If he is defeated, that will send a very strong message to all parties, no? If the person is only the son or daughter or a nephew of an important person, you can’t just thrust him on the people.”
Across India, political families are entrenched at every level of government and politics. At least nine of the 32 members of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet either descended from political families or have children seeking or holding office. Parliament is littered with political families; a recent study found that 31 of the 58 women elected had a husband, brother, father or father-in-law in politics.
The trend is even more glaring at the state level. In Maharashtra, analysts estimate that 30 or more party candidates running this month are from political families. The state’s chief minister, the top executive post, is the son of a former chief minister. This is also the case in two other states while the Congress Party is strongly considering replacing the late chief minister of Andhra Pradesh with his son.
“It has gotten into the DNA of the Indian political system,” said Jagdeep Chhokar, a founding member of the Association for Democratic Reform in New Delhi. “To control the workings of the party, the leader depends on trusted people. And one of the traditions of Indian culture is that you trust family members more than outsiders.”
Indian politics have a high turnover rate and voting blocs can be defined by region, religion, caste or community. Yet analysts say Indian voters favor a familiar family pedigree, partly because of a cultural reverence for the family and because of habits in some regions that trace back centuries. Several of the royal families who ruled over feudal states have today evolved into political families.
Modern India’s political marketplace is so crowded with parties and candidates that the “brand” of a familiar family name can bring an advantage, several analysts say. And the closed nature of political parties often perpetuates the dynastic problem; in several cases, rebels who broke from one party have formed their own and installed relatives around them.
Few political families are eager to step away from the power and lucre of office. In the state of Haryana, which has several local political dynasties, a recent study concluded that incumbents running for re-election had increased their personal wealth, on average, by 388 percent during their five years in office.
“Every political family these days is keen to keep someone in the field,” said Suhas Palshikar, who teaches politics at Pune University in Maharashtra. “Lots of resources are involved. Lots of networks are involved. And to put it crudely, a lot of money is involved.”
Mrs. Patil, 74, the Indian president, has less than three years remaining in her term. The position of president is largely ceremonial, with real power invested in the prime minister and his cabinet, though the presidency does command deference. Mrs. Patil’s press officer said the president had not been involved in her son’s candidacy but that the son, like anyone, has a constitutional right to seek office.
Her son’s opponents belittle any suggestion that his family did not orchestrate his candidacy and call him a carpetbagger who has spent much of his life away from Amravati, returning only in the past year after his political ambitions had been kindled.
“His only asset is his mom,” said Dr. Pradeep Shingore, 56, a cardiologist who is the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate for the seat. “Politics is being used as ancestral property.”
On a cloudless morning in one of the city’s slums, the incumbent, Mr. Deshmukh, led supporters on a padyatra, or foot march, a ritual in Indian politicking. Sprinkled in the crowd were the mayor and 20 other local officials from the Congress Party who are defiantly supporting him.
“People are very angry,” said Ashok Dongre, the mayor. “These families are not good for democracy because the common person, the party worker in the field, should be encouraged to go for higher positions. If you do not do that, how will the party succeed?”
Many observers consider Mr. Deshmukh the favorite in the race, though he faces practical obstacles. Every candidate on the ballot is accompanied by a party symbol, which provides a guide for illiterate rural voters. The Congress symbol, an open hand, is iconic in India. But as an independent, Mr. Deshmukh had no symbol; after considering choices offered by the election bureau, he decided upon an image of a television.
“He has come to seek your blessing!” a campaign worker shouted in the slum as others waved banners with the television image. “His symbol is television! Tee-vee! Tee-vee! Tee-vee!”
For his part, Mr. Shekhawat, the president’s son, brushes aside criticism of his candidacy. He is making his first run for office after working for an educational institute controlled by his family and has spent more than a decade working inside the Congress Party. He says Mr. Deshmukh has failed to promote development projects adequately and accuses him of the political sin of disloyalty.
“This kind of defiance shows indiscipline,” Mr. Shekhawat said. “Nobody is above the party. Nobody.”
Nepotism presents an especially complicated question for the Congress Party and the Gandhi dynasty. Rahul Gandhi, the presumptive heir to the party, has been visiting poor villages while promoting the idea of making the party more open and internally democratic. As part of his tour, Mr. Gandhi appeared Friday in Amravati for a rally with local Congress candidates.
On the stage with him was the president’s son.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
Maoist Rebels Widen Deadly Reach Across India
By JIM YARDLEY
BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.
“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.
Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.
If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.
For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world ... LhWqKucIcQ
By JIM YARDLEY
BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.
“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.
Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.
If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.
For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world ... LhWqKucIcQ
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world ... india.html
November 13, 2009
Rural India Gets Chance at Piece of Jobs Boom
By LYDIA POLGREEN
BAGEPALLI, India — Under harsh fluorescent lights, dozens of heads bend over keyboards, the clattering unison of earnest typing filling the room. Monitors flicker with insurance forms, time sheets and customer service e-mail messages, tasks from far away, sent to this corner of India to be processed on the cheap.
This scene unfolds in cities across India, especially in the high-tech hubs of Bangalore and Gurgaon, places synonymous with the information technology revolution that has transformed India’s economy and pushed the country toward double-digit economic growth.
But these workers are young people from villages clustered around this small town deep in rural Karnataka State in India’s southwest. They are part of an experiment by a handful of entrepreneurs to bring the jobs outsourcing has created to distant corners of India that have been largely cut off from its extraordinary economic rise.
Only about a million workers are employed in the buzzing call centers and pristine tech company campuses that have come to symbolize India’s boom — a drop in the bucket, given the country’s more than 1 billion people.
Almost all of those jobs are in cities. But 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas. India largely skipped — or never arrived at — the industrial phase of development that might have pulled the rural masses to cities. Over the decades a Gandhian fondness for — some say idealization of — rural life has also kept people in villages, where the bonds of caste and custom remain strong.
India has struggled unsuccessfully with the question of how to lift this vast underclass out of poverty. Some economists argue that India still needs rapid urbanization if it is ever to become a major economic power and provide jobs to its vast legions of unemployed. But the founders of Rural Shores, a company that is setting up outsourcing offices in rural areas, say it makes more sense to take the jobs where the people are.
“We thought, ‘Why not take the jobs to the village?’ ” said G. Srinivasan, the company’s director. “There is a lot of talent there, and we can train them to do the job.”
Rural India was once seen as a dead weight on the Indian economy, a bastion of backwardness embodied by the frequent suicides of farmers eking out livings from arid fields, dependent upon fickle monsoons. But Indian and foreign companies have come to see India’s backwaters differently, as an untapped market for relatively inexpensive goods like low-tech cellphones, kitchen gadgets and cheap motorcycles.
Now some businesses have begun looking to rural India for an untapped pool of eager and motivated office workers. Rural Shores has hired about 100 young people, most of them high school graduates who have completed some college, all of them from rural areas around this small town. The company has three centers now, but it aims to open 500 centers across India in the next five years.
Most of the center’s employees are the first members of their families to have office jobs. They speak halting English at best, but have enough skill with the language to do basic data entry, read forms and even write simple e-mail messages.
With much lower rent and wages than in similar centers in cities, the company says it can do the same jobs as many outsourcing companies for half the price. A Bangalore office worker with skills similar to those of workers here commands about 7,000 rupees a month, or $150, Mr. Srinivasan said. In small towns and villages, a minimum-wage salary of about $60 a month is considered excellent.
Here in Bagepalli, the Rural Shores office hums through two shifts a day. One set of workers answers customer service e-mail messages for an Indian loyalty card company. Another processes claims for an insurance company. In one room, workers capture data from scanned timecards filled out by truck drivers in the United States. They record nights spent in Abilene, Tex., deliveries in Kansas City and breakdowns in Salt Lake City, all of which the workers decipher and enter into a database.
Amid the clatter of slender fingers hammering at keyboards, R. Saicharan, 24, a business school graduate from Chennai, explained the frenzy of typing. “Every morning we get a download of images of time sheets,” he said. “By 7 p.m. we need to process 13,000 of them.”
The time sheets belong to American truck drivers, and Rural Shores has been hired as a subcontractor for a larger outsourcing company in Bangalore to do the data entry portion of the work. Deciphering scrawls on the scanned documents, the 20 workers on Mr. Saicharan’s team race to earn bonuses for being the fastest typist.
The current champion is S. Karthik, 20, a high school graduate who worked briefly in Bangalore but found city life too hectic and expensive. “Here I can live with my family,” Mr. Karthik said.
Like many here, he is working on a college degree by correspondence course. Most of his friends had either moved to Bangalore or were unemployed. “There are no jobs in Bagepalli for a young man,” he said.
Most of the workers are the children of farmers and often the first generation to finish high school. For many, a job at an outsourcing center is an unimaginable opportunity.
K. Aruna, 19, lives with her widowed mother and younger sister in a two-room house on a narrow, muddy lane in a small village on the outskirts of Bagepalli. Until Ms. Aruna got a job at the Rural Shores center, the family subsisted on what their two-acre farm and two cows could produce. Sometimes they struggled to earn $20 a month among the three of them. They could scarcely afford vegetables and fruit to supplement dull meals of lentils and flatbread.
With her new job Ms. Aruna now makes more than $70 a month. The family has bought some furniture — a wardrobe — and new saris and jewelry. When she came home with her office identification badge hung around her neck, the whole village gawked.
“I am the only person in this village to have an office job,” Ms. Aruna said, fingering the teardrop-shaped gold earrings she had bought herself. “I never thought it would be possible.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world ... india.html
November 13, 2009
Rural India Gets Chance at Piece of Jobs Boom
By LYDIA POLGREEN
BAGEPALLI, India — Under harsh fluorescent lights, dozens of heads bend over keyboards, the clattering unison of earnest typing filling the room. Monitors flicker with insurance forms, time sheets and customer service e-mail messages, tasks from far away, sent to this corner of India to be processed on the cheap.
This scene unfolds in cities across India, especially in the high-tech hubs of Bangalore and Gurgaon, places synonymous with the information technology revolution that has transformed India’s economy and pushed the country toward double-digit economic growth.
But these workers are young people from villages clustered around this small town deep in rural Karnataka State in India’s southwest. They are part of an experiment by a handful of entrepreneurs to bring the jobs outsourcing has created to distant corners of India that have been largely cut off from its extraordinary economic rise.
Only about a million workers are employed in the buzzing call centers and pristine tech company campuses that have come to symbolize India’s boom — a drop in the bucket, given the country’s more than 1 billion people.
Almost all of those jobs are in cities. But 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas. India largely skipped — or never arrived at — the industrial phase of development that might have pulled the rural masses to cities. Over the decades a Gandhian fondness for — some say idealization of — rural life has also kept people in villages, where the bonds of caste and custom remain strong.
India has struggled unsuccessfully with the question of how to lift this vast underclass out of poverty. Some economists argue that India still needs rapid urbanization if it is ever to become a major economic power and provide jobs to its vast legions of unemployed. But the founders of Rural Shores, a company that is setting up outsourcing offices in rural areas, say it makes more sense to take the jobs where the people are.
“We thought, ‘Why not take the jobs to the village?’ ” said G. Srinivasan, the company’s director. “There is a lot of talent there, and we can train them to do the job.”
Rural India was once seen as a dead weight on the Indian economy, a bastion of backwardness embodied by the frequent suicides of farmers eking out livings from arid fields, dependent upon fickle monsoons. But Indian and foreign companies have come to see India’s backwaters differently, as an untapped market for relatively inexpensive goods like low-tech cellphones, kitchen gadgets and cheap motorcycles.
Now some businesses have begun looking to rural India for an untapped pool of eager and motivated office workers. Rural Shores has hired about 100 young people, most of them high school graduates who have completed some college, all of them from rural areas around this small town. The company has three centers now, but it aims to open 500 centers across India in the next five years.
Most of the center’s employees are the first members of their families to have office jobs. They speak halting English at best, but have enough skill with the language to do basic data entry, read forms and even write simple e-mail messages.
With much lower rent and wages than in similar centers in cities, the company says it can do the same jobs as many outsourcing companies for half the price. A Bangalore office worker with skills similar to those of workers here commands about 7,000 rupees a month, or $150, Mr. Srinivasan said. In small towns and villages, a minimum-wage salary of about $60 a month is considered excellent.
Here in Bagepalli, the Rural Shores office hums through two shifts a day. One set of workers answers customer service e-mail messages for an Indian loyalty card company. Another processes claims for an insurance company. In one room, workers capture data from scanned timecards filled out by truck drivers in the United States. They record nights spent in Abilene, Tex., deliveries in Kansas City and breakdowns in Salt Lake City, all of which the workers decipher and enter into a database.
Amid the clatter of slender fingers hammering at keyboards, R. Saicharan, 24, a business school graduate from Chennai, explained the frenzy of typing. “Every morning we get a download of images of time sheets,” he said. “By 7 p.m. we need to process 13,000 of them.”
The time sheets belong to American truck drivers, and Rural Shores has been hired as a subcontractor for a larger outsourcing company in Bangalore to do the data entry portion of the work. Deciphering scrawls on the scanned documents, the 20 workers on Mr. Saicharan’s team race to earn bonuses for being the fastest typist.
The current champion is S. Karthik, 20, a high school graduate who worked briefly in Bangalore but found city life too hectic and expensive. “Here I can live with my family,” Mr. Karthik said.
Like many here, he is working on a college degree by correspondence course. Most of his friends had either moved to Bangalore or were unemployed. “There are no jobs in Bagepalli for a young man,” he said.
Most of the workers are the children of farmers and often the first generation to finish high school. For many, a job at an outsourcing center is an unimaginable opportunity.
K. Aruna, 19, lives with her widowed mother and younger sister in a two-room house on a narrow, muddy lane in a small village on the outskirts of Bagepalli. Until Ms. Aruna got a job at the Rural Shores center, the family subsisted on what their two-acre farm and two cows could produce. Sometimes they struggled to earn $20 a month among the three of them. They could scarcely afford vegetables and fruit to supplement dull meals of lentils and flatbread.
With her new job Ms. Aruna now makes more than $70 a month. The family has bought some furniture — a wardrobe — and new saris and jewelry. When she came home with her office identification badge hung around her neck, the whole village gawked.
“I am the only person in this village to have an office job,” Ms. Aruna said, fingering the teardrop-shaped gold earrings she had bought herself. “I never thought it would be possible.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world ... nted=print
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world ... &th&emc=th
November 22, 2009
Survey of Pakistan’s Young Predicts ‘Disaster’ if Their Needs Aren’t Addressed
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
LAHORE, Pakistan — Pakistan will face a “demographic disaster” if it does not address the needs of its young generation, the largest in the country’s history, whose views reflect a deep disillusionment with government and democracy, according to a report released here on Saturday.
The report, commissioned by the British Council and conducted by the Nielsen research company, drew a picture of a deeply frustrated young generation that feels abandoned by its government and despondent about its future.
An overwhelming majority of young Pakistanis say their country is headed in the wrong direction, the report said, and only 1 in 10 has confidence in the government. Most see themselves as Muslim first and Pakistani second, and they are now entering a work force in which the lion’s share cannot find jobs, a potentially volatile situation if the government cannot address its concerns.
“This is a real wake-up call for the international community,” said David Steven, a fellow at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University, who was an adviser on the report. “You could get rapid social and economic change. But the other route will lead to a nightmare that would unfold over 20 to 30 years.”
The report provides an unsettling portrait of a difficult time for Pakistan, a 62-year-old nuclear-armed country that is fighting an insurgency in its western mountains and struggling to provide for its rapidly expanding population. The population has risen by almost half in just 20 years, a pace that is double the world average, according to the report.
The despair among the young generation is rooted in the condition of their lives, the report found. Only a fifth of those interviewed had permanent full-time jobs. Half said they did not have sufficient skills to enter the workplace. And one in four could not read or write, a legacy of the country’s abysmal public education system, in which less than 40 percent of children are enrolled in school, far below the South Asian average of 58 percent.
While most do not trust their government, they attach their loyalty to religion. Three-quarters identified themselves primarily as Muslim, with just one in seven identifying themselves as Pakistani.
The demographic power of this generation represents a turning point for Pakistan. Its energy, if properly harnessed, could power an economic rise, as was the case in many East Asian countries in the 1990s, Mr. Steven said in a telephone interview.
But if the opportunity is squandered by insufficient investment in areas like education and health care, the country will face a demographic disaster, the report said. To avoid that, the authors of the report calculated that Pakistan’s economy would need to grow by 36 million jobs in the next decade — about a quarter the size of the United States economy — an enormous challenge in an economy that is growing by about a million jobs a year.
Pakistan has a long way to go. The study interviewed 1,226 Pakistanis ages 18 to 29, from different backgrounds across the country, in March and April. More than 70 percent said they were worse off financially than they were last year. This year’s budget earmarks just 2 percent of the economy for education, about half the percentage spent in India and Turkey. Life in rural areas is rudimentary. The report cites data showing that 40 percent of households have no electricity, and that animal dung and leftover waste from crops account for more than 80 percent of the country’s energy use.
Young people’s biggest concern — far above terrorism — was inflation, which rose to 23 percent in 2009, pushing 7 percent of Pakistanis back into poverty, the report said. More than 90 percent agreed better quality education was a priority.
There were bright spots. The young people were civic-minded, with a third saying the purpose of education was to create good citizens. They were also more interested in collective action and volunteer activities than their parents. But they were deeply disillusioned with politics, which they saw as corrupt and based on a system in which personal connections mattered more than merit. That sentiment is borne out by the global competitiveness index of 133 countries produced by the World Economic Forum, which in 2009 put Pakistan in slot 101, two notches below Nigeria.
“Here a student struggles day and night but the son of a rich man by giving money gets higher marks than him,” the report quoted a young man in Lahore as saying.
That led to one of the report’s most surprising findings: Only a third of those polled thought democracy was the best system for Pakistan, equal to the fraction preferring Islamic law, in what David Martin, director of the British Council in Pakistan, called “an indictment of the failures of democracy over many years.”
Only 1 in 10 said they were “very interested” in political events in Pakistan, while more than a third said they were not interested at all. The highest-ranking institution was Pakistan’s military. Sixty percent of those interviewed said that they trusted it. Second highest was religious educational institutions, trusted by about 50 percent of respondents. The national government came last at 10 percent.
If the government has failed to channel the energy of Pakistan’s youth, militant groups have succeeded, drawing educated and uneducated young people with slogans of jihad and, in some cases, of social justice.
The findings were sobering for Pakistani officials. Faisal Subzwari, minister of youth affairs for Sindh Province, who attended the presentation of the report in Lahore, said: “These are the facts. They might be cruel, but we have to admit them.”
But young Pakistanis have demonstrated their appetite for collective action, with thousands of people taking to the streets last spring as part of a movement of lawyers, who were demanding the reinstatement of the chief justice, and Mr. Steven argued that the country’s future would depend on how that energy was channeled. “Can Pakistan harness this energy, or will it continue to fight against it?” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world ... &th&emc=th
November 22, 2009
Survey of Pakistan’s Young Predicts ‘Disaster’ if Their Needs Aren’t Addressed
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
LAHORE, Pakistan — Pakistan will face a “demographic disaster” if it does not address the needs of its young generation, the largest in the country’s history, whose views reflect a deep disillusionment with government and democracy, according to a report released here on Saturday.
The report, commissioned by the British Council and conducted by the Nielsen research company, drew a picture of a deeply frustrated young generation that feels abandoned by its government and despondent about its future.
An overwhelming majority of young Pakistanis say their country is headed in the wrong direction, the report said, and only 1 in 10 has confidence in the government. Most see themselves as Muslim first and Pakistani second, and they are now entering a work force in which the lion’s share cannot find jobs, a potentially volatile situation if the government cannot address its concerns.
“This is a real wake-up call for the international community,” said David Steven, a fellow at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University, who was an adviser on the report. “You could get rapid social and economic change. But the other route will lead to a nightmare that would unfold over 20 to 30 years.”
The report provides an unsettling portrait of a difficult time for Pakistan, a 62-year-old nuclear-armed country that is fighting an insurgency in its western mountains and struggling to provide for its rapidly expanding population. The population has risen by almost half in just 20 years, a pace that is double the world average, according to the report.
The despair among the young generation is rooted in the condition of their lives, the report found. Only a fifth of those interviewed had permanent full-time jobs. Half said they did not have sufficient skills to enter the workplace. And one in four could not read or write, a legacy of the country’s abysmal public education system, in which less than 40 percent of children are enrolled in school, far below the South Asian average of 58 percent.
While most do not trust their government, they attach their loyalty to religion. Three-quarters identified themselves primarily as Muslim, with just one in seven identifying themselves as Pakistani.
The demographic power of this generation represents a turning point for Pakistan. Its energy, if properly harnessed, could power an economic rise, as was the case in many East Asian countries in the 1990s, Mr. Steven said in a telephone interview.
But if the opportunity is squandered by insufficient investment in areas like education and health care, the country will face a demographic disaster, the report said. To avoid that, the authors of the report calculated that Pakistan’s economy would need to grow by 36 million jobs in the next decade — about a quarter the size of the United States economy — an enormous challenge in an economy that is growing by about a million jobs a year.
Pakistan has a long way to go. The study interviewed 1,226 Pakistanis ages 18 to 29, from different backgrounds across the country, in March and April. More than 70 percent said they were worse off financially than they were last year. This year’s budget earmarks just 2 percent of the economy for education, about half the percentage spent in India and Turkey. Life in rural areas is rudimentary. The report cites data showing that 40 percent of households have no electricity, and that animal dung and leftover waste from crops account for more than 80 percent of the country’s energy use.
Young people’s biggest concern — far above terrorism — was inflation, which rose to 23 percent in 2009, pushing 7 percent of Pakistanis back into poverty, the report said. More than 90 percent agreed better quality education was a priority.
There were bright spots. The young people were civic-minded, with a third saying the purpose of education was to create good citizens. They were also more interested in collective action and volunteer activities than their parents. But they were deeply disillusioned with politics, which they saw as corrupt and based on a system in which personal connections mattered more than merit. That sentiment is borne out by the global competitiveness index of 133 countries produced by the World Economic Forum, which in 2009 put Pakistan in slot 101, two notches below Nigeria.
“Here a student struggles day and night but the son of a rich man by giving money gets higher marks than him,” the report quoted a young man in Lahore as saying.
That led to one of the report’s most surprising findings: Only a third of those polled thought democracy was the best system for Pakistan, equal to the fraction preferring Islamic law, in what David Martin, director of the British Council in Pakistan, called “an indictment of the failures of democracy over many years.”
Only 1 in 10 said they were “very interested” in political events in Pakistan, while more than a third said they were not interested at all. The highest-ranking institution was Pakistan’s military. Sixty percent of those interviewed said that they trusted it. Second highest was religious educational institutions, trusted by about 50 percent of respondents. The national government came last at 10 percent.
If the government has failed to channel the energy of Pakistan’s youth, militant groups have succeeded, drawing educated and uneducated young people with slogans of jihad and, in some cases, of social justice.
The findings were sobering for Pakistani officials. Faisal Subzwari, minister of youth affairs for Sindh Province, who attended the presentation of the report in Lahore, said: “These are the facts. They might be cruel, but we have to admit them.”
But young Pakistanis have demonstrated their appetite for collective action, with thousands of people taking to the streets last spring as part of a movement of lawyers, who were demanding the reinstatement of the chief justice, and Mr. Steven argued that the country’s future would depend on how that energy was channeled. “Can Pakistan harness this energy, or will it continue to fight against it?” he said.
November 29, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
India’s Eternal Crisis
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Mashobra, India
ON the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, I hurried through a dark apple orchard to the nearest television in this Himalayan village. My landlord opened his door reluctantly, and then appeared unmoved by the news I had just received by phone. I struggled to explain the enormity of what was happening, the significance of New York, the iconic status of the World Trade Center — to no avail. It was time for his evening prayers; the television could not be turned on.
I did not witness the horrific sights of 9/11 until three days later. Since then, cable television and even broadband Internet have arrived in Mashobra and in my own home. Now the world’s manifold atrocities are always available for brisk inspection on India’s many 24-hour news channels. Indeed, the brutal terrorist assault on Mumbai that killed 163 people a year ago was immediately proclaimed as India’s own 9/11 by the country’s young TV anchors, who seem to model themselves on Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Yet, on the first anniversary of “26/11,” it seems as remote as 9/11 to the inhabitants of this village.
There is no great mystery behind this indifference, which is distinct from callousness. India, where most people still depend on agriculture for a living, has just suffered one of its most serious droughts in decades. The outlook for winter crops is bleak; many farmers have committed suicide in recent months, adding to the epidemic of rural suicides over the last few years.
Politically, too, India has lurched from one crisis to another in the last year. Prudent financial regulation saved India from the worst effects of the worldwide economic recession. But the rage of people who feel themselves not only left behind but victimized by corporate-driven and urban-oriented economic growth has erupted into violence; the Indian government has called for an all-out war against the Maoist insurgent groups that now administer large parts of central India. Anti-India insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeast continue to simmer, exacting a little-reported but high daily toll.
Geopolitically, India’s room to maneuver has shrunk since the Mumbai attacks. Last November, middle-class nationalist fury, though initially directed at inept Indian authorities, settled on Pakistan, where the attacks were partly planned and financed. The writer Shashi Tharoor described “India’s leaders and strategic thinkers” as watching Israel’s assault on Gaza last winter with “empathy,” and wondering “why can’t we do the same?” One hopes Mr. Tharoor, who has since become India’s junior foreign minister, is today more aware of why India can’t do a Gaza or Lebanon on its nuclear-armed neighbor.
As Western anxiety about nuclear-armed Pakistan’s stability deepens, India can barely afford aggressive rhetoric, let alone military retaliation, against its longtime foe. Pakistan remains vital to Western campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Aware of its strategic importance, Pakistan has been in no hurry to accede to India’s demands to prosecute those it holds responsible for the Mumbai massacre. (One hopes the charges filed against seven radicals on Wednesday mark a real change.) Islamabad has also upped the rhetorical ante by accusing India of backing the violent secessionist movement in Baluchistan, in western Pakistan.
India’s seeming impotence enrages those in the new right-wing news media who are eager to commemorate 26/11, and to make that ersatz shorthand signify India’s unavenged humiliation and shame. Prabhu Chawla, the editor of India Today, the country’s leading newsmagazine, expressed the frustration of many middle-class nationalists: “India, divided by politics, doesn’t know what to do with its enemy or with its much-mauled nationalist soul. We are as clueless as we were on that dreadful November night one year ago.”
That may be true, but in a country where 400 million live without electricity, it isn’t easy to manufacture, or sustain, a national consensus. In any case, things are not as bad as the pundits make out. The lone surviving Mumbai killer is already on trial; his accomplices are being gradually apprehended. There have been no major retaliatory attacks against Muslims. There are stirrings of a civic, even political, consciousness among rich Indians who, until the Mumbai massacre, were largely unaffected by our frequent terrorist bombings.
India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
This is largely because many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, of a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits. The fatalism I sense in my village may be the consolation of the weak, of those powerless to shape the world to their ends. But it also provides a built-in check against the arrogance of power — and the hubris that has made America’s response to 9/11 so disastrously counterproductive.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
India’s Eternal Crisis
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Mashobra, India
ON the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, I hurried through a dark apple orchard to the nearest television in this Himalayan village. My landlord opened his door reluctantly, and then appeared unmoved by the news I had just received by phone. I struggled to explain the enormity of what was happening, the significance of New York, the iconic status of the World Trade Center — to no avail. It was time for his evening prayers; the television could not be turned on.
I did not witness the horrific sights of 9/11 until three days later. Since then, cable television and even broadband Internet have arrived in Mashobra and in my own home. Now the world’s manifold atrocities are always available for brisk inspection on India’s many 24-hour news channels. Indeed, the brutal terrorist assault on Mumbai that killed 163 people a year ago was immediately proclaimed as India’s own 9/11 by the country’s young TV anchors, who seem to model themselves on Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Yet, on the first anniversary of “26/11,” it seems as remote as 9/11 to the inhabitants of this village.
There is no great mystery behind this indifference, which is distinct from callousness. India, where most people still depend on agriculture for a living, has just suffered one of its most serious droughts in decades. The outlook for winter crops is bleak; many farmers have committed suicide in recent months, adding to the epidemic of rural suicides over the last few years.
Politically, too, India has lurched from one crisis to another in the last year. Prudent financial regulation saved India from the worst effects of the worldwide economic recession. But the rage of people who feel themselves not only left behind but victimized by corporate-driven and urban-oriented economic growth has erupted into violence; the Indian government has called for an all-out war against the Maoist insurgent groups that now administer large parts of central India. Anti-India insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeast continue to simmer, exacting a little-reported but high daily toll.
Geopolitically, India’s room to maneuver has shrunk since the Mumbai attacks. Last November, middle-class nationalist fury, though initially directed at inept Indian authorities, settled on Pakistan, where the attacks were partly planned and financed. The writer Shashi Tharoor described “India’s leaders and strategic thinkers” as watching Israel’s assault on Gaza last winter with “empathy,” and wondering “why can’t we do the same?” One hopes Mr. Tharoor, who has since become India’s junior foreign minister, is today more aware of why India can’t do a Gaza or Lebanon on its nuclear-armed neighbor.
As Western anxiety about nuclear-armed Pakistan’s stability deepens, India can barely afford aggressive rhetoric, let alone military retaliation, against its longtime foe. Pakistan remains vital to Western campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Aware of its strategic importance, Pakistan has been in no hurry to accede to India’s demands to prosecute those it holds responsible for the Mumbai massacre. (One hopes the charges filed against seven radicals on Wednesday mark a real change.) Islamabad has also upped the rhetorical ante by accusing India of backing the violent secessionist movement in Baluchistan, in western Pakistan.
India’s seeming impotence enrages those in the new right-wing news media who are eager to commemorate 26/11, and to make that ersatz shorthand signify India’s unavenged humiliation and shame. Prabhu Chawla, the editor of India Today, the country’s leading newsmagazine, expressed the frustration of many middle-class nationalists: “India, divided by politics, doesn’t know what to do with its enemy or with its much-mauled nationalist soul. We are as clueless as we were on that dreadful November night one year ago.”
That may be true, but in a country where 400 million live without electricity, it isn’t easy to manufacture, or sustain, a national consensus. In any case, things are not as bad as the pundits make out. The lone surviving Mumbai killer is already on trial; his accomplices are being gradually apprehended. There have been no major retaliatory attacks against Muslims. There are stirrings of a civic, even political, consciousness among rich Indians who, until the Mumbai massacre, were largely unaffected by our frequent terrorist bombings.
India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
This is largely because many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, of a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits. The fatalism I sense in my village may be the consolation of the weak, of those powerless to shape the world to their ends. But it also provides a built-in check against the arrogance of power — and the hubris that has made America’s response to 9/11 so disastrously counterproductive.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opini ... nted=print
January 6, 2010
Indian Official Gets Far on a Few Words
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NEW DELHI — It seemed an innocent enough question, posed by an Indian on vacation recently in the palace-studded region of Rajasthan. Should the Indian government make it more difficult for tourists to visit the country’s glorious sights by tightening visa requirements in the name of preventing terrorism?
On a road trip with his wife, the man who posed the question, Shashi Tharoor, tapped out this brief missive to his Twitter followers on his BlackBerry, in the cramped argot necessitated by Twitter’s 140-character limit: “Dilemma of our age. Tough visa restrictions in hope of btr security or openness & liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.”
But Mr. Tharoor, a writer and a former top United Nations diplomat, who is now a member of Parliament and a junior minister of foreign affairs, is not just any Indian, and the message went out not to just a handful of friends but to more than half a million people who follow him on Twitter.
That message, along with a few others mildly questioning the merits of India’s new, stricter tourist visa policies, landed him on the front page of most of India’s English-language newspapers, which accused him of a very big mistake in Indian politics: appearing to disagree publicly with his superiors on a delicate issue.
Politicians in democracies the world over have warmed to Twitter, the microblogging service, and other social media tools, like Facebook, to connect with voters. Many members of the United States Congress use it, as does Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd.
But in India, the world’s largest and most boisterous democracy, it has not caught on with elected officials. Indeed, many of India’s power elite, whether in politics, the news media or business, seem to look askance at Mr. Tharoor’s enthusiasm for a medium that collapses the distance between the governors and the governed and dismantles the layers of protocol and decorum that keep elected officials and senior bureaucrats here aloof from the everyday concerns of those they serve.
Most of India’s political elite seem to have no idea what Twitter is. Many senior bureaucrats see it as a waste of time. Asked if he would consider using Twitter, India’s home secretary, G. K. Pillai, pursed his lips disapprovingly and said, “I haven’t got the time.”
But Mr. Tharoor reads almost every post sent his way, according to his staff, and personally responds to as many as he can. Such direct access to an elected official is almost unheard of in India, and Mr. Tharoor’s use of the medium has helped define his political rise.
Many analysts here are closely watching his progress now for signs of whether Indians with experience abroad can apply their expertise to politics here.
Mr. Tharoor is an unusual figure in Indian politics. After a long career at the United Nations, he ran for Parliament from his hometown, Trivandrum, the capital of the southern state of Kerala. In his spare time he also became an author of some acclaim, writing 11 books, including 3 novels.
At 53, he is considered young by the standards of Indian politics, and something of an upstart.
An aide opened a Twitter account for him early last year, but initially he was wary and simply too busy with his campaign to post much. But he quickly saw the potential.
“I suddenly realized it was both a broadcast medium and an interactive medium,” Mr. Tharoor said in a telephone interview.
His vacation message was not the first one that landed him in hot water. In September, in the midst of an austerity drive that had senior officials flying coach, he posted a message about riding in “cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”
But the remark about cows, in the context of Hinduism, was not a laughing matter for many, and some officials in his own party said he should resign over the remark.
The news media breathlessly chronicle each of Mr. Tharoor’s supposed Twitter missteps in editorials and talk show discussions. One news channel scrolled his latest Twitter updates across its screen under the rubric “Breaking News.”
Twitter enthusiasts say the news media make a fuss about it because it usurps its traditional role as intermediary and interpreter between the powerful and the masses.
“By constantly associating Twitter with controversies, Indian media will successfully dissuade other politicians from joining the social networking site,” Ajit Narayana, an avid Twitter user who is organizing a conference this month on Twitter’s use in India, wrote in an e-mail message.
Because he was born abroad and spent most of his career outside India, Mr. Tharoor has sometimes been accused of being out of touch with the country’s mores and folkways. His use of Twitter, which is getting more popular but is still the province of a tiny fraction of Internet users, smacks to some of elitism.
Mr. Tharoor said that he embraced Twitter because it helped Indians understand what he did every day, and it helped him understand what his followers thought.
Twitter, he said, “is a way of engaging the people to whom all politicians are ultimately accountable in the substance of our work.”
Today, Mr. Tharoor has more than half a million followers on Twitter, and his ability to speak directly to these people is an invaluable asset to an increasingly networked Indian society, political experts said.
“Shashi’s tweeting habit is a way to connect with the electronic-age population, which will be very important in the years to come,” said Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi who also uses Twitter.
But Diptosh Majumdar, national affairs editor at CNN-IBN, a cable news channel, said in his Twitter feed that the Congress Party’s old guard, which in many ways controls Mr. Tharoor’s political destiny, was unlikely to be impressed by his social media credentials.
“If Twitteroor feels that virtual reality may help him climb the political ladder faster, he is yet to identify the contours of politics here,” Mr. Majumdar wrote, using a nickname for Mr. Tharoor.
Nevertheless, Mr. Tharoor said he would keep on posting Twitter messages, whether it helped or harmed his political career. “I will not pretend the experience has been uniformly positive,” he said. “But I am very happy to have this audience out there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
Indian Official Gets Far on a Few Words
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NEW DELHI — It seemed an innocent enough question, posed by an Indian on vacation recently in the palace-studded region of Rajasthan. Should the Indian government make it more difficult for tourists to visit the country’s glorious sights by tightening visa requirements in the name of preventing terrorism?
On a road trip with his wife, the man who posed the question, Shashi Tharoor, tapped out this brief missive to his Twitter followers on his BlackBerry, in the cramped argot necessitated by Twitter’s 140-character limit: “Dilemma of our age. Tough visa restrictions in hope of btr security or openness & liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.”
But Mr. Tharoor, a writer and a former top United Nations diplomat, who is now a member of Parliament and a junior minister of foreign affairs, is not just any Indian, and the message went out not to just a handful of friends but to more than half a million people who follow him on Twitter.
That message, along with a few others mildly questioning the merits of India’s new, stricter tourist visa policies, landed him on the front page of most of India’s English-language newspapers, which accused him of a very big mistake in Indian politics: appearing to disagree publicly with his superiors on a delicate issue.
Politicians in democracies the world over have warmed to Twitter, the microblogging service, and other social media tools, like Facebook, to connect with voters. Many members of the United States Congress use it, as does Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd.
But in India, the world’s largest and most boisterous democracy, it has not caught on with elected officials. Indeed, many of India’s power elite, whether in politics, the news media or business, seem to look askance at Mr. Tharoor’s enthusiasm for a medium that collapses the distance between the governors and the governed and dismantles the layers of protocol and decorum that keep elected officials and senior bureaucrats here aloof from the everyday concerns of those they serve.
Most of India’s political elite seem to have no idea what Twitter is. Many senior bureaucrats see it as a waste of time. Asked if he would consider using Twitter, India’s home secretary, G. K. Pillai, pursed his lips disapprovingly and said, “I haven’t got the time.”
But Mr. Tharoor reads almost every post sent his way, according to his staff, and personally responds to as many as he can. Such direct access to an elected official is almost unheard of in India, and Mr. Tharoor’s use of the medium has helped define his political rise.
Many analysts here are closely watching his progress now for signs of whether Indians with experience abroad can apply their expertise to politics here.
Mr. Tharoor is an unusual figure in Indian politics. After a long career at the United Nations, he ran for Parliament from his hometown, Trivandrum, the capital of the southern state of Kerala. In his spare time he also became an author of some acclaim, writing 11 books, including 3 novels.
At 53, he is considered young by the standards of Indian politics, and something of an upstart.
An aide opened a Twitter account for him early last year, but initially he was wary and simply too busy with his campaign to post much. But he quickly saw the potential.
“I suddenly realized it was both a broadcast medium and an interactive medium,” Mr. Tharoor said in a telephone interview.
His vacation message was not the first one that landed him in hot water. In September, in the midst of an austerity drive that had senior officials flying coach, he posted a message about riding in “cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”
But the remark about cows, in the context of Hinduism, was not a laughing matter for many, and some officials in his own party said he should resign over the remark.
The news media breathlessly chronicle each of Mr. Tharoor’s supposed Twitter missteps in editorials and talk show discussions. One news channel scrolled his latest Twitter updates across its screen under the rubric “Breaking News.”
Twitter enthusiasts say the news media make a fuss about it because it usurps its traditional role as intermediary and interpreter between the powerful and the masses.
“By constantly associating Twitter with controversies, Indian media will successfully dissuade other politicians from joining the social networking site,” Ajit Narayana, an avid Twitter user who is organizing a conference this month on Twitter’s use in India, wrote in an e-mail message.
Because he was born abroad and spent most of his career outside India, Mr. Tharoor has sometimes been accused of being out of touch with the country’s mores and folkways. His use of Twitter, which is getting more popular but is still the province of a tiny fraction of Internet users, smacks to some of elitism.
Mr. Tharoor said that he embraced Twitter because it helped Indians understand what he did every day, and it helped him understand what his followers thought.
Twitter, he said, “is a way of engaging the people to whom all politicians are ultimately accountable in the substance of our work.”
Today, Mr. Tharoor has more than half a million followers on Twitter, and his ability to speak directly to these people is an invaluable asset to an increasingly networked Indian society, political experts said.
“Shashi’s tweeting habit is a way to connect with the electronic-age population, which will be very important in the years to come,” said Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi who also uses Twitter.
But Diptosh Majumdar, national affairs editor at CNN-IBN, a cable news channel, said in his Twitter feed that the Congress Party’s old guard, which in many ways controls Mr. Tharoor’s political destiny, was unlikely to be impressed by his social media credentials.
“If Twitteroor feels that virtual reality may help him climb the political ladder faster, he is yet to identify the contours of politics here,” Mr. Majumdar wrote, using a nickname for Mr. Tharoor.
Nevertheless, Mr. Tharoor said he would keep on posting Twitter messages, whether it helped or harmed his political career. “I will not pretend the experience has been uniformly positive,” he said. “But I am very happy to have this audience out there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 8, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Asia’s 70-Percent Gods
By ROGER COHEN
BEIJING — I have been visiting the Asian Gods in their colonnaded mausoleums and wondering what they think of the societies forged in their name. How these Gods fare will be a core 21st-century question.
First, in Hanoi, there was Ho Chi Minh, worldwide wanderer (including a spell in Brooklyn), impish nemesis of French and U.S. armies, unifier of an independent Vietnam, “Uncle” to the nation; now embalmed despite his wish to have his ashes scattered. My 15-year-old son, in good Brooklyn slouch mode, was reprimanded for having his hands in his pockets and so showing insufficient respect.
I don’t think he’d ever seen a dead body before, certainly not one preserved for four decades. The Vietnamese guards mistook awkwardness for attitude. A God in bloodless flesh is an idea that takes getting your head around.
Then, here in a glacial Beijing, on a bright morning in Tiananmen Square, having walked past a McDonald’s outlet, I found myself alone with Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman and Teacher, looking a little more florid than Ho. As there was nobody else around I thought I’d linger, but a guard was having none of that.
It seems the minutes with the wordless Gods of Asia are clocked as carefully as those with a New York lawyer.
To say a lot of people died for the ideas of Mao and Ho would be a genteel understatement. China’s famine alone of 1958-1961 took an estimated 35 million lives. That was before the “terrible decade” of the Cultural Revolution — as shattering to minds as starvation had been to bodies — began in 1966.
Ho, whose long ramble through Europe and the United States is a reminder that revolutionary ideas sparked by displacement in the West are nothing new (however different from Ho today’s London or Hamburg-formed anti-Western militants are), did not do things on Mao’s scale. But more than three decades of war, followed by sweeping collectivization, took a toll in the millions.
These Gods were once absolute and their exactions severe. So why are they revered still? I think above all because they asserted their countries’ nationhood, unity, pride and independence against Western colonization or foreign invasion and so delivered them forever from forms of humiliation.
There’s really no getting away from the fact that, at some level, Mao and Ho are anti-Western Gods in an age when the West’s power and moral authority are being widely questioned — a trend President Obama’s global popularity can do little to stem.
Of course, Mao and Ho also hold the sway they do because the Communist parties they led still rule one-party states, and because those parties have recast the two men’s ideologies. Mao Zedong’s thought did not embrace that McDonald’s outlet.
They are now, in effect, the 70-percent Gods, omniscience curtailed. Deng Xiaoping set China on the rapid-growth path that has changed the world by allowing that Mao had erred (by some 30 percent) and that a proletarian revolution that left people starving should yield to one in which people could get rich in sort-of capitalist fashion. In a similar way, with Vietnam on its knees, its Communist rulers discovered — or perhaps invented — a saying of Ho that “The poor should get rich and the rich should get richer” — to justify a market lurch.
These 70-percent Gods are interesting creatures. They no longer slaughter. They do not imprison en masse. They don’t try to fast-forward to utopia.
No, they build firewalls rather than walls. They fear peaceful protest more than violent movements. They ban Facebook rather than banish folk to camps. They’re less ruthless but more stressed. In short, they’ve gone through 21st century makeovers.
These makeovers have been successful. It’s hard, but not impossible, to imagine the survival of the one-party Chinese and Vietnamese states without the fabulous growth Market-Leninism has produced.
The thing is, however, that such dynamic societies produce more educated, wealthier people; and those people in time wonder about things other than getting a bigger apartment or a car. They start wondering whether they should determine who governs them. They wonder about freedom of expression. They get irritated by corruption. They wonder why they can’t Twitter.
And that is why — a great paradox — the custodians of the 70-percent Gods are so nervous at the very moment when things are going their way, when they have growth unimaginable in the West, when everyone’s talking of China’s rise.
Only in the light of such anxiety can China’s severe recent sentencing of Liu Xiaobo, a writer and political activist, to 11 years in prison be understood. Liu was a principal figure behind a document calling for political liberalization known as Charter 08 that declares: “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.”
And it is similar anxiety that explains Vietnam’s arrest of Le Cong Dinh, a charismatic lawyer. Dinh’s promotion of pluralism has brought him charges of colluding with “domestic and foreign reactionaries.”
Asia’s Gods have proved elastic. The resultant gains have been staggering, for their societies and the world. But these prisoners’ words are not crimes, by no means, and their plight is one measure of the tensions behind the masks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Asia’s 70-Percent Gods
By ROGER COHEN
BEIJING — I have been visiting the Asian Gods in their colonnaded mausoleums and wondering what they think of the societies forged in their name. How these Gods fare will be a core 21st-century question.
First, in Hanoi, there was Ho Chi Minh, worldwide wanderer (including a spell in Brooklyn), impish nemesis of French and U.S. armies, unifier of an independent Vietnam, “Uncle” to the nation; now embalmed despite his wish to have his ashes scattered. My 15-year-old son, in good Brooklyn slouch mode, was reprimanded for having his hands in his pockets and so showing insufficient respect.
I don’t think he’d ever seen a dead body before, certainly not one preserved for four decades. The Vietnamese guards mistook awkwardness for attitude. A God in bloodless flesh is an idea that takes getting your head around.
Then, here in a glacial Beijing, on a bright morning in Tiananmen Square, having walked past a McDonald’s outlet, I found myself alone with Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman and Teacher, looking a little more florid than Ho. As there was nobody else around I thought I’d linger, but a guard was having none of that.
It seems the minutes with the wordless Gods of Asia are clocked as carefully as those with a New York lawyer.
To say a lot of people died for the ideas of Mao and Ho would be a genteel understatement. China’s famine alone of 1958-1961 took an estimated 35 million lives. That was before the “terrible decade” of the Cultural Revolution — as shattering to minds as starvation had been to bodies — began in 1966.
Ho, whose long ramble through Europe and the United States is a reminder that revolutionary ideas sparked by displacement in the West are nothing new (however different from Ho today’s London or Hamburg-formed anti-Western militants are), did not do things on Mao’s scale. But more than three decades of war, followed by sweeping collectivization, took a toll in the millions.
These Gods were once absolute and their exactions severe. So why are they revered still? I think above all because they asserted their countries’ nationhood, unity, pride and independence against Western colonization or foreign invasion and so delivered them forever from forms of humiliation.
There’s really no getting away from the fact that, at some level, Mao and Ho are anti-Western Gods in an age when the West’s power and moral authority are being widely questioned — a trend President Obama’s global popularity can do little to stem.
Of course, Mao and Ho also hold the sway they do because the Communist parties they led still rule one-party states, and because those parties have recast the two men’s ideologies. Mao Zedong’s thought did not embrace that McDonald’s outlet.
They are now, in effect, the 70-percent Gods, omniscience curtailed. Deng Xiaoping set China on the rapid-growth path that has changed the world by allowing that Mao had erred (by some 30 percent) and that a proletarian revolution that left people starving should yield to one in which people could get rich in sort-of capitalist fashion. In a similar way, with Vietnam on its knees, its Communist rulers discovered — or perhaps invented — a saying of Ho that “The poor should get rich and the rich should get richer” — to justify a market lurch.
These 70-percent Gods are interesting creatures. They no longer slaughter. They do not imprison en masse. They don’t try to fast-forward to utopia.
No, they build firewalls rather than walls. They fear peaceful protest more than violent movements. They ban Facebook rather than banish folk to camps. They’re less ruthless but more stressed. In short, they’ve gone through 21st century makeovers.
These makeovers have been successful. It’s hard, but not impossible, to imagine the survival of the one-party Chinese and Vietnamese states without the fabulous growth Market-Leninism has produced.
The thing is, however, that such dynamic societies produce more educated, wealthier people; and those people in time wonder about things other than getting a bigger apartment or a car. They start wondering whether they should determine who governs them. They wonder about freedom of expression. They get irritated by corruption. They wonder why they can’t Twitter.
And that is why — a great paradox — the custodians of the 70-percent Gods are so nervous at the very moment when things are going their way, when they have growth unimaginable in the West, when everyone’s talking of China’s rise.
Only in the light of such anxiety can China’s severe recent sentencing of Liu Xiaobo, a writer and political activist, to 11 years in prison be understood. Liu was a principal figure behind a document calling for political liberalization known as Charter 08 that declares: “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.”
And it is similar anxiety that explains Vietnam’s arrest of Le Cong Dinh, a charismatic lawyer. Dinh’s promotion of pluralism has brought him charges of colluding with “domestic and foreign reactionaries.”
Asia’s Gods have proved elastic. The resultant gains have been staggering, for their societies and the world. But these prisoners’ words are not crimes, by no means, and their plight is one measure of the tensions behind the masks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opini ... nted=print
January 10, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Who’s Sleeping Now?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Hong Kong
C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: “China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.”
I’ll say. Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it.
We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.
O.K., that was a cheap shot. But here’s one that isn’t: Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, liked to say that companies come to “strategic inflection points,” where the fundamentals of a business change and they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory or do nothing and wither. The same is true for countries.
The U.S. is at just such a strategic inflection point. We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.
Is President Obama going to finish health care and then put aside the pending energy legislation — and carbon pricing — that Congress has already passed in order to get through the midterms without Republicans screaming “new taxes?” Or is he going to seize this moment before the midterms — possibly his last window to put together a majority in the Senate, including some Republicans, for a price on carbon — and put in place a real U.S. engine for clean energy innovation and energy security?
I’ve been stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year.
Here’s e-mail from Bill Gross, who runs eSolar, a promising California solar-thermal start-up: On Saturday, in Beijing, said Gross, he announced “the biggest solar-thermal deal ever. It’s a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build plants in China using our California-based technology. China is being even more aggressive than the U.S. We applied for a [U.S. Department of Energy] loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico, and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”
Yes, climate change is a concern for Beijing, but more immediately China’s leaders know that their country is in the midst of the biggest migration of people from the countryside to urban centers in the history of mankind. This is creating a surge in energy demand, which China is determined to meet with cleaner, homegrown sources so that its future economy will be less vulnerable to supply shocks and so it doesn’t pollute itself to death.
In the last year alone, so many new solar panel makers emerged in China that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents, according to The Times’s bureau chief here, Keith Bradsher. Meanwhile, China last week tested the fastest bullet train in the world — 217 miles per hour — from Wuhan to Guangzhou. As Bradsher noted, China “has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion. Trains will cover the 700-mile route in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today. By comparison, Amtrak trains require at least 18 hours to travel a similar distance from New York to Chicago.”
China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15.
“By the end of this decade, China will be dominating global production of the whole range of power equipment,” said Andrew Brandler, the C.E.O. of the CLP Group, Hong Kong’s largest power utility.
In the process, China is going to make clean power technologies cheaper for itself and everyone else. But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.
This is a strategic inflection point. It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Who’s Sleeping Now?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Hong Kong
C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: “China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.”
I’ll say. Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it.
We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.
O.K., that was a cheap shot. But here’s one that isn’t: Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, liked to say that companies come to “strategic inflection points,” where the fundamentals of a business change and they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory or do nothing and wither. The same is true for countries.
The U.S. is at just such a strategic inflection point. We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.
Is President Obama going to finish health care and then put aside the pending energy legislation — and carbon pricing — that Congress has already passed in order to get through the midterms without Republicans screaming “new taxes?” Or is he going to seize this moment before the midterms — possibly his last window to put together a majority in the Senate, including some Republicans, for a price on carbon — and put in place a real U.S. engine for clean energy innovation and energy security?
I’ve been stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year.
Here’s e-mail from Bill Gross, who runs eSolar, a promising California solar-thermal start-up: On Saturday, in Beijing, said Gross, he announced “the biggest solar-thermal deal ever. It’s a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build plants in China using our California-based technology. China is being even more aggressive than the U.S. We applied for a [U.S. Department of Energy] loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico, and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”
Yes, climate change is a concern for Beijing, but more immediately China’s leaders know that their country is in the midst of the biggest migration of people from the countryside to urban centers in the history of mankind. This is creating a surge in energy demand, which China is determined to meet with cleaner, homegrown sources so that its future economy will be less vulnerable to supply shocks and so it doesn’t pollute itself to death.
In the last year alone, so many new solar panel makers emerged in China that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents, according to The Times’s bureau chief here, Keith Bradsher. Meanwhile, China last week tested the fastest bullet train in the world — 217 miles per hour — from Wuhan to Guangzhou. As Bradsher noted, China “has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion. Trains will cover the 700-mile route in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today. By comparison, Amtrak trains require at least 18 hours to travel a similar distance from New York to Chicago.”
China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15.
“By the end of this decade, China will be dominating global production of the whole range of power equipment,” said Andrew Brandler, the C.E.O. of the CLP Group, Hong Kong’s largest power utility.
In the process, China is going to make clean power technologies cheaper for itself and everyone else. But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.
This is a strategic inflection point. It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opini ... nted=print
January 15, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Google vs. China
By ROGER COHEN
CHONGQING, CHINA — Seated in the cobwebbed little office of Liu Wei, a professor of business administration at Chongqing University in central China, listening to him document the city’s boom, I found my mind wandering as I gazed at his computer screen, open to a Google page.
From Chicago to Chongqing (which, with its population of over 30 million in the municipal area and more than 5 million in the city itself, dwarfs the windy city), Google makes the world go round. Today, there are citizens and “Netizens.” The battle is on, at least in China, to see who will prevail.
China has become a very curious case. As Liu noted to me, “We are included in globalization, an American-led concept, and we have benefited immensely.” Yet Beijing resists the very openness on which it depends. Openness for China is a means to an end — prosperity and development — but not a value.
This is the Chinese paradox Google now appears bent on challenging. Google is right to do so.
China is the world’s manufacturer. It is America’s creditor. It is using global technology and resources to fast-forward some 20 percent of humanity to modernity. The churning landscape here, of cranes and half-finished high-rises and new highways, speaks of a gargantuan national project inconceivable without the treasure globalization has furnished.
The imagery of this fast-forwarding is all global: The Chinese dream looks like nothing so much as the American dream.
Banner ads outside residential developments feature glittering young couples (the women strikingly round-eyed and white-skinned) and images of golf courses. Escape is often portrayed as a family with one child in a green field with a sports utility vehicle; they could be in Connecticut. The bright young things clutching 3G phones in endless ads are chic, globalized metrosexuals.
The Communist Party has bought into the seduction of branding. It has grasped that Nokia and Uniqlo are the bread and circuses of the modern age.
I took the new high-speed train from Chongqing to Chengdu across the rolling hills of Sichuan with their patchwork of vegetable plots. The distance is about the same as New York to Boston but this train service (one of hundreds projected) has cut travel time below two hours — dream on, East Coast commuters! Everywhere the countryside is being gouged open as workers heave some new project into being. Yes, China is leaping ahead!
In its way, this hoisting of a great mass from backwardness is inspiring. Even the mind-numbing statistics — life here is a litany of the most, the biggest, the fastest — elicit vague awe. Many people speak movingly of how they live better now than any previous generation. China’s leaders have been astonishingly deft in delivering development from deprivation.
And yet. ... They seem at times to be chasing their own shadows, as if nothing is as scary as the very development they have conjured.
At a dinner party, a woman told me how her blog had been shut down. She laughed. It was so trivial! YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all blocked. The tens of thousands of government agents monitoring the Internet at the Ministry of Information are working overtime. Western officials in Beijing told me they used to laugh at the notion of China reining in the Internet — these guys actually think they can control the Web, ha! — but are not laughing as much any more.
Their comment was made before Google said it had had enough. Thanks to China Mobile, it was on the Chongqing-Chengdu express that I read the Google announcement that it will cease cooperating with Chinese censorship of Google.cn and might withdraw from China. So, I thought, the behemoth of global connectedness and the behemoth of global growth confront each other.
Nobody here can be surprised that China has been trying to hack into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, among other cyberattacks. That’s consistent with the prevailing mood. Google is on the money when it says China is a great nation behind much of the world’s growth today but that its actions go “to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.”
I don’t think China can forever ride globalization, its development stallion, and deny its very essence: open systems. My sense is the Chinese government is selling itself short. Like the man who taps phones for a living and comes to believe phone tappers are everywhere, it has elevated suspicion to an obsession even as success and stability have brought a significant buy-in. Google’s “Basta!” is a welcome provocation to a critical debate.
News of Google’s decision was, of course, buried. One news portal belonging to Phoenix TV carried an item beneath the Games section saying Google was leaving because it found the local market too confusing and had poor leadership.
But one blogger, Xu Caixing, cut through such obfuscation, saying the issue was “censorship and human rights.” He concluded: “Who is afraid? What are they afraid of?”
Those are good questions. Discussions between Google and the Chinese government will fail if they do not answer them.
A reader’s letter, quoted in my column “In defense of America” (Dec. 22), said Vassar was the “first U.S. college granting degrees to women.” It was not. Oberlin College was.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Google vs. China
By ROGER COHEN
CHONGQING, CHINA — Seated in the cobwebbed little office of Liu Wei, a professor of business administration at Chongqing University in central China, listening to him document the city’s boom, I found my mind wandering as I gazed at his computer screen, open to a Google page.
From Chicago to Chongqing (which, with its population of over 30 million in the municipal area and more than 5 million in the city itself, dwarfs the windy city), Google makes the world go round. Today, there are citizens and “Netizens.” The battle is on, at least in China, to see who will prevail.
China has become a very curious case. As Liu noted to me, “We are included in globalization, an American-led concept, and we have benefited immensely.” Yet Beijing resists the very openness on which it depends. Openness for China is a means to an end — prosperity and development — but not a value.
This is the Chinese paradox Google now appears bent on challenging. Google is right to do so.
China is the world’s manufacturer. It is America’s creditor. It is using global technology and resources to fast-forward some 20 percent of humanity to modernity. The churning landscape here, of cranes and half-finished high-rises and new highways, speaks of a gargantuan national project inconceivable without the treasure globalization has furnished.
The imagery of this fast-forwarding is all global: The Chinese dream looks like nothing so much as the American dream.
Banner ads outside residential developments feature glittering young couples (the women strikingly round-eyed and white-skinned) and images of golf courses. Escape is often portrayed as a family with one child in a green field with a sports utility vehicle; they could be in Connecticut. The bright young things clutching 3G phones in endless ads are chic, globalized metrosexuals.
The Communist Party has bought into the seduction of branding. It has grasped that Nokia and Uniqlo are the bread and circuses of the modern age.
I took the new high-speed train from Chongqing to Chengdu across the rolling hills of Sichuan with their patchwork of vegetable plots. The distance is about the same as New York to Boston but this train service (one of hundreds projected) has cut travel time below two hours — dream on, East Coast commuters! Everywhere the countryside is being gouged open as workers heave some new project into being. Yes, China is leaping ahead!
In its way, this hoisting of a great mass from backwardness is inspiring. Even the mind-numbing statistics — life here is a litany of the most, the biggest, the fastest — elicit vague awe. Many people speak movingly of how they live better now than any previous generation. China’s leaders have been astonishingly deft in delivering development from deprivation.
And yet. ... They seem at times to be chasing their own shadows, as if nothing is as scary as the very development they have conjured.
At a dinner party, a woman told me how her blog had been shut down. She laughed. It was so trivial! YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all blocked. The tens of thousands of government agents monitoring the Internet at the Ministry of Information are working overtime. Western officials in Beijing told me they used to laugh at the notion of China reining in the Internet — these guys actually think they can control the Web, ha! — but are not laughing as much any more.
Their comment was made before Google said it had had enough. Thanks to China Mobile, it was on the Chongqing-Chengdu express that I read the Google announcement that it will cease cooperating with Chinese censorship of Google.cn and might withdraw from China. So, I thought, the behemoth of global connectedness and the behemoth of global growth confront each other.
Nobody here can be surprised that China has been trying to hack into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, among other cyberattacks. That’s consistent with the prevailing mood. Google is on the money when it says China is a great nation behind much of the world’s growth today but that its actions go “to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.”
I don’t think China can forever ride globalization, its development stallion, and deny its very essence: open systems. My sense is the Chinese government is selling itself short. Like the man who taps phones for a living and comes to believe phone tappers are everywhere, it has elevated suspicion to an obsession even as success and stability have brought a significant buy-in. Google’s “Basta!” is a welcome provocation to a critical debate.
News of Google’s decision was, of course, buried. One news portal belonging to Phoenix TV carried an item beneath the Games section saying Google was leaving because it found the local market too confusing and had poor leadership.
But one blogger, Xu Caixing, cut through such obfuscation, saying the issue was “censorship and human rights.” He concluded: “Who is afraid? What are they afraid of?”
Those are good questions. Discussions between Google and the Chinese government will fail if they do not answer them.
A reader’s letter, quoted in my column “In defense of America” (Dec. 22), said Vassar was the “first U.S. college granting degrees to women.” It was not. Oberlin College was.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opini ... nted=print
January 20, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Is China an Enron? (Part 2)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Last week, I wrote a column suggesting that while some overheated Chinese markets, like real estate, may offer shorting opportunities, I’d be wary of the argument that China’s economy today is just one big short-inviting bubble, à la Dubai. Your honor, I’d like to now revise and amend my remarks.
There is one short position, one big short, that does intrigue me in China. I am not sure who makes a market in this area, but here goes: If China forces out Google, I’d like to short the Chinese Communist Party.
Here is why: Chinese companies today are both more backward and more advanced than most Americans realize. There are actually two Chinese economies today. There is the Communist Party and its affiliates; let’s call them Command China. These are the very traditional state-owned enterprises.
Alongside them, there is a second China, largely concentrated in coastal cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. This is a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated techniques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of business knowledge. I call that Network China.
What is so important about knowledge flows? This, for me, is the key to understanding the Google story and why one might decide to short the Chinese Communist Party.
John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released “Shift Index” that we’re in the midst of “The Big Shift.” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.
“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.
I would argue that Command China, in its efforts to suppress, curtail and channel knowledge flows into politically acceptable domains that will indefinitely sustain the control of the Communist Party — i.e., censoring Google — is increasingly at odds with Network China, which is thriving by participating in global knowledge flows. That is what the war over Google is really all about: It is a proxy and a symbol for whether the Chinese will be able to freely search and connect wherever their imaginations and creative impulses take them, which is critical for the future of Network China.
Have no doubt, China has some world-class networked companies that are “in the flow” already, such as Li & Fung, a $14 billion apparel company with a network of 10,000 specialized business partners, and Dachangjiang, the motorcycle maker. The flows occurring on a daily basis in the networks of these Chinese companies to do design, product innovation and supply-chain management and to pool the best global expertise “are unlike anything that U.S. companies have figured out,” said Hagel.
The orchestrators of these networks, he added, “encourage participants to gather among themselves in an ad hoc fashion to address unexpected performance challenges, learn from each other and pull in outsiders as they need them. More traditional companies driven by a desire to protect and exploit knowledge stocks carefully limit the partners they deal with.”
Command China has thrived up to now largely by perfecting the 20th-century model for low-cost manufacturing based on mining knowledge stocks and limiting flows. But China will only thrive in the 21st century — and the Communist Party survive in power — if it can get more of its firms to shift to the 21st-century model of Network China. That means enabling more and more Chinese people, universities and companies to participate in the world’s great knowledge flows, especially ones that connect well beyond the established industry and market boundaries.
Alas, though, China seems to be betting that it can straddle three impulses — control flows for political reasons, maintain 20th-century Command Chinese factories for employment reasons and expand 21st-century Network China for growth reasons. But the contradictions within this straddle could undermine all three. The 20th-century Command model will be under pressure. The future belongs to those who promote richer and ever more diverse knowledge flows and develop the institutions and practices required to harness them.
So there you have it: Command China, which wants to censor Google, is working against Network China, which thrives on Google. For now, it looks as if Command China will have its way. If that turns out to be the case, then I’d like to short the Communist Party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Is China an Enron? (Part 2)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Last week, I wrote a column suggesting that while some overheated Chinese markets, like real estate, may offer shorting opportunities, I’d be wary of the argument that China’s economy today is just one big short-inviting bubble, à la Dubai. Your honor, I’d like to now revise and amend my remarks.
There is one short position, one big short, that does intrigue me in China. I am not sure who makes a market in this area, but here goes: If China forces out Google, I’d like to short the Chinese Communist Party.
Here is why: Chinese companies today are both more backward and more advanced than most Americans realize. There are actually two Chinese economies today. There is the Communist Party and its affiliates; let’s call them Command China. These are the very traditional state-owned enterprises.
Alongside them, there is a second China, largely concentrated in coastal cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. This is a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated techniques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of business knowledge. I call that Network China.
What is so important about knowledge flows? This, for me, is the key to understanding the Google story and why one might decide to short the Chinese Communist Party.
John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released “Shift Index” that we’re in the midst of “The Big Shift.” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.
“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.
I would argue that Command China, in its efforts to suppress, curtail and channel knowledge flows into politically acceptable domains that will indefinitely sustain the control of the Communist Party — i.e., censoring Google — is increasingly at odds with Network China, which is thriving by participating in global knowledge flows. That is what the war over Google is really all about: It is a proxy and a symbol for whether the Chinese will be able to freely search and connect wherever their imaginations and creative impulses take them, which is critical for the future of Network China.
Have no doubt, China has some world-class networked companies that are “in the flow” already, such as Li & Fung, a $14 billion apparel company with a network of 10,000 specialized business partners, and Dachangjiang, the motorcycle maker. The flows occurring on a daily basis in the networks of these Chinese companies to do design, product innovation and supply-chain management and to pool the best global expertise “are unlike anything that U.S. companies have figured out,” said Hagel.
The orchestrators of these networks, he added, “encourage participants to gather among themselves in an ad hoc fashion to address unexpected performance challenges, learn from each other and pull in outsiders as they need them. More traditional companies driven by a desire to protect and exploit knowledge stocks carefully limit the partners they deal with.”
Command China has thrived up to now largely by perfecting the 20th-century model for low-cost manufacturing based on mining knowledge stocks and limiting flows. But China will only thrive in the 21st century — and the Communist Party survive in power — if it can get more of its firms to shift to the 21st-century model of Network China. That means enabling more and more Chinese people, universities and companies to participate in the world’s great knowledge flows, especially ones that connect well beyond the established industry and market boundaries.
Alas, though, China seems to be betting that it can straddle three impulses — control flows for political reasons, maintain 20th-century Command Chinese factories for employment reasons and expand 21st-century Network China for growth reasons. But the contradictions within this straddle could undermine all three. The 20th-century Command model will be under pressure. The future belongs to those who promote richer and ever more diverse knowledge flows and develop the institutions and practices required to harness them.
So there you have it: Command China, which wants to censor Google, is working against Network China, which thrives on Google. For now, it looks as if Command China will have its way. If that turns out to be the case, then I’d like to short the Communist Party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/opini ... nted=print
February 16, 2010
India Worries as China Builds Ports in South Asia
By VIKAS BAJAJ
HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka — For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.
Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.
As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.
But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat.
“There is a method in the madness in terms of where they are locating their ports and staging points,” Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary who is now a member of the government’s National Security Advisory Board, said of China. “This kind of effort is aimed at counterbalancing and undermining India’s natural influence in these areas.”
India and China, the world’s two fastest-growing economies, have a history of tense relations. They share a contested Himalayan border over which they fought a war in 1962. India has given shelter to the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet as China exerted control over it. And China has close military ties with Pakistan, with which India has fought three wars.
But the two countries also do an increasingly booming business with each other. China recently became India’s largest trading partner, and both have worked together to advance similar positions in global trade and climate change negotiations.
Chinese officials deny ulterior motives for their projects in South Asia. And top Indian leaders have tried to play down talk of a rivalry with China, saying there is enough room in the world for both economies to rise simultaneously.
As recently as the 1990s, China’s and India’s trade with four South Asian nations — Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan — was roughly equal. But over the last decade, China has outpaced India in deepening ties.
For China, these countries provide both new markets and alternative routes to the Indian Ocean, which its ships now reach through a narrow channel between Indonesia and Malaysia known as the Strait of Malacca. India, for its part, needs to improve economic ties with its neighbors to broaden its growth and to help foster peace in the region. Some of the shift in trade toward China comes from heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, which has hampered trade between the two countries. But China has also made inroads in nations that have been more friendly with India, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Moreover, protectionist sentiments have marred India’s relationships with its neighbors. South Asia has a free-trade agreement, but countries that are part of the pact get few benefits, economists say, because India and its neighbors refuse to lower tariffs on many goods and services to protect their own businesses. By contrast, the countries of Southeast Asia have minimal or no duties on most goods and services that they import from one another.
India has had some success in establishing closer ties with Sri Lanka, with which it has a strong bilateral trade agreement. But China has become a partner of choice for big projects here like the Hambantota port. China’s Export-Import Bank is financing 85 percent of the cost of the $1 billion project, and China Harbour Engineering, which is part of a state-owned company, is building it. Similar arrangements have been struck for an international airport being built nearby.
Sri Lankan officials want to turn Hambantota, which was devastated by the 2004 tsunami and is the home constituency for President Mahinda Rajapaksa, into the second-largest urban area in the country after the capital, Colombo. (It is the ninth-biggest today.) The government is also building a convention center, a government complex and a cricket stadium.
Sri Lanka needs foreign assistance to make those dreams a reality, because the government’s finances are stretched by a large debt it accumulated in paying for a 25-year civil war that ended in May. In 2009, the country borrowed $2.6 billion from the International Monetary Fund.
Mr. Rajapaksa has said he offered the Hambantota port project first to India, but officials there turned it down. In an interview, Jaliya Wickramasuriya, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the United States, said the country looked for investors in America and around the world, but China offered the best terms. “We don’t have favorites,” he said.
Still, Sri Lankan officials have refused to disclose information that would allow analysts to compare China’s proposals with those submitted by other bidders. The country has also kept private details about other projects that are being financed and built by China, including a power plant, an arts center and a special economic zone.
The Sunday Times, a Sri Lankan newspaper, recently estimated that China was involved in projects totaling $6 billion — more than any other country, including India and Japan, which have historically been big donors and investors in Sri Lanka.
Harsha de Silva, a prominent economist in Colombo and an adviser to the country’s main opposition party, said the Sri Lankan government appeared to prefer awarding projects to China because it did not impose “conditions for reform, transparency and competitive bidding” that would be part of contracts with countries like India and the United States or organizations like the World Bank.
Other analysts say China is winning big projects here and elsewhere in the region because its companies offer lower costs. Chinese companies are also competitive because they have acquired a lot of expertise in building large infrastructure projects in China, said Jerry Lou, Morgan Stanley’s China strategist.
In 10 years, Chinese companies have become the biggest suppliers to ports of cranes used to move shipping containers, displacing South Korean and Japanese companies, he said. “They are running at very high efficiency and at the lowest costs,” Mr. Lou said. “China is a game-changer, rather than a new player in the world’s construction industry.”
India is starting to respond to China’s growing influence by becoming more aggressive in courting trade partners. India recently signed a free-trade deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and South Korea. Officials have even begun talking about signing a trade deal with China to bolster exports.
India’s chief trade negotiator, D. K. Mittal, acknowledged that the country’s economic ties with its neighbors were not as strong as they should be and blamed political distrust between the countries. But he said leaders were now determined to improve economic relations, something he said was highlighted in a recent agreement with Bangladesh.
In that deal, India agreed to sell electricity to Bangladesh, provide it with a $1 billion line of credit for infrastructure projects and reduce tariffs on imports. Bangladesh agreed to allow Indian ships to use a port that is being redeveloped by China. “The political leaders have to rise above and say, ‘I want this to happen,’ ” Mr. Mittal said in an interview. “That’s what the leaders are realizing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/busin ... nted=print
India Worries as China Builds Ports in South Asia
By VIKAS BAJAJ
HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka — For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.
Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.
As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.
But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat.
“There is a method in the madness in terms of where they are locating their ports and staging points,” Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary who is now a member of the government’s National Security Advisory Board, said of China. “This kind of effort is aimed at counterbalancing and undermining India’s natural influence in these areas.”
India and China, the world’s two fastest-growing economies, have a history of tense relations. They share a contested Himalayan border over which they fought a war in 1962. India has given shelter to the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet as China exerted control over it. And China has close military ties with Pakistan, with which India has fought three wars.
But the two countries also do an increasingly booming business with each other. China recently became India’s largest trading partner, and both have worked together to advance similar positions in global trade and climate change negotiations.
Chinese officials deny ulterior motives for their projects in South Asia. And top Indian leaders have tried to play down talk of a rivalry with China, saying there is enough room in the world for both economies to rise simultaneously.
As recently as the 1990s, China’s and India’s trade with four South Asian nations — Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan — was roughly equal. But over the last decade, China has outpaced India in deepening ties.
For China, these countries provide both new markets and alternative routes to the Indian Ocean, which its ships now reach through a narrow channel between Indonesia and Malaysia known as the Strait of Malacca. India, for its part, needs to improve economic ties with its neighbors to broaden its growth and to help foster peace in the region. Some of the shift in trade toward China comes from heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, which has hampered trade between the two countries. But China has also made inroads in nations that have been more friendly with India, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Moreover, protectionist sentiments have marred India’s relationships with its neighbors. South Asia has a free-trade agreement, but countries that are part of the pact get few benefits, economists say, because India and its neighbors refuse to lower tariffs on many goods and services to protect their own businesses. By contrast, the countries of Southeast Asia have minimal or no duties on most goods and services that they import from one another.
India has had some success in establishing closer ties with Sri Lanka, with which it has a strong bilateral trade agreement. But China has become a partner of choice for big projects here like the Hambantota port. China’s Export-Import Bank is financing 85 percent of the cost of the $1 billion project, and China Harbour Engineering, which is part of a state-owned company, is building it. Similar arrangements have been struck for an international airport being built nearby.
Sri Lankan officials want to turn Hambantota, which was devastated by the 2004 tsunami and is the home constituency for President Mahinda Rajapaksa, into the second-largest urban area in the country after the capital, Colombo. (It is the ninth-biggest today.) The government is also building a convention center, a government complex and a cricket stadium.
Sri Lanka needs foreign assistance to make those dreams a reality, because the government’s finances are stretched by a large debt it accumulated in paying for a 25-year civil war that ended in May. In 2009, the country borrowed $2.6 billion from the International Monetary Fund.
Mr. Rajapaksa has said he offered the Hambantota port project first to India, but officials there turned it down. In an interview, Jaliya Wickramasuriya, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the United States, said the country looked for investors in America and around the world, but China offered the best terms. “We don’t have favorites,” he said.
Still, Sri Lankan officials have refused to disclose information that would allow analysts to compare China’s proposals with those submitted by other bidders. The country has also kept private details about other projects that are being financed and built by China, including a power plant, an arts center and a special economic zone.
The Sunday Times, a Sri Lankan newspaper, recently estimated that China was involved in projects totaling $6 billion — more than any other country, including India and Japan, which have historically been big donors and investors in Sri Lanka.
Harsha de Silva, a prominent economist in Colombo and an adviser to the country’s main opposition party, said the Sri Lankan government appeared to prefer awarding projects to China because it did not impose “conditions for reform, transparency and competitive bidding” that would be part of contracts with countries like India and the United States or organizations like the World Bank.
Other analysts say China is winning big projects here and elsewhere in the region because its companies offer lower costs. Chinese companies are also competitive because they have acquired a lot of expertise in building large infrastructure projects in China, said Jerry Lou, Morgan Stanley’s China strategist.
In 10 years, Chinese companies have become the biggest suppliers to ports of cranes used to move shipping containers, displacing South Korean and Japanese companies, he said. “They are running at very high efficiency and at the lowest costs,” Mr. Lou said. “China is a game-changer, rather than a new player in the world’s construction industry.”
India is starting to respond to China’s growing influence by becoming more aggressive in courting trade partners. India recently signed a free-trade deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and South Korea. Officials have even begun talking about signing a trade deal with China to bolster exports.
India’s chief trade negotiator, D. K. Mittal, acknowledged that the country’s economic ties with its neighbors were not as strong as they should be and blamed political distrust between the countries. But he said leaders were now determined to improve economic relations, something he said was highlighted in a recent agreement with Bangladesh.
In that deal, India agreed to sell electricity to Bangladesh, provide it with a $1 billion line of credit for infrastructure projects and reduce tariffs on imports. Bangladesh agreed to allow Indian ships to use a port that is being redeveloped by China. “The political leaders have to rise above and say, ‘I want this to happen,’ ” Mr. Mittal said in an interview. “That’s what the leaders are realizing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/busin ... nted=print
February 27, 2010
Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and WAQAR GILLANI
LAHORE, Pakistan — Umar Kundi was his parents’ pride, an ambitious young man from a small town who made it to medical school in the big city. It seemed like a story of working-class success, living proof in this unequal society that a telephone operator’s son could become a doctor.
But things went wrong along the way. On campus Mr. Kundi fell in with a hard-line Islamic group. His degree did not get him a job, and he drifted in the urban crush of young people looking for work. His early radicalization helped channel his ambitions in a grander, more sinister way.
Instead of healing the sick, Mr. Kundi went on to become one of Pakistan’s most accomplished militants. Working under a handler from Al Qaeda, he was part of a network that carried out some of the boldest attacks against the Pakistani state and its people last year, the police here say. Months of hunting him ended on Feb. 19, when he was killed in a shootout with the police at the age of 29.
Mr. Kundi and members of his circle — educated strivers who come from the lower middle class — are part of a new generation that has made militant networks in Pakistan more sophisticated and deadly. Al Qaeda has harnessed their aimless ambition and anger at Pakistan’s alliance with the United States, their generation’s most electrifying enemy.
“These are guys who use Google Maps to plan their attacks,” said a senior Punjab Province police official. “Their training is better than our national police academy.”
Like Mr. Kundi, many came of age in the 1990s, when jihad was state policy — aimed at challenging Indian control in Kashmir — and jihadi groups recruited openly in universities. Under the influence of Al Qaeda, their energies have been redirected and turned inward, against Pakistan’s own government and people.
That shift has fractured long-established militant networks, which were once supported by the state, producing a patchwork of new associations that are fluid and defy easy categorization.
“The situation now is quite confusing,” said Tariq Parvez, director of the National Counterterrorism Authority in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “We can no longer talk in terms of organizations. Now it’s a question of like-minded militants.”
The result has been deadly. In 2009, militant attacks killed 3,021 Pakistanis, three times as many as in 2006.
The issue is urgent. Pakistan is in the midst of a youth bulge, with more than a million people a year pouring into the job market, and the economy — at its current rate — is not growing fast enough to absorb them. Only a tiny fraction choose militancy, but acute joblessness exacerbates the risk.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world ... ?th&emc=th
Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and WAQAR GILLANI
LAHORE, Pakistan — Umar Kundi was his parents’ pride, an ambitious young man from a small town who made it to medical school in the big city. It seemed like a story of working-class success, living proof in this unequal society that a telephone operator’s son could become a doctor.
But things went wrong along the way. On campus Mr. Kundi fell in with a hard-line Islamic group. His degree did not get him a job, and he drifted in the urban crush of young people looking for work. His early radicalization helped channel his ambitions in a grander, more sinister way.
Instead of healing the sick, Mr. Kundi went on to become one of Pakistan’s most accomplished militants. Working under a handler from Al Qaeda, he was part of a network that carried out some of the boldest attacks against the Pakistani state and its people last year, the police here say. Months of hunting him ended on Feb. 19, when he was killed in a shootout with the police at the age of 29.
Mr. Kundi and members of his circle — educated strivers who come from the lower middle class — are part of a new generation that has made militant networks in Pakistan more sophisticated and deadly. Al Qaeda has harnessed their aimless ambition and anger at Pakistan’s alliance with the United States, their generation’s most electrifying enemy.
“These are guys who use Google Maps to plan their attacks,” said a senior Punjab Province police official. “Their training is better than our national police academy.”
Like Mr. Kundi, many came of age in the 1990s, when jihad was state policy — aimed at challenging Indian control in Kashmir — and jihadi groups recruited openly in universities. Under the influence of Al Qaeda, their energies have been redirected and turned inward, against Pakistan’s own government and people.
That shift has fractured long-established militant networks, which were once supported by the state, producing a patchwork of new associations that are fluid and defy easy categorization.
“The situation now is quite confusing,” said Tariq Parvez, director of the National Counterterrorism Authority in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “We can no longer talk in terms of organizations. Now it’s a question of like-minded militants.”
The result has been deadly. In 2009, militant attacks killed 3,021 Pakistanis, three times as many as in 2006.
The issue is urgent. Pakistan is in the midst of a youth bulge, with more than a million people a year pouring into the job market, and the economy — at its current rate — is not growing fast enough to absorb them. Only a tiny fraction choose militancy, but acute joblessness exacerbates the risk.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world ... ?th&emc=th
There are related photos at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 18, 2010
For India’s Newly Rich Farmers, Limos Won’t Do
By JIM YARDLEY
NOIDA, India — Bhisham Singh Yadav, father of the groom, is stressed. His rented Lexus got stuck behind a bullock cart. He has hired a truck to blast Hindi pop, but it is too big to maneuver through his village. At least his grandest gesture, evidence of his upward mobility, is circling overhead. The helicopter has arrived.
Mr. Yadav, a wheat farmer, has never flown, nor has anyone else in the family. And this will only be a short trip: delivering his son less than two miles to the village of the bride. But like many families in this expanding suburb of New Delhi, the Yadavs have come into money, and they want everyone to know it.
“People will remember that his son went on a helicopter for his marriage,” a cousin, Vikas Yadav, shouted over the din. “People should know they are spending money. For us, things like this are the stuff of dreams.”
The Yadavs are members of a new economic caste in India: nouveau riche farmers. Land acquisition for expanding cities and industry is one of the most bitterly contentious issues in India, rife with corruption and violent protests. Yet in some areas it has created pockets of overnight wealth, especially in the outlying regions of the capital, New Delhi.
By Western standards, few of these farmers are truly rich. But in India, where the annual per capita income is about $1,000 and where roughly 800 million people live on less than $2 a day, some farmers have gotten windfalls of several million rupees by selling land. Over the years, farmers and others have sold more than 50,000 acres of farmland as Noida has evolved into a suburb of 300,000 people with shopping malls and office parks.
That has created what might seem to be a pleasant predicament: What to do with the cash? Some farmers have bought more land, banked money, invested in their children’s educations or made improvements to their homes. In Punjab, a few farmers told the Indian news media they wanted to use their land riches to move to Canada. But still others are broke after indulging in spending sprees for cars, holiday trips and other luxuries.
“They go for Land Rovers,” said N. Sridharan, a professor at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. “They buy more televisions, and quite a lot of money also goes into drinking. They try to blow it out.”
Much of this conspicuous consumption is bad financial planning by farmers who have little education or experience with the seductive heat of cold cash. But some sociologists say such ostentatious spending, especially on weddings, is rooted in the desire of lower castes to show off their social mobility, partly by emulating the practices of the upper castes.
In India, as in many places, a wedding has always been equal parts religious ceremony, theatrical production and wealth demonstration project. For the country’s elite, the latest matrimonial trend is destination weddings in Bali or palaces in Rajasthan. For the new rich, hiring a helicopter is motivated by the same impulses for excitement and one-upmanship.
“Everyone wants to be better than the others,” said Subhash Goyal, whose travel company handles three or four helicopter weddings every year in the Delhi region. “This is how the new rich behave. They want to show off and say, ‘I have more money than you.’ ”
On the morning of his son’s wedding, Mr. Yadav sat in the shabby brick courtyard of his village home, finalizing the last details of a ceremony that seemed to straddle different centuries. He had earned about $109,000 selling three acres of his ancestral land. He banked some of the money, renovated his house, bought a small Hyundai and purchased three more acres farther out to continue farming.
He estimates that his share of the wedding — the bride’s father pays a bigger share — will cost him $13,000, including $8,327 for the chopper. “It is for my happiness, for the happiness of my son,” said Mr. Yadav, 36. “In my marriage, I went in a car. But that was a different era.”
As the family began the traditional procession through the village, his son, Kapil, 19, was dressed in embroidered finery atop a white horse. Mr. Yadav’s rented white Lexus finally got around the bullock cart; he was taking it to the bride’s village while his son rode in the chopper. As another touch, Mr. Yadav also had hired a truck — the Reenu Rock Star 2010 Hi-Fi DJ — to lead the procession. It was playing Hindi pop so loudly that the brick homes of the village seemed to shake.
Then a problem arose: The truck was stuck at a tight corner, and the procession was pinned between the truck and a herd of water buffaloes. As people slipped around the marooned Reenu Rock Star, another problem materialized: The helicopter was already circling above.
Usually, the procession is a slow parade to wave to neighbors. But the Yadavs had rented the helicopter by the hour, so everyone started running, sidestepping the piles of water buffalo dung and the channel of open sewage. The corpulent mother of the groom, her flesh spilling out of her sari, giggled as she barreled toward the arriving aircraft.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “We are so happy!”
The helicopter landed in a clearing. In the distance, the concrete skeletons of new apartment towers were clouded in a haze. Hundreds of villagers surrounded the small blue helicopter, which was guarded by a detail of local police officers. Then the groom and two relatives jumped in, and the blue bird rose over the village, as Mr. Yadav hopped in the Lexus and roared toward the bride’s village.
The ride took five minutes, and Mr. Yadav barely beat the arriving chopper. When the son stepped onto solid ground, he was wearing a garland made of 100 rupee notes. The helicopter was to return in the morning, after the wedding ceremony, to deliver the newlyweds back to the groom’s village and the rest of their lives.
But as the white-haired pilot prepared to depart, the father of the bride, Davinder Singh Yadav, pulled him close. “Please take it over the village a few times before you leave,” he shouted. “The village is so big. Everybody needs to see it.”
A moment later, as the copter circled above the small farming houses, the father said: “The whole village will remember. The whole world will remember.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 18, 2010
For India’s Newly Rich Farmers, Limos Won’t Do
By JIM YARDLEY
NOIDA, India — Bhisham Singh Yadav, father of the groom, is stressed. His rented Lexus got stuck behind a bullock cart. He has hired a truck to blast Hindi pop, but it is too big to maneuver through his village. At least his grandest gesture, evidence of his upward mobility, is circling overhead. The helicopter has arrived.
Mr. Yadav, a wheat farmer, has never flown, nor has anyone else in the family. And this will only be a short trip: delivering his son less than two miles to the village of the bride. But like many families in this expanding suburb of New Delhi, the Yadavs have come into money, and they want everyone to know it.
“People will remember that his son went on a helicopter for his marriage,” a cousin, Vikas Yadav, shouted over the din. “People should know they are spending money. For us, things like this are the stuff of dreams.”
The Yadavs are members of a new economic caste in India: nouveau riche farmers. Land acquisition for expanding cities and industry is one of the most bitterly contentious issues in India, rife with corruption and violent protests. Yet in some areas it has created pockets of overnight wealth, especially in the outlying regions of the capital, New Delhi.
By Western standards, few of these farmers are truly rich. But in India, where the annual per capita income is about $1,000 and where roughly 800 million people live on less than $2 a day, some farmers have gotten windfalls of several million rupees by selling land. Over the years, farmers and others have sold more than 50,000 acres of farmland as Noida has evolved into a suburb of 300,000 people with shopping malls and office parks.
That has created what might seem to be a pleasant predicament: What to do with the cash? Some farmers have bought more land, banked money, invested in their children’s educations or made improvements to their homes. In Punjab, a few farmers told the Indian news media they wanted to use their land riches to move to Canada. But still others are broke after indulging in spending sprees for cars, holiday trips and other luxuries.
“They go for Land Rovers,” said N. Sridharan, a professor at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. “They buy more televisions, and quite a lot of money also goes into drinking. They try to blow it out.”
Much of this conspicuous consumption is bad financial planning by farmers who have little education or experience with the seductive heat of cold cash. But some sociologists say such ostentatious spending, especially on weddings, is rooted in the desire of lower castes to show off their social mobility, partly by emulating the practices of the upper castes.
In India, as in many places, a wedding has always been equal parts religious ceremony, theatrical production and wealth demonstration project. For the country’s elite, the latest matrimonial trend is destination weddings in Bali or palaces in Rajasthan. For the new rich, hiring a helicopter is motivated by the same impulses for excitement and one-upmanship.
“Everyone wants to be better than the others,” said Subhash Goyal, whose travel company handles three or four helicopter weddings every year in the Delhi region. “This is how the new rich behave. They want to show off and say, ‘I have more money than you.’ ”
On the morning of his son’s wedding, Mr. Yadav sat in the shabby brick courtyard of his village home, finalizing the last details of a ceremony that seemed to straddle different centuries. He had earned about $109,000 selling three acres of his ancestral land. He banked some of the money, renovated his house, bought a small Hyundai and purchased three more acres farther out to continue farming.
He estimates that his share of the wedding — the bride’s father pays a bigger share — will cost him $13,000, including $8,327 for the chopper. “It is for my happiness, for the happiness of my son,” said Mr. Yadav, 36. “In my marriage, I went in a car. But that was a different era.”
As the family began the traditional procession through the village, his son, Kapil, 19, was dressed in embroidered finery atop a white horse. Mr. Yadav’s rented white Lexus finally got around the bullock cart; he was taking it to the bride’s village while his son rode in the chopper. As another touch, Mr. Yadav also had hired a truck — the Reenu Rock Star 2010 Hi-Fi DJ — to lead the procession. It was playing Hindi pop so loudly that the brick homes of the village seemed to shake.
Then a problem arose: The truck was stuck at a tight corner, and the procession was pinned between the truck and a herd of water buffaloes. As people slipped around the marooned Reenu Rock Star, another problem materialized: The helicopter was already circling above.
Usually, the procession is a slow parade to wave to neighbors. But the Yadavs had rented the helicopter by the hour, so everyone started running, sidestepping the piles of water buffalo dung and the channel of open sewage. The corpulent mother of the groom, her flesh spilling out of her sari, giggled as she barreled toward the arriving aircraft.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “We are so happy!”
The helicopter landed in a clearing. In the distance, the concrete skeletons of new apartment towers were clouded in a haze. Hundreds of villagers surrounded the small blue helicopter, which was guarded by a detail of local police officers. Then the groom and two relatives jumped in, and the blue bird rose over the village, as Mr. Yadav hopped in the Lexus and roared toward the bride’s village.
The ride took five minutes, and Mr. Yadav barely beat the arriving chopper. When the son stepped onto solid ground, he was wearing a garland made of 100 rupee notes. The helicopter was to return in the morning, after the wedding ceremony, to deliver the newlyweds back to the groom’s village and the rest of their lives.
But as the white-haired pilot prepared to depart, the father of the bride, Davinder Singh Yadav, pulled him close. “Please take it over the village a few times before you leave,” he shouted. “The village is so big. Everybody needs to see it.”
A moment later, as the copter circled above the small farming houses, the father said: “The whole village will remember. The whole world will remember.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/busin ... earch.html
March 17, 2010
China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S.
By KEITH BRADSHER
XI’AN, China — For years, many of China’s best and brightest left for the United States, where high-tech industry was more cutting-edge. But Mark R. Pinto is moving in the opposite direction.
Mr. Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today, it is the world’s biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays.
In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif., has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Last week, it even held its annual shareholders’ meeting in Xi’an.
It is hardly alone. Companies — and their engineers — are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States.
A few American companies are even making deals with Chinese companies to license Chinese technology.
The Chinese market is surging for electricity, cars and much more, and companies are concluding that their researchers need to be close to factories and consumers alike. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs here after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world’s solar panels by the end of this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/busin ... earch.html
March 17, 2010
China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S.
By KEITH BRADSHER
XI’AN, China — For years, many of China’s best and brightest left for the United States, where high-tech industry was more cutting-edge. But Mark R. Pinto is moving in the opposite direction.
Mr. Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today, it is the world’s biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays.
In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif., has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Last week, it even held its annual shareholders’ meeting in Xi’an.
It is hardly alone. Companies — and their engineers — are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States.
A few American companies are even making deals with Chinese companies to license Chinese technology.
The Chinese market is surging for electricity, cars and much more, and companies are concluding that their researchers need to be close to factories and consumers alike. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs here after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world’s solar panels by the end of this year.
April 20, 2010
At Top University, a Fight for Pakistan’s Future
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
LAHORE, Pakistan — The professor was working in his office here on the campus of Pakistan’s largest university this month when members of an Islamic student group battered open the door, beat him with metal rods and bashed him over the head with a giant flower pot.
Iftikhar Baloch, an environmental science professor, had expelled members of the group for violent behavior. The retribution left him bloodied and nearly unconscious, and it united his fellow professors, who protested with a nearly three-week strike that ended Monday.
The attack and the anger it provoked have drawn attention to the student group, Islami Jamiat Talaba, whose morals police have for years terrorized this graceful, century-old institution by brandishing a chauvinistic form of Islam, teachers here say.
But the group has help from a surprising source — national political leaders who have given it free rein, because they sometimes make political alliances with its parent organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s oldest and most powerful religious party, they say.
The university’s plight encapsulates Pakistan’s predicament: an intolerant, aggressive minority terrorizes a more open-minded, peaceful majority, while an opportunistic political class dithers, benefiting from alliances with the aggressors.
The dynamic helps explain how the Taliban and other militant groups here, though small and often unpopular minorities, retain their hold over large portions of Pakistani society.
But this is the University of the Punjab, Pakistan’s premier institution of higher learning, with about 30,000 students, and a principal avenue of advancement for the swelling ranks of Pakistan’s lower and middle classes.
The battle here concerns the future direction of the country, and whether those pushing an intolerant vision of Islam will prevail against this nation’s beleaguered, outward-looking, educated class.
That is why the problem of Islami Jamiat Talaba is so urgent, teachers say.
“They are hooligans with a Taliban mentality and they should be banned, full stop,” Maliha A. Aga, a teacher in the art department, said of the student group as she stood in a throng of protesters in professorial robes this month. “That’s the only way this university will survive.”
The rhetoric of the group, like that of its parent political party, is strongly anti-West, chauvinistic and intolerant of Pakistan’s religious minorities. It was a vocal supporter of the Taliban, until doing so became unpopular last year.
Its members block music classes, ban Western soft drinks and beat male students for sitting near girls on the university lawn.
“It’s fascist,” said Shaista Sirajuddin, an English literature professor, of the Islamic student movement. “Every single government has averted its eyes.”
The group is something of a puzzle. It may be aggressive, but it is relatively small, and has waned in popularity among students in recent years. One young teacher said association with it now brought stigma.
But it still manages to dominate by deftly wielding Islam as a weapon to bludgeon its enemies, denouncing anyone who disagrees with it as un-Islamic.
The tactic is effective in Pakistan, a young country whose early confusion about the role of Islam in society has hardened into a rigid certainty, making it highly taboo to question.
“It’s unthinkable to talk even about human rights without reference to the Holy Book,” said Ms. Sirajuddin, referring to the Koran. “Such is the dread to be talked about as un-Islamic.”
The reason goes back to history. In the 1980s, an American-supported autocrat, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, seeded the education system with Islamists in an effort to forge a unified Pakistani identity. At the University of the Punjab, that created a pool of supporters for Islami Jamiat Talaba among teachers, making the group all but impossible to eject.
It has left liberal teachers like Ms. Sirajuddin despairing for their institution, which once upon a time produced three Nobel laureates. Now, they say, it is a shadow of its former self and no longer a safe environment for young people to exchange ideas.
One of the leaders of the group’s national chapter, Nadim Ahmed, condemned the beating as “shameful,” and said the main attackers had been suspended. But he emphasized that the group itself was peaceful. Its only ambitions, he said, are to welcome new students and organize book fairs.
But students and teachers say the group’s aim is power, and that it uses violence to get it. A teacher, who would give her name only as Ms. Tayyib, fearing retribution, said group members twice attacked sports events she had organized, once wielding chairs. The recently formed music department has never been able to hold a class on campus.
“Every second issue is a sin,” Ms. Tayyib said.
The intimidation has poisoned the academic atmosphere, said another young teacher, Nazia, who was also too fearful to allow her full name to be printed. “Jamiat is a threat for teachers,” Nazia said. “That weakens the quality of education.”
Mr. Baloch, the teacher who was beaten on April 1, had taken a stand against them. He identified the ringleader as Usman Ashraf, a 26-year-old geology graduate student, whose mug shot is posted in departments around campus.
“I received many applications” complaining of abuses, he said while convalescing in his home. “And more or less every second one had his name on it.”
Just as in Pakistan as a whole, the stakes in this power game are property and money, and the student group has both. It is deeply embedded in the life of the campus, controlling the dormitories, the cafeterias and the campus snack shops.
The group created a parallel administration, according to a former member, Nadim Jamil, and has divided the university into five zones, with a nazim, or mayor, assigned to each. The dormitories are their fiefdoms, he said, where mayors monitor movements, hold Koran reading classes and recruit members.
The university is as ineffectual as the group is organized: There are dormitory ID cards, but no one bothers to check them, said Ms. Tayyib, who used to live in the girls’ dormitory, which is also controlled by the group.
“It’s our fault,” Ms. Tayyib said. “We are weak. The administration is lethargic.”
As unpopular as it may be on campus, the group never has trouble getting recruits. Many first-year students are shy, underprivileged youths from the countryside. The group appeals to this weakness, helping with expenses and opening up a system of benefits: More milk in their tea. Better food. Cleaner dishes.
“It’s an addiction,” Ms. Tayyib said, describing the thinking of the young recruits. “I’m from a remote area, and no one ever listened to me. But now I’m important.”
Mr. Baloch, who received more than 30 stitches in his head, said he believed that the attack had galvanized public opinion against the group and that it would serve to turn people against it. “The wheels of justice grind slowly but surely,” he said.
Others are less certain. Last week, several of the attackers were arrested, but Mr. Ashraf, the ringleader, was not among them. Besides, the group’s top leader on campus is the son of an important politician.
“This opportunity will be lost,” said Nazia, the young teacher. “I know it’s pessimistic, but it’s what I’m thinking.”
Waqar Gillani contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/world ... ?th&emc=th
At Top University, a Fight for Pakistan’s Future
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
LAHORE, Pakistan — The professor was working in his office here on the campus of Pakistan’s largest university this month when members of an Islamic student group battered open the door, beat him with metal rods and bashed him over the head with a giant flower pot.
Iftikhar Baloch, an environmental science professor, had expelled members of the group for violent behavior. The retribution left him bloodied and nearly unconscious, and it united his fellow professors, who protested with a nearly three-week strike that ended Monday.
The attack and the anger it provoked have drawn attention to the student group, Islami Jamiat Talaba, whose morals police have for years terrorized this graceful, century-old institution by brandishing a chauvinistic form of Islam, teachers here say.
But the group has help from a surprising source — national political leaders who have given it free rein, because they sometimes make political alliances with its parent organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s oldest and most powerful religious party, they say.
The university’s plight encapsulates Pakistan’s predicament: an intolerant, aggressive minority terrorizes a more open-minded, peaceful majority, while an opportunistic political class dithers, benefiting from alliances with the aggressors.
The dynamic helps explain how the Taliban and other militant groups here, though small and often unpopular minorities, retain their hold over large portions of Pakistani society.
But this is the University of the Punjab, Pakistan’s premier institution of higher learning, with about 30,000 students, and a principal avenue of advancement for the swelling ranks of Pakistan’s lower and middle classes.
The battle here concerns the future direction of the country, and whether those pushing an intolerant vision of Islam will prevail against this nation’s beleaguered, outward-looking, educated class.
That is why the problem of Islami Jamiat Talaba is so urgent, teachers say.
“They are hooligans with a Taliban mentality and they should be banned, full stop,” Maliha A. Aga, a teacher in the art department, said of the student group as she stood in a throng of protesters in professorial robes this month. “That’s the only way this university will survive.”
The rhetoric of the group, like that of its parent political party, is strongly anti-West, chauvinistic and intolerant of Pakistan’s religious minorities. It was a vocal supporter of the Taliban, until doing so became unpopular last year.
Its members block music classes, ban Western soft drinks and beat male students for sitting near girls on the university lawn.
“It’s fascist,” said Shaista Sirajuddin, an English literature professor, of the Islamic student movement. “Every single government has averted its eyes.”
The group is something of a puzzle. It may be aggressive, but it is relatively small, and has waned in popularity among students in recent years. One young teacher said association with it now brought stigma.
But it still manages to dominate by deftly wielding Islam as a weapon to bludgeon its enemies, denouncing anyone who disagrees with it as un-Islamic.
The tactic is effective in Pakistan, a young country whose early confusion about the role of Islam in society has hardened into a rigid certainty, making it highly taboo to question.
“It’s unthinkable to talk even about human rights without reference to the Holy Book,” said Ms. Sirajuddin, referring to the Koran. “Such is the dread to be talked about as un-Islamic.”
The reason goes back to history. In the 1980s, an American-supported autocrat, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, seeded the education system with Islamists in an effort to forge a unified Pakistani identity. At the University of the Punjab, that created a pool of supporters for Islami Jamiat Talaba among teachers, making the group all but impossible to eject.
It has left liberal teachers like Ms. Sirajuddin despairing for their institution, which once upon a time produced three Nobel laureates. Now, they say, it is a shadow of its former self and no longer a safe environment for young people to exchange ideas.
One of the leaders of the group’s national chapter, Nadim Ahmed, condemned the beating as “shameful,” and said the main attackers had been suspended. But he emphasized that the group itself was peaceful. Its only ambitions, he said, are to welcome new students and organize book fairs.
But students and teachers say the group’s aim is power, and that it uses violence to get it. A teacher, who would give her name only as Ms. Tayyib, fearing retribution, said group members twice attacked sports events she had organized, once wielding chairs. The recently formed music department has never been able to hold a class on campus.
“Every second issue is a sin,” Ms. Tayyib said.
The intimidation has poisoned the academic atmosphere, said another young teacher, Nazia, who was also too fearful to allow her full name to be printed. “Jamiat is a threat for teachers,” Nazia said. “That weakens the quality of education.”
Mr. Baloch, the teacher who was beaten on April 1, had taken a stand against them. He identified the ringleader as Usman Ashraf, a 26-year-old geology graduate student, whose mug shot is posted in departments around campus.
“I received many applications” complaining of abuses, he said while convalescing in his home. “And more or less every second one had his name on it.”
Just as in Pakistan as a whole, the stakes in this power game are property and money, and the student group has both. It is deeply embedded in the life of the campus, controlling the dormitories, the cafeterias and the campus snack shops.
The group created a parallel administration, according to a former member, Nadim Jamil, and has divided the university into five zones, with a nazim, or mayor, assigned to each. The dormitories are their fiefdoms, he said, where mayors monitor movements, hold Koran reading classes and recruit members.
The university is as ineffectual as the group is organized: There are dormitory ID cards, but no one bothers to check them, said Ms. Tayyib, who used to live in the girls’ dormitory, which is also controlled by the group.
“It’s our fault,” Ms. Tayyib said. “We are weak. The administration is lethargic.”
As unpopular as it may be on campus, the group never has trouble getting recruits. Many first-year students are shy, underprivileged youths from the countryside. The group appeals to this weakness, helping with expenses and opening up a system of benefits: More milk in their tea. Better food. Cleaner dishes.
“It’s an addiction,” Ms. Tayyib said, describing the thinking of the young recruits. “I’m from a remote area, and no one ever listened to me. But now I’m important.”
Mr. Baloch, who received more than 30 stitches in his head, said he believed that the attack had galvanized public opinion against the group and that it would serve to turn people against it. “The wheels of justice grind slowly but surely,” he said.
Others are less certain. Last week, several of the attackers were arrested, but Mr. Ashraf, the ringleader, was not among them. Besides, the group’s top leader on campus is the son of an important politician.
“This opportunity will be lost,” said Nazia, the young teacher. “I know it’s pessimistic, but it’s what I’m thinking.”
Waqar Gillani contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/world ... ?th&emc=th
May 10, 2010
As Cricket Grew in India, Corruption Followed
By JIM YARDLEY
NEW DELHI — Founded three seasons ago, the Indian Premier League managed to make the sport of cricket sexy. India’s corporate titans bought teams, Bollywood stars infused matches with celebrity glamour and fans from Mumbai to Dubai to New Jersey followed the league on television as its value rose to more than $4 billion.
For many Indians, the league, known as the I.P.L., became a symbol of a newly dynamic and confident India that was expanding its influence in the world. Yet after weeks of allegations of graft and financial malfeasance, the resignation of a government minister and the suspension of the league’s charismatic commissioner, the league has become emblematic of something else: how much the old and often corrupt political and business elite still dominates the country.
“The great pity in India is that creations like the I.P.L. became a victim of their own success,” the editor in chief of the magazine India Today, Aroon Purie, wrote this month. “Where there is money involved, especially large sums, corruption is not far behind.”
Cricket may befuddle much of the world, but the sport is an obsession in India, which is one reason the cricket scandal — dubbed I.P.L. Gate by the Indian news media — has assumed such import. Government tax examiners have confiscated accounting records, and the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the sport’s regulatory body, is expected to hold a pivotal hearing in coming days for the league’s suspended commissioner, Lalit Kumar Modi.
Insiders on the cricket board depict Mr. Modi as a visionary who operated the league by fiat and enriched himself and his family members through hidden shares in teams or fees from television and Internet contracts. But the board is also in a compromised position. It is a nongovernmental organization dominated by some of the country’s most powerful politicians, including Arun Jaitley, a top leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and Sharad Pawar, the agriculture minister.
Many commentators are skeptical that the board could have been completely ignorant of Mr. Modi’s actions. Mr. Modi says he did nothing wrong. Even before the scandal, the board was criticized as lacking transparency and was accused of conflicts of interest. One board member is also the owner of an I.P.L. team.
For decades, politicians have had their fingers in the game. Cricket has been organized around state teams competing in regional and national tournaments, with elite players selected for India’s national team. Every state has a cricket association, often led by the state’s chief minister or some other influential politician or bureaucrat. Today, political figures lead cricket associations in at least six states.
G. Rajaraman, a longtime cricket journalist, said these relationships initially benefited the sport because the politician could help a team get resources. But that equation changed since money began entering the sport, first with television in the 1990s and then with the advent of the I.P.L. Soon, more politicians were vying for control. Mr. Pawar, the agriculture minister, took over the national cricket board in 2005, with Mr. Modi as his protégé.
Having lived in the United States, Mr. Modi saw how commercial leagues like the N.B.A. promoted stars and hometown teams to excite fans and generate revenues. European soccer, especially the English Premier League, was already televised across Asia just as an emerging Indian middle class was starting to discover sports as a leisure spectator activity.
“Modi saw this and he said, ‘We need to create our own icons,’ ” Mr. Rajaraman said.
Mr. Modi formatted the I.P.L. as a made-for-television product. He outraged purists by adopting a condensed version of the sport that reduced the length of a match from a day, or several days, to three television-friendly hours. Mr. Modi also brought in cheerleaders and movie stars.
Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, bought part of a team, and some fans paid hundreds of dollars to mingle with players, fashion models and celebrities at postgame parties that continued into the early morning hours. Celebrity Web sites began carrying photos of the parties or gossip about which Bollywood stars were seen in the stands.
“A lot of women started watching,” Mr. Rajaraman said. “There are a lot of people who watch to see what Shah Rukh Khan is doing at the end of the game, or what new T-shirt he is wearing.”
Ramachandra Guha, a historian who has written a book about cricket, said the I.P.L. tailored itself to the aspirations, and alienation, of an Indian middle class disillusioned with the country’s corruption and poverty. But Mr. Guha said the organization of the league — with teams located in India’s most affluent cities as opposed to having one in every state — has effectively mirrored the deep inequality in society.
“It is the India that is doing well economically,” he said. “It shuts itself off from the other 800 million Indians who live in the hinterlands.”
Now, Mr. Modi is gathering documents for his hearing, while government officials have come under scrutiny. A junior minister of foreign affairs, Shashi Tharoor, was forced to resign because of his involvement with a consortium that won a bid for a team in his home state.
Others who seem closely linked to the league have so far stayed in power as the scandal has assumed political overtones. Mr. Pawar heads a regional political party that is part of the coalition government led by the Congress Party. As yet, investigators have not accused him of any wrongdoing.
And the country’s civil aviation minister, Praful Patel, has faced questions on whether he was involved in the bidding process for a new franchise and whether his ministry had showed favoritism to his daughter, a former model who helps coordinate the I.P.L.’s travel. In late April, the state-owned airline, Air India, canceled a scheduled flight, delaying passengers, so that Mr. Patel’s daughter and several I.P.L. players could use it as a paid charter.
Dhiraj Nayyar, a senior editor at The Financial Express, said the cricket scandal was best understood in the context of India’s economic evolution. When India’s stock exchange took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scandals erupted over market manipulation until regulatory structures were strengthened. Today, the same absence of transparency and regulation exists in cricket.
“The I.P.L. is a curious creature that combines the best and worst of Indian capitalism — fabulous enterprise and outcomes on the one side, riddled with cronyism, patronage and power politics on the other,” Mr. Nayyar wrote recently. “In many ways the I.P.L. is a confirmation of what India really is: an emerging economy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/world ... ?th&emc=th
As Cricket Grew in India, Corruption Followed
By JIM YARDLEY
NEW DELHI — Founded three seasons ago, the Indian Premier League managed to make the sport of cricket sexy. India’s corporate titans bought teams, Bollywood stars infused matches with celebrity glamour and fans from Mumbai to Dubai to New Jersey followed the league on television as its value rose to more than $4 billion.
For many Indians, the league, known as the I.P.L., became a symbol of a newly dynamic and confident India that was expanding its influence in the world. Yet after weeks of allegations of graft and financial malfeasance, the resignation of a government minister and the suspension of the league’s charismatic commissioner, the league has become emblematic of something else: how much the old and often corrupt political and business elite still dominates the country.
“The great pity in India is that creations like the I.P.L. became a victim of their own success,” the editor in chief of the magazine India Today, Aroon Purie, wrote this month. “Where there is money involved, especially large sums, corruption is not far behind.”
Cricket may befuddle much of the world, but the sport is an obsession in India, which is one reason the cricket scandal — dubbed I.P.L. Gate by the Indian news media — has assumed such import. Government tax examiners have confiscated accounting records, and the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the sport’s regulatory body, is expected to hold a pivotal hearing in coming days for the league’s suspended commissioner, Lalit Kumar Modi.
Insiders on the cricket board depict Mr. Modi as a visionary who operated the league by fiat and enriched himself and his family members through hidden shares in teams or fees from television and Internet contracts. But the board is also in a compromised position. It is a nongovernmental organization dominated by some of the country’s most powerful politicians, including Arun Jaitley, a top leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and Sharad Pawar, the agriculture minister.
Many commentators are skeptical that the board could have been completely ignorant of Mr. Modi’s actions. Mr. Modi says he did nothing wrong. Even before the scandal, the board was criticized as lacking transparency and was accused of conflicts of interest. One board member is also the owner of an I.P.L. team.
For decades, politicians have had their fingers in the game. Cricket has been organized around state teams competing in regional and national tournaments, with elite players selected for India’s national team. Every state has a cricket association, often led by the state’s chief minister or some other influential politician or bureaucrat. Today, political figures lead cricket associations in at least six states.
G. Rajaraman, a longtime cricket journalist, said these relationships initially benefited the sport because the politician could help a team get resources. But that equation changed since money began entering the sport, first with television in the 1990s and then with the advent of the I.P.L. Soon, more politicians were vying for control. Mr. Pawar, the agriculture minister, took over the national cricket board in 2005, with Mr. Modi as his protégé.
Having lived in the United States, Mr. Modi saw how commercial leagues like the N.B.A. promoted stars and hometown teams to excite fans and generate revenues. European soccer, especially the English Premier League, was already televised across Asia just as an emerging Indian middle class was starting to discover sports as a leisure spectator activity.
“Modi saw this and he said, ‘We need to create our own icons,’ ” Mr. Rajaraman said.
Mr. Modi formatted the I.P.L. as a made-for-television product. He outraged purists by adopting a condensed version of the sport that reduced the length of a match from a day, or several days, to three television-friendly hours. Mr. Modi also brought in cheerleaders and movie stars.
Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, bought part of a team, and some fans paid hundreds of dollars to mingle with players, fashion models and celebrities at postgame parties that continued into the early morning hours. Celebrity Web sites began carrying photos of the parties or gossip about which Bollywood stars were seen in the stands.
“A lot of women started watching,” Mr. Rajaraman said. “There are a lot of people who watch to see what Shah Rukh Khan is doing at the end of the game, or what new T-shirt he is wearing.”
Ramachandra Guha, a historian who has written a book about cricket, said the I.P.L. tailored itself to the aspirations, and alienation, of an Indian middle class disillusioned with the country’s corruption and poverty. But Mr. Guha said the organization of the league — with teams located in India’s most affluent cities as opposed to having one in every state — has effectively mirrored the deep inequality in society.
“It is the India that is doing well economically,” he said. “It shuts itself off from the other 800 million Indians who live in the hinterlands.”
Now, Mr. Modi is gathering documents for his hearing, while government officials have come under scrutiny. A junior minister of foreign affairs, Shashi Tharoor, was forced to resign because of his involvement with a consortium that won a bid for a team in his home state.
Others who seem closely linked to the league have so far stayed in power as the scandal has assumed political overtones. Mr. Pawar heads a regional political party that is part of the coalition government led by the Congress Party. As yet, investigators have not accused him of any wrongdoing.
And the country’s civil aviation minister, Praful Patel, has faced questions on whether he was involved in the bidding process for a new franchise and whether his ministry had showed favoritism to his daughter, a former model who helps coordinate the I.P.L.’s travel. In late April, the state-owned airline, Air India, canceled a scheduled flight, delaying passengers, so that Mr. Patel’s daughter and several I.P.L. players could use it as a paid charter.
Dhiraj Nayyar, a senior editor at The Financial Express, said the cricket scandal was best understood in the context of India’s economic evolution. When India’s stock exchange took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scandals erupted over market manipulation until regulatory structures were strengthened. Today, the same absence of transparency and regulation exists in cricket.
“The I.P.L. is a curious creature that combines the best and worst of Indian capitalism — fabulous enterprise and outcomes on the one side, riddled with cronyism, patronage and power politics on the other,” Mr. Nayyar wrote recently. “In many ways the I.P.L. is a confirmation of what India really is: an emerging economy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/world ... ?th&emc=th
There is a related slideshow at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world ... delhi.html
May 13, 2010
In India, Hitching Hopes on a Subway
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NEW DELHI — The trains arrive with a whisper. The doors slide open and a puff of refrigerated air confronts the city’s summertime miasma. A bell dings, the doors close and the train whisks its passengers to the next stop.
This sequence of events might seem utterly ordinary on train platforms in Berlin or Bangkok, Stockholm or Singapore. But here in the sweaty heart of India’s northernmost megacity, the runaway success of the city’s almost complete subway system, known as the Metro, is a feat bordering on miraculous, and it offers new hope that India’s perpetually decrepit urban infrastructure can be dragged into the 21st century.
The Delhi Metro manages to defy just about every stereotype of urban India. It is scrupulously clean, impeccably maintained and almost unfailingly punctual. Its cars are the latest models, complete with air-conditioning and even power outlets to let commuters charge their mobile phones and laptops. Its signaling and other safety technology is first rate, and the system is among the best in the world, urban transport experts say. Despite cheap fares, less than 20 cents for the shortest ride and about 67 cents for the longest, the system manages to turn an operating profit.
In a country where government projects are chronically delayed and budgets are busted, the Metro is on track to finish its 118-mile network by fall, right on schedule and within its $6.55 billion budget.
“Metro’s performance has been outstanding,” said Pronab Sen, India’s chief statistician, whose government department keeps track of delays and cost overruns.
The Delhi Metro is perhaps the most ambitious urban infrastructure project since India won its independence, and its progress has been closely watched in a country facing a looming urban disaster. Unlike China and other rapidly growing developing countries, India remains predominantly rural.
But that is changing as millions of impoverished villagers try to grab a slice of India’s rapid but unequally shared economic growth. India has done almost nothing to cope with the influx of villagers into the cities, much less plan for many more, analysts say.
A study published last month by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030, 590 million Indians would live in cities and 70 percent of India’s new jobs would be in cities. India needs $1.2 trillion in infrastructure to accommodate these new arrivals, the report concluded, including 4,600 miles of railways and subways, and real estate equivalent to the entire city of Chicago every year.
India’s romance with the village, which Mahatma Gandhi believed was the most suitable environment for human development, is partly to blame for the decrepitude of Indian cities.
Uniformly, India’s cities are a mess. Bangalore, India’s high-tech hub, is strangled daily by traffic that has already eroded its image. Mumbai, the commercial capital, is riddled with overcrowded slums.
New Delhi, as the capital, is alone among India’s largest cities in having control over its own money and destiny. The Metro is the most visible example of that advantage.
Much of the credit for its success is usually laid at the feet of one man, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, a 77-year-old technocrat who serves as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s managing director. Mr. Sreedharan has a reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility. At the Metro he has tried to create the culture of a private start-up business in the most unlikely of petri dishes: the epicenter of India’s sprawling bureaucracy.
Instead of dry procedural manuals, senior managers are given a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, one of Hinduism’s most important texts. But its significance is not religious, said Anuj Dayal, a spokesman for the Metro.
“It is a management text,” he said of the book, which is taken from the Mahabharata, an epic poem at the heart of Hindu philosophy. “It is the story of how to motivate an unmotivated person.”
The Bhagavad-Gita retells a battlefield dialogue between the god Krishna, disguised as a chariot driver, and Arjuna, a brave but demoralized king. Krishna convinces him that he must do his duty against all odds, and fight even what seems to be an unwinnable war.
It is a message that resonates with workers, many of whom came from India’s railway system, where bureaucratic procedures hampered even the smallest innovations. But in the Metro even the lowliest employees’ ideas are taken seriously, said P. K. Pathak, who runs Metro’s training institute.
When trainees at the institute, which is packed to the gills to try to churn out enough employees to staff its new lines, suggested staggering lunch times in the cafeteria to ease crowding, Mr. Pathak made the change that very day.
“In the railway, change was very difficult,” Mr. Pathak said. “In Metro, we are open to all ideas.”
Some of its changes seem simple but are revolutionary by Indian standards. The Metro has contracted out as much of its work as possible, keeping its payrolls slim and its management structure as simple as possible, officials say. They jettisoned the ubiquitous string-tied paper files, emblematic of India’s vast bureaucracy, doing as much work as possible electronically.
Some critics of the Metro system say that the project ran roughshod over environmental concerns and land-rights issues, two factors that typically cause long delays in infrastructure projects. Others say that it has not integrated fully with the city’s vast network of buses, which are much cheaper and cover far more ground. Nor is it clear that it can easily be replicated, since New Delhi is less densely populated than most large Indian cities, making land acquisition easier.
No one appreciates the Metro more than riders. Pawan Sharma, a civil servant who commutes from the western suburb of Dwarka, was so impressed with the Metro that he signed up to be a volunteer monitor. With a blue badge affixed to his chest, he patrols the train cars for two hours in the morning and evening, looking for people breaking the rules. He receives no compensation, not even free Metro rides.
The Metro’s rules are strictly enforced. Spitting, a common habit of Northern Indian men, is forbidden. So is sitting on the floor, a habit from India’s often-squalid railways, where passengers without tickets squat on the floor of overcrowded trains. Public urination, another unfortunate habit in a country where there are more cellphones than toilets, is off limits. Eating and drinking are forbidden, too.
Such rules chafe against the anything-goes chaos of urban life in India, Mr. Sharma said.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you bothering me?’ ” he said on a recent afternoon as he cajoled a young rider to stand up, not squat on the floor. “But I tell them, ‘The government has given us this nice facility. Why do you want to spoil it?’ ”
Mr. Sharma said he had to be strict in this crowded, hectic city.
“Small things add up to big things,” he said. “If you ease up they will start spitting in the trains. They will sit on the floor and play cards. The whole system will become a mess.”
Indeed, it remains to be seen if the Delhi Metro will remain as well-run as it is today, and whether its lessons can be applied elsewhere. Mr. Sreedharan recently had heart bypass surgery and is on extended medical leave, and he plans to retire once the Metro is completed later this year.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
*****
India 'diverts funds for poor to pay for Delhi games'
By Chris Morris
BBC News, Delhi
More than 100,000 poor families have already been evicted, the report says
Tens of millions of dollars have been diverted in India from schemes to fight poverty and used to fund Delhi's Commonwealth Games, a report says.
The Housing and Land Rights Network pressure group says its report is based on official documents obtained under India's right to information act.
The group says there should be an independent inquiry into how this was allowed to happen.
Government officials in Delhi say they are looking into the allegations.
'Clear evidence'
This report is a damning indictment of the way the Commonwealth Games have been financed and planned by the central and state governments.
It says tens of millions of dollars have been diverted from funds which are supposed to help raise underprivileged low caste communities out of poverty.
The report also says spending on the Games has spiralled out of control: expenditure on sports infrastructure alone is more than 2,000% of the initial projected budget.
In addition, more than 100,000 poor families have already been evicted due to projects connected with the Games, and up to 40,000 families are likely to be displaced before the Games begin in October, the document says.
The report's author, Miloon Kothari, a former UN human rights rapporteur, told the BBC that the evidence was clear.
The determination, he said, to portray Delhi as a world-class city and an international sports destination, had led the government to lose sight of its legal and moral commitments to its people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8683412.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world ... delhi.html
May 13, 2010
In India, Hitching Hopes on a Subway
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NEW DELHI — The trains arrive with a whisper. The doors slide open and a puff of refrigerated air confronts the city’s summertime miasma. A bell dings, the doors close and the train whisks its passengers to the next stop.
This sequence of events might seem utterly ordinary on train platforms in Berlin or Bangkok, Stockholm or Singapore. But here in the sweaty heart of India’s northernmost megacity, the runaway success of the city’s almost complete subway system, known as the Metro, is a feat bordering on miraculous, and it offers new hope that India’s perpetually decrepit urban infrastructure can be dragged into the 21st century.
The Delhi Metro manages to defy just about every stereotype of urban India. It is scrupulously clean, impeccably maintained and almost unfailingly punctual. Its cars are the latest models, complete with air-conditioning and even power outlets to let commuters charge their mobile phones and laptops. Its signaling and other safety technology is first rate, and the system is among the best in the world, urban transport experts say. Despite cheap fares, less than 20 cents for the shortest ride and about 67 cents for the longest, the system manages to turn an operating profit.
In a country where government projects are chronically delayed and budgets are busted, the Metro is on track to finish its 118-mile network by fall, right on schedule and within its $6.55 billion budget.
“Metro’s performance has been outstanding,” said Pronab Sen, India’s chief statistician, whose government department keeps track of delays and cost overruns.
The Delhi Metro is perhaps the most ambitious urban infrastructure project since India won its independence, and its progress has been closely watched in a country facing a looming urban disaster. Unlike China and other rapidly growing developing countries, India remains predominantly rural.
But that is changing as millions of impoverished villagers try to grab a slice of India’s rapid but unequally shared economic growth. India has done almost nothing to cope with the influx of villagers into the cities, much less plan for many more, analysts say.
A study published last month by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030, 590 million Indians would live in cities and 70 percent of India’s new jobs would be in cities. India needs $1.2 trillion in infrastructure to accommodate these new arrivals, the report concluded, including 4,600 miles of railways and subways, and real estate equivalent to the entire city of Chicago every year.
India’s romance with the village, which Mahatma Gandhi believed was the most suitable environment for human development, is partly to blame for the decrepitude of Indian cities.
Uniformly, India’s cities are a mess. Bangalore, India’s high-tech hub, is strangled daily by traffic that has already eroded its image. Mumbai, the commercial capital, is riddled with overcrowded slums.
New Delhi, as the capital, is alone among India’s largest cities in having control over its own money and destiny. The Metro is the most visible example of that advantage.
Much of the credit for its success is usually laid at the feet of one man, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, a 77-year-old technocrat who serves as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s managing director. Mr. Sreedharan has a reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility. At the Metro he has tried to create the culture of a private start-up business in the most unlikely of petri dishes: the epicenter of India’s sprawling bureaucracy.
Instead of dry procedural manuals, senior managers are given a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, one of Hinduism’s most important texts. But its significance is not religious, said Anuj Dayal, a spokesman for the Metro.
“It is a management text,” he said of the book, which is taken from the Mahabharata, an epic poem at the heart of Hindu philosophy. “It is the story of how to motivate an unmotivated person.”
The Bhagavad-Gita retells a battlefield dialogue between the god Krishna, disguised as a chariot driver, and Arjuna, a brave but demoralized king. Krishna convinces him that he must do his duty against all odds, and fight even what seems to be an unwinnable war.
It is a message that resonates with workers, many of whom came from India’s railway system, where bureaucratic procedures hampered even the smallest innovations. But in the Metro even the lowliest employees’ ideas are taken seriously, said P. K. Pathak, who runs Metro’s training institute.
When trainees at the institute, which is packed to the gills to try to churn out enough employees to staff its new lines, suggested staggering lunch times in the cafeteria to ease crowding, Mr. Pathak made the change that very day.
“In the railway, change was very difficult,” Mr. Pathak said. “In Metro, we are open to all ideas.”
Some of its changes seem simple but are revolutionary by Indian standards. The Metro has contracted out as much of its work as possible, keeping its payrolls slim and its management structure as simple as possible, officials say. They jettisoned the ubiquitous string-tied paper files, emblematic of India’s vast bureaucracy, doing as much work as possible electronically.
Some critics of the Metro system say that the project ran roughshod over environmental concerns and land-rights issues, two factors that typically cause long delays in infrastructure projects. Others say that it has not integrated fully with the city’s vast network of buses, which are much cheaper and cover far more ground. Nor is it clear that it can easily be replicated, since New Delhi is less densely populated than most large Indian cities, making land acquisition easier.
No one appreciates the Metro more than riders. Pawan Sharma, a civil servant who commutes from the western suburb of Dwarka, was so impressed with the Metro that he signed up to be a volunteer monitor. With a blue badge affixed to his chest, he patrols the train cars for two hours in the morning and evening, looking for people breaking the rules. He receives no compensation, not even free Metro rides.
The Metro’s rules are strictly enforced. Spitting, a common habit of Northern Indian men, is forbidden. So is sitting on the floor, a habit from India’s often-squalid railways, where passengers without tickets squat on the floor of overcrowded trains. Public urination, another unfortunate habit in a country where there are more cellphones than toilets, is off limits. Eating and drinking are forbidden, too.
Such rules chafe against the anything-goes chaos of urban life in India, Mr. Sharma said.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you bothering me?’ ” he said on a recent afternoon as he cajoled a young rider to stand up, not squat on the floor. “But I tell them, ‘The government has given us this nice facility. Why do you want to spoil it?’ ”
Mr. Sharma said he had to be strict in this crowded, hectic city.
“Small things add up to big things,” he said. “If you ease up they will start spitting in the trains. They will sit on the floor and play cards. The whole system will become a mess.”
Indeed, it remains to be seen if the Delhi Metro will remain as well-run as it is today, and whether its lessons can be applied elsewhere. Mr. Sreedharan recently had heart bypass surgery and is on extended medical leave, and he plans to retire once the Metro is completed later this year.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
*****
India 'diverts funds for poor to pay for Delhi games'
By Chris Morris
BBC News, Delhi
More than 100,000 poor families have already been evicted, the report says
Tens of millions of dollars have been diverted in India from schemes to fight poverty and used to fund Delhi's Commonwealth Games, a report says.
The Housing and Land Rights Network pressure group says its report is based on official documents obtained under India's right to information act.
The group says there should be an independent inquiry into how this was allowed to happen.
Government officials in Delhi say they are looking into the allegations.
'Clear evidence'
This report is a damning indictment of the way the Commonwealth Games have been financed and planned by the central and state governments.
It says tens of millions of dollars have been diverted from funds which are supposed to help raise underprivileged low caste communities out of poverty.
The report also says spending on the Games has spiralled out of control: expenditure on sports infrastructure alone is more than 2,000% of the initial projected budget.
In addition, more than 100,000 poor families have already been evicted due to projects connected with the Games, and up to 40,000 families are likely to be displaced before the Games begin in October, the document says.
The report's author, Miloon Kothari, a former UN human rights rapporteur, told the BBC that the evidence was clear.
The determination, he said, to portray Delhi as a world-class city and an international sports destination, had led the government to lose sight of its legal and moral commitments to its people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8683412.stm
May 21, 2010
In Violent Karachi, Insurgency Finds a Haven
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
KARACHI, Pakistan — In this violent city of 18 million people, where the country’s wealthiest live just miles from thousands of extremist religious schools and their Taliban supporters, lies the urban front line of Pakistan’s struggle with Islamic militancy.
A thousand miles to the north, the Pakistani Army is fighting the Taliban in barren tribal lands, and the Central Intelligence Agency has unleashed an air war with drones.
But the infrastructure that propels the insurgency — recruits, money, hiding places, and ideological underpinning — is embedded across this grubby city on the Arabian Sea, according to politicians and militants alike.
It remains unclear whether Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who is accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square, set out from Karachi for his journey to the tribal area of North Waziristan, where, according to American officials, he got training from the Pakistani Taliban.
But he lived in a middle-class area of Karachi in the 1990s, and it would have been easy enough for him to find conduits to the Pakistani Taliban among this city’s more than 3,500 religious schools, or even to go to the Pakistani Taliban here directly, according to people familiar with his circumstances.
The Pakistani authorities have arrested two men in Karachi who they say were linked to Mr. Shahzad and are now questioning them in Islamabad, Pakistani officials say. One was close to Jamaat-e-Islami, a radical religious party that is staunchly anti-American and whose supporters have harbored operatives of Al Qaeda, a Karachi police official said.
The second man was arrested at a mosque funded by Jaish-i-Muhammad, an Islamic extremist group that has been backed by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, and has recently joined forces with the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas.
Jaish and a multitude of other hard-line Islamic groups have helped make Karachi, with its overlay of radical Islamic edicts — cinemas barely exist, alcohol is essentially banned — a welcoming rear base for the Pakistani Taliban.
It is also a sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban, who the Americans are fighting in Afghanistan and who are clients of the Pakistanis. Despite the arrest of a senior commander for the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, on the outskirts of Karachi in January, some senior members still stay in the wealthy area of the Defense Housing Authority and have free passage in and out of the city, according to local politicians.
The chaos and crime that bedevil Karachi, mainly the result of gang warfare among armed wings of the political parties, create a near perfect place for fighters of the Pakistani Taliban to plan and to hide.
More......
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world ... &th&emc=th
In Violent Karachi, Insurgency Finds a Haven
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
KARACHI, Pakistan — In this violent city of 18 million people, where the country’s wealthiest live just miles from thousands of extremist religious schools and their Taliban supporters, lies the urban front line of Pakistan’s struggle with Islamic militancy.
A thousand miles to the north, the Pakistani Army is fighting the Taliban in barren tribal lands, and the Central Intelligence Agency has unleashed an air war with drones.
But the infrastructure that propels the insurgency — recruits, money, hiding places, and ideological underpinning — is embedded across this grubby city on the Arabian Sea, according to politicians and militants alike.
It remains unclear whether Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who is accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square, set out from Karachi for his journey to the tribal area of North Waziristan, where, according to American officials, he got training from the Pakistani Taliban.
But he lived in a middle-class area of Karachi in the 1990s, and it would have been easy enough for him to find conduits to the Pakistani Taliban among this city’s more than 3,500 religious schools, or even to go to the Pakistani Taliban here directly, according to people familiar with his circumstances.
The Pakistani authorities have arrested two men in Karachi who they say were linked to Mr. Shahzad and are now questioning them in Islamabad, Pakistani officials say. One was close to Jamaat-e-Islami, a radical religious party that is staunchly anti-American and whose supporters have harbored operatives of Al Qaeda, a Karachi police official said.
The second man was arrested at a mosque funded by Jaish-i-Muhammad, an Islamic extremist group that has been backed by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, and has recently joined forces with the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas.
Jaish and a multitude of other hard-line Islamic groups have helped make Karachi, with its overlay of radical Islamic edicts — cinemas barely exist, alcohol is essentially banned — a welcoming rear base for the Pakistani Taliban.
It is also a sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban, who the Americans are fighting in Afghanistan and who are clients of the Pakistanis. Despite the arrest of a senior commander for the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, on the outskirts of Karachi in January, some senior members still stay in the wealthy area of the Defense Housing Authority and have free passage in and out of the city, according to local politicians.
The chaos and crime that bedevil Karachi, mainly the result of gang warfare among armed wings of the political parties, create a near perfect place for fighters of the Pakistani Taliban to plan and to hide.
More......
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world ... &th&emc=th
June 4, 2010
India’s Young and Poor Rally to Another Gandhi
By JIM YARDLEY
AHRAURA, India — Rahul Gandhi’s helicopter descends out of the boiling afternoon sky and a restless, sweat-soaked crowd of 100,000 people suddenly surges to life. Men rush forward in the staggering heat. Teenage boys wave a white bedsheet bearing a faintly cheeky request: We Want to Meet the Prince of India.
Mr. Gandhi climbs onto a special viewing stand in this isolated corner of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and offers a boyish wave. Not yet 40, Mr. Gandhi is the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, the grandson of India’s fourth prime minister and the son of India’s seventh prime minister. His audience includes some of the poorest people in India.
“I’m standing here with you,” he declared to loud cheers, speaking for about 15 minutes before he left, waving through the window of his helicopter. “I can come with you anywhere and everywhere to fight with you.”
India is Mr. Gandhi’s family inheritance. Seemingly the only uncertainty is when he will collect it. He holds no major post in government, yet rumors persist that the governing Indian National Congress Party — whose president is his mother, Sonia Gandhi — might install him as prime minister before the current government expires in 2014. The job’s current occupant, Manmohan Singh, recently had to bat away retirement questions.
Yet despite his aura of inevitability, Mr. Gandhi largely remains an enigma. India is an emerging power, facing myriad domestic and international issues, but he remains deliberately aloof from daily politics. His thoughts on many major issues — as well as the temperature of the fire in his belly — remain mostly unknown.
For the Congress Party, that may be an advantage. The party has been the top vote getter in the last two national elections by appealing to the poor through welfare schemes while also pursuing pro-growth policies. But it holds power only with the support of fickle coalition partners.
Mr. Gandhi is using his enormous popularity to broaden the party’s political base, steering clear of more contentious policy making. That could help position Congress to win an outright national majority — though it does little to illuminate what he would do with a mandate if he won it.
“What most people still have a hard time figuring out is, ‘What is Rahul Gandhi’s vision?’ ” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, who has met privately with Mr. Gandhi and speaks highly of him. “It is still not apparent to a lot of people what his own deep political convictions are.”
Mr. Gandhi traverses the country, often on secret trips, to recruit as many as 10 million new youth members. His job is also to try to take back crucial strongholds like Uttar Pradesh, in the north, which his family claims as its home base but which the Congress Party does not control.
Most Indian political parties are internally undemocratic and often dominated by political dynasties, none more famous the Gandhi clan. But Mr. Gandhi has also insisted that the party’s youth organizations hold internal elections for posts and operate as meritocracies.
He also has succeeded far more than other Indian politicians in tapping into the hunger for generational change in India, analysts say, and has positioned himself as a change agent for the future, despite his obvious debts to India’s political past. He is trying to bypass the identity politics of caste and appeal to young people of all backgrounds. “We youth are with Rahul!” said Manonit Garharabari, 23, at the rally. “The whole youth is with Rahul. We seen an internal strength in him.”
Mr. Gandhi is omnipresent in the media, and his face is plastered on untold numbers of billboards and political posters. His public image is as a humble, serious man, if somewhat shy, even as his name invariably tops polls ranking the country’s “hottest” or “most eligible” bachelors. Yet he almost never grants interviews, including for this article, and only occasionally conducts news conferences. Reporters are often tipped to his appearances at one village or another but often all they get is a photograph — which inevitably appears in newspapers around India.
His daily life is cloaked in secrecy, which makes it an irresistible if elusive topic for the Indian media. One news station ran a lengthy report after obtaining a short video clip of Mr. Gandhi riding his bicycle in New Delhi. Mr. Gandhi confirmed in 2004 that he had a Spanish girlfriend, but whether they remained a couple was unclear.
His advisers say his low profile reflects his desire not to overstep the authority of his organizational position while the secrecy is rooted in security concerns. His grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated, as was his father, Rajiv Gandhi. (The family is not related to Mohandas Gandhi, considered the father of modern India. Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister and another founding father.) His official residence in New Delhi is heavily fortified and he traveled to the rally in Ahraura with a special black-clad security detail.
Yet analysts say his inaccessibility is also a deliberate effort to protect him from taking unpopular public stands and also to burnish his image. Last spring, he turned down an offer to join Mr. Singh’s cabinet. “They want to keep a certain mystique to him,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst in New Delhi.
Before he entered politics in 2004, winning a parliamentary seat in his father’s old district in Uttar Pradesh, Mr. Gandhi had appeared ambivalent about the family profession. He attended Harvard for three years before transferring to Rollins College in Florida because of security concerns after his father’s death. He earned a master’s degree in development studies at Cambridge and worked in London as a management consultant before returning to India after his mother took over the Congress Party.
Some veteran politicians initially dismissed him as a pappu, the Hindi word for a nice boy, if one who is not too smart. Inside the Congress Party, some leaders had considered his younger sister, Priyanka, a more dynamic politician, but her focus has been on raising her children rather than running for office.
Mr. Gandhi’s breakthrough came during the 2009 elections, when he campaigned across the country and was later credited for the unexpectedly strong showing by Congress.
Some analysts interpreted the 2009 voting results as evidence that the clout of regional, caste-based parties was waning. Over two decades, these parties splintered national politics and gave rise to leaders like Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and India’s most powerful Dalit politician, who uses only one name. Analysts say Congress must regain seats in Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar if it wants to achieve a national majority.
“The real test is Uttar Pradesh,” Mr. Rangarajan said. “Everything rests on it. It is the most populous state. It is the demographic center.”
Uttar Pradesh will hold state elections in 2012, and Mr. Gandhi is pushing to unseat Ms. Mayawati. For months, Mr. Gandhi has periodically turned up at villages to share a meal or even spend the night with Dalit families. He told reporters that he did not see people’s castes, only that they were poor.
“When Rahul Gandhi goes to the home of a Dalit to share a meal, Mayawati’s stomach starts itching!” shouted one speaker at the rally.
His youth drives are conducted state by state, and he has hired a nonprofit group of former election commissioners to oversee the internal elections for posts in the party youth organizations — as opposed to the usual practice of party bosses picking their choices.
Mr. Gandhi’s campaign could eventually threaten entrenched interests within the party, analysts say, which is why, for now, the internal voting is limited to the youth organizations. And his efforts to unseat Ms. Mayawati got off to an inconsistent start. Analysts say the public response to his recruitment efforts in Uttar Pradesh had been tepid before his latest trip.
Ultimately, analysts say, Mr. Gandhi will have to reveal more about himself than his just organizational vision. He has traveled widely and met with business or political leaders. When Bill Gates recently visited India, he joined Mr. Gandhi in a village. In Egypt, Mr. Gandhi has befriended Gamal Mubarak, son and heir apparent of President Hosni Mubarak. In China, he has met Xi Jinping, the man tapped to replace the country’s president and Communist Party leader, Hu Jintao.
It seems he is preparing for the future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world ... nted=print
India’s Young and Poor Rally to Another Gandhi
By JIM YARDLEY
AHRAURA, India — Rahul Gandhi’s helicopter descends out of the boiling afternoon sky and a restless, sweat-soaked crowd of 100,000 people suddenly surges to life. Men rush forward in the staggering heat. Teenage boys wave a white bedsheet bearing a faintly cheeky request: We Want to Meet the Prince of India.
Mr. Gandhi climbs onto a special viewing stand in this isolated corner of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and offers a boyish wave. Not yet 40, Mr. Gandhi is the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, the grandson of India’s fourth prime minister and the son of India’s seventh prime minister. His audience includes some of the poorest people in India.
“I’m standing here with you,” he declared to loud cheers, speaking for about 15 minutes before he left, waving through the window of his helicopter. “I can come with you anywhere and everywhere to fight with you.”
India is Mr. Gandhi’s family inheritance. Seemingly the only uncertainty is when he will collect it. He holds no major post in government, yet rumors persist that the governing Indian National Congress Party — whose president is his mother, Sonia Gandhi — might install him as prime minister before the current government expires in 2014. The job’s current occupant, Manmohan Singh, recently had to bat away retirement questions.
Yet despite his aura of inevitability, Mr. Gandhi largely remains an enigma. India is an emerging power, facing myriad domestic and international issues, but he remains deliberately aloof from daily politics. His thoughts on many major issues — as well as the temperature of the fire in his belly — remain mostly unknown.
For the Congress Party, that may be an advantage. The party has been the top vote getter in the last two national elections by appealing to the poor through welfare schemes while also pursuing pro-growth policies. But it holds power only with the support of fickle coalition partners.
Mr. Gandhi is using his enormous popularity to broaden the party’s political base, steering clear of more contentious policy making. That could help position Congress to win an outright national majority — though it does little to illuminate what he would do with a mandate if he won it.
“What most people still have a hard time figuring out is, ‘What is Rahul Gandhi’s vision?’ ” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, who has met privately with Mr. Gandhi and speaks highly of him. “It is still not apparent to a lot of people what his own deep political convictions are.”
Mr. Gandhi traverses the country, often on secret trips, to recruit as many as 10 million new youth members. His job is also to try to take back crucial strongholds like Uttar Pradesh, in the north, which his family claims as its home base but which the Congress Party does not control.
Most Indian political parties are internally undemocratic and often dominated by political dynasties, none more famous the Gandhi clan. But Mr. Gandhi has also insisted that the party’s youth organizations hold internal elections for posts and operate as meritocracies.
He also has succeeded far more than other Indian politicians in tapping into the hunger for generational change in India, analysts say, and has positioned himself as a change agent for the future, despite his obvious debts to India’s political past. He is trying to bypass the identity politics of caste and appeal to young people of all backgrounds. “We youth are with Rahul!” said Manonit Garharabari, 23, at the rally. “The whole youth is with Rahul. We seen an internal strength in him.”
Mr. Gandhi is omnipresent in the media, and his face is plastered on untold numbers of billboards and political posters. His public image is as a humble, serious man, if somewhat shy, even as his name invariably tops polls ranking the country’s “hottest” or “most eligible” bachelors. Yet he almost never grants interviews, including for this article, and only occasionally conducts news conferences. Reporters are often tipped to his appearances at one village or another but often all they get is a photograph — which inevitably appears in newspapers around India.
His daily life is cloaked in secrecy, which makes it an irresistible if elusive topic for the Indian media. One news station ran a lengthy report after obtaining a short video clip of Mr. Gandhi riding his bicycle in New Delhi. Mr. Gandhi confirmed in 2004 that he had a Spanish girlfriend, but whether they remained a couple was unclear.
His advisers say his low profile reflects his desire not to overstep the authority of his organizational position while the secrecy is rooted in security concerns. His grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated, as was his father, Rajiv Gandhi. (The family is not related to Mohandas Gandhi, considered the father of modern India. Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister and another founding father.) His official residence in New Delhi is heavily fortified and he traveled to the rally in Ahraura with a special black-clad security detail.
Yet analysts say his inaccessibility is also a deliberate effort to protect him from taking unpopular public stands and also to burnish his image. Last spring, he turned down an offer to join Mr. Singh’s cabinet. “They want to keep a certain mystique to him,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst in New Delhi.
Before he entered politics in 2004, winning a parliamentary seat in his father’s old district in Uttar Pradesh, Mr. Gandhi had appeared ambivalent about the family profession. He attended Harvard for three years before transferring to Rollins College in Florida because of security concerns after his father’s death. He earned a master’s degree in development studies at Cambridge and worked in London as a management consultant before returning to India after his mother took over the Congress Party.
Some veteran politicians initially dismissed him as a pappu, the Hindi word for a nice boy, if one who is not too smart. Inside the Congress Party, some leaders had considered his younger sister, Priyanka, a more dynamic politician, but her focus has been on raising her children rather than running for office.
Mr. Gandhi’s breakthrough came during the 2009 elections, when he campaigned across the country and was later credited for the unexpectedly strong showing by Congress.
Some analysts interpreted the 2009 voting results as evidence that the clout of regional, caste-based parties was waning. Over two decades, these parties splintered national politics and gave rise to leaders like Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and India’s most powerful Dalit politician, who uses only one name. Analysts say Congress must regain seats in Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar if it wants to achieve a national majority.
“The real test is Uttar Pradesh,” Mr. Rangarajan said. “Everything rests on it. It is the most populous state. It is the demographic center.”
Uttar Pradesh will hold state elections in 2012, and Mr. Gandhi is pushing to unseat Ms. Mayawati. For months, Mr. Gandhi has periodically turned up at villages to share a meal or even spend the night with Dalit families. He told reporters that he did not see people’s castes, only that they were poor.
“When Rahul Gandhi goes to the home of a Dalit to share a meal, Mayawati’s stomach starts itching!” shouted one speaker at the rally.
His youth drives are conducted state by state, and he has hired a nonprofit group of former election commissioners to oversee the internal elections for posts in the party youth organizations — as opposed to the usual practice of party bosses picking their choices.
Mr. Gandhi’s campaign could eventually threaten entrenched interests within the party, analysts say, which is why, for now, the internal voting is limited to the youth organizations. And his efforts to unseat Ms. Mayawati got off to an inconsistent start. Analysts say the public response to his recruitment efforts in Uttar Pradesh had been tepid before his latest trip.
Ultimately, analysts say, Mr. Gandhi will have to reveal more about himself than his just organizational vision. He has traveled widely and met with business or political leaders. When Bill Gates recently visited India, he joined Mr. Gandhi in a village. In Egypt, Mr. Gandhi has befriended Gamal Mubarak, son and heir apparent of President Hosni Mubarak. In China, he has met Xi Jinping, the man tapped to replace the country’s president and Communist Party leader, Hu Jintao.
It seems he is preparing for the future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world ... nted=print
A lethal attack on two mosques of a minority sect was the result of years of ignoring religious diversity.
June 11, 2010
One Myth, Many Pakistans
By ALI SETHI
Lahore, Pakistan
FOR many Pakistanis, the deaths of more than 80 members of the Ahmadi religious sect in mosque attacks two weeks ago raised questions of the nation’s future. For me, it recalled a command from my schoolboy past: “Write a Note on the Two-Nation Theory.”
It was a way of scoring easy points on the history exam, and of using new emotions and impressive-sounding words. I began my answer like this:
The Two-Nation Theory is the Theory that holds that the Hindus and Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent are Two Distinct and Separate Nations. It is a Theory that is supported by Numerous Facts and Figures. During the War of Independence of 1857 the Muslim rulers of India were defeated by the British. Suddenly the Hindus, who had always held a grudge against the Muslims for conquering them, began to collaborate with the new British rulers. They joined British schools, worked in British offices and began to make large amounts of money, while the Muslims, who were Discriminated Against, became poorer and poorer. It was now Undisputable that the Hindus and the Muslims were Two Distinct and Separate Nations, and it was becoming necessary for the Muslims to demand a Distinct and Separate Homeland for themselves in the Indian Subcontinent.
To that point, my “note” had only built up the atmosphere of mistrust and hostility between Hindus and Muslims. It had yet to give examples of the Distinctness and Separateness of the two communities (such as that Hindus worshipped the cow but Muslims ate it), of Hindu betrayals and conspiracies (they wanted Hindi, not Urdu, to be the national language). And it had still to name and praise the saddened Muslim clerics, reformers and poets who had first noted these “undisputable” differences.
I got points for every mini-note that I stretched into a full page, which was valid if it gave one important date and one important name, each highlighted for the benefit of the teacher. This was because the teacher couldn’t really read English, and could award points only to answers that carefully showcased their Facts and Figures.
After the exam I would go home. Here the Two-Nation Theory fell apart. I was part-Shiite (my mother’s family), part-Sunni (my father’s family) and part-nothing (neither of my parents was sectarian). There were other things: the dark-skinned man who swabbed the floors of the house was a Christian; the jovial, foul-mouthed, red-haired old woman who visited my grandmother every few months was rumored to be an Ahmadi. (It was a small group, I had been told, that considered itself Muslim but had been outlawed by the government.)
But even more than these visible religious variations, I was more aware of things like caste and money: my mother’s family was upper caste, claiming a magical blood bond with the Prophet Muhammad, and owned large tracts of land in the countryside. My father’s relatives, however, were undisguised converts from Hinduism who had fled their villages long ago and now lived in the city, where they were always running out of money, working in government offices and selling homemade furniture and gambling (and losing) on the stock market.
The Two-Nation Theory allowed only for the simple categories of Hindu and Muslim, one for India and the other for Pakistan; it had no room for inner complications like Shiite and Sunni and Christian and Ahmadi. (I had yet to learn that more than a million Hindus still lived in Pakistan.) It also required the abolition of magical blood claims and landholdings and stock markets, so that our personalities and situations could be determined purely by our religious beliefs.
But I knew that things weren’t really like that. And this was something I knew from the beginning, and lived with quite comfortably: the history in my textbook was Distinct and Separate from the histories of real people.
Some years later, in a secluded college library in Massachusetts, I read a very different account of the Two-Nation Theory. Here I learned that it was devised in the 1930s by a group of desperate Muslim politicians who wanted to extract some constitutional concessions from the British before they left India.
The Muslims of India, these politicians were saying in their political way, were a “distinct group” with their own “history and culture.” But really, the book told me, all they wanted was special protection for the poor Muslim minorities in soon-to-be-independent, mostly Hindu India.
But the politicians’ gamble failed; they were taken up on their bluff and were given a separate country, abruptly and violently cut-up, two far-apart chunks of Muslim-majority areas (but what about the poor Muslim minorities that were still stuck in Hindu-majority areas!) that its founders (but it was a mistake!) now had to justify with the subtleties of their theory.
It was like a punishment.
One by one, the founders died — the most important, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, just a year after Pakistan’s birth. Their theory could have died with them. What was the use now of the idea of Muslim specialness — the distinctiveness and separateness of Indian Muslims — in an independent, Muslim-majority country?
But the idea was kept alive and made useful: first by a set of unelected bureaucrats, then by generals, then by landowners, and then by generals again. And, always, to blackmail the people (still indistinct and unspecial). An Islamic dance was danced: sovereignty rested with “Allah alone”; the country would be called an Islamic republic; alcohol and gambling were banned; the Ahmadi sect was outlawed (to please the fringe mullahs) for violating, with their beliefs and practices, Muhammad’s position in “the principle of the finality of [Muhammad’s] prophethood.”
It peaked with the government takeover in 1977 by Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who announced that his great wish in life was to “Islamize” the people of Pakistan. The Two-Nation Theory, confined so far to political slogans and clauses in the Constitution, now went everywhere: it was injected into textbook passages (the ones I would reproduce, with new words and emotions, in my exam) and radio shows and programs on the one state-run TV channel. And it branched out, becoming anti-Communist (to attract American money), anti-Shiite (to attract Arab money, given for cutting Iran’s influence in the continent), anti-woman (to please the mullahs) and still more anti-Ahmadi (to enhance the pleasure and power of the mullahs).
The Two-Nation Theory was dynamic, useful, lucrative.
And it still is lucrative. Its best rewards are nowadays found in the high ratings (and correspondingly high advertising revenue) of Pakistan’s newly independent TV channels. Dozens of them are competing to sell the fastest-burning conspiracy theories (India and Israel and America are behind the latest suicide bombings) and the most punishing religious advice (don’t wear nail polish, don’t celebrate birthdays, kill blasphemers wherever you find them), that a semi-urban, semi-Islamized population, raised on years of government textbooks and radio shows and TV sermons (themselves confirmed and elucidated by the sermons of mullahs in neighborhood mosques) finds hard to shut out.
So the coordinated gun and bomb attacks during services at two Ahmadi mosques here on May 28 surprised no one. Some were saddened. But most took it as a matter of course. On the TV channels news of the assaults was reported and displayed (all those eyeballs, all those ads) but not explained. And in Lahore’s Main Market, near rickshaw stands and fruit stalls — the rickshaw drivers and fruit sellers standing in the heat outside the window display of an electronics shop, watching the muted carnage on an imported flat-screen TV — the incident was mulled over and attributed in the end to the larger madness that was overtaking the country.
IT was, they agreed, in some ways like the burning last year of a Christian village outside Lahore, and in other ways like the sporadic killings of Shiites in the years before that. But they also likened it to the televised killings of armed clerics in Islamabad’s Red Mosque — carried out three years ago by the military itself — and the unadmitted, unexplained attacks by American drones still falling on the people in the western mountains.
In the drawing rooms of Lahore, among the children of bureaucrats, landlords and military men (amazingly practical and un-Islamic in their drawing rooms), it was said that the Ahmadi attacks, though tragic, were not a sign of doom. After all, the Punjabi Taliban, who had claimed responsibility, were just another network — easily disrupted (when the time came) by a combination of on-the-ground raids and abductions, long and unexplained detentions, and perhaps strikes on mountainside training centers by the Predator drones that we don’t admit to knowing anything about.
That was their idea of the war on terrorism: the physical removal of a nuisance, something rare and extreme and isolatable.
A few days later, I read in the newspaper that the police had made an arrest in the Ahmadi attacks. The suspect’s name was Abdullah and he was 17 years old. When asked for his motives, he said that he had learned that Ahmadis were drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, “so their bloodshed was a great service to Islam.”
It was a simple enough statement. But I wondered about his ideas. Had he taken them from the Constitution? Or was he inspired by the court order days earlier banning Facebook for holding a contest of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?
Did he hear it in a mosque, or see it on a TV screen in the window display of an electronics shop? Did he read about blasphemy and its punishments in a textbook? Or was he one of those boys (Twenty million? Thirty million?) who don’t go to school and can’t read textbooks?
Was he taught about the Ahmadis in the mountains of Waziristan, where the police say he trained for his mission? Did he witness an American drone attack there? Did he think it was carried out by Ahmadis? Was it confirmed for him by a popular talk show host that the Ahmadis were America’s agents in Pakistan? And, in Waziristan, was he trained by the good Taliban, the ones the Pakistani military is trying to protect, or the bad Taliban, the ones it is trying to kill?
Or was he told about the Ahmadis after he had come all the way to the vast, grassy compound on the outskirts of Lahore where doctors and professors and businessmen — and even, it is said, some bureaucrats and landowners and military men — converge now and then to hang out with the masses and talk about the ways and woes of Islam?
Several theories now, with several competing culprits. It’s hard to pick just one.
Ali Sethi is the author of “The Wish Maker,” a novel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 11, 2010
One Myth, Many Pakistans
By ALI SETHI
Lahore, Pakistan
FOR many Pakistanis, the deaths of more than 80 members of the Ahmadi religious sect in mosque attacks two weeks ago raised questions of the nation’s future. For me, it recalled a command from my schoolboy past: “Write a Note on the Two-Nation Theory.”
It was a way of scoring easy points on the history exam, and of using new emotions and impressive-sounding words. I began my answer like this:
The Two-Nation Theory is the Theory that holds that the Hindus and Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent are Two Distinct and Separate Nations. It is a Theory that is supported by Numerous Facts and Figures. During the War of Independence of 1857 the Muslim rulers of India were defeated by the British. Suddenly the Hindus, who had always held a grudge against the Muslims for conquering them, began to collaborate with the new British rulers. They joined British schools, worked in British offices and began to make large amounts of money, while the Muslims, who were Discriminated Against, became poorer and poorer. It was now Undisputable that the Hindus and the Muslims were Two Distinct and Separate Nations, and it was becoming necessary for the Muslims to demand a Distinct and Separate Homeland for themselves in the Indian Subcontinent.
To that point, my “note” had only built up the atmosphere of mistrust and hostility between Hindus and Muslims. It had yet to give examples of the Distinctness and Separateness of the two communities (such as that Hindus worshipped the cow but Muslims ate it), of Hindu betrayals and conspiracies (they wanted Hindi, not Urdu, to be the national language). And it had still to name and praise the saddened Muslim clerics, reformers and poets who had first noted these “undisputable” differences.
I got points for every mini-note that I stretched into a full page, which was valid if it gave one important date and one important name, each highlighted for the benefit of the teacher. This was because the teacher couldn’t really read English, and could award points only to answers that carefully showcased their Facts and Figures.
After the exam I would go home. Here the Two-Nation Theory fell apart. I was part-Shiite (my mother’s family), part-Sunni (my father’s family) and part-nothing (neither of my parents was sectarian). There were other things: the dark-skinned man who swabbed the floors of the house was a Christian; the jovial, foul-mouthed, red-haired old woman who visited my grandmother every few months was rumored to be an Ahmadi. (It was a small group, I had been told, that considered itself Muslim but had been outlawed by the government.)
But even more than these visible religious variations, I was more aware of things like caste and money: my mother’s family was upper caste, claiming a magical blood bond with the Prophet Muhammad, and owned large tracts of land in the countryside. My father’s relatives, however, were undisguised converts from Hinduism who had fled their villages long ago and now lived in the city, where they were always running out of money, working in government offices and selling homemade furniture and gambling (and losing) on the stock market.
The Two-Nation Theory allowed only for the simple categories of Hindu and Muslim, one for India and the other for Pakistan; it had no room for inner complications like Shiite and Sunni and Christian and Ahmadi. (I had yet to learn that more than a million Hindus still lived in Pakistan.) It also required the abolition of magical blood claims and landholdings and stock markets, so that our personalities and situations could be determined purely by our religious beliefs.
But I knew that things weren’t really like that. And this was something I knew from the beginning, and lived with quite comfortably: the history in my textbook was Distinct and Separate from the histories of real people.
Some years later, in a secluded college library in Massachusetts, I read a very different account of the Two-Nation Theory. Here I learned that it was devised in the 1930s by a group of desperate Muslim politicians who wanted to extract some constitutional concessions from the British before they left India.
The Muslims of India, these politicians were saying in their political way, were a “distinct group” with their own “history and culture.” But really, the book told me, all they wanted was special protection for the poor Muslim minorities in soon-to-be-independent, mostly Hindu India.
But the politicians’ gamble failed; they were taken up on their bluff and were given a separate country, abruptly and violently cut-up, two far-apart chunks of Muslim-majority areas (but what about the poor Muslim minorities that were still stuck in Hindu-majority areas!) that its founders (but it was a mistake!) now had to justify with the subtleties of their theory.
It was like a punishment.
One by one, the founders died — the most important, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, just a year after Pakistan’s birth. Their theory could have died with them. What was the use now of the idea of Muslim specialness — the distinctiveness and separateness of Indian Muslims — in an independent, Muslim-majority country?
But the idea was kept alive and made useful: first by a set of unelected bureaucrats, then by generals, then by landowners, and then by generals again. And, always, to blackmail the people (still indistinct and unspecial). An Islamic dance was danced: sovereignty rested with “Allah alone”; the country would be called an Islamic republic; alcohol and gambling were banned; the Ahmadi sect was outlawed (to please the fringe mullahs) for violating, with their beliefs and practices, Muhammad’s position in “the principle of the finality of [Muhammad’s] prophethood.”
It peaked with the government takeover in 1977 by Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who announced that his great wish in life was to “Islamize” the people of Pakistan. The Two-Nation Theory, confined so far to political slogans and clauses in the Constitution, now went everywhere: it was injected into textbook passages (the ones I would reproduce, with new words and emotions, in my exam) and radio shows and programs on the one state-run TV channel. And it branched out, becoming anti-Communist (to attract American money), anti-Shiite (to attract Arab money, given for cutting Iran’s influence in the continent), anti-woman (to please the mullahs) and still more anti-Ahmadi (to enhance the pleasure and power of the mullahs).
The Two-Nation Theory was dynamic, useful, lucrative.
And it still is lucrative. Its best rewards are nowadays found in the high ratings (and correspondingly high advertising revenue) of Pakistan’s newly independent TV channels. Dozens of them are competing to sell the fastest-burning conspiracy theories (India and Israel and America are behind the latest suicide bombings) and the most punishing religious advice (don’t wear nail polish, don’t celebrate birthdays, kill blasphemers wherever you find them), that a semi-urban, semi-Islamized population, raised on years of government textbooks and radio shows and TV sermons (themselves confirmed and elucidated by the sermons of mullahs in neighborhood mosques) finds hard to shut out.
So the coordinated gun and bomb attacks during services at two Ahmadi mosques here on May 28 surprised no one. Some were saddened. But most took it as a matter of course. On the TV channels news of the assaults was reported and displayed (all those eyeballs, all those ads) but not explained. And in Lahore’s Main Market, near rickshaw stands and fruit stalls — the rickshaw drivers and fruit sellers standing in the heat outside the window display of an electronics shop, watching the muted carnage on an imported flat-screen TV — the incident was mulled over and attributed in the end to the larger madness that was overtaking the country.
IT was, they agreed, in some ways like the burning last year of a Christian village outside Lahore, and in other ways like the sporadic killings of Shiites in the years before that. But they also likened it to the televised killings of armed clerics in Islamabad’s Red Mosque — carried out three years ago by the military itself — and the unadmitted, unexplained attacks by American drones still falling on the people in the western mountains.
In the drawing rooms of Lahore, among the children of bureaucrats, landlords and military men (amazingly practical and un-Islamic in their drawing rooms), it was said that the Ahmadi attacks, though tragic, were not a sign of doom. After all, the Punjabi Taliban, who had claimed responsibility, were just another network — easily disrupted (when the time came) by a combination of on-the-ground raids and abductions, long and unexplained detentions, and perhaps strikes on mountainside training centers by the Predator drones that we don’t admit to knowing anything about.
That was their idea of the war on terrorism: the physical removal of a nuisance, something rare and extreme and isolatable.
A few days later, I read in the newspaper that the police had made an arrest in the Ahmadi attacks. The suspect’s name was Abdullah and he was 17 years old. When asked for his motives, he said that he had learned that Ahmadis were drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, “so their bloodshed was a great service to Islam.”
It was a simple enough statement. But I wondered about his ideas. Had he taken them from the Constitution? Or was he inspired by the court order days earlier banning Facebook for holding a contest of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?
Did he hear it in a mosque, or see it on a TV screen in the window display of an electronics shop? Did he read about blasphemy and its punishments in a textbook? Or was he one of those boys (Twenty million? Thirty million?) who don’t go to school and can’t read textbooks?
Was he taught about the Ahmadis in the mountains of Waziristan, where the police say he trained for his mission? Did he witness an American drone attack there? Did he think it was carried out by Ahmadis? Was it confirmed for him by a popular talk show host that the Ahmadis were America’s agents in Pakistan? And, in Waziristan, was he trained by the good Taliban, the ones the Pakistani military is trying to protect, or the bad Taliban, the ones it is trying to kill?
Or was he told about the Ahmadis after he had come all the way to the vast, grassy compound on the outskirts of Lahore where doctors and professors and businessmen — and even, it is said, some bureaucrats and landowners and military men — converge now and then to hang out with the masses and talk about the ways and woes of Islam?
Several theories now, with several competing culprits. It’s hard to pick just one.
Ali Sethi is the author of “The Wish Maker,” a novel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opini ... ?th&emc=th