June 28, 2010
Right-to-Know Law Gives India’s Poor a Lever
By LYDIA POLGREEN
BANTA, India — Chanchala Devi always wanted a house. Not a mud-and-stick hut, like her current home in this desolate village in the mineral-rich, corruption-corroded state of Jharkhand, but a proper brick-and-mortar house. When she heard that a government program for the poor would give her about $700 to build that house, she applied immediately.
As an impoverished day laborer from a downtrodden caste, she was an ideal candidate for the grant. Yet she waited four years, watching as wealthier neighbors got grants and built sturdy houses, while she and her three children slept beneath a leaky roof of tree branches and crumbling clay tiles.
Two months ago she took advantage of India’s powerful and wildly popular Right to Information law. With help from a local activist, she filed a request at a local government office to find out who had gotten the grants while she waited, and why. Within days a local bureaucrat had good news: Her grant had been approved, and she would soon get her check.
Ms. Devi’s good fortune is part of an information revolution sweeping India. It may be the world’s largest democracy, but a vast and powerful bureaucracy governs. It is an imperial edifice built on feudal foundations, and for much of independent India’s history the bureaucracy has been largely unaccountable. Citizens had few means to demand to know what their government was doing for them.
But it has now become clear that India’s 1.2 billion citizens have been newly empowered by the far-reaching law granting them the right to demand almost any information from the government. The law is backed by stiff fines for bureaucrats who withhold information, a penalty that appears to be ensuring speedy compliance.
The law has not, as some activists hoped, had a major effect on corruption. Often, as in Ms. Devi’s case, the bureaucracy solves the problem for the complaining individual, but seldom undertakes a broader inquiry.
Still, the law has become part of the fabric of rural India in the five years since it was passed, and has clearly begun to tilt the balance of power, long skewed toward bureaucrats and politicians.
“The feeling in government has always been that the people working in government are the rulers, and the people are the ruled,” said Wajahat Habibullah, the central government’s chief information commissioner. “This law has given the people the feeling that the government is accountable to them.”
Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, once said that only 15 percent of spending on the poor actually reached them — the rest was wasted or siphoned off.
That figure may have changed in the decades since he uttered it, but few Indians doubt that a good chunk of the roughly $47 billion budgeted this fiscal year to help impoverished citizens is lost.
India’s Right to Information law has given the poor a powerful tool to ensure they get their slice of that cake. The law, passed after more than a decade of agitation by good-government activists, has become embedded in Indian folklore. In the first three years the law was in effect, two million applications were filed.
Jharkhand is an eastern Indian state where corruption and incompetence are rife, fueled by mineral wealth and the political chaos that has gripped the state since it was carved out of the state of Bihar in 2000. Here the rural poor are using the law to solve basic problems. Their success stories seem like the most minor of triumphs, but they represent major life improvements for India’s poorest.
In one village near Banta, a clinic that was supposed to be staffed full time by a medical worker trained to diagnose ailments like malaria and diarrhea and provide care to infants and expectant mothers had not been staffed regularly for years. A local resident filed a request to see worker attendance records. Soon the medical worker started showing up regularly.
The worker, Sneha Lata, an assistant midwife whose government salary is $250 a month, denied that she had been neglecting her post. She said the information law was a nuisance. “Because of this law I have to listen to all these complaints,” she said. But with villagers now watching, she dares not miss work.
In a nearby hut, Ramani Devi sewed a blanket for a grandson born nine days earlier. In years past she would have been in the fields, toiling for a handful of change to make ends meet. As an elderly widow, Ms. Devi (no relation to Chanchala Devi) knew she was entitled to a $9 monthly government pension. That may not sound like much, but in a rural village, it is the difference between eating and starving.
Middlemen at the government office demand bribes of $20 to direct applications to the right bureaucrat, and many people ineligible for pensions were collecting them. When a local activist filed a request to find out which villagers were receiving pensions, Ms. Devi, who is a Dalit, formerly known as an untouchable, finally got her pension. Now she proudly shows off her savings account passbook.
Simply filing an inquiry about a missing ration card, a wayward pension application or a birth certificate is nowadays enough to force the once stodgy bureaucracy to deliver, activists here say.
But a more responsive bureaucracy is not necessarily less corrupt.
Sunil Kumar Mahto, 29, an activist in Ranchi, Jharkhand’s capital, said he quickly learned that using the law to expose corruption was pointless. He gave the example of a road project. “The money was spent, but there was no road,” Mr. Mahto said.
When he applied to find out what had happened, new money was allocated and the road was ultimately built. But no action was taken against whoever had pocketed the original money.
“The nexus of politicians, contractors and bureaucrats is very strong here,” Mr. Mahto explained. “To get action against someone is very difficult.”
Some critics wonder if the law is simply a pressure valve that allows people to get basic needs addressed without challenging the status quo. “It has been very successful in rooting out petty corruption,” said Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. “But our accountability mechanisms are weak, and transparency has no purpose without accountability.”
But Shekhar Singh, an activist who fought for passage of the law, said that in a nation recovering from centuries of colonial and feudal oppression, fighting corruption was secondary.
“Our main objective was to empower citizens,” Mr. Singh said. “This law has done that — given the people the power to challenge their government. That is no small thing.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world ... &th&emc=th
ASIA
Religious fundamentalism main root of violence in Pakistan
By Mahfooz Kanwar, For The Calgary HeraldJuly 6, 2010
In a little more than a month there have been two major terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims against other Muslims at mosques in Lahore, Pakistan.
This past Thursday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up killing at least 42 people and injuring a minimum of 180 people at the Data Darbar shrine, where a famous Sufisaint is buried.
On May 28, fundamentalist Muslims massacred more than 90 Ahmadiyya Muslims at their two mosques in Lahore and injured hundreds more.
When these events occur -- and their have been many more in this Punjab region of Pakistan -- the world wonders: why do Muslims kill other Muslims?
Not only did some Muslim fundamentalists armed with suicide vests, guns and grenades kill and injure dozens of worshippers, but they also took a large number of Ahmadis hostage.
This appalling, murderous act is not unusual in the history of Pakistan. In 1953, Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, a fundamentalist religious and political party in Pakistan, created a murderous upheaval against Ahmadis in the same city of Lahore. Jamaat's hooligans killed approximately 2,000 innocent Ahmadis. Now, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are suspected in this sectarian violence.
During my schooling, I minored in Islamic studies, and have published a book on Sociology of Islam. I have studied Islam further and have published my research in two other of my books as well as columns in newspapers and I have discussed those results in three of my 21 documentaries over the years.
Many Muslim fundamentalists are semi-literate, and some of them totally illiterate mullahs. The Holy Book of Qur'an makes it very clear that those Muslims who kill or commit suicide will be condemned to hell. Yet, some of these ill-informed Muslim extremists, such as suicide bombers, commit both murder and suicide. And they believe they are acclaimed to go to heaven in their life here after.
Pakistani Islamists always have had issues with the Muslim sect of Ahmadis. Along with the Islamic fundamentalists, some prominent secular politicians have also played the card of religion in Pakistan. The former prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims in the early 1970s.
Bhutto's government introduced a column for religion on the national identity cards as well as passports in singling out the Muslim sect of Ahmadis along with the rest of non-Muslims in Pakistan. This was designed basically to create a system of religious apartheid in Pakistan. That act smacked the basic Islamic principle of tolerance.
In Pakistan, Ahmadis are often barred from praying in their mosques. To preach their faith is considered to be a crime under Article 295 of the Penal Code of Pakistan. The federal sharia Court of Pakistan has ruled that preventing Ahmadis from preaching their faith is no violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution of Pakistan. This is akin to the system of apartheid which was once practised in South Africa.
Although Bhutto was overwhelmingly supported politically by more than two million Ahmadis in Pakistan, he declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Bhutto, a secular political leader, betrayed Ahmadis big time. However, the vile fundamentalist and ruthless military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq expanded the system of apartheid for Ahmadis in Pakistan.
What makes Bhutto, Zia and many mullahs qualified to decide who are or aren't Muslims? It is supposed to be God's business to judge His creatures.
In my research for my forthcoming book, Addiction to Religion, I note, among other things, that Islam means peace and Muslims are supposed to adhere to peace, but that does not seem to be the case for decades now.
Islam is a religion but Islamism is an addiction to religion that leads to terrorism. Fundamentalism is a gateway to addiction to religion which blinds people to become suicide bombers who commit two sins in Islam that will take them to hell.
Unfortunately, Pakistan is ruled by five pillars of corrupt establishment. They are: unpatriotic feudal landlords turned politicians (they, along with the Jamaat-e-Islami, were opposed to the creation of Pakistan), cruel military dictators (who have ruled Pakistan ruthlessly for more than half of it's history), corrupt politicians, depraved bureaucrats, and fundamentalist mullahs.
This last pillar is perhaps the most key. Until the idea of freedom of religion becomes accepted in Pakistan, Muslims will keep on killing each other. That's because they believe that there is only one way to practice Islam -- their way. They are taught no tolerance to other faiths or even to those who share their faith but practise it differently. That's why Shiites kill Sunnis, Sunnis kill Shiites, both kill Ahmadis and these groups -- with the backing of the government and Pakistani law -- all persecute and attack Christians and Hindus.
Until and unless something revolutionary happens, Pakistan will continue facing drastic, murderous problems.
Mahfooz Kanwar is Professor Emeritus at Mount Royal University
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
By Mahfooz Kanwar, For The Calgary HeraldJuly 6, 2010
In a little more than a month there have been two major terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims against other Muslims at mosques in Lahore, Pakistan.
This past Thursday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up killing at least 42 people and injuring a minimum of 180 people at the Data Darbar shrine, where a famous Sufisaint is buried.
On May 28, fundamentalist Muslims massacred more than 90 Ahmadiyya Muslims at their two mosques in Lahore and injured hundreds more.
When these events occur -- and their have been many more in this Punjab region of Pakistan -- the world wonders: why do Muslims kill other Muslims?
Not only did some Muslim fundamentalists armed with suicide vests, guns and grenades kill and injure dozens of worshippers, but they also took a large number of Ahmadis hostage.
This appalling, murderous act is not unusual in the history of Pakistan. In 1953, Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, a fundamentalist religious and political party in Pakistan, created a murderous upheaval against Ahmadis in the same city of Lahore. Jamaat's hooligans killed approximately 2,000 innocent Ahmadis. Now, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are suspected in this sectarian violence.
During my schooling, I minored in Islamic studies, and have published a book on Sociology of Islam. I have studied Islam further and have published my research in two other of my books as well as columns in newspapers and I have discussed those results in three of my 21 documentaries over the years.
Many Muslim fundamentalists are semi-literate, and some of them totally illiterate mullahs. The Holy Book of Qur'an makes it very clear that those Muslims who kill or commit suicide will be condemned to hell. Yet, some of these ill-informed Muslim extremists, such as suicide bombers, commit both murder and suicide. And they believe they are acclaimed to go to heaven in their life here after.
Pakistani Islamists always have had issues with the Muslim sect of Ahmadis. Along with the Islamic fundamentalists, some prominent secular politicians have also played the card of religion in Pakistan. The former prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims in the early 1970s.
Bhutto's government introduced a column for religion on the national identity cards as well as passports in singling out the Muslim sect of Ahmadis along with the rest of non-Muslims in Pakistan. This was designed basically to create a system of religious apartheid in Pakistan. That act smacked the basic Islamic principle of tolerance.
In Pakistan, Ahmadis are often barred from praying in their mosques. To preach their faith is considered to be a crime under Article 295 of the Penal Code of Pakistan. The federal sharia Court of Pakistan has ruled that preventing Ahmadis from preaching their faith is no violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution of Pakistan. This is akin to the system of apartheid which was once practised in South Africa.
Although Bhutto was overwhelmingly supported politically by more than two million Ahmadis in Pakistan, he declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Bhutto, a secular political leader, betrayed Ahmadis big time. However, the vile fundamentalist and ruthless military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq expanded the system of apartheid for Ahmadis in Pakistan.
What makes Bhutto, Zia and many mullahs qualified to decide who are or aren't Muslims? It is supposed to be God's business to judge His creatures.
In my research for my forthcoming book, Addiction to Religion, I note, among other things, that Islam means peace and Muslims are supposed to adhere to peace, but that does not seem to be the case for decades now.
Islam is a religion but Islamism is an addiction to religion that leads to terrorism. Fundamentalism is a gateway to addiction to religion which blinds people to become suicide bombers who commit two sins in Islam that will take them to hell.
Unfortunately, Pakistan is ruled by five pillars of corrupt establishment. They are: unpatriotic feudal landlords turned politicians (they, along with the Jamaat-e-Islami, were opposed to the creation of Pakistan), cruel military dictators (who have ruled Pakistan ruthlessly for more than half of it's history), corrupt politicians, depraved bureaucrats, and fundamentalist mullahs.
This last pillar is perhaps the most key. Until the idea of freedom of religion becomes accepted in Pakistan, Muslims will keep on killing each other. That's because they believe that there is only one way to practice Islam -- their way. They are taught no tolerance to other faiths or even to those who share their faith but practise it differently. That's why Shiites kill Sunnis, Sunnis kill Shiites, both kill Ahmadis and these groups -- with the backing of the government and Pakistani law -- all persecute and attack Christians and Hindus.
Until and unless something revolutionary happens, Pakistan will continue facing drastic, murderous problems.
Mahfooz Kanwar is Professor Emeritus at Mount Royal University
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
July 9, 2010
In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine
By JIM YARDLEY
KODERMA, India — When Nirupama Pathak left this remote mining region for graduate school in New Delhi, she seemed to be leaving the old India for the new. Her parents paid her tuition and did not resist when she wanted to choose her own career. But choosing a husband was another matter.
Her family was Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and when Ms. Pathak, 22, announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, her family began pressing her to change her mind. They warned of social ostracism and accused her of defiling their religion.
Days after Ms. Pathak returned home in late April, she was found dead in her bedroom. The police have arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, on suspicion of murder, while the family contends that the death was a suicide.
The postmortem report revealed another unexpected element to the case: Ms. Pathak was pregnant.
“One thing is absolutely clear,” said Prashant Bhushan, a social activist and lawyer now advising Ms. Pathak’s fiancé. “Her family was trying their level best to prevent her from marrying that boy. The pressure was such that either she was driven to suicide or she was killed.”
In India, where the tension between traditional and modern mores reverberates throughout society, Ms. Pathak’s death comes amid an apparent resurgence of so-called honor killings against couples who breach Hindu marriage traditions.
This week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered a cabinet-level commission to consider tougher penalties in honor killings.
In June, India’s Supreme Court sent notices to seven Indian states, as well as to the national government, seeking responses about what was being done to address the problem.
The phenomenon of honor killings is most prevalent in some northern states, especially Haryana, where village caste councils, or khap panchayats, often operate as an extralegal morals police force, issuing edicts against couples who marry outside their caste or who marry within the same village — considered a religious violation since villages are often regarded as extended families.
Even as the court system has sought to curb these councils, politicians have hesitated, since the councils often control significant vote blocs in local elections.
New cases of killings or harassment appear in the Indian news media almost every week. Last month, the police arrested three men for the honor killings of a couple in New Delhi who had married outside their castes, as well as the murder of a woman who eloped with a man from another caste.
Two of the suspects are accused of murdering their sisters, and an uncle of the slain couple spoke of their murders as justifiable.
“What is wrong in it?” the uncle, Dharmaveer Nagar, told the Indian news media. “Murder is wrong, but this is socially the best thing that has been done.”
Intercaste marriages are protected under Indian law, yet social attitudes remain largely resistant. In a 2006 survey cited in a United Nations report, 76 percent of respondents deemed the practice unacceptable. An overwhelming majority of Hindu couples continue to marry within their castes, and newspapers are filled with marital advertisements in which parents, seeking to arrange a marriage for a son or daughter, specify caste among lists of desired attributes like profession and educational achievement.
“This is part and parcel of our culture, that you marry into your own caste,” said Dharmendra Pathak, the father of Ms. Pathak, during an interview in his home. “Every society has its own culture. Every society has its own traditions.”
Yet Indian society is also rapidly changing, with a new generation more likely to mix with people from different backgrounds as young people commingle on college campuses or in the workplace.
Ms. Pathak had studied journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications in New Delhi before taking a job at a financial newspaper. At school, she had met Priyabhanshu Ranjan, a top student whose family was from a middle-upper caste, the Kayastha.
“The day I proposed, she said, ‘My family will not accept this. My family is very conservative,’ ” Mr. Ranjan recalled. “I used to try to convince her that once we got married, they would accept it.”
Ms. Pathak deliberated over the proposal for months before accepting in early 2009. Convinced her family would disapprove, she kept her engagement a secret for more than a year, until she learned that her father was interviewing prospective Brahmin grooms in New Delhi to arrange a marriage for her. Her parents were also renovating the family home for a wedding celebration.
Ms. Pathak called her oldest brother, Samarendra, who spent the next week trying to change her mind.
“What I told her was that the decision you have taken — there is nothing wrong with it,” he said. “But the society we live in will not accept it. You can’t transform society in a day. It takes time.”
When her father learned of the engagement, he wrote his daughter a letter and paid a surprise visit to New Delhi.
In the letter, the father acknowledged that such marriages were allowed under India’s Constitution, but argued that the Constitution had existed for only decades while Hindu religious beliefs dated back thousands of years.
At one point, Ms. Pathak’s mother called, crying, asking if they had wronged her in a past life.
The death of Ms. Pathak remains under investigation. Her body was discovered in her upstairs bedroom on the morning of April 29, while her mother was the only person at home. Initially, neighbors and family members said she had died from electrocution, but then later changed their story to say she had hanged herself. The police arrested the mother after the postmortem report concluded that Ms. Pathak had been suffocated.
But Ms. Pathak’s father and her two brothers have argued that the postmortem was flawed and claimed that her death had been a suicide. The family produced a suicide note and persuaded a local magistrate to order an investigation into Mr. Ranjan, the boyfriend — which his supporters have described as politically motivated.
Ms. Pathak’s pregnancy has also complicated the case. Mr. Ranjan said that he had been unaware of her condition, and her family told the police that they, too, had been unaware. But in an interview, the father and brothers changed their story, saying that Ms. Pathak confessed her pregnancy to her mother on the morning of her death.
For now, the case has polarized opinion. In Koderma, supporters of the Pathak family have rallied for the release of the mother from jail. In New Delhi, former classmates of Ms. Pathak and other supporters have held candlelight vigils, calling for the case to be prosecuted as an honor killing.
“This kind of the thing is increasing everywhere,” said Girija Vyas, a member of Parliament and the president of the National Commission of Women. “There should not be these things in the 21st century. These things must be stopped.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Koderma, and Saimah Khwaja from New Delhi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world ... &th&emc=th
In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine
By JIM YARDLEY
KODERMA, India — When Nirupama Pathak left this remote mining region for graduate school in New Delhi, she seemed to be leaving the old India for the new. Her parents paid her tuition and did not resist when she wanted to choose her own career. But choosing a husband was another matter.
Her family was Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and when Ms. Pathak, 22, announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, her family began pressing her to change her mind. They warned of social ostracism and accused her of defiling their religion.
Days after Ms. Pathak returned home in late April, she was found dead in her bedroom. The police have arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, on suspicion of murder, while the family contends that the death was a suicide.
The postmortem report revealed another unexpected element to the case: Ms. Pathak was pregnant.
“One thing is absolutely clear,” said Prashant Bhushan, a social activist and lawyer now advising Ms. Pathak’s fiancé. “Her family was trying their level best to prevent her from marrying that boy. The pressure was such that either she was driven to suicide or she was killed.”
In India, where the tension between traditional and modern mores reverberates throughout society, Ms. Pathak’s death comes amid an apparent resurgence of so-called honor killings against couples who breach Hindu marriage traditions.
This week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered a cabinet-level commission to consider tougher penalties in honor killings.
In June, India’s Supreme Court sent notices to seven Indian states, as well as to the national government, seeking responses about what was being done to address the problem.
The phenomenon of honor killings is most prevalent in some northern states, especially Haryana, where village caste councils, or khap panchayats, often operate as an extralegal morals police force, issuing edicts against couples who marry outside their caste or who marry within the same village — considered a religious violation since villages are often regarded as extended families.
Even as the court system has sought to curb these councils, politicians have hesitated, since the councils often control significant vote blocs in local elections.
New cases of killings or harassment appear in the Indian news media almost every week. Last month, the police arrested three men for the honor killings of a couple in New Delhi who had married outside their castes, as well as the murder of a woman who eloped with a man from another caste.
Two of the suspects are accused of murdering their sisters, and an uncle of the slain couple spoke of their murders as justifiable.
“What is wrong in it?” the uncle, Dharmaveer Nagar, told the Indian news media. “Murder is wrong, but this is socially the best thing that has been done.”
Intercaste marriages are protected under Indian law, yet social attitudes remain largely resistant. In a 2006 survey cited in a United Nations report, 76 percent of respondents deemed the practice unacceptable. An overwhelming majority of Hindu couples continue to marry within their castes, and newspapers are filled with marital advertisements in which parents, seeking to arrange a marriage for a son or daughter, specify caste among lists of desired attributes like profession and educational achievement.
“This is part and parcel of our culture, that you marry into your own caste,” said Dharmendra Pathak, the father of Ms. Pathak, during an interview in his home. “Every society has its own culture. Every society has its own traditions.”
Yet Indian society is also rapidly changing, with a new generation more likely to mix with people from different backgrounds as young people commingle on college campuses or in the workplace.
Ms. Pathak had studied journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications in New Delhi before taking a job at a financial newspaper. At school, she had met Priyabhanshu Ranjan, a top student whose family was from a middle-upper caste, the Kayastha.
“The day I proposed, she said, ‘My family will not accept this. My family is very conservative,’ ” Mr. Ranjan recalled. “I used to try to convince her that once we got married, they would accept it.”
Ms. Pathak deliberated over the proposal for months before accepting in early 2009. Convinced her family would disapprove, she kept her engagement a secret for more than a year, until she learned that her father was interviewing prospective Brahmin grooms in New Delhi to arrange a marriage for her. Her parents were also renovating the family home for a wedding celebration.
Ms. Pathak called her oldest brother, Samarendra, who spent the next week trying to change her mind.
“What I told her was that the decision you have taken — there is nothing wrong with it,” he said. “But the society we live in will not accept it. You can’t transform society in a day. It takes time.”
When her father learned of the engagement, he wrote his daughter a letter and paid a surprise visit to New Delhi.
In the letter, the father acknowledged that such marriages were allowed under India’s Constitution, but argued that the Constitution had existed for only decades while Hindu religious beliefs dated back thousands of years.
At one point, Ms. Pathak’s mother called, crying, asking if they had wronged her in a past life.
The death of Ms. Pathak remains under investigation. Her body was discovered in her upstairs bedroom on the morning of April 29, while her mother was the only person at home. Initially, neighbors and family members said she had died from electrocution, but then later changed their story to say she had hanged herself. The police arrested the mother after the postmortem report concluded that Ms. Pathak had been suffocated.
But Ms. Pathak’s father and her two brothers have argued that the postmortem was flawed and claimed that her death had been a suicide. The family produced a suicide note and persuaded a local magistrate to order an investigation into Mr. Ranjan, the boyfriend — which his supporters have described as politically motivated.
Ms. Pathak’s pregnancy has also complicated the case. Mr. Ranjan said that he had been unaware of her condition, and her family told the police that they, too, had been unaware. But in an interview, the father and brothers changed their story, saying that Ms. Pathak confessed her pregnancy to her mother on the morning of her death.
For now, the case has polarized opinion. In Koderma, supporters of the Pathak family have rallied for the release of the mother from jail. In New Delhi, former classmates of Ms. Pathak and other supporters have held candlelight vigils, calling for the case to be prosecuted as an honor killing.
“This kind of the thing is increasing everywhere,” said Girija Vyas, a member of Parliament and the president of the National Commission of Women. “There should not be these things in the 21st century. These things must be stopped.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Koderma, and Saimah Khwaja from New Delhi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world ... &th&emc=th
There is a related video and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/world ... l?ref=asia
July 18, 2010
Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Much of Pakistan’s capital city looks like a rich Los Angeles suburb. Shiny sport utility vehicles purr down gated driveways. Elegant multistory homes are tended by servants. Laundry is never hung out to dry.
But behind the opulence lurks a troubling fact. Very few of these households pay income tax. That is mostly because the politicians who make the rules are also the country’s richest citizens, and are skilled at finding ways to exempt themselves.
That would be a problem in any country. But in Pakistan, the lack of a workable tax system feeds something more menacing: a festering inequality in Pakistani society, where the wealth of its most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good. That is creating conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.
It is also a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.
Though the authorities have tried to expand the net in recent years, taxing profits from the stock market and real estate, entire swaths of the economy, like agriculture, a major moneymaker for the elite, remain untaxed.
“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.”
The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million, according to a December study by the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency in Islamabad.
While Pakistan’s income from taxes last year was the lowest in the country’s history, according to Zafar ul-Majeed, a senior official in the Federal Board of Revenue, the assets of current members of Parliament nearly doubled from those of members of the previous Parliament, the institute study found.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/world ... l?ref=asia
July 18, 2010
Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Much of Pakistan’s capital city looks like a rich Los Angeles suburb. Shiny sport utility vehicles purr down gated driveways. Elegant multistory homes are tended by servants. Laundry is never hung out to dry.
But behind the opulence lurks a troubling fact. Very few of these households pay income tax. That is mostly because the politicians who make the rules are also the country’s richest citizens, and are skilled at finding ways to exempt themselves.
That would be a problem in any country. But in Pakistan, the lack of a workable tax system feeds something more menacing: a festering inequality in Pakistani society, where the wealth of its most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good. That is creating conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.
It is also a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.
Though the authorities have tried to expand the net in recent years, taxing profits from the stock market and real estate, entire swaths of the economy, like agriculture, a major moneymaker for the elite, remain untaxed.
“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.”
The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million, according to a December study by the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency in Islamabad.
While Pakistan’s income from taxes last year was the lowest in the country’s history, according to Zafar ul-Majeed, a senior official in the Federal Board of Revenue, the assets of current members of Parliament nearly doubled from those of members of the previous Parliament, the institute study found.
August 6, 2010
Hard-Line Islam Fills Void in Flooded Pakistan
By ADAM B. ELLICK and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
There are a related video and photographs linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/world ... &th&emc=th
CHARSADDA, Pakistan — As public anger rises over the government’s slow and chaotic response to Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years, hard-line Islamic charities have stepped into the breach with a grass-roots efficiency that is earning them new support among Pakistan’s beleaguered masses.
Victims of the floods and political observers say the disaster has provided yet another deeply painful reminder of the anemic health of the civilian government as it teeters between the ineffectual and neglectful.
The floods have opened a fresh opportunity for the Islamic charities to demonstrate that they can provide what the government cannot, much as the Islamists did during the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, which helped them lure new recruits to banned militant groups through the charity wings that front for them.
In just two districts in this part of the northwest, three Islamic charities have provided shelter to thousands, collected tens of thousands in donations and served about 25,000 hot meals a day a since last Saturday — six full days before the government delivered cooked food.
“The West says we are terrorists and intolerant, but in time of need, we’re the ones serving the people,” said Maulana Yousaf Shah, the provincial leader of one of the groups, Jamiat-ulema-e-Islam.
Mian Adil, the vice chairman of another group, Falah-e-Insaniyat, said the aid he distributed at a center in one of the districts, Nowshera, came with a message attached — “not to trust the government” and its Western allies.
Falah-e-Insaniyat is the charity wing and the latest front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa is the political arm of Lashkar, which the United Nations has listed as a terrorist group.
Under pressure since the Mumbai attacks, Jamaat-ud-Dawa had lowered its profile. But now, at least one of its relief centers in Mianwali, in Punjab, boldly flies its trademark flag, displaying a black sword.
The very visible presence of such groups shows they continue to operate openly from their strongholds in Punjab Province, the nation’s heartland, to far-flung corners of the northeast, where they are expanding their legitimacy, and by extension, their ideology.
Their gains come as the United States continues to struggle to win support in the region, despite lavishing billions of dollars in military and civilian aid on Pakistan since 2001 to encourage its help in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Some experts predicted that the public resentment of the government generated by the floods could erode support from the military’s campaign against the militants, and give a boost to Pakistan’s Islamic parties, which remain small but influential.
A 30-year-old tobacco dealer, Gohar Aman, said he got a taste of the nearly complete absence of the government’s response when he got in his car on Thursday to search for a relief post he could entrust with an $80 donation.
For 25 miles all he could find were centers run by hard-line Islamic groups, an unsettling option for a man whose brothers are elected leaders of the governing secular party.
Finally, he settled on the Haqqania Madrasa — a fundamentalist boarding school whose alumni include Jalaluddin Haqqani, who runs the militant network that recruits suicide bombers to strike at coalition forces in Afghanistan from his redoubt inside Pakistan.
The school’s leaders, including the director, Maulana Shah, had converted their buildings just off the main road in Charsadda into a dignified homeless shelter providing hot meals, medical treatment and 24-hour electricity to 2,500 flood victims.
“It’s our first time here,” said Mr. Aman, giving a wad of cash to the director. “But we see how comfortable the people are living here, and we can’t trust the government.”
President Asif Ali Zardari, already deeply unpopular, has come in for stinging criticism for leaving in the middle of the crisis to visit France and Britain as Pakistan grappled with floods that one provincial minister said would set the country back 50 years.
“I don’t care if Zardari is in Europe,” Main Gul, 50, a laborer who lost his home and two cows, said in an interview. “His government is in Pakistan, but where are they?”
Mr. Zardari arrived Friday at the country home of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain for talks that the Pakistani government said were an important opportunity to smooth over relations after Mr. Cameron recently criticized Pakistan for failing to fight terrorism.
There was no hint that Mr. Zardari would cut his trip short to return home, where the floods have affected more than 12 million people, and have killed at least 1,500, according to government and United Nations estimates.
“He would have been remembered and criticized even if there were no floods in the country,” Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said. “I am the chief executive of the country. I am here and my whole cabinet is here to supervise the relief operation, which is our responsibility and not the president’s.”
But a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak the news media, said the state was serving only 40 percent of the needs of the people because of a lack of manpower and the vast nature of the catastrophe.
The government is housing tens of thousands of people inside public schools, but a person who lived there said the conditions were so foul that when rice was available they “fight like dogs.”
That official relief effort depends greatly on international aid groups and foreign governments, which have donated tens of millions of dollars and provided critical equipment to assist the army’s rescue operations.
American helicopters began evacuating people and ferrying supplies this week. But some of the $35 million in aid put up by Washington will come in cash or be channeled through local or international groups, denying the unpopular Americans the chance to improve their image with Pakistanis face to face.
As the rains moved south to Sindh Province on Friday, the senior United Nations official in Pakistan, Martin Mogwanja, said the flooding had left more than 1.5 million people homeless. The United Nations would soon begin an appeal for up to $200 million, he said.
The chaos and inadequacy of the government effort contrasted sharply with the efficiency and reach of the Islamic charities.
Khadim Hussain, an analyst at the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy who has studied the expansion of the militant groups, said it was “very alarming” that the Islamic groups had moved so fully into the mainstream.
He warned that a failure by the government to reach the people could lead to a “complete reversal” of public support for the military’s campaign against the militant groups that have threatened the state.
In places where foreign and government officials retreated for security reasons, the well-mobilized Islamic charities have consistently been a step ahead and penetrated even remote villages with ease, survivors said.
The Islamic charities sprung into action immediately after the floods hit last week, they said, sending a brigade of 4,000 volunteers in Nowshera, in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, to rebuild homes in villages far too dangerous for foreign aid workers to enter.
When asked about the government’s slow response, Maulana Shah, the madrasa director, was dismissive. “They’re your slaves, so why don’t you ask them?” he said, referring to the Pakistani-American ties. He had collected more than $30,000 from private donors since opening the doors of his madrassa, he said.
Officials at one aid center associated with Jamaat-ud-Dawa said that the police tried to dismantle their operation on Tuesday morning as they prepared a breakfast for about 25 flood victims, using an ordinance that prohibited public gatherings without a permit.
The victims protested and pleaded with the police not to shut down a humanitarian service that the government was not providing. They got their way.
“They could not put a hand on us,” said Farhad Ali, a madrassa teacher who volunteers at the post, “because we were here first and we’re the only ones delivering.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, Waqar Gillani from Mianwali, Pakistan, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
Hard-Line Islam Fills Void in Flooded Pakistan
By ADAM B. ELLICK and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
There are a related video and photographs linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/world ... &th&emc=th
CHARSADDA, Pakistan — As public anger rises over the government’s slow and chaotic response to Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years, hard-line Islamic charities have stepped into the breach with a grass-roots efficiency that is earning them new support among Pakistan’s beleaguered masses.
Victims of the floods and political observers say the disaster has provided yet another deeply painful reminder of the anemic health of the civilian government as it teeters between the ineffectual and neglectful.
The floods have opened a fresh opportunity for the Islamic charities to demonstrate that they can provide what the government cannot, much as the Islamists did during the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, which helped them lure new recruits to banned militant groups through the charity wings that front for them.
In just two districts in this part of the northwest, three Islamic charities have provided shelter to thousands, collected tens of thousands in donations and served about 25,000 hot meals a day a since last Saturday — six full days before the government delivered cooked food.
“The West says we are terrorists and intolerant, but in time of need, we’re the ones serving the people,” said Maulana Yousaf Shah, the provincial leader of one of the groups, Jamiat-ulema-e-Islam.
Mian Adil, the vice chairman of another group, Falah-e-Insaniyat, said the aid he distributed at a center in one of the districts, Nowshera, came with a message attached — “not to trust the government” and its Western allies.
Falah-e-Insaniyat is the charity wing and the latest front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa is the political arm of Lashkar, which the United Nations has listed as a terrorist group.
Under pressure since the Mumbai attacks, Jamaat-ud-Dawa had lowered its profile. But now, at least one of its relief centers in Mianwali, in Punjab, boldly flies its trademark flag, displaying a black sword.
The very visible presence of such groups shows they continue to operate openly from their strongholds in Punjab Province, the nation’s heartland, to far-flung corners of the northeast, where they are expanding their legitimacy, and by extension, their ideology.
Their gains come as the United States continues to struggle to win support in the region, despite lavishing billions of dollars in military and civilian aid on Pakistan since 2001 to encourage its help in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Some experts predicted that the public resentment of the government generated by the floods could erode support from the military’s campaign against the militants, and give a boost to Pakistan’s Islamic parties, which remain small but influential.
A 30-year-old tobacco dealer, Gohar Aman, said he got a taste of the nearly complete absence of the government’s response when he got in his car on Thursday to search for a relief post he could entrust with an $80 donation.
For 25 miles all he could find were centers run by hard-line Islamic groups, an unsettling option for a man whose brothers are elected leaders of the governing secular party.
Finally, he settled on the Haqqania Madrasa — a fundamentalist boarding school whose alumni include Jalaluddin Haqqani, who runs the militant network that recruits suicide bombers to strike at coalition forces in Afghanistan from his redoubt inside Pakistan.
The school’s leaders, including the director, Maulana Shah, had converted their buildings just off the main road in Charsadda into a dignified homeless shelter providing hot meals, medical treatment and 24-hour electricity to 2,500 flood victims.
“It’s our first time here,” said Mr. Aman, giving a wad of cash to the director. “But we see how comfortable the people are living here, and we can’t trust the government.”
President Asif Ali Zardari, already deeply unpopular, has come in for stinging criticism for leaving in the middle of the crisis to visit France and Britain as Pakistan grappled with floods that one provincial minister said would set the country back 50 years.
“I don’t care if Zardari is in Europe,” Main Gul, 50, a laborer who lost his home and two cows, said in an interview. “His government is in Pakistan, but where are they?”
Mr. Zardari arrived Friday at the country home of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain for talks that the Pakistani government said were an important opportunity to smooth over relations after Mr. Cameron recently criticized Pakistan for failing to fight terrorism.
There was no hint that Mr. Zardari would cut his trip short to return home, where the floods have affected more than 12 million people, and have killed at least 1,500, according to government and United Nations estimates.
“He would have been remembered and criticized even if there were no floods in the country,” Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said. “I am the chief executive of the country. I am here and my whole cabinet is here to supervise the relief operation, which is our responsibility and not the president’s.”
But a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak the news media, said the state was serving only 40 percent of the needs of the people because of a lack of manpower and the vast nature of the catastrophe.
The government is housing tens of thousands of people inside public schools, but a person who lived there said the conditions were so foul that when rice was available they “fight like dogs.”
That official relief effort depends greatly on international aid groups and foreign governments, which have donated tens of millions of dollars and provided critical equipment to assist the army’s rescue operations.
American helicopters began evacuating people and ferrying supplies this week. But some of the $35 million in aid put up by Washington will come in cash or be channeled through local or international groups, denying the unpopular Americans the chance to improve their image with Pakistanis face to face.
As the rains moved south to Sindh Province on Friday, the senior United Nations official in Pakistan, Martin Mogwanja, said the flooding had left more than 1.5 million people homeless. The United Nations would soon begin an appeal for up to $200 million, he said.
The chaos and inadequacy of the government effort contrasted sharply with the efficiency and reach of the Islamic charities.
Khadim Hussain, an analyst at the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy who has studied the expansion of the militant groups, said it was “very alarming” that the Islamic groups had moved so fully into the mainstream.
He warned that a failure by the government to reach the people could lead to a “complete reversal” of public support for the military’s campaign against the militant groups that have threatened the state.
In places where foreign and government officials retreated for security reasons, the well-mobilized Islamic charities have consistently been a step ahead and penetrated even remote villages with ease, survivors said.
The Islamic charities sprung into action immediately after the floods hit last week, they said, sending a brigade of 4,000 volunteers in Nowshera, in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, to rebuild homes in villages far too dangerous for foreign aid workers to enter.
When asked about the government’s slow response, Maulana Shah, the madrasa director, was dismissive. “They’re your slaves, so why don’t you ask them?” he said, referring to the Pakistani-American ties. He had collected more than $30,000 from private donors since opening the doors of his madrassa, he said.
Officials at one aid center associated with Jamaat-ud-Dawa said that the police tried to dismantle their operation on Tuesday morning as they prepared a breakfast for about 25 flood victims, using an ordinance that prohibited public gatherings without a permit.
The victims protested and pleaded with the police not to shut down a humanitarian service that the government was not providing. They got their way.
“They could not put a hand on us,” said Farhad Ali, a madrassa teacher who volunteers at the post, “because we were here first and we’re the only ones delivering.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, Waqar Gillani from Mianwali, Pakistan, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/world ... ?th&emc=th
August 21, 2010
India Tries Using Cash Bonuses to Slow Birthrates
By JIM YARDLEY
SATARA, India — Sunita Laxman Jadhav is a door-to-door saleswoman who sells waiting. She sweeps along muddy village lanes in her nurse’s white sari, calling on newly married couples with an unblushing proposition: Wait two years before getting pregnant, and the government will thank you.
It also will pay you.
“I want to tell you about our honeymoon package,” began Ms. Jadhav, an auxiliary nurse, during a recent house call on a new bride in this farming region in the state of Maharashtra. Ms. Jadhav explained that the district government would pay 5,000 rupees, or about $106, if the couple waited to have children. Waiting, she promised, would allow them time to finish their schooling or to save money.
Waiting also would allow India more time to curb a rapidly growing population that threatens to turn its demography from a prized asset into a crippling burden. With almost 1.2 billion people, India is disproportionately young; roughly half the population is younger than 25. This “demographic dividend” is one reason some economists predict that India could surpass China in economic growth rates within five years. India will have a young, vast work force while a rapidly aging China will face the burden of supporting an older population.
But if youth is India’s advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand schooling and other services. In coming decades, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and the critical uncertainty is just how populous it will be. Estimates range from 1.5 billion to 1.9 billion people, and Indian leaders recognize that that must be avoided.
Yet unlike authoritarian China, where the governing Communist Party long ago instituted the world’s strictest population policy, India is an unruly democracy where the central government has set population targets but where state governments carry out separate efforts to limit the birthrate. While some states have reacted to population fears with coercion, forbidding parents with more than two children from holding local office, or disqualifying government workers from certain benefits if they have larger families, other states have done little.
Meanwhile, many national politicians have been wary of promoting population control ever since an angry public backlash against a scandal over forced vasectomies during the 1970s. It was considered a sign of progress that India’s Parliament debated “population stabilization” this month after largely ignoring the issue for years.
“It’s already late,” said Sabu Padmadas, a demographer with the University of Southampton who has worked extensively in India. “It’s definitely high time for India to act.”
The program here in Satara is a pilot program — one of several initiatives across the country that have used a softer approach — trying to slow down population growth by challenging deeply ingrained rural customs. Experts say far too many rural women wed as teenagers, usually in arranged marriages, and then have babies in quick succession — a pattern that exacerbates poverty and spurs what demographers call “population momentum” by bunching children together. In Satara, local health officials have led campaigns to curb teenage weddings, as well as promoting the “honeymoon package” of cash bonuses and encouraging the use of contraceptives so that couples wait to start a family.
“This is how population stabilization will come,” said Rohini Lahane, an administrator in the district health office.
India averages about 2.6 children per family, far below what it was a half century ago, yet still above the rate of 2.1 that would stabilize the population. Many states with higher income and education levels are already near or below an average of two children per family. Yet the poorest and most populous states, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, average almost four children per family and have some of the lowest levels of female literacy.
“An educated girl is your best contraception,” said Dr. Amarjit Singh, executive director of the National Population Stabilization Fund, a quasi-governmental advisory agency. He said that roughly half of India’s future excess population growth was expected to come from its six poorest states.
Maharashtra is not in that category, but its population is still growing too fast. A farming district ringed with green hills, Satara has three million people. A 1997 survey found that almost a quarter of all women were marrying before the legal age of 18, while roughly 45 percent of all infants and young children in the district were malnourished.
In response, the district began a campaign to reduce the number of child brides and more than 27,000 parents signed a written pledge agreeing not to allow their daughters to wed before age 18. Within a few years, the marrying age rose and the rate of child malnutrition dropped. Today, officials say about 15 percent of children are malnourished. But if couples were marrying a little later, they were usually producing a child within the first year of marriage, followed by another soon after. So in August 2009, Satara introduced its honeymoon package as an incentive to delay childbirths. So far, 2,366 couples have enrolled.
“The response has been good,” said Dr. Archana Khade, a physician at the primary health care center in the village of Kahner. “But the money is a secondary thing. It’s about the other things, for better future prospects.”
Now, health officials in other states have come to Satara to study the program. Every day, auxiliary nurses like Ms. Jadhav canvass villages to disseminate information about family planning and solicit new couples for the honeymoon package. In India, a new couple usually resides with the family of the groom and it is the older generation that represents Ms. Jadhav’s biggest challenge.
“The first time I go, they always defy you,” she said. “They say, ‘No, we don’t want to do that.’ The older generation believes that the moment a couple gets married, they want a baby in their house.”
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Jadhav and Dr. Khade made their pitch to a 20-year-old bride, who stared silently down as her mother-in-law hovered in an adjacent room of their farmhouse.
“You can delay your first pregnancy,” Dr. Khade said. “Have you talked to your husband about family planning or when you want to have a child?”
“He doesn’t want to have children early,” the bride answered, almost in a whisper.
“Do you think your in-laws will be happy with your decision?” Dr. Khade asked.
The young bride was silent. Her in-laws did not know that she was already using birth-control pills.
Many experts emphasize that easing India’s population burden will require a holistic response centered on improving health services and teaching about a full range of contraception.
Many rural women know little about family planning, and female sterilization is the most commonly used form of birth control. During the 1990s, officials in the state of Andhra Pradesh advocated sterilization of mothers after a second child, an approach that brought a sharp drop in the birthrate but was criticized as coercive in some cases.
In Satara, the birthrate has fallen to about 1.9 children per family, partly because of the honeymoon package, with many women opting for sterilization after their second child. Problems persist, such as a sharp gender imbalance in Satara and many other regions of India because of a cultural bias toward having sons. With more pressure to limit families to two children, female fetuses are often aborted after a couple sees an ultrasound.
Yet the idea of waiting appeals to many women. One new bride, Reshma Yogesh Sawand, 25, said she and her husband wanted to wait to have a child — and only one — in order to save money and move to a bigger city.
“If I have just one,” said Ms. Sawand, who is taking a computer course and has a job selling insurance policies, “I can take better care of it.”
Saimah Khwaja contributed research from Maharashtra State.
August 21, 2010
India Tries Using Cash Bonuses to Slow Birthrates
By JIM YARDLEY
SATARA, India — Sunita Laxman Jadhav is a door-to-door saleswoman who sells waiting. She sweeps along muddy village lanes in her nurse’s white sari, calling on newly married couples with an unblushing proposition: Wait two years before getting pregnant, and the government will thank you.
It also will pay you.
“I want to tell you about our honeymoon package,” began Ms. Jadhav, an auxiliary nurse, during a recent house call on a new bride in this farming region in the state of Maharashtra. Ms. Jadhav explained that the district government would pay 5,000 rupees, or about $106, if the couple waited to have children. Waiting, she promised, would allow them time to finish their schooling or to save money.
Waiting also would allow India more time to curb a rapidly growing population that threatens to turn its demography from a prized asset into a crippling burden. With almost 1.2 billion people, India is disproportionately young; roughly half the population is younger than 25. This “demographic dividend” is one reason some economists predict that India could surpass China in economic growth rates within five years. India will have a young, vast work force while a rapidly aging China will face the burden of supporting an older population.
But if youth is India’s advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand schooling and other services. In coming decades, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and the critical uncertainty is just how populous it will be. Estimates range from 1.5 billion to 1.9 billion people, and Indian leaders recognize that that must be avoided.
Yet unlike authoritarian China, where the governing Communist Party long ago instituted the world’s strictest population policy, India is an unruly democracy where the central government has set population targets but where state governments carry out separate efforts to limit the birthrate. While some states have reacted to population fears with coercion, forbidding parents with more than two children from holding local office, or disqualifying government workers from certain benefits if they have larger families, other states have done little.
Meanwhile, many national politicians have been wary of promoting population control ever since an angry public backlash against a scandal over forced vasectomies during the 1970s. It was considered a sign of progress that India’s Parliament debated “population stabilization” this month after largely ignoring the issue for years.
“It’s already late,” said Sabu Padmadas, a demographer with the University of Southampton who has worked extensively in India. “It’s definitely high time for India to act.”
The program here in Satara is a pilot program — one of several initiatives across the country that have used a softer approach — trying to slow down population growth by challenging deeply ingrained rural customs. Experts say far too many rural women wed as teenagers, usually in arranged marriages, and then have babies in quick succession — a pattern that exacerbates poverty and spurs what demographers call “population momentum” by bunching children together. In Satara, local health officials have led campaigns to curb teenage weddings, as well as promoting the “honeymoon package” of cash bonuses and encouraging the use of contraceptives so that couples wait to start a family.
“This is how population stabilization will come,” said Rohini Lahane, an administrator in the district health office.
India averages about 2.6 children per family, far below what it was a half century ago, yet still above the rate of 2.1 that would stabilize the population. Many states with higher income and education levels are already near or below an average of two children per family. Yet the poorest and most populous states, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, average almost four children per family and have some of the lowest levels of female literacy.
“An educated girl is your best contraception,” said Dr. Amarjit Singh, executive director of the National Population Stabilization Fund, a quasi-governmental advisory agency. He said that roughly half of India’s future excess population growth was expected to come from its six poorest states.
Maharashtra is not in that category, but its population is still growing too fast. A farming district ringed with green hills, Satara has three million people. A 1997 survey found that almost a quarter of all women were marrying before the legal age of 18, while roughly 45 percent of all infants and young children in the district were malnourished.
In response, the district began a campaign to reduce the number of child brides and more than 27,000 parents signed a written pledge agreeing not to allow their daughters to wed before age 18. Within a few years, the marrying age rose and the rate of child malnutrition dropped. Today, officials say about 15 percent of children are malnourished. But if couples were marrying a little later, they were usually producing a child within the first year of marriage, followed by another soon after. So in August 2009, Satara introduced its honeymoon package as an incentive to delay childbirths. So far, 2,366 couples have enrolled.
“The response has been good,” said Dr. Archana Khade, a physician at the primary health care center in the village of Kahner. “But the money is a secondary thing. It’s about the other things, for better future prospects.”
Now, health officials in other states have come to Satara to study the program. Every day, auxiliary nurses like Ms. Jadhav canvass villages to disseminate information about family planning and solicit new couples for the honeymoon package. In India, a new couple usually resides with the family of the groom and it is the older generation that represents Ms. Jadhav’s biggest challenge.
“The first time I go, they always defy you,” she said. “They say, ‘No, we don’t want to do that.’ The older generation believes that the moment a couple gets married, they want a baby in their house.”
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Jadhav and Dr. Khade made their pitch to a 20-year-old bride, who stared silently down as her mother-in-law hovered in an adjacent room of their farmhouse.
“You can delay your first pregnancy,” Dr. Khade said. “Have you talked to your husband about family planning or when you want to have a child?”
“He doesn’t want to have children early,” the bride answered, almost in a whisper.
“Do you think your in-laws will be happy with your decision?” Dr. Khade asked.
The young bride was silent. Her in-laws did not know that she was already using birth-control pills.
Many experts emphasize that easing India’s population burden will require a holistic response centered on improving health services and teaching about a full range of contraception.
Many rural women know little about family planning, and female sterilization is the most commonly used form of birth control. During the 1990s, officials in the state of Andhra Pradesh advocated sterilization of mothers after a second child, an approach that brought a sharp drop in the birthrate but was criticized as coercive in some cases.
In Satara, the birthrate has fallen to about 1.9 children per family, partly because of the honeymoon package, with many women opting for sterilization after their second child. Problems persist, such as a sharp gender imbalance in Satara and many other regions of India because of a cultural bias toward having sons. With more pressure to limit families to two children, female fetuses are often aborted after a couple sees an ultrasound.
Yet the idea of waiting appeals to many women. One new bride, Reshma Yogesh Sawand, 25, said she and her husband wanted to wait to have a child — and only one — in order to save money and move to a bigger city.
“If I have just one,” said Ms. Sawand, who is taking a computer course and has a job selling insurance policies, “I can take better care of it.”
Saimah Khwaja contributed research from Maharashtra State.
August 28, 2010
Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Pakistani Elite
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
MUZAFFARGARH, Pakistan — In Pakistan, where politics has long been a matter of pedigree, Jamshed Dasti is a mongrel. The scrappy son of an amateur wrestler, Mr. Dasti has clawed his way into Pakistan’s Parliament, beating the wealthy, landed families who have ruled here.
In elite circles, Mr. Dasti is reviled as a thug, a small-time hustler with a fake college degree who represents the worst of Pakistan today. But here, he is hailed as a hero, living proof that in Pakistan, a poor man can get a seat at the rich men’s table.
Mr. Dasti’s rise is part of a broad shift in political power in Pakistan. For generations, politics took place in the parlors of a handful of rich families, a Westernized elite that owned large tracts of land and sometimes even the people who worked it. But Pakistan is urbanizing fast, and powerful forces of change are chipping away at the landed aristocracy, known in Pakistan as the feudal class.
The result is a changing political landscape more representative of Pakistani society, but far less predictable for the United States. Mr. Dasti, 32, speaks no English. His legislative record includes opposition to a sexual harassment bill. He has 35 criminal cases to his name and is from the country’s conservative heartland, where dislike of America runs deep.
How this plays out is crucial to Pakistan’s future. The country’s fast-expanding, flood-weary population needs local government as never before, but with political power shifting and institutions stillborn, the state has never been less able to provide it.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world ... &th&emc=th
Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Pakistani Elite
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
MUZAFFARGARH, Pakistan — In Pakistan, where politics has long been a matter of pedigree, Jamshed Dasti is a mongrel. The scrappy son of an amateur wrestler, Mr. Dasti has clawed his way into Pakistan’s Parliament, beating the wealthy, landed families who have ruled here.
In elite circles, Mr. Dasti is reviled as a thug, a small-time hustler with a fake college degree who represents the worst of Pakistan today. But here, he is hailed as a hero, living proof that in Pakistan, a poor man can get a seat at the rich men’s table.
Mr. Dasti’s rise is part of a broad shift in political power in Pakistan. For generations, politics took place in the parlors of a handful of rich families, a Westernized elite that owned large tracts of land and sometimes even the people who worked it. But Pakistan is urbanizing fast, and powerful forces of change are chipping away at the landed aristocracy, known in Pakistan as the feudal class.
The result is a changing political landscape more representative of Pakistani society, but far less predictable for the United States. Mr. Dasti, 32, speaks no English. His legislative record includes opposition to a sexual harassment bill. He has 35 criminal cases to his name and is from the country’s conservative heartland, where dislike of America runs deep.
How this plays out is crucial to Pakistan’s future. The country’s fast-expanding, flood-weary population needs local government as never before, but with political power shifting and institutions stillborn, the state has never been less able to provide it.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world ... &th&emc=th
September 5, 2010
Floods in Pakistan Carry the Seeds of Upheaval
By CARLOTTA GALL
THATA SIAL, Pakistan — When the governor of Punjab Province arrived recently in this small town with truckloads of relief goods for flood victims, his visit was as much a political mission as a humanitarian one. His message to the hundred or so displaced people gathered under an awning was that the government was there for them.
“The people say this was an act of God,” the governor, Salman Taseer, said in an interview after reassuring the crowd. “But what comes now, they say, is the act of man. If we don’t deliver, they will not forgive us.”
After scathing criticism that they were unprepared for the disaster and inept in their initial response, government officials, ministers and even President Asif Ali Zardari are crisscrossing flood-affected areas of the country in a frantic effort to ease public anger and despair.
Pakistani officials, diplomats and aid workers warn that while civil unrest has so far been averted, the aftermath of the worst-ever flooding in Pakistan could destabilize the country in the months to come and aggravate the already deep regional, sectarian and class fissures.
Management of the disaster has added to the distrust that many Pakistanis already feel for their civilian political leaders, while the armed forces have burnished their image performing rescue and relief missions along the length of the flooded areas.
There have been angry accusations from politicians and flood victims that officials have guided relief to their own party supporters, and serious allegations that powerful landlords and politicians diverted surging floodwaters to protect their own lands at the expense of others.
Most political commentators say the president and his government are safe for the time being, if only because no one wants to take on the immense responsibilities of the crisis. And the main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, does not appear ready to test his party in national elections.
The coalition government, headed by the Pakistan Peoples Party, has been in power only two years. After nine years of military rule before that, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, seems to have little appetite to take on direct management of the country while he can enhance the military’s image away from the political limelight.
The real dangers for the government may lurk once the first phase of the emergency passes. Many flood victims will accept immediate hardship, but will be less able to withstand prolonged hunger and homelessness, Pakistani officials and aid workers say.
Demonstrations by flood victims have so far been only sporadic and mostly peaceful. In one typical episode on Tuesday, village women sat blocking traffic for 20 minutes across a main highway in southern Sindh Province, until the police promised to make sure they received some aid.
But the government, already saddled with severe economic and security problems, may not survive the large-scale social upheaval and long-term hardship from the floods — including a lack of housing, food shortages and price spikes — officials, diplomats and aid workers warned.
The floods have affected an estimated 20 million people, an eighth of the population. Millions of dollars’ worth of crops and livestock have been lost. No region has escaped the destruction.
The floods are still devouring villages and farmland in the southern province of Sindh, and about 800,000 people remain stranded and without food, Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program of the United Nations, said in an interview during a visit to Pakistan last week. Nearly 10 million people are considered short of food and their situation will remain precarious for six months to a year, she said.
Ms. Sheeran, too, warned of more dangerous long-term effects. People face a triple threat, she said: loss of crops, loss of seed for the next planting season and loss of a daily income.
Amid the emergency, politicians seem to have become absorbed in scoring points and squabbling, which has added to the disillusionment many Pakistanis already feel for their leaders, many of whom are rich landowners.
Much of the media and the main opposition leader, Mr. Sharif, castigated President Zardari for going ahead with a visit to France and Britain when the floods first occurred, and expressed doubts that the government would manage the inflow of assistance honestly. Mr. Sharif suggested an independent commission to oversee the relief effort, an idea President Zardari swiftly rejected.
Mr. Taseer, who like the president is a member of the Pakistan Peoples Party, took a swipe at Mr. Sharif in his speech here to flood victims.
“Nawaz Sharif is in Murree right now, but I am not criticizing him,” he told them, referring to the resort in the Himalayan foothills where the Pakistani elite spend hot summer months. “We have political differences but this is the time to put them aside.”
That has not been the case. The leader of one of the government’s coalition partners, Altaf Hussain, who runs the Muttahida Qaumi Movement from London, suggested that “patriotic generals” should step in to lead the country in such a crisis, a reminder that he could cause the government to collapse if he chose to pull out of the coalition.
One of the most angry accusations has come from Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a former prime minister whose constituency in the province of Baluchistan has been almost totally inundated.
Mr. Jamali criticized members of the government, accusing them of intentionally redirecting floodwaters through Baluchistan and inundating the homes and farmlands of one million people in the country’s poorest province.
Much of Baluchistan is already embroiled in a separatist revolt, and Mr. Jamali warned that the latest careless treatment by the government would only worsen the popular mood. “A Baluch does not forget what happens to him,” he said.
Beneath the political sparring, intense and sometimes lethal tussles for power have erupted, both locally and nationally.
Political power struggles in the country’s sprawling port city of Karachi have degenerated into an ethnic turf war between two parties in the governing coalition, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, whose support base is drawn from Urdu-speaking immigrants, and the Awami National Party, whose base is mostly Pashtun. Targeted killings left 165 dead people in August, including some senior political figures.
Now tens of thousands of people displaced by the floods, most of them ethnic Sindhis, are arriving in Karachi, adding a volatile new element to the political dynamic there. While Sindhi nationalists are welcoming them, opponents, like M.Q.M. members, warn that they will create more violence.
Then there is the continuing threat from the Taliban and other militant groups, which has not subsided. They will look for every opportunity to continue their campaign of violence and to stir sectarian strife, officials warned. Last week alone, bomb attacks against Shiite religious processions in Punjab and Baluchistan killed more than 90 people and wounded more than 300.
Along the length of the flood region through Punjab and Sindh Provinces, displaced people said they expected little help would filter down to those who deserve it. “The influential ones are getting all the money and the poor will get nothing,” said Wazir Ali, 23, whose family was camping beside a road outside the town of Sukkur in Sindh.
A farm laborer, Qaim Din, 50, said he feared going back to his village when the floods receded because the family would have nothing to eat. “We will die of hunger,” he said. “We are very poor.”
He was not optimistic about government promises of assistance. “We hope, but we will be sure of it only when we get it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
Floods in Pakistan Carry the Seeds of Upheaval
By CARLOTTA GALL
THATA SIAL, Pakistan — When the governor of Punjab Province arrived recently in this small town with truckloads of relief goods for flood victims, his visit was as much a political mission as a humanitarian one. His message to the hundred or so displaced people gathered under an awning was that the government was there for them.
“The people say this was an act of God,” the governor, Salman Taseer, said in an interview after reassuring the crowd. “But what comes now, they say, is the act of man. If we don’t deliver, they will not forgive us.”
After scathing criticism that they were unprepared for the disaster and inept in their initial response, government officials, ministers and even President Asif Ali Zardari are crisscrossing flood-affected areas of the country in a frantic effort to ease public anger and despair.
Pakistani officials, diplomats and aid workers warn that while civil unrest has so far been averted, the aftermath of the worst-ever flooding in Pakistan could destabilize the country in the months to come and aggravate the already deep regional, sectarian and class fissures.
Management of the disaster has added to the distrust that many Pakistanis already feel for their civilian political leaders, while the armed forces have burnished their image performing rescue and relief missions along the length of the flooded areas.
There have been angry accusations from politicians and flood victims that officials have guided relief to their own party supporters, and serious allegations that powerful landlords and politicians diverted surging floodwaters to protect their own lands at the expense of others.
Most political commentators say the president and his government are safe for the time being, if only because no one wants to take on the immense responsibilities of the crisis. And the main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, does not appear ready to test his party in national elections.
The coalition government, headed by the Pakistan Peoples Party, has been in power only two years. After nine years of military rule before that, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, seems to have little appetite to take on direct management of the country while he can enhance the military’s image away from the political limelight.
The real dangers for the government may lurk once the first phase of the emergency passes. Many flood victims will accept immediate hardship, but will be less able to withstand prolonged hunger and homelessness, Pakistani officials and aid workers say.
Demonstrations by flood victims have so far been only sporadic and mostly peaceful. In one typical episode on Tuesday, village women sat blocking traffic for 20 minutes across a main highway in southern Sindh Province, until the police promised to make sure they received some aid.
But the government, already saddled with severe economic and security problems, may not survive the large-scale social upheaval and long-term hardship from the floods — including a lack of housing, food shortages and price spikes — officials, diplomats and aid workers warned.
The floods have affected an estimated 20 million people, an eighth of the population. Millions of dollars’ worth of crops and livestock have been lost. No region has escaped the destruction.
The floods are still devouring villages and farmland in the southern province of Sindh, and about 800,000 people remain stranded and without food, Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program of the United Nations, said in an interview during a visit to Pakistan last week. Nearly 10 million people are considered short of food and their situation will remain precarious for six months to a year, she said.
Ms. Sheeran, too, warned of more dangerous long-term effects. People face a triple threat, she said: loss of crops, loss of seed for the next planting season and loss of a daily income.
Amid the emergency, politicians seem to have become absorbed in scoring points and squabbling, which has added to the disillusionment many Pakistanis already feel for their leaders, many of whom are rich landowners.
Much of the media and the main opposition leader, Mr. Sharif, castigated President Zardari for going ahead with a visit to France and Britain when the floods first occurred, and expressed doubts that the government would manage the inflow of assistance honestly. Mr. Sharif suggested an independent commission to oversee the relief effort, an idea President Zardari swiftly rejected.
Mr. Taseer, who like the president is a member of the Pakistan Peoples Party, took a swipe at Mr. Sharif in his speech here to flood victims.
“Nawaz Sharif is in Murree right now, but I am not criticizing him,” he told them, referring to the resort in the Himalayan foothills where the Pakistani elite spend hot summer months. “We have political differences but this is the time to put them aside.”
That has not been the case. The leader of one of the government’s coalition partners, Altaf Hussain, who runs the Muttahida Qaumi Movement from London, suggested that “patriotic generals” should step in to lead the country in such a crisis, a reminder that he could cause the government to collapse if he chose to pull out of the coalition.
One of the most angry accusations has come from Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a former prime minister whose constituency in the province of Baluchistan has been almost totally inundated.
Mr. Jamali criticized members of the government, accusing them of intentionally redirecting floodwaters through Baluchistan and inundating the homes and farmlands of one million people in the country’s poorest province.
Much of Baluchistan is already embroiled in a separatist revolt, and Mr. Jamali warned that the latest careless treatment by the government would only worsen the popular mood. “A Baluch does not forget what happens to him,” he said.
Beneath the political sparring, intense and sometimes lethal tussles for power have erupted, both locally and nationally.
Political power struggles in the country’s sprawling port city of Karachi have degenerated into an ethnic turf war between two parties in the governing coalition, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, whose support base is drawn from Urdu-speaking immigrants, and the Awami National Party, whose base is mostly Pashtun. Targeted killings left 165 dead people in August, including some senior political figures.
Now tens of thousands of people displaced by the floods, most of them ethnic Sindhis, are arriving in Karachi, adding a volatile new element to the political dynamic there. While Sindhi nationalists are welcoming them, opponents, like M.Q.M. members, warn that they will create more violence.
Then there is the continuing threat from the Taliban and other militant groups, which has not subsided. They will look for every opportunity to continue their campaign of violence and to stir sectarian strife, officials warned. Last week alone, bomb attacks against Shiite religious processions in Punjab and Baluchistan killed more than 90 people and wounded more than 300.
Along the length of the flood region through Punjab and Sindh Provinces, displaced people said they expected little help would filter down to those who deserve it. “The influential ones are getting all the money and the poor will get nothing,” said Wazir Ali, 23, whose family was camping beside a road outside the town of Sukkur in Sindh.
A farm laborer, Qaim Din, 50, said he feared going back to his village when the floods receded because the family would have nothing to eat. “We will die of hunger,” he said. “We are very poor.”
He was not optimistic about government promises of assistance. “We hope, but we will be sure of it only when we get it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/world ... ?th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world ... &th&emc=th
September 10, 2010
Business Class Rises in Ashes of Caste System
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CHENNAI, India — Chezi K. Ganesan looks every inch the high-tech entrepreneur, dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of denim shirt and khaki trousers, slick smartphone close at hand. He splits his time between San Jose and this booming coastal metropolis, running his $6 million a year computer chip-making company.
His family has come a long way. His grandfather was not allowed to enter Hindu temples, or even to stand too close to upper-caste people, and women of his Nadar caste, who stood one notch above untouchables in India’s ancient caste hierarchy, were once forced to bare their breasts before upper caste men as a reminder of their low station.
“Caste has no impact on life today,” Mr. Ganesan said in an interview at one of Chennai’s exclusive social clubs, the kind of place where a generation ago someone of his caste would not have been welcome. “It is no longer a barrier.”
The Nadars’ spectacular rise from despised manual laborers who made a mildly alcoholic palm wine to business leaders in one of India’s most prosperous states offers significant clues to India’s caste conundrum and how it has impeded economic progress in many parts of the country.
India is enjoying an extended economic boom, with near double-digit growth. But the benefits have not been equally shared, and southern India has rocketed far ahead of much of the rest of the country on virtually every score — people here earn more money, are better educated, live longer lives and have fewer children.
A crucial factor is the collapse of the caste system over the last half century, a factor that undergirds many of the other reasons that the south has prospered — more stable governments, better infrastructure and a geographic position that gives it closer connections to the global economy.
“The breakdown of caste hierarchy has broken the traditional links between caste and profession, and released enormous entrepreneurial energies in the south,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a professor at Brown University who has studied the role of caste in southern India’s development. This breakdown, he said, goes a long way to explaining “why the south has taken such a lead over the north in the last three decades.”
India’s Constitution abolished caste, the social hierarchy that has ordered Indian life for millenniums, and instituted a system of quotas to help those at the bottom rise up. But caste divisions persist nonetheless, with upper castes dominating many spheres of life despite their relatively small numbers.
While in the south lower caste members concentrated on economic development and education as a route to prosperity, in the north the chief aim of caste-based groups has been political power and its spoils. As a result India’s northern lower castes tend to be less educated and less prosperous than their southern counterparts. Charismatic leaders in the north from lower castes have used caste identity as a way to mobilize voters, winning control over several large north Indian states. Caste so thoroughly permeates politics in the northern half of the world’s largest democracy that it is often said that people don’t cast their vote; they vote their caste.
Caste is so crucial to northern politics that caste-based parties have demanded that caste be included in India’s census, and the government, bowing to pressure, agreed to collect data on caste for the first time since independence. They hope that by showing their large numbers, caste-based parties can force government to set aside more jobs for their communities.
Tamil Nadu’s Nadars belong to a community in the middle of India’s caste system, occupying a place barely above the untouchables, now called Dalits. Academics and analysts have closely watched the rise of the Nadar caste for clues about the role caste barriers play in holding back India’s economic progress.
Unlike northern India, where caste-based political movements are a fairly recent phenomenon, lower castes in southern India began agitating against upper-caste domination at the beginning of the 20th century. Because these movements arose before independence and the possibility of elected political power, they focused on issues like dignity, education, and self-reliance, Mr. Varshney said.
Nadars created business associations to provide entrepreneurs with credit they could not get from banks. They started charities to pay for education for poor children. They built their own temples and marriage halls to avoid upper caste discrimination.
“Our community focused on education, not politics,” said R. Chandramogan, a Nadar entrepreneur who built India’s largest privately owned dairy company from scratch. “We knew that with education, we could accomplish anything.”
As a result, when independence came the southern lower castes, who had already broken the upper caste monopoly on economic power, enjoyed political power almost right from the start. Tamil Nadu set aside 69 percent of government jobs and seats in higher education for downtrodden castes, which helped rapidly move lower caste people into the mainstream. The north put in place affirmative action policies, but because education was widely embraced, southern people from lower castes were better able to take advantage of these opportunities than northerners.
When India’s economy liberalized in the 1990s, the south was far more prepared to take advantage of globalization, said Samuel Paul of the Public Affairs Center, a research institution that has looked closely at the growing divide between north and south India. “The south was ready,” Mr. Paul said.
Nadar businessmen like C. Manickavel have skillfully ridden the waves of prosperity that have crashed over India since liberalization, making small fortunes. Mr. Manickavel’s father had started a small printing business in Chennai, which at its peak made $40,000 a year. But he sent his son to one of the best engineering schools in India, and Mr. Manickavel has turned that modest business into a $1 million-a-year operation that designs e-books for big American publishers.
“We are supposed to be a backward community but we don’t think of ourselves that way,” he said in an interview in his state-of-the-art paperless e-publishing facility here. “I make sure my daughter studies at the best school in Chennai. We are as good as anybody else.”
It remains to be seen if the political agitation around caste in northern India will produce prosperity for lower caste people there, experts say. In India’s liberalizing economy these communities must prepare themselves to compete, not simply demand a bigger slice of the shrinking government cake, said Rajeev Ranjan, the chief bureaucrat in charge of industrial development in Tamil Nadu.
He is originally from Bihar, a northern state thoroughly in the grip of caste politics, but he has been stationed in the south for 25 years. He said northern states must heed the southern example. “Without that kind of social change it is very hard to do economic development,” he said. “One depends on the other.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
September 10, 2010
Business Class Rises in Ashes of Caste System
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CHENNAI, India — Chezi K. Ganesan looks every inch the high-tech entrepreneur, dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of denim shirt and khaki trousers, slick smartphone close at hand. He splits his time between San Jose and this booming coastal metropolis, running his $6 million a year computer chip-making company.
His family has come a long way. His grandfather was not allowed to enter Hindu temples, or even to stand too close to upper-caste people, and women of his Nadar caste, who stood one notch above untouchables in India’s ancient caste hierarchy, were once forced to bare their breasts before upper caste men as a reminder of their low station.
“Caste has no impact on life today,” Mr. Ganesan said in an interview at one of Chennai’s exclusive social clubs, the kind of place where a generation ago someone of his caste would not have been welcome. “It is no longer a barrier.”
The Nadars’ spectacular rise from despised manual laborers who made a mildly alcoholic palm wine to business leaders in one of India’s most prosperous states offers significant clues to India’s caste conundrum and how it has impeded economic progress in many parts of the country.
India is enjoying an extended economic boom, with near double-digit growth. But the benefits have not been equally shared, and southern India has rocketed far ahead of much of the rest of the country on virtually every score — people here earn more money, are better educated, live longer lives and have fewer children.
A crucial factor is the collapse of the caste system over the last half century, a factor that undergirds many of the other reasons that the south has prospered — more stable governments, better infrastructure and a geographic position that gives it closer connections to the global economy.
“The breakdown of caste hierarchy has broken the traditional links between caste and profession, and released enormous entrepreneurial energies in the south,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a professor at Brown University who has studied the role of caste in southern India’s development. This breakdown, he said, goes a long way to explaining “why the south has taken such a lead over the north in the last three decades.”
India’s Constitution abolished caste, the social hierarchy that has ordered Indian life for millenniums, and instituted a system of quotas to help those at the bottom rise up. But caste divisions persist nonetheless, with upper castes dominating many spheres of life despite their relatively small numbers.
While in the south lower caste members concentrated on economic development and education as a route to prosperity, in the north the chief aim of caste-based groups has been political power and its spoils. As a result India’s northern lower castes tend to be less educated and less prosperous than their southern counterparts. Charismatic leaders in the north from lower castes have used caste identity as a way to mobilize voters, winning control over several large north Indian states. Caste so thoroughly permeates politics in the northern half of the world’s largest democracy that it is often said that people don’t cast their vote; they vote their caste.
Caste is so crucial to northern politics that caste-based parties have demanded that caste be included in India’s census, and the government, bowing to pressure, agreed to collect data on caste for the first time since independence. They hope that by showing their large numbers, caste-based parties can force government to set aside more jobs for their communities.
Tamil Nadu’s Nadars belong to a community in the middle of India’s caste system, occupying a place barely above the untouchables, now called Dalits. Academics and analysts have closely watched the rise of the Nadar caste for clues about the role caste barriers play in holding back India’s economic progress.
Unlike northern India, where caste-based political movements are a fairly recent phenomenon, lower castes in southern India began agitating against upper-caste domination at the beginning of the 20th century. Because these movements arose before independence and the possibility of elected political power, they focused on issues like dignity, education, and self-reliance, Mr. Varshney said.
Nadars created business associations to provide entrepreneurs with credit they could not get from banks. They started charities to pay for education for poor children. They built their own temples and marriage halls to avoid upper caste discrimination.
“Our community focused on education, not politics,” said R. Chandramogan, a Nadar entrepreneur who built India’s largest privately owned dairy company from scratch. “We knew that with education, we could accomplish anything.”
As a result, when independence came the southern lower castes, who had already broken the upper caste monopoly on economic power, enjoyed political power almost right from the start. Tamil Nadu set aside 69 percent of government jobs and seats in higher education for downtrodden castes, which helped rapidly move lower caste people into the mainstream. The north put in place affirmative action policies, but because education was widely embraced, southern people from lower castes were better able to take advantage of these opportunities than northerners.
When India’s economy liberalized in the 1990s, the south was far more prepared to take advantage of globalization, said Samuel Paul of the Public Affairs Center, a research institution that has looked closely at the growing divide between north and south India. “The south was ready,” Mr. Paul said.
Nadar businessmen like C. Manickavel have skillfully ridden the waves of prosperity that have crashed over India since liberalization, making small fortunes. Mr. Manickavel’s father had started a small printing business in Chennai, which at its peak made $40,000 a year. But he sent his son to one of the best engineering schools in India, and Mr. Manickavel has turned that modest business into a $1 million-a-year operation that designs e-books for big American publishers.
“We are supposed to be a backward community but we don’t think of ourselves that way,” he said in an interview in his state-of-the-art paperless e-publishing facility here. “I make sure my daughter studies at the best school in Chennai. We are as good as anybody else.”
It remains to be seen if the political agitation around caste in northern India will produce prosperity for lower caste people there, experts say. In India’s liberalizing economy these communities must prepare themselves to compete, not simply demand a bigger slice of the shrinking government cake, said Rajeev Ranjan, the chief bureaucrat in charge of industrial development in Tamil Nadu.
He is originally from Bihar, a northern state thoroughly in the grip of caste politics, but he has been stationed in the south for 25 years. He said northern states must heed the southern example. “Without that kind of social change it is very hard to do economic development,” he said. “One depends on the other.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
October 2, 2010
As Games Begin, India Hopes to Save Its Pride
By JIM YARDLEY
NEW DELHI — When India won its bid for the 2010 Commonwealth Games seven years ago, the event instantly became an emblem of national prestige. But as the country prepares to open the games on Sunday evening, an opportunity to burnish its global image has instead become a national embarrassment.
The litany of problems plaguing the games — collapsed footbridges, filthy dorms, cartoonish corruption — have not only made headlines around the world. They have left Indians to wonder why a country so promising in so many regards is incapable of organizing a signature event when the eyes of the world are focused on it.
The answer, to many of those involved with the games, is that India’s political culture, if prized for its commitment to democracy, often seems unable to transcend its own dysfunction. There were at least 21 governmental or quasi-governmental agencies involved in preparing for the games, yet none were ultimately in charge, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to try to personally take command as things went awry in August. Analysts say the absence of a clear line of authority translated into an absence of urgency and accountability.
Moreover, crucial figures in organizing the games had almost no experience in staging international events and were products of an insular Indian political culture where cronyism and nepotism often trump competence.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world ... ?th&emc=th
******
October 2, 2010
Games India Isn’t Ready to Play
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Mashobra, India
ON Friday afternoon, public spaces across north India were flooded with policemen and paramilitaries. Thousands of alleged “troublemakers” were arrested. The sending of bulk text messages from mobile phones was banned. These precautions had nothing to do with the opening on Sunday of the Commonwealth Games, the athletic competition among the nations of the former British Empire that so many Indians have hoped would be their country’s symbolic coming out as a world power.
Rather, the police were out in force because an Indian court had pronounced its verdict on the site in the town of Ayodhya that has been long claimed by Hindu nationalists as the birthplace of Lord Rama. The government did not want a repeat of the horrific mob violence that in 1992 had followed the destruction by Hindu nationalists of a 16th-century mosque standing on the land in question.
Shortly after the verdict, which split the disputed site unequally in favor of Hindus and to the detriment of Muslims, I went for a walk through the Himalayan village near my home. Even here, 600 miles from Ayodhya, people seemed to be playing it safe, the market partly closed, and shopkeepers clustered around television sets behind shutters.
Only the migrant laborers, who have come hundreds of miles from central India to the Himalayas, were still at work, men, women and even children carrying heavy stones on their heads at the construction projects that litter the hillsides.
Easily identified — the parents small and thin and dark, and the children with distended bellies and rust-brown hair that speak of chronic malnutrition — these migrant laborers have been a regular sight here for some years, building summer homes for the affluent of Delhi all day, and then huddling under tin shacks at night.
I stopped to talk to a couple I know. All morning news channels had been working themselves into a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Even the more sober commentators fretted whether our “rising economic superpower” would be torn apart again over the question of whether the mythical Lord Rama was born in a ramshackle provincial town.
But the laborers hadn’t heard of the court verdict. As colder weather approaches, their greatest anxiety seemed to be to protect themselves: the punitive rains this summer have blown away the roofs of their living quarters. And it seemed only right that these helots of India’s globalized economy should be indifferent to the possible despoiling of India’s image in the West.
•
So who is anxious over India’s image in the wealthy world? That particular burden is borne by India’s small affluent elite, for whom the last few months have been full of painful and awkward self-reckonings. Certainly, the fear of violence over Ayodhya was only the latest in a long line of reminders that, as the columnist Vir Sanghvi put it, “as hard as we try to build a new India ... old India still has the power to humiliate and embarrass us.”
Since June, a mass insurrection, resembling the Palestinian intifada, has raged in the Indian-held Valley of Kashmir. Defying draconian curfews, large and overwhelmingly young crowds of Kashmiri Muslims have protested human rights abuses by the nearly 700,000 Indian security forces there. Ill-trained soldiers have met stone-pelting protesters with gunfire, killing more than a hundred Kashmiris, mostly teenagers, and ensuring another militant backlash that will be exploited by radical Islamists in Pakistan.
A full-blown insurgency is already under way in central India, where guerrilla fighters inspired by Mao Zedong’s tactics are arrayed against a government they see as actively colluding with multinational corporations to deprive tribal people of their mineral-rich lands. In recent months, the Maoists have attacked the symbols of the state’s authority — railroads, armories, police stations — seemingly at will, killing scores of people.
Yet the greatest recent blow to wealthy Indians’ delusions on the subject of their nation’s inexorable rise has been the Commonwealth Games, for which Delhi was given a long and painful facelift. For so many, the contest was expected to banish India’s old ghosts of religious and class conflict, and cement its claims to a seat at the high tables of international superpowers.
But the games turned into a fiasco well before their scheduled opening. Two weeks ago, a huge footbridge connected to the main stadium collapsed. The federation that runs the games has called the athletes’ housing “uninhabitable.” The organizers have had to hire an army of vicious langur monkeys to keep wild animals from infesting the venues. Pictures of crumbling arenas and filthy toilets are circulating more widely than the beautiful landscapes of the government’s “Incredible India” tourism campaign.
As the ratings agency Moody worries that the debacle has “tarnished” India’s image, commentators here angrily hunt for blameworthy politicians and officials over what they call “national shame.” The contrast to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in which the Chinese government largely overcame controversy and staked a claim to a dominant place in the world order, is all too depressingly clear.
•
These shocks to the Indian self-image are traumatic. But then the illusions about the new India have been too blinding. Vigorous economic growth, high-profile Indian businessmen congregating at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, and the greater visibility of successful and articulate Indians abroad have combined to make India, or English-speaking Indians, anyway, appear a perfect fit for the Western model of modernity — a “roaring capitalist success story,” as Foreign Affairs described the country in 2006.
It has helped our self-image, too, that Indians have many democratic institutions that are missing in most non-Western countries. Thus the major narrative that has developed internationally about democratic India in recent years assumes it to be more “stable” than authoritarian China. Yet Beijing faces no political problems as severe as the many insurgencies in central India and Kashmir, or tragedies as great as the waves of suicides of tens of thousands of overburdened farmers over the last two decades.
Certainly, the narrative of India as vibrant democracy and booming economy suppresses more than it reveals. Business-lounge elites around the world revel in statistics about economic growth and Indians rising up Forbes’s rankings of billionaires. At the same time, they simply ignore the alarmingly deep and growing inequalities of income and resources in India.
The newspaper Financial Express estimated that the private wealth of the 49 Indians on the Forbes list is nearly 31 percent of India’s gross domestic product — a ratio that makes them three times more crucial to the Indian economy than their billionaire counterparts in the United States are to the American economy. In July, a United Nations report revealed that there are more poor people in just eight Indian states than in all the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, with the large state of Madhya Pradesh comparable in intensity of deprivation to war-ravaged Congo.
India not only lives, as the cliché goes, in several centuries at once; it is also a land of multiple narratives, which continuously and often painfully overlap. The Commonwealth Games, the showcase of India’s progress, uprooted as many as 100,000 of the most deprived Indians in Delhi no less ruthlessly than the Chinese cleanse their ultramodern cities of the ungainly poor.
The laborers building the vacation retreats of the privileged in my village — part of the explosion of cheap labor that has helped build private fortunes in India and abroad — are refugees from the part of India where longstanding feudal cruelties are now compounded by the battles between Maoists and multinational corporations seeking precious minerals.
Well-to-do Indians fear that Hindu nationalists emboldened by the verdict on Ayodhya might scare off foreign investors. But it was Hindu nationalists who, coming to power in 1998 through successive bloody anti-Muslim campaigns, followed policies that expedited the country’s grossly uneven economic development and entrenched corporate special interests in India’s politics.
More fatefully, the Hindu nationalists exploded nuclear bombs underground and threatened Pakistan with all-out war, creating a legacy of hard-line nationalism — which the Indian military in Kashmir and successive governments in Delhi have embraced.
Certainly, the four million Muslims of Kashmir, who every day suffer the brutalities of what’s arguably the world’s largest military occupation, cannot be blamed for failing to make meaningful distinctions between Hindu nationalists and the current government, led by the more moderate Congress Party. Their fate remains that of a minority kept under perpetual siege by a paranoid nation-state.
Like hundreds of millions of other voiceless Indians, the migrant laborers in my village are even less able to distinguish between the oppressions of old feudal India and the pitiless exploitations of the new business-minded India. I wonder if the recent destruction of their fragile shelters doesn’t hold some symbolism. Perhaps the greatest danger to India’s image is that they may one day cease to cower in those shacks, and, like their counterparts in central India, erupt in armed revolt.
This summer’s setbacks to India’s image may soon fade from memory. But their lesson for the rhapsodic narrators of India’s modernity seems clear. “There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” This is the melancholy truth that all narratives about “rising” India must acknowledge if they are not to be trumped by pictures of a collapsed bridge and a leaking toilet.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opini ... nted=print
As Games Begin, India Hopes to Save Its Pride
By JIM YARDLEY
NEW DELHI — When India won its bid for the 2010 Commonwealth Games seven years ago, the event instantly became an emblem of national prestige. But as the country prepares to open the games on Sunday evening, an opportunity to burnish its global image has instead become a national embarrassment.
The litany of problems plaguing the games — collapsed footbridges, filthy dorms, cartoonish corruption — have not only made headlines around the world. They have left Indians to wonder why a country so promising in so many regards is incapable of organizing a signature event when the eyes of the world are focused on it.
The answer, to many of those involved with the games, is that India’s political culture, if prized for its commitment to democracy, often seems unable to transcend its own dysfunction. There were at least 21 governmental or quasi-governmental agencies involved in preparing for the games, yet none were ultimately in charge, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to try to personally take command as things went awry in August. Analysts say the absence of a clear line of authority translated into an absence of urgency and accountability.
Moreover, crucial figures in organizing the games had almost no experience in staging international events and were products of an insular Indian political culture where cronyism and nepotism often trump competence.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world ... ?th&emc=th
******
October 2, 2010
Games India Isn’t Ready to Play
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Mashobra, India
ON Friday afternoon, public spaces across north India were flooded with policemen and paramilitaries. Thousands of alleged “troublemakers” were arrested. The sending of bulk text messages from mobile phones was banned. These precautions had nothing to do with the opening on Sunday of the Commonwealth Games, the athletic competition among the nations of the former British Empire that so many Indians have hoped would be their country’s symbolic coming out as a world power.
Rather, the police were out in force because an Indian court had pronounced its verdict on the site in the town of Ayodhya that has been long claimed by Hindu nationalists as the birthplace of Lord Rama. The government did not want a repeat of the horrific mob violence that in 1992 had followed the destruction by Hindu nationalists of a 16th-century mosque standing on the land in question.
Shortly after the verdict, which split the disputed site unequally in favor of Hindus and to the detriment of Muslims, I went for a walk through the Himalayan village near my home. Even here, 600 miles from Ayodhya, people seemed to be playing it safe, the market partly closed, and shopkeepers clustered around television sets behind shutters.
Only the migrant laborers, who have come hundreds of miles from central India to the Himalayas, were still at work, men, women and even children carrying heavy stones on their heads at the construction projects that litter the hillsides.
Easily identified — the parents small and thin and dark, and the children with distended bellies and rust-brown hair that speak of chronic malnutrition — these migrant laborers have been a regular sight here for some years, building summer homes for the affluent of Delhi all day, and then huddling under tin shacks at night.
I stopped to talk to a couple I know. All morning news channels had been working themselves into a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Even the more sober commentators fretted whether our “rising economic superpower” would be torn apart again over the question of whether the mythical Lord Rama was born in a ramshackle provincial town.
But the laborers hadn’t heard of the court verdict. As colder weather approaches, their greatest anxiety seemed to be to protect themselves: the punitive rains this summer have blown away the roofs of their living quarters. And it seemed only right that these helots of India’s globalized economy should be indifferent to the possible despoiling of India’s image in the West.
•
So who is anxious over India’s image in the wealthy world? That particular burden is borne by India’s small affluent elite, for whom the last few months have been full of painful and awkward self-reckonings. Certainly, the fear of violence over Ayodhya was only the latest in a long line of reminders that, as the columnist Vir Sanghvi put it, “as hard as we try to build a new India ... old India still has the power to humiliate and embarrass us.”
Since June, a mass insurrection, resembling the Palestinian intifada, has raged in the Indian-held Valley of Kashmir. Defying draconian curfews, large and overwhelmingly young crowds of Kashmiri Muslims have protested human rights abuses by the nearly 700,000 Indian security forces there. Ill-trained soldiers have met stone-pelting protesters with gunfire, killing more than a hundred Kashmiris, mostly teenagers, and ensuring another militant backlash that will be exploited by radical Islamists in Pakistan.
A full-blown insurgency is already under way in central India, where guerrilla fighters inspired by Mao Zedong’s tactics are arrayed against a government they see as actively colluding with multinational corporations to deprive tribal people of their mineral-rich lands. In recent months, the Maoists have attacked the symbols of the state’s authority — railroads, armories, police stations — seemingly at will, killing scores of people.
Yet the greatest recent blow to wealthy Indians’ delusions on the subject of their nation’s inexorable rise has been the Commonwealth Games, for which Delhi was given a long and painful facelift. For so many, the contest was expected to banish India’s old ghosts of religious and class conflict, and cement its claims to a seat at the high tables of international superpowers.
But the games turned into a fiasco well before their scheduled opening. Two weeks ago, a huge footbridge connected to the main stadium collapsed. The federation that runs the games has called the athletes’ housing “uninhabitable.” The organizers have had to hire an army of vicious langur monkeys to keep wild animals from infesting the venues. Pictures of crumbling arenas and filthy toilets are circulating more widely than the beautiful landscapes of the government’s “Incredible India” tourism campaign.
As the ratings agency Moody worries that the debacle has “tarnished” India’s image, commentators here angrily hunt for blameworthy politicians and officials over what they call “national shame.” The contrast to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in which the Chinese government largely overcame controversy and staked a claim to a dominant place in the world order, is all too depressingly clear.
•
These shocks to the Indian self-image are traumatic. But then the illusions about the new India have been too blinding. Vigorous economic growth, high-profile Indian businessmen congregating at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, and the greater visibility of successful and articulate Indians abroad have combined to make India, or English-speaking Indians, anyway, appear a perfect fit for the Western model of modernity — a “roaring capitalist success story,” as Foreign Affairs described the country in 2006.
It has helped our self-image, too, that Indians have many democratic institutions that are missing in most non-Western countries. Thus the major narrative that has developed internationally about democratic India in recent years assumes it to be more “stable” than authoritarian China. Yet Beijing faces no political problems as severe as the many insurgencies in central India and Kashmir, or tragedies as great as the waves of suicides of tens of thousands of overburdened farmers over the last two decades.
Certainly, the narrative of India as vibrant democracy and booming economy suppresses more than it reveals. Business-lounge elites around the world revel in statistics about economic growth and Indians rising up Forbes’s rankings of billionaires. At the same time, they simply ignore the alarmingly deep and growing inequalities of income and resources in India.
The newspaper Financial Express estimated that the private wealth of the 49 Indians on the Forbes list is nearly 31 percent of India’s gross domestic product — a ratio that makes them three times more crucial to the Indian economy than their billionaire counterparts in the United States are to the American economy. In July, a United Nations report revealed that there are more poor people in just eight Indian states than in all the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, with the large state of Madhya Pradesh comparable in intensity of deprivation to war-ravaged Congo.
India not only lives, as the cliché goes, in several centuries at once; it is also a land of multiple narratives, which continuously and often painfully overlap. The Commonwealth Games, the showcase of India’s progress, uprooted as many as 100,000 of the most deprived Indians in Delhi no less ruthlessly than the Chinese cleanse their ultramodern cities of the ungainly poor.
The laborers building the vacation retreats of the privileged in my village — part of the explosion of cheap labor that has helped build private fortunes in India and abroad — are refugees from the part of India where longstanding feudal cruelties are now compounded by the battles between Maoists and multinational corporations seeking precious minerals.
Well-to-do Indians fear that Hindu nationalists emboldened by the verdict on Ayodhya might scare off foreign investors. But it was Hindu nationalists who, coming to power in 1998 through successive bloody anti-Muslim campaigns, followed policies that expedited the country’s grossly uneven economic development and entrenched corporate special interests in India’s politics.
More fatefully, the Hindu nationalists exploded nuclear bombs underground and threatened Pakistan with all-out war, creating a legacy of hard-line nationalism — which the Indian military in Kashmir and successive governments in Delhi have embraced.
Certainly, the four million Muslims of Kashmir, who every day suffer the brutalities of what’s arguably the world’s largest military occupation, cannot be blamed for failing to make meaningful distinctions between Hindu nationalists and the current government, led by the more moderate Congress Party. Their fate remains that of a minority kept under perpetual siege by a paranoid nation-state.
Like hundreds of millions of other voiceless Indians, the migrant laborers in my village are even less able to distinguish between the oppressions of old feudal India and the pitiless exploitations of the new business-minded India. I wonder if the recent destruction of their fragile shelters doesn’t hold some symbolism. Perhaps the greatest danger to India’s image is that they may one day cease to cower in those shacks, and, like their counterparts in central India, erupt in armed revolt.
This summer’s setbacks to India’s image may soon fade from memory. But their lesson for the rhapsodic narrators of India’s modernity seems clear. “There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” This is the melancholy truth that all narratives about “rising” India must acknowledge if they are not to be trumped by pictures of a collapsed bridge and a leaking toilet.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opini ... nted=print
October 30, 2010
China’s Fast Rise Leads Neighbors to Join Forces
By MARK LANDLER, JIM YARDLEY and MICHAEL WINES
HANOI, Vietnam — China’s military expansion and assertive trade policies have set off jitters across Asia, prompting many of its neighbors to rekindle old alliances and cultivate new ones to better defend their interests against the rising superpower.
A whirl of deal-making and diplomacy, from Tokyo to New Delhi, is giving the United States an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where its eclipse by China has been viewed as inevitable.
President Obama’s trip to the region this week, his most extensive as president, will take him to the area’s big democracies, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, skirting authoritarian China. Those countries and other neighbors have taken steps, though with varying degrees of candor, to blunt China’s assertiveness in the region.
Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India are expected to sign a landmark deal for American military transport aircraft and are discussing the possible sale of jet fighters, which would escalate the Pentagon’s defense partnership with India to new heights. Japan and India are courting Southeast Asian nations with trade agreements and talk of a “circle of democracy.” Vietnam has a rapidly warming rapport with its old foe, the United States, in large part because its old friend, China, makes broad territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The deals and alliances are not intended to contain China. But they suggest a palpable shift in the diplomatic landscape, on vivid display as leaders from 18 countries gathered this weekend under the wavelike roof of Hanoi’s futuristic convention center, not far from Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, for a meeting suffused by tensions between China and its neighbors.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world ... nl&emc=a22
*****
October 30, 2010
It’s Morning in India
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New Delhi
This week’s award for not knowing what world you’re living in surely goes to the French high school and college students who blockaded their campuses, and snarled rail traffic, in a nationwide strike against the French government’s decision to raise its pension retirement age from 60 to 62. If those students understood the hypercompetitive and economically integrated world they were living in today, they would have taken to the streets to demand smaller classes, better teaching, more opportunities for entrepreneurship and more foreign private investment in France — so they could have the sorts of good private sector jobs that would enable them to finance retirement at age 62. France already discovered that a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day — and so, too, are pension levels not sustained by a vibrant private sector.
What is most striking to me being in India this week, though, is how many Indians, young and old, expressed their concerns that America also seems at times to be running away from the world it invented and that India is adopting.
With President Obama scheduled to come here next week, at a time when more than a few U.S. politicians are loudly denouncing immigration reforms, free trade expansion and outsourcing, more than a few Indian business leaders want to ask the president: “What’s up with that?” Didn’t America export to the world all the technologies and free market dogmas that created this increasingly flat, global economic playing field — and now you’re turning against them?
“It is the Silicon Valley revolution which enabled the massive rise in tradable services and the U.S.-built telecommunication networks that allowed creation of the virtual office,” Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal Online, wrote in the Indian magazine Businessworld this week. “But the U.S. seems sadly unprepared to take advantage of the revolution it has spawned. The country’s worn-out infrastructure, failing education system and lack of political consensus have prevented it from riding a new wave to prosperity.” Ouch.
Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India, explained that for the first 40 years of Indian independence, entrepreneurs here were looked down upon. India had lost confidence in its ability to compete, so it opted for protectionism. But when the ’90s rolled around, and India’s government was almost bankrupt, India’s technology industry was able to get the government to open up the economy, in part by citing the example of America and Silicon Valley. India has flourished ever since.
“America,” said Srivastava, “was the one who said to us: ‘You have to go for meritocracy. You don’t have to produce everything yourselves. Go for free trade and open markets.’ This has been the American national anthem, and we pushed our government to tune in to it. And just when they’re beginning to learn how to hum it, you’re changing the anthem. ... Our industry was the one pushing our government to open our markets for American imports, 100 percent foreign ownership of companies and tough copyright laws when it wasn’t fashionable.”
If America turns away from these values, he added, the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.
It looks, said Srivastava, as if “what is happening in America is a loss of self-confidence. We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership? American’s leadership was never because you had more arms. It was because of ideas, imagination, and meritocracy.” If America turns away from its core values, he added, “there is nobody else to take that leadership. Do we want China as the world’s moral leader? No. We desperately want America to succeed.”
This isn’t just so American values triumph. With a rising China on one side and a crumbling Pakistan on the other, India’s newfound friendship with America has taken on strategic importance. “It is very worrying to live in a world that no longer has the balance of power we’ve had for 60 years,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “That is why everyone is concerned about America.”
India and America are both democracies, a top Indian official explained to me, but emotionally they are now ships passing in the night. Because today the poorest Indian maid believes that if she can just save a few dollars to get her kid English lessons, that kid will have a better life than she does. So she is an optimist. “But the guy in Kansas,” he added, “who today is enjoying a better life than that maid, is worried that he can’t pass it on to his kids. So he’s a pessimist.”
Yes, when America lapses into a bad mood, everyone notices. After asking for an explanation of the Tea Party’s politics, Gupta remarked: “We have moved away from a politics of grievance to a politics of aspiration. Where is the American dream? Where is the optimism?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opini ... =&emc=a212
China’s Fast Rise Leads Neighbors to Join Forces
By MARK LANDLER, JIM YARDLEY and MICHAEL WINES
HANOI, Vietnam — China’s military expansion and assertive trade policies have set off jitters across Asia, prompting many of its neighbors to rekindle old alliances and cultivate new ones to better defend their interests against the rising superpower.
A whirl of deal-making and diplomacy, from Tokyo to New Delhi, is giving the United States an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where its eclipse by China has been viewed as inevitable.
President Obama’s trip to the region this week, his most extensive as president, will take him to the area’s big democracies, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, skirting authoritarian China. Those countries and other neighbors have taken steps, though with varying degrees of candor, to blunt China’s assertiveness in the region.
Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India are expected to sign a landmark deal for American military transport aircraft and are discussing the possible sale of jet fighters, which would escalate the Pentagon’s defense partnership with India to new heights. Japan and India are courting Southeast Asian nations with trade agreements and talk of a “circle of democracy.” Vietnam has a rapidly warming rapport with its old foe, the United States, in large part because its old friend, China, makes broad territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The deals and alliances are not intended to contain China. But they suggest a palpable shift in the diplomatic landscape, on vivid display as leaders from 18 countries gathered this weekend under the wavelike roof of Hanoi’s futuristic convention center, not far from Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, for a meeting suffused by tensions between China and its neighbors.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world ... nl&emc=a22
*****
October 30, 2010
It’s Morning in India
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New Delhi
This week’s award for not knowing what world you’re living in surely goes to the French high school and college students who blockaded their campuses, and snarled rail traffic, in a nationwide strike against the French government’s decision to raise its pension retirement age from 60 to 62. If those students understood the hypercompetitive and economically integrated world they were living in today, they would have taken to the streets to demand smaller classes, better teaching, more opportunities for entrepreneurship and more foreign private investment in France — so they could have the sorts of good private sector jobs that would enable them to finance retirement at age 62. France already discovered that a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day — and so, too, are pension levels not sustained by a vibrant private sector.
What is most striking to me being in India this week, though, is how many Indians, young and old, expressed their concerns that America also seems at times to be running away from the world it invented and that India is adopting.
With President Obama scheduled to come here next week, at a time when more than a few U.S. politicians are loudly denouncing immigration reforms, free trade expansion and outsourcing, more than a few Indian business leaders want to ask the president: “What’s up with that?” Didn’t America export to the world all the technologies and free market dogmas that created this increasingly flat, global economic playing field — and now you’re turning against them?
“It is the Silicon Valley revolution which enabled the massive rise in tradable services and the U.S.-built telecommunication networks that allowed creation of the virtual office,” Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal Online, wrote in the Indian magazine Businessworld this week. “But the U.S. seems sadly unprepared to take advantage of the revolution it has spawned. The country’s worn-out infrastructure, failing education system and lack of political consensus have prevented it from riding a new wave to prosperity.” Ouch.
Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India, explained that for the first 40 years of Indian independence, entrepreneurs here were looked down upon. India had lost confidence in its ability to compete, so it opted for protectionism. But when the ’90s rolled around, and India’s government was almost bankrupt, India’s technology industry was able to get the government to open up the economy, in part by citing the example of America and Silicon Valley. India has flourished ever since.
“America,” said Srivastava, “was the one who said to us: ‘You have to go for meritocracy. You don’t have to produce everything yourselves. Go for free trade and open markets.’ This has been the American national anthem, and we pushed our government to tune in to it. And just when they’re beginning to learn how to hum it, you’re changing the anthem. ... Our industry was the one pushing our government to open our markets for American imports, 100 percent foreign ownership of companies and tough copyright laws when it wasn’t fashionable.”
If America turns away from these values, he added, the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.
It looks, said Srivastava, as if “what is happening in America is a loss of self-confidence. We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership? American’s leadership was never because you had more arms. It was because of ideas, imagination, and meritocracy.” If America turns away from its core values, he added, “there is nobody else to take that leadership. Do we want China as the world’s moral leader? No. We desperately want America to succeed.”
This isn’t just so American values triumph. With a rising China on one side and a crumbling Pakistan on the other, India’s newfound friendship with America has taken on strategic importance. “It is very worrying to live in a world that no longer has the balance of power we’ve had for 60 years,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “That is why everyone is concerned about America.”
India and America are both democracies, a top Indian official explained to me, but emotionally they are now ships passing in the night. Because today the poorest Indian maid believes that if she can just save a few dollars to get her kid English lessons, that kid will have a better life than she does. So she is an optimist. “But the guy in Kansas,” he added, “who today is enjoying a better life than that maid, is worried that he can’t pass it on to his kids. So he’s a pessimist.”
Yes, when America lapses into a bad mood, everyone notices. After asking for an explanation of the Tea Party’s politics, Gupta remarked: “We have moved away from a politics of grievance to a politics of aspiration. Where is the American dream? Where is the optimism?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opini ... =&emc=a212
November 6, 2010
Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes India
By JIM YARDLEY
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world ... s&emc=tha1
NEW DELHI — Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the great Indian apostle of peace, democracy and nonviolent protest, Mohandas K. Gandhi.
The postcard was a trinket of public diplomacy, a souvenir of the new president’s affinity for India. Now that Mr. Obama is visiting India for the first time, on a trip pitched as a jobs mission, his fascination with Gandhi is influencing his itinerary and his message as he tries to win over India’s skeptical political class.
“He is a hero not just to India, but to the world,” the president wrote in a guest book on Saturday in Gandhi’s modest former home in Mumbai, now the Mani Bhavan museum.
Yet if paying homage to Gandhi is expected of visiting dignitaries, Mr. Obama’s more personal identification with the Gandhian legacy — the president once named him the person he would most like to dine with — places him on complicated terrain.
Gandhi remains India’s patriarch, the founding father whose face is printed on the currency, but modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power.
If anything, India’s rise as a global power seems likely to distance it even further from Gandhi. India is inching toward a tighter military relationship with the United States, once distrusted as an imperialist power, even as the Americans are fighting a war in nearby Afghanistan.
India also has an urbanizing consumer-driven economy and a growing middle class that indulges itself in cars, apartments and other goods. It is this economic progress that underpins India’s rising geopolitical clout and its attractiveness to the United States as a global partner.
Gandhi is still revered here, and credited with shaping India’s political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy. But he can sometimes seem to hover over modern India like a parent whose expectations are rarely met.
Mr. Obama, too, has experienced the clash of those lofty expectations with political realities. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he was conducting two wars, he described himself as “living testimony to the moral force” of the nonviolent movement embodied by Dr. King and Gandhi.
“But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,” he continued, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”
That paradox was on vivid display on Saturday when Mr. Obama arrived in Mumbai, an event carried live on national television, celebrating Gandhi’s legacy but also selling military transport planes and bringing along 200 American business leaders.
India’s political establishment, if thrilled by the visit, is also withholding judgment. Mr. Obama was faulted in New Delhi for some early missteps, including his comment that China should play an active role in South Asia. His battering in the midterm elections has raised concerns about his political viability. And many Indian officials still hold a torch for former President George W. Bush, who was popular for pushing through a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries.
Mr. Obama’s visit is intended to dispel those doubts and deepen a partnership rooted in shared democratic values. Since taking office, he has already met several times with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as with other delegations of Indian officials. On several occasions, he has cited his deep admiration for Gandhi, perhaps as evidence of his fondness for India.
“The impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express, a leading English-language newspaper, adding that the repeated references struck some officials as platitudinous.
In praising Gandhi, Mr. Obama has often cited the influence of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns on the civil rights movement in the United States. Dr. King visited India in 1959, more than a decade after Gandhi’s death, seeking to draw from the taproot of his moral power, in a trip publicized in India and the United States.
“The trip for King was very much about laying claim to the Gandhian legacy,” said Nico Slate, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who has researched the linkage between the two men.
Unlike Mr. Obama, Dr. King and Gandhi had the advantage of never having to govern. And even Dr. King learned the limits of Gandhi’s influence in an India confronted with the realities of global politics. When he was invited to make an address on Indian radio, Dr. King condemned the cold war arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, suggesting that India should set a higher, Gandhian standard by demilitarizing. Indian officials quickly rejected the idea.
“It was very Gandhian, but in many ways very unrealistic, at least from the vantage point of the Indian establishment,” Mr. Slate said. “Even King came to realize that India, in some ways, was never Gandhian.”
Dr. King also visited Gandhi’s home in Mumbai and, like Mr. Obama, signed the guest book. “Pretty cool,” Mr. Obama said Saturday when a museum administrator showed him Dr. King’s entry. “Nineteen-fifty-nine. What a great book.”
On Sunday, Mr. Obama will fly to New Delhi and, like Dr. King, visit the Rajghat, the black marble memorial on the spot where Gandhi was cremated after his assassination in 1948. Today, the Rajghat attracts about 10,000 visitors a day and is a requisite stop for visiting foreign leaders, regardless of political ideology: Mr. Bush and former President Bill Clinton have visited. So has the Dalai Lama. But so has the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin; the president of authoritarian China, Hu Jintao; and, more recently, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the leader of the ruling military junta in Myanmar.
Ramachandra Guha, a Gandhi biographer, said Indian officials approached him three months ago seeking suggestions for Gandhi-related sites for Mr. Obama’s visit. Mr. Guha recommended an ashram in rural central India where Gandhi once lived, a suggestion rejected because of concerns over security and distance, he said.
To Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a grandson of Gandhi, the fact that his grandfather inspired the American president demonstrated the continued vibrancy of Gandhi’s message. If he bemoaned the corruption and money contaminating Indian politics, he said Gandhi’s spirit could still be found among the Indian civil society groups helping the poor and protecting the environment.
“Today, the need for a practical idealism is recognized throughout the world,” he said.
The word practical seemed especially relevant.
Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes India
By JIM YARDLEY
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world ... s&emc=tha1
NEW DELHI — Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the great Indian apostle of peace, democracy and nonviolent protest, Mohandas K. Gandhi.
The postcard was a trinket of public diplomacy, a souvenir of the new president’s affinity for India. Now that Mr. Obama is visiting India for the first time, on a trip pitched as a jobs mission, his fascination with Gandhi is influencing his itinerary and his message as he tries to win over India’s skeptical political class.
“He is a hero not just to India, but to the world,” the president wrote in a guest book on Saturday in Gandhi’s modest former home in Mumbai, now the Mani Bhavan museum.
Yet if paying homage to Gandhi is expected of visiting dignitaries, Mr. Obama’s more personal identification with the Gandhian legacy — the president once named him the person he would most like to dine with — places him on complicated terrain.
Gandhi remains India’s patriarch, the founding father whose face is printed on the currency, but modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power.
If anything, India’s rise as a global power seems likely to distance it even further from Gandhi. India is inching toward a tighter military relationship with the United States, once distrusted as an imperialist power, even as the Americans are fighting a war in nearby Afghanistan.
India also has an urbanizing consumer-driven economy and a growing middle class that indulges itself in cars, apartments and other goods. It is this economic progress that underpins India’s rising geopolitical clout and its attractiveness to the United States as a global partner.
Gandhi is still revered here, and credited with shaping India’s political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy. But he can sometimes seem to hover over modern India like a parent whose expectations are rarely met.
Mr. Obama, too, has experienced the clash of those lofty expectations with political realities. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he was conducting two wars, he described himself as “living testimony to the moral force” of the nonviolent movement embodied by Dr. King and Gandhi.
“But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,” he continued, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”
That paradox was on vivid display on Saturday when Mr. Obama arrived in Mumbai, an event carried live on national television, celebrating Gandhi’s legacy but also selling military transport planes and bringing along 200 American business leaders.
India’s political establishment, if thrilled by the visit, is also withholding judgment. Mr. Obama was faulted in New Delhi for some early missteps, including his comment that China should play an active role in South Asia. His battering in the midterm elections has raised concerns about his political viability. And many Indian officials still hold a torch for former President George W. Bush, who was popular for pushing through a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries.
Mr. Obama’s visit is intended to dispel those doubts and deepen a partnership rooted in shared democratic values. Since taking office, he has already met several times with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as with other delegations of Indian officials. On several occasions, he has cited his deep admiration for Gandhi, perhaps as evidence of his fondness for India.
“The impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express, a leading English-language newspaper, adding that the repeated references struck some officials as platitudinous.
In praising Gandhi, Mr. Obama has often cited the influence of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns on the civil rights movement in the United States. Dr. King visited India in 1959, more than a decade after Gandhi’s death, seeking to draw from the taproot of his moral power, in a trip publicized in India and the United States.
“The trip for King was very much about laying claim to the Gandhian legacy,” said Nico Slate, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who has researched the linkage between the two men.
Unlike Mr. Obama, Dr. King and Gandhi had the advantage of never having to govern. And even Dr. King learned the limits of Gandhi’s influence in an India confronted with the realities of global politics. When he was invited to make an address on Indian radio, Dr. King condemned the cold war arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, suggesting that India should set a higher, Gandhian standard by demilitarizing. Indian officials quickly rejected the idea.
“It was very Gandhian, but in many ways very unrealistic, at least from the vantage point of the Indian establishment,” Mr. Slate said. “Even King came to realize that India, in some ways, was never Gandhian.”
Dr. King also visited Gandhi’s home in Mumbai and, like Mr. Obama, signed the guest book. “Pretty cool,” Mr. Obama said Saturday when a museum administrator showed him Dr. King’s entry. “Nineteen-fifty-nine. What a great book.”
On Sunday, Mr. Obama will fly to New Delhi and, like Dr. King, visit the Rajghat, the black marble memorial on the spot where Gandhi was cremated after his assassination in 1948. Today, the Rajghat attracts about 10,000 visitors a day and is a requisite stop for visiting foreign leaders, regardless of political ideology: Mr. Bush and former President Bill Clinton have visited. So has the Dalai Lama. But so has the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin; the president of authoritarian China, Hu Jintao; and, more recently, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the leader of the ruling military junta in Myanmar.
Ramachandra Guha, a Gandhi biographer, said Indian officials approached him three months ago seeking suggestions for Gandhi-related sites for Mr. Obama’s visit. Mr. Guha recommended an ashram in rural central India where Gandhi once lived, a suggestion rejected because of concerns over security and distance, he said.
To Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a grandson of Gandhi, the fact that his grandfather inspired the American president demonstrated the continued vibrancy of Gandhi’s message. If he bemoaned the corruption and money contaminating Indian politics, he said Gandhi’s spirit could still be found among the Indian civil society groups helping the poor and protecting the environment.
“Today, the need for a practical idealism is recognized throughout the world,” he said.
The word practical seemed especially relevant.
November 10, 2010
A Girl, a School and Hope
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
Given today’s economic difficulties, I thought I’d come to Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden, lug him back home in my duffel bag and declare him at American customs to pick up the $27 million reward.
More on that mission in a moment. First, another conundrum here in Pakistan:
The United States has provided $18 billion to Pakistan in aid since 9/11, yet Pakistan’s government shelters the Afghan Taliban as it kills American soldiers and drains the American Treasury. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of Pakistanis have confidence in President Obama, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s not even half as many as express confidence in bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks postflood aid from Western taxpayers, yet barely taxes its own affluent citizens at home. And its feudal landholders have historically opposed good schools, for fear that poor Pakistanis — if educated — would object to oppression.
One reason Pakistan is sometimes called the most dangerous country in the world is this: a kindergarten child in this country has only a 1 percent chance of reaching the 12th grade, according to the Pakistan Education Task Force, an official panel. The average Pakistani child is significantly less likely to be schooled than the average child in sub-Saharan Africa.
American myopia historically has played a role. We’ve propped up generals but not the lawyers’ movement for democracy. We’ve allocated billions of dollars for Pakistan’s army but not for schools. And the U.S. has never been willing to take the single most important step: open our markets wide to Pakistani garment exports, so as to provide jobs and strengthen the business sector.
Now let’s break for a ray of hope.
This is my first trip to Pakistan in years in which the country’s downhill slide seems to have been arrested — and that’s notwithstanding the floods that ravaged the country recently.
It helps that the United States has approved the Kerry-Lugar-Berman package to provide civilian aid, earning the U.S. a dose of goodwill in Pakistan. But most important, members of Pakistan’s emerging middle class are stepping up to the plate.
They are enraged at the terrorists who have been tearing apart their country, they’re appalled by corruption and illiteracy, and they want peace so that their children can become educated and live a better life. Their obsession is college, not Kashmir.
Partly because of middle-class influence, ordinary Pakistanis are increasingly focused on education. About one-fourth of Pakistani children, even from poor families, now attend private schools, simply because the public schools are so wretched.
These days the middle class is not only eclipsing the feudal landowners but also rejects the old feudal contempt for the masses. One reflection of the middle-class engagement is the rise of the Citizens Foundation, a terrific aid group started by a group of businessmen frustrated by their country’s appalling schools.
Today, T.C.F. runs 660 excellent schools for the poorest citizens. I visited several of these schools on this trip — and, wow!
T.C.F. spends 40 percent less per pupil than state schools do, but manages to provide incomparably better education. Here in the most-populous province of Punjab, for example, nearly 100 percent of Citizens Foundation pupils pass government exams, while over the last four years state schools have averaged a 44 percent pass rate.
The most inspiring Pakistani I met on this trip wasn’t a prominent official but a 17-year-old girl.
Zahida Sardar, an ebullient teenager with braids and a radiant smile, used to languish in an execrable state school in Minhala outside Lahore. “A teacher might come only twice a month,” Zahida recalled.
In such a school, Zahida despaired that she would have no chance to become a doctor or teacher. She began to pester her parents to send her to a T.C.F. school so she could actually get an education, but her parents are illiterate and worried about school fees.
“My father said, ‘I’m not going to pay. Why should we spend money on education?’ ” Zahida recalled. So Zahida tormented her mother, begging her just to find out if a transfer might be possible.
“For three months, I pestered and insisted,” Zahida recalled. She tried everything she could think of, including a daily torrent of tears.
I met Zahida’s mother, Sardara, who told me that the girl was impossible and just wouldn’t take a “no.” “She just wore me down,” Sardara said. Timidly, Sardara visited the T.C.F. school, and the principal agreed to test Zahida and, when she performed brilliantly, accept her at much reduced fees of 50 cents a month.
So Zahida is now is a star in the 11th grade — speaking to me comfortably in English.
Oh, and bin Laden? Well, maybe I’ll get lucky on my next trip. But in Zahida and other educated young Pakistanis, I’ve found those who will vanquish him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/opini ... s&emc=a211
A Girl, a School and Hope
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
Given today’s economic difficulties, I thought I’d come to Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden, lug him back home in my duffel bag and declare him at American customs to pick up the $27 million reward.
More on that mission in a moment. First, another conundrum here in Pakistan:
The United States has provided $18 billion to Pakistan in aid since 9/11, yet Pakistan’s government shelters the Afghan Taliban as it kills American soldiers and drains the American Treasury. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of Pakistanis have confidence in President Obama, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s not even half as many as express confidence in bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks postflood aid from Western taxpayers, yet barely taxes its own affluent citizens at home. And its feudal landholders have historically opposed good schools, for fear that poor Pakistanis — if educated — would object to oppression.
One reason Pakistan is sometimes called the most dangerous country in the world is this: a kindergarten child in this country has only a 1 percent chance of reaching the 12th grade, according to the Pakistan Education Task Force, an official panel. The average Pakistani child is significantly less likely to be schooled than the average child in sub-Saharan Africa.
American myopia historically has played a role. We’ve propped up generals but not the lawyers’ movement for democracy. We’ve allocated billions of dollars for Pakistan’s army but not for schools. And the U.S. has never been willing to take the single most important step: open our markets wide to Pakistani garment exports, so as to provide jobs and strengthen the business sector.
Now let’s break for a ray of hope.
This is my first trip to Pakistan in years in which the country’s downhill slide seems to have been arrested — and that’s notwithstanding the floods that ravaged the country recently.
It helps that the United States has approved the Kerry-Lugar-Berman package to provide civilian aid, earning the U.S. a dose of goodwill in Pakistan. But most important, members of Pakistan’s emerging middle class are stepping up to the plate.
They are enraged at the terrorists who have been tearing apart their country, they’re appalled by corruption and illiteracy, and they want peace so that their children can become educated and live a better life. Their obsession is college, not Kashmir.
Partly because of middle-class influence, ordinary Pakistanis are increasingly focused on education. About one-fourth of Pakistani children, even from poor families, now attend private schools, simply because the public schools are so wretched.
These days the middle class is not only eclipsing the feudal landowners but also rejects the old feudal contempt for the masses. One reflection of the middle-class engagement is the rise of the Citizens Foundation, a terrific aid group started by a group of businessmen frustrated by their country’s appalling schools.
Today, T.C.F. runs 660 excellent schools for the poorest citizens. I visited several of these schools on this trip — and, wow!
T.C.F. spends 40 percent less per pupil than state schools do, but manages to provide incomparably better education. Here in the most-populous province of Punjab, for example, nearly 100 percent of Citizens Foundation pupils pass government exams, while over the last four years state schools have averaged a 44 percent pass rate.
The most inspiring Pakistani I met on this trip wasn’t a prominent official but a 17-year-old girl.
Zahida Sardar, an ebullient teenager with braids and a radiant smile, used to languish in an execrable state school in Minhala outside Lahore. “A teacher might come only twice a month,” Zahida recalled.
In such a school, Zahida despaired that she would have no chance to become a doctor or teacher. She began to pester her parents to send her to a T.C.F. school so she could actually get an education, but her parents are illiterate and worried about school fees.
“My father said, ‘I’m not going to pay. Why should we spend money on education?’ ” Zahida recalled. So Zahida tormented her mother, begging her just to find out if a transfer might be possible.
“For three months, I pestered and insisted,” Zahida recalled. She tried everything she could think of, including a daily torrent of tears.
I met Zahida’s mother, Sardara, who told me that the girl was impossible and just wouldn’t take a “no.” “She just wore me down,” Sardara said. Timidly, Sardara visited the T.C.F. school, and the principal agreed to test Zahida and, when she performed brilliantly, accept her at much reduced fees of 50 cents a month.
So Zahida is now is a star in the 11th grade — speaking to me comfortably in English.
Oh, and bin Laden? Well, maybe I’ll get lucky on my next trip. But in Zahida and other educated young Pakistanis, I’ve found those who will vanquish him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/opini ... s&emc=a211
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/world ... nes&emc=a2
November 12, 2010
Rebuilding Lags in Pakistan Area After Offensive
By ADAM B. ELLICK
DRUSHKHELA, Pakistan — People here felt a surge of optimism last year when the military declared the Swat Valley cleared of Taliban insurgents, who had bullied their way to power by publicly whipping and beheading opponents.
But more than a year after millions of residents returned home, the absence of virtually any government follow-through has turned that hope into despair.
Throughout the valley, tens of thousands of students are sheltered by broken-down walls and flimsy tents supplied mostly by international aid groups. The government has yet to rebuild even one of the more than 150 schools leveled by the Taliban in their methodical campaign to prevent girls’ education.
Running water, electricity and school supplies are widely absent. The floods that ravaged the country this summer, and hit Swat especially hard, have only compounded the hardships and diverted money and attention away from reconstructing war-torn areas.
The lack of any visible progress has fed the frustrations of local people and international donors over the government’s incompetence and corruption, raising fears that it has squandered a chance to win over a pivotal population in its war against militancy, which has been urged on by the United States.
“In the minds of these little kids, the frustration against our own government is developing, and against the West is developing,” said Esanullah Khan, a landlord here who advises the army and aid organizations on rebuilding schools. “They’ll go into Talibanization or miscreants because that is their only option left. What do they have to lose?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/world ... nes&emc=a2
November 12, 2010
Rebuilding Lags in Pakistan Area After Offensive
By ADAM B. ELLICK
DRUSHKHELA, Pakistan — People here felt a surge of optimism last year when the military declared the Swat Valley cleared of Taliban insurgents, who had bullied their way to power by publicly whipping and beheading opponents.
But more than a year after millions of residents returned home, the absence of virtually any government follow-through has turned that hope into despair.
Throughout the valley, tens of thousands of students are sheltered by broken-down walls and flimsy tents supplied mostly by international aid groups. The government has yet to rebuild even one of the more than 150 schools leveled by the Taliban in their methodical campaign to prevent girls’ education.
Running water, electricity and school supplies are widely absent. The floods that ravaged the country this summer, and hit Swat especially hard, have only compounded the hardships and diverted money and attention away from reconstructing war-torn areas.
The lack of any visible progress has fed the frustrations of local people and international donors over the government’s incompetence and corruption, raising fears that it has squandered a chance to win over a pivotal population in its war against militancy, which has been urged on by the United States.
“In the minds of these little kids, the frustration against our own government is developing, and against the West is developing,” said Esanullah Khan, a landlord here who advises the army and aid organizations on rebuilding schools. “They’ll go into Talibanization or miscreants because that is their only option left. What do they have to lose?”
There is a related slide show and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magaz ... s&emc=a210
Excerpt:
"The larger idea is to build a more sustainable economy, or what Chinese leaders have called a balanced and harmonious society. In that economy, families would not have to save 20 percent of their income in order to pay for schooling and medical care, as many do now. They would instead be able to afford more of the comforts of modern life — better housing, clothing, transportation and communication. In time, China would become the world’s next great consumer society.
That term may have negative connotations in the United States, particularly after the last decade of debt excess. But the term means something very different for China. A Chinese consumer society would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The benefits of the industrial boom that began in the 1980s would spread more rapidly beyond the country’s eastern coast. The service sector would grow, and the economy would no longer be quite so dependent on smoke-spewing factories.
For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, millions — could end up with jobs that exist, at least in part, to design, make or sell goods and services to China. This possibility helps explain why Democrats, Republicans, economists, business consultants, corporate executives and labor leaders all devote so much time to urging China to consume more. One subtext of the recent G-20 meeting in Seoul was the encouragement of Chinese consumption. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magaz ... s&emc=a210
Excerpt:
"The larger idea is to build a more sustainable economy, or what Chinese leaders have called a balanced and harmonious society. In that economy, families would not have to save 20 percent of their income in order to pay for schooling and medical care, as many do now. They would instead be able to afford more of the comforts of modern life — better housing, clothing, transportation and communication. In time, China would become the world’s next great consumer society.
That term may have negative connotations in the United States, particularly after the last decade of debt excess. But the term means something very different for China. A Chinese consumer society would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The benefits of the industrial boom that began in the 1980s would spread more rapidly beyond the country’s eastern coast. The service sector would grow, and the economy would no longer be quite so dependent on smoke-spewing factories.
For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, millions — could end up with jobs that exist, at least in part, to design, make or sell goods and services to China. This possibility helps explain why Democrats, Republicans, economists, business consultants, corporate executives and labor leaders all devote so much time to urging China to consume more. One subtext of the recent G-20 meeting in Seoul was the encouragement of Chinese consumption. "
January 8, 2011
China Rises, and Checkmates
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING
If there’s a human face on Rising China, it belongs not to some Politburo chief, not to an Internet tycoon, but to a quiet, mild-mannered teenage girl named Hou Yifan.
Ms. Hou (whose name is pronounced Ho Ee-fahn) is an astonishing phenomenon: at 16, she is the new women’s world chess champion, the youngest person, male or female, ever to win a world championship. And she reflects the way China — by investing heavily in education and human capital, particularly in young women — is increasingly having an outsize impact on every aspect of the world.
Napoleon is famously said to have declared, “When China wakes, it will shake the world.” That is becoming true even in spheres that China historically has had little connection with, like chess, basketball, rare earth minerals, cyber warfare, space exploration and nuclear research.
This is a process that Miss Hou exemplifies. Only about 1 percent of Chinese play chess, and China has never been a chess power. But since 1991, China has produced four women’s world chess champions, and Ms. Hou is the one with by far the most promise.
At this point, I have to put my sensitive male ego aside. You see, Ms. Hou gamely agreed to play me after I interviewed her. She had just flown into Beijing after winning the world championship, and she was exhausted — and she shredded me in 21 moves.
Most dispiriting, when I was teetering at the abyss near the end of the game, her coach nudged her and suggested mischievously that we should switch sides. Ms. Hou would inherit my impossible position — and the gleam in her coach’s eye suggested that she would still win.
I protested that I could survive being beaten on the chess board by a schoolgirl. But to be toyed with, like a mouse by a cat — that would be too much. Ms. Hou nodded compassionately and checkmated me a few moves later.
At 14 she became the youngest female grandmaster ever. She’s still so young that it’s unclear just how remarkable she will become.
Women in general haven’t been nearly as good at chess as men, and the world’s top women are mostly ranked well below the top men — but Ms. Hou could be an exception. She is the only female chess player today considered to have a shot at becoming one of the top few players in the world, male or female.
Cynics sometimes suggest that China’s rise as a world power is largely a matter of government manipulation of currency rates and trade rules, and there’s no doubt that there’s plenty of rigging or cheating going on in every sphere. But China has also done an extraordinarily good job of investing in its people and in spreading opportunity across the country. Moreover, perhaps as a legacy of Confucianism, its citizens have shown a passion for education and self-improvement — along with remarkable capacity for discipline and hard work, what the Chinese call “chi ku,” or “eating bitterness.”
Ms. Hou dined on plenty of bitterness in working her way up to champion. She grew up in the boondocks, in a county town in Jiangsu Province, and her parents did not play chess. But they lavished attention on her and spoiled her, as parents of only children (“little emperors”) routinely do in China.
China used to be one of the most sexist societies in the world — with female infanticide, foot binding, and concubinage — but it turned a corner and now is remarkably good at giving opportunities to girls as well as boys. When Ms. Hou’s parents noticed her interest in a chess board at a store, they promptly bought her a chess set — and then hired a chess tutor for her.
Ye Jiangchuan, the chief coach of the national men’s and women’s teams, told me that he played Ms. Hou when she was 9 years old — and was stunned. “I saw that this kid was special,” he told me, and he invited her to move to Beijing to play with the national teams. Three years later she was the youngest girl ever to compete in the world chess championships.
It will be many, many decades before China can challenge the United States as the overall “No. 1” in the world, for we have a huge lead and China still must show that it can transition to a more open and democratic society. But already in discrete areas — its automobile market, carbon emissions and now women’s chess — China is emerging as No. 1 here and there, and that process will continue.
There’s a lesson for us as well. China’s national commitment to education, opportunity and eating bitterness — those are qualities that we in the West might emulate as well. As you know after you’ve been checkmated by Hou Yifan.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/opini ... nted=print
China Rises, and Checkmates
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING
If there’s a human face on Rising China, it belongs not to some Politburo chief, not to an Internet tycoon, but to a quiet, mild-mannered teenage girl named Hou Yifan.
Ms. Hou (whose name is pronounced Ho Ee-fahn) is an astonishing phenomenon: at 16, she is the new women’s world chess champion, the youngest person, male or female, ever to win a world championship. And she reflects the way China — by investing heavily in education and human capital, particularly in young women — is increasingly having an outsize impact on every aspect of the world.
Napoleon is famously said to have declared, “When China wakes, it will shake the world.” That is becoming true even in spheres that China historically has had little connection with, like chess, basketball, rare earth minerals, cyber warfare, space exploration and nuclear research.
This is a process that Miss Hou exemplifies. Only about 1 percent of Chinese play chess, and China has never been a chess power. But since 1991, China has produced four women’s world chess champions, and Ms. Hou is the one with by far the most promise.
At this point, I have to put my sensitive male ego aside. You see, Ms. Hou gamely agreed to play me after I interviewed her. She had just flown into Beijing after winning the world championship, and she was exhausted — and she shredded me in 21 moves.
Most dispiriting, when I was teetering at the abyss near the end of the game, her coach nudged her and suggested mischievously that we should switch sides. Ms. Hou would inherit my impossible position — and the gleam in her coach’s eye suggested that she would still win.
I protested that I could survive being beaten on the chess board by a schoolgirl. But to be toyed with, like a mouse by a cat — that would be too much. Ms. Hou nodded compassionately and checkmated me a few moves later.
At 14 she became the youngest female grandmaster ever. She’s still so young that it’s unclear just how remarkable she will become.
Women in general haven’t been nearly as good at chess as men, and the world’s top women are mostly ranked well below the top men — but Ms. Hou could be an exception. She is the only female chess player today considered to have a shot at becoming one of the top few players in the world, male or female.
Cynics sometimes suggest that China’s rise as a world power is largely a matter of government manipulation of currency rates and trade rules, and there’s no doubt that there’s plenty of rigging or cheating going on in every sphere. But China has also done an extraordinarily good job of investing in its people and in spreading opportunity across the country. Moreover, perhaps as a legacy of Confucianism, its citizens have shown a passion for education and self-improvement — along with remarkable capacity for discipline and hard work, what the Chinese call “chi ku,” or “eating bitterness.”
Ms. Hou dined on plenty of bitterness in working her way up to champion. She grew up in the boondocks, in a county town in Jiangsu Province, and her parents did not play chess. But they lavished attention on her and spoiled her, as parents of only children (“little emperors”) routinely do in China.
China used to be one of the most sexist societies in the world — with female infanticide, foot binding, and concubinage — but it turned a corner and now is remarkably good at giving opportunities to girls as well as boys. When Ms. Hou’s parents noticed her interest in a chess board at a store, they promptly bought her a chess set — and then hired a chess tutor for her.
Ye Jiangchuan, the chief coach of the national men’s and women’s teams, told me that he played Ms. Hou when she was 9 years old — and was stunned. “I saw that this kid was special,” he told me, and he invited her to move to Beijing to play with the national teams. Three years later she was the youngest girl ever to compete in the world chess championships.
It will be many, many decades before China can challenge the United States as the overall “No. 1” in the world, for we have a huge lead and China still must show that it can transition to a more open and democratic society. But already in discrete areas — its automobile market, carbon emissions and now women’s chess — China is emerging as No. 1 here and there, and that process will continue.
There’s a lesson for us as well. China’s national commitment to education, opportunity and eating bitterness — those are qualities that we in the West might emulate as well. As you know after you’ve been checkmated by Hou Yifan.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/opini ... nted=print
January 15, 2011
China’s Winning Schools?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING
An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!
At the very top of the charts, in all three fields and by a wide margin, was Shanghai. Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.
The United States? We came in 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math.
I’ve been visiting schools in China and Asia for more than 20 years (and we sent our own kids briefly to schools in Japan, which also bears a Confucian imprint), and I’ve spent much of that time either envious or dumbfounded. I’ll never forget pulling our 2-year-old son out of his Tokyo nursery school so we could visit the States and being handed a form in which we had to list: “reason for proposed vacation.”
Education thrives in China and the rest of Asia because it is a top priority — and we’ve plenty to learn from that.
Granted, Shanghai’s rise to the top of the global charts is not representative of all China, for Shanghai has the country’s best schools. Yet it’s also true that China has made remarkable improvements in the once-awful schools in peasant areas.
Just 20 years ago, children often dropped out of elementary school in rural areas. Teachers sometimes could barely speak standard Mandarin, which, in theory, is the language of instruction.
These days, even in backward rural areas, most girls and boys alike attend high school. College isn’t unusual. And the teachers are vastly improved. In my Chinese-American wife’s ancestral village — a poor community in southern China — the peasant children are a grade ahead in math compared with my children at an excellent public school in the New York area. That seems broadly true of math around the country.
For a socialist system that hesitates to fire people, China has also been surprisingly adept — more so than America — at dealing with ineffective teachers. Chinese principals can’t easily dismiss teachers, but they can get extra training for less effective teachers, or if that doesn’t work, push them into other jobs.
“Bad teachers can always be made gym teachers,” a principal in the city of Xian explained to me as she showed me around her kindergarten. In China, school sports and gym just don’t matter.
(That kindergarten exemplified another of China’s strengths: excellent early childhood education, typically beginning at age 2. Indeed, the only element of China’s education system that really falters badly is the university system. Colleges are third-rate and should be a national disgrace.)
But this is the paradox: Chinese themselves are far less impressed by their school system. Almost every time I try to interview a Chinese about the system here, I hear grousing rather than praise. Many Chinese complain scathingly that their system kills independent thought and creativity, and they envy the American system for nurturing self-reliance — and for trying to make learning exciting and not just a chore.
In Xian, I visited Gaoxin Yizhong, perhaps the city’s best high school, and the students and teachers spoke wistfully of the American emphasis on clubs, arts and independent thought. “We need to encourage more creativity,” explained Hua Guohong, a chemistry teacher. “We should learn from American schools.”
One friend in Guangdong Province says he will send his children to the United States to study because the local schools are a “creativity-killer.” Another sent his son to an international school to escape what he likens to “programs for trained seals.” Private schools are sprouting everywhere, and many boast of a focus on creativity.
For my part, I think the self-criticisms are exactly right, but I also deeply admire the passion for education and the commitment to making the system better. And while William Butler Yeats was right that “education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire,” it’s also true that it’s easier to ignite a bonfire if there’s fuel in the bucket.
The larger issue is that the greatest strength of the Chinese system is the Confucian reverence for education that is steeped into the culture. In Chinese schools, teachers are much respected, and the most admired kid is often the brain rather than the jock or class clown.
Americans think of China’s strategic challenge in terms of, say, the new Chinese stealth fighter aircraft. But the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.
That’s what we did in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. These latest test results should be our 21st-century Sputnik.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opini ... emc=tha212
China’s Winning Schools?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING
An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!
At the very top of the charts, in all three fields and by a wide margin, was Shanghai. Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.
The United States? We came in 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math.
I’ve been visiting schools in China and Asia for more than 20 years (and we sent our own kids briefly to schools in Japan, which also bears a Confucian imprint), and I’ve spent much of that time either envious or dumbfounded. I’ll never forget pulling our 2-year-old son out of his Tokyo nursery school so we could visit the States and being handed a form in which we had to list: “reason for proposed vacation.”
Education thrives in China and the rest of Asia because it is a top priority — and we’ve plenty to learn from that.
Granted, Shanghai’s rise to the top of the global charts is not representative of all China, for Shanghai has the country’s best schools. Yet it’s also true that China has made remarkable improvements in the once-awful schools in peasant areas.
Just 20 years ago, children often dropped out of elementary school in rural areas. Teachers sometimes could barely speak standard Mandarin, which, in theory, is the language of instruction.
These days, even in backward rural areas, most girls and boys alike attend high school. College isn’t unusual. And the teachers are vastly improved. In my Chinese-American wife’s ancestral village — a poor community in southern China — the peasant children are a grade ahead in math compared with my children at an excellent public school in the New York area. That seems broadly true of math around the country.
For a socialist system that hesitates to fire people, China has also been surprisingly adept — more so than America — at dealing with ineffective teachers. Chinese principals can’t easily dismiss teachers, but they can get extra training for less effective teachers, or if that doesn’t work, push them into other jobs.
“Bad teachers can always be made gym teachers,” a principal in the city of Xian explained to me as she showed me around her kindergarten. In China, school sports and gym just don’t matter.
(That kindergarten exemplified another of China’s strengths: excellent early childhood education, typically beginning at age 2. Indeed, the only element of China’s education system that really falters badly is the university system. Colleges are third-rate and should be a national disgrace.)
But this is the paradox: Chinese themselves are far less impressed by their school system. Almost every time I try to interview a Chinese about the system here, I hear grousing rather than praise. Many Chinese complain scathingly that their system kills independent thought and creativity, and they envy the American system for nurturing self-reliance — and for trying to make learning exciting and not just a chore.
In Xian, I visited Gaoxin Yizhong, perhaps the city’s best high school, and the students and teachers spoke wistfully of the American emphasis on clubs, arts and independent thought. “We need to encourage more creativity,” explained Hua Guohong, a chemistry teacher. “We should learn from American schools.”
One friend in Guangdong Province says he will send his children to the United States to study because the local schools are a “creativity-killer.” Another sent his son to an international school to escape what he likens to “programs for trained seals.” Private schools are sprouting everywhere, and many boast of a focus on creativity.
For my part, I think the self-criticisms are exactly right, but I also deeply admire the passion for education and the commitment to making the system better. And while William Butler Yeats was right that “education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire,” it’s also true that it’s easier to ignite a bonfire if there’s fuel in the bucket.
The larger issue is that the greatest strength of the Chinese system is the Confucian reverence for education that is steeped into the culture. In Chinese schools, teachers are much respected, and the most admired kid is often the brain rather than the jock or class clown.
Americans think of China’s strategic challenge in terms of, say, the new Chinese stealth fighter aircraft. But the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.
That’s what we did in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. These latest test results should be our 21st-century Sputnik.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opini ... emc=tha212
Census in India a window into a changing nation
STEPHANIE NOLEN
NEW DELHI— From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2011 7:39PM EST
Last updated Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2011 10:44PM EST
Hunched over a clipboard, squinting in the pale yellow glow of a street camp, Shika Shrivasta surveyed the grimy, wiggly boy in front of her.
“Address?” she asked, and he gestured vaguely at the park around them. She frowned at her papers: runaway nine-year-olds, jittery from solvent sniffing, do not have a category in India’s census.
But the pair made their way through the form – the boy, Vishnu, doesn’t work or go to school – until they were done and Ms. Shrivasta waved him on, turning with a sigh to the next homeless person sleeping rough on the streets of central Delhi.
“Everyone,” she repeated through slightly clenched teeth, “has to be counted.”
India concluded its national census this week, having tallied up some 1.2 billion souls, and the last night of counting focused on homeless people – of whom there are an estimated 150,000 in Delhi alone. Getting them into the count was just one in an array of staggering challenges: how to enumerate in the dozen areas under control of various armed rebel movements, and in the 572 tiny islands that make up Andaman and Nicobar; how to train 2.5 million enumerators and handle answers in 6,661 languages.
“In the developed world, you have a tremendous advantage, where you can post out the census form and people fill it up and mail it back,” said C. Chandramouli, India’s registrar general and census commissioner. “Here, census is a human drama.”
It is also a window into how India is changing.
This census, for example, allows a respondent to list a gender of male, female or “other” – part of a growing acceptance of transgendered people.
There is a series of questions on mental and physical disability, which Mr. Chandramouli said has likely been sharply underreported in the past because of stigma.
There is also, for the first time, a question about divorce (in the past “divorced” and “separated” were one category) since anecdotal evidence suggests that many more married people separate than formally divorce. “We will see. Does anyone actually do the [divorce] process? And then it will be for the legal system to work out if the system is too difficult,” the commissioner said.
The census attempts to collect some data on fertility, asking women not only how many children they have living, but also how many they have ever given birth to. However, only women who say they are now or have been married are asked about children; there is no question about births out of wedlock, although originally the registry office had planned to collect that data.
“When we field tested the question, we found the enumerators were not asking at the household itself, but going to the next house and then saying, ‘I know you do not have such people in your family, but what about at that house?’ ” Mr. Chandramouli said. “You have to hand it to them for innovation – if I put the question on, they will get an answer for me.”
Census results may help evaluate the impact of the massive social welfare programs undertaken by India’s ruling Congress Party in recent years. A huge investment in universal primary education may be reflected in higher literacy rates or higher reported school enrolment. (Or it may not: Critics, who say the program has foundered on a lack of skilled teachers and poor planning, may be vindicated by the results.)
And the rural employment guarantee scheme, the world’s largest public works initiative with an annual budget of about $10-billion (Canadian), may be responsible for a drop in the number of people who report having worked for at least a few months in the past year, or who say they migrated for economic reasons.
A critical piece of data will be the number of women compared to men – India’s sex ratios have been declining steadily for the past three decades, as a strong social preference for sons and smaller family sizes encourages sex-selective abortion. Government policies have been aimed at discouraging the practice, but population sampling indicates those campaigns have had no impact. It will be a sharp embarrassment for the central government if, as predicted, the sex ratio is found to have fallen even further over the past decade since the last census.
The toughest question involves age, split into two parts: “How old are you?” and “When were you born?” Most Indians don’t have an answer for either and the tendency is to round to the nearest zero or five, Mr. Chandramouli said.
For people who have no idea, enumerators prompt with key historical events, such as: “Were you born around the time of independence?” That can be further narrowed by asking: “Was it near this or that festival?”
“And then you get a month, more or less,” Mr. Chandramouli said.
People are not asked about income, notoriously underreported here to evade a weak taxation system. Mr. Chandramouli pointed out that any income data collected would be so suspect as to be useless.
And the census does not ask about the most sensitive of Indian subjects, caste, to be addressed in a separate census in June. Demographers argued that including it in this census would prompt people to inflate numbers, because a percentage of jobs, school places and government seats are all reserved for low-caste groups, and thus ruin the integrity of the data. But with so much government policy based on remediating caste-based inequity, they agreed it was critical to collect the data.
Historical texts make reference to population counts done here as early as 800 B.C. The British began a formal census in 1872. Before this census, it took staff eight years to process and release data – barely time to catch their breath before the next one. But new data-capturing technology is currently scanning 1.5 million forms a day, Mr. Chandramouli said, and the bulk of the results from this count should be out by 2013.
While the Maoist territory, the homeless people, and the coding of 3,000 religions are an evident challenge, The commissioner’s biggest headache is counting citizens in India’s booming cities. In a village, everyone knows the teacher (all enumerators are teachers) and has time to sit and talk things through. But in the cities, people don’t even know their neighbours. In upscale neighbourhoods, enumerators must battle their way through a maze of streets, seek out oddly placed gates or doors, talk their way past security guards and housekeepers, to get to a resident. “And then they say, ‘Come back later, I’m off to yoga class or shopping.’ ”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le1927625/
STEPHANIE NOLEN
NEW DELHI— From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2011 7:39PM EST
Last updated Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2011 10:44PM EST
Hunched over a clipboard, squinting in the pale yellow glow of a street camp, Shika Shrivasta surveyed the grimy, wiggly boy in front of her.
“Address?” she asked, and he gestured vaguely at the park around them. She frowned at her papers: runaway nine-year-olds, jittery from solvent sniffing, do not have a category in India’s census.
But the pair made their way through the form – the boy, Vishnu, doesn’t work or go to school – until they were done and Ms. Shrivasta waved him on, turning with a sigh to the next homeless person sleeping rough on the streets of central Delhi.
“Everyone,” she repeated through slightly clenched teeth, “has to be counted.”
India concluded its national census this week, having tallied up some 1.2 billion souls, and the last night of counting focused on homeless people – of whom there are an estimated 150,000 in Delhi alone. Getting them into the count was just one in an array of staggering challenges: how to enumerate in the dozen areas under control of various armed rebel movements, and in the 572 tiny islands that make up Andaman and Nicobar; how to train 2.5 million enumerators and handle answers in 6,661 languages.
“In the developed world, you have a tremendous advantage, where you can post out the census form and people fill it up and mail it back,” said C. Chandramouli, India’s registrar general and census commissioner. “Here, census is a human drama.”
It is also a window into how India is changing.
This census, for example, allows a respondent to list a gender of male, female or “other” – part of a growing acceptance of transgendered people.
There is a series of questions on mental and physical disability, which Mr. Chandramouli said has likely been sharply underreported in the past because of stigma.
There is also, for the first time, a question about divorce (in the past “divorced” and “separated” were one category) since anecdotal evidence suggests that many more married people separate than formally divorce. “We will see. Does anyone actually do the [divorce] process? And then it will be for the legal system to work out if the system is too difficult,” the commissioner said.
The census attempts to collect some data on fertility, asking women not only how many children they have living, but also how many they have ever given birth to. However, only women who say they are now or have been married are asked about children; there is no question about births out of wedlock, although originally the registry office had planned to collect that data.
“When we field tested the question, we found the enumerators were not asking at the household itself, but going to the next house and then saying, ‘I know you do not have such people in your family, but what about at that house?’ ” Mr. Chandramouli said. “You have to hand it to them for innovation – if I put the question on, they will get an answer for me.”
Census results may help evaluate the impact of the massive social welfare programs undertaken by India’s ruling Congress Party in recent years. A huge investment in universal primary education may be reflected in higher literacy rates or higher reported school enrolment. (Or it may not: Critics, who say the program has foundered on a lack of skilled teachers and poor planning, may be vindicated by the results.)
And the rural employment guarantee scheme, the world’s largest public works initiative with an annual budget of about $10-billion (Canadian), may be responsible for a drop in the number of people who report having worked for at least a few months in the past year, or who say they migrated for economic reasons.
A critical piece of data will be the number of women compared to men – India’s sex ratios have been declining steadily for the past three decades, as a strong social preference for sons and smaller family sizes encourages sex-selective abortion. Government policies have been aimed at discouraging the practice, but population sampling indicates those campaigns have had no impact. It will be a sharp embarrassment for the central government if, as predicted, the sex ratio is found to have fallen even further over the past decade since the last census.
The toughest question involves age, split into two parts: “How old are you?” and “When were you born?” Most Indians don’t have an answer for either and the tendency is to round to the nearest zero or five, Mr. Chandramouli said.
For people who have no idea, enumerators prompt with key historical events, such as: “Were you born around the time of independence?” That can be further narrowed by asking: “Was it near this or that festival?”
“And then you get a month, more or less,” Mr. Chandramouli said.
People are not asked about income, notoriously underreported here to evade a weak taxation system. Mr. Chandramouli pointed out that any income data collected would be so suspect as to be useless.
And the census does not ask about the most sensitive of Indian subjects, caste, to be addressed in a separate census in June. Demographers argued that including it in this census would prompt people to inflate numbers, because a percentage of jobs, school places and government seats are all reserved for low-caste groups, and thus ruin the integrity of the data. But with so much government policy based on remediating caste-based inequity, they agreed it was critical to collect the data.
Historical texts make reference to population counts done here as early as 800 B.C. The British began a formal census in 1872. Before this census, it took staff eight years to process and release data – barely time to catch their breath before the next one. But new data-capturing technology is currently scanning 1.5 million forms a day, Mr. Chandramouli said, and the bulk of the results from this count should be out by 2013.
While the Maoist territory, the homeless people, and the coding of 3,000 religions are an evident challenge, The commissioner’s biggest headache is counting citizens in India’s booming cities. In a village, everyone knows the teacher (all enumerators are teachers) and has time to sit and talk things through. But in the cities, people don’t even know their neighbours. In upscale neighbourhoods, enumerators must battle their way through a maze of streets, seek out oddly placed gates or doors, talk their way past security guards and housekeepers, to get to a resident. “And then they say, ‘Come back later, I’m off to yoga class or shopping.’ ”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le1927625/
April 30, 2011
Where China Outpaces America
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
SHANGHAI
Here’s a fact about China that you may not know: people in Shanghai today have a longer life expectancy than Americans.
A child in Shanghai is expected to live 82 years. In the United States, the figure is not quite 79 years. (For all of China, including rural areas, life expectancy is lower, 73 years — but rising steadily.)
The harsh repression in China these days rightly garners headlines, but health data reflect another side of a nation that could scarcely be more complex and contradictory.
For those who remember Shanghai a quarter-century ago as a dilapidated city where farmers would collect night soil from families without sanitation, it’s extraordinary that among permanent residents of Shanghai, infant mortality is 2.9 deaths per 1,000 births. That is well below the rate of 5.3 in New York City. (Include migrant laborers living in Shanghai, perhaps a fairer comparison, and the rate climbs to a bit higher than in New York.)
That Shanghai child enjoys a world-class education in a public school — the best school system of any in a recent 65-nation survey, although it’s also true that Chinese schools have their own problems such as widespread cheating and stifling of creativity.
Since 1990, the country has reduced infant mortality rates by 54 percent, according to Unicef statistics. On a Chinese scale, that represents more than 360,000 children’s lives saved each year.
That’s what makes China such a fascinating and contradictory place. Other countries, from Egypt to North Korea, oppress and impoverish their people. But the Chinese Communist Party in the reform era has been oppressive politically — even worse lately, with the harshest clampdown in two decades — while hugely enriching its people.
President Hu Jintao and other top Communist Party officials are autocrats, yes, but unusually competent autocrats. Polls show Chinese citizens pretty happy with their lot by international standards, although there’s some doubt about how meaningful these polls are. My hunch is that if the Communist Party did hold free elections, it would win by a landslide — especially in rural areas.
A Harvard scholar once told me that today’s China is best approached with ambivalence, and that seems about right to me. The crackdown that I deplored in my last column is real, and so is the stunning level of official corruption. But the same government that throws small numbers of dissidents in prison also provides new opportunities to hundreds of millions.
What’s the trade-off between imprisoning a brilliant Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident like Liu Xiaobo and saving hundreds of thousands of babies’ lives each year through improved health care? There isn’t one. The two sides of China are incommensurate. They are the yin and yang of 21st-century China.
The United States tends to perceive China through a Manichaean lens — either the economic juggernaut overcoming poverty and investing brilliantly in alternative energy, or the Darth Vader that tortures dissidents. In fact, both are equally real. Likewise, China abuses trade pacts, but it has also been appreciating its currency (mostly through inflation) much more than Americans give it credit for.
We face a period in which Chinese-American tensions are likely to rise, aggravated by the American presidential election and the Chinese leadership transition in 2012, as well as by the crackdown that was the topic of my last column.
When I lived in China in the 1980s and ’90s, there was always an awkward economic imbalance between me and my Chinese friends. I had a car, and they had bicycles. I paid for our meals together because I was so much better off.
Now there’s a new imbalance: Some of those same people ride around in chauffeured limousines while I get around in taxis. They take me to fancy restaurants whose prices give me headaches.
One Chinese friend took me to a home with private indoor basketball court and personal movie theater. It was a tribute to the stunning improvement in the country’s standard of living. But it also speaks to growing income gaps at a time when, by official figures, 320 million rural Chinese do not even have access to safe water.
Moreover, some of the economic boom appears attributable to a bubble, particularly in real estate. And some of the grand fortunes are linked to corruption by government officials. One friend, the son of a Politburo member, once told me that he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by a Chinese company just to be on its board. That way, the company could persuade local governments to give it land at reduced prices.
What are we to make of such a country?
That it contains multitudes. And that at this time of rising China-United States tensions, any simplistic black or white view of it may well be right — but also incomplete and misleading.  
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opini ... emc=tha212
Where China Outpaces America
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
SHANGHAI
Here’s a fact about China that you may not know: people in Shanghai today have a longer life expectancy than Americans.
A child in Shanghai is expected to live 82 years. In the United States, the figure is not quite 79 years. (For all of China, including rural areas, life expectancy is lower, 73 years — but rising steadily.)
The harsh repression in China these days rightly garners headlines, but health data reflect another side of a nation that could scarcely be more complex and contradictory.
For those who remember Shanghai a quarter-century ago as a dilapidated city where farmers would collect night soil from families without sanitation, it’s extraordinary that among permanent residents of Shanghai, infant mortality is 2.9 deaths per 1,000 births. That is well below the rate of 5.3 in New York City. (Include migrant laborers living in Shanghai, perhaps a fairer comparison, and the rate climbs to a bit higher than in New York.)
That Shanghai child enjoys a world-class education in a public school — the best school system of any in a recent 65-nation survey, although it’s also true that Chinese schools have their own problems such as widespread cheating and stifling of creativity.
Since 1990, the country has reduced infant mortality rates by 54 percent, according to Unicef statistics. On a Chinese scale, that represents more than 360,000 children’s lives saved each year.
That’s what makes China such a fascinating and contradictory place. Other countries, from Egypt to North Korea, oppress and impoverish their people. But the Chinese Communist Party in the reform era has been oppressive politically — even worse lately, with the harshest clampdown in two decades — while hugely enriching its people.
President Hu Jintao and other top Communist Party officials are autocrats, yes, but unusually competent autocrats. Polls show Chinese citizens pretty happy with their lot by international standards, although there’s some doubt about how meaningful these polls are. My hunch is that if the Communist Party did hold free elections, it would win by a landslide — especially in rural areas.
A Harvard scholar once told me that today’s China is best approached with ambivalence, and that seems about right to me. The crackdown that I deplored in my last column is real, and so is the stunning level of official corruption. But the same government that throws small numbers of dissidents in prison also provides new opportunities to hundreds of millions.
What’s the trade-off between imprisoning a brilliant Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident like Liu Xiaobo and saving hundreds of thousands of babies’ lives each year through improved health care? There isn’t one. The two sides of China are incommensurate. They are the yin and yang of 21st-century China.
The United States tends to perceive China through a Manichaean lens — either the economic juggernaut overcoming poverty and investing brilliantly in alternative energy, or the Darth Vader that tortures dissidents. In fact, both are equally real. Likewise, China abuses trade pacts, but it has also been appreciating its currency (mostly through inflation) much more than Americans give it credit for.
We face a period in which Chinese-American tensions are likely to rise, aggravated by the American presidential election and the Chinese leadership transition in 2012, as well as by the crackdown that was the topic of my last column.
When I lived in China in the 1980s and ’90s, there was always an awkward economic imbalance between me and my Chinese friends. I had a car, and they had bicycles. I paid for our meals together because I was so much better off.
Now there’s a new imbalance: Some of those same people ride around in chauffeured limousines while I get around in taxis. They take me to fancy restaurants whose prices give me headaches.
One Chinese friend took me to a home with private indoor basketball court and personal movie theater. It was a tribute to the stunning improvement in the country’s standard of living. But it also speaks to growing income gaps at a time when, by official figures, 320 million rural Chinese do not even have access to safe water.
Moreover, some of the economic boom appears attributable to a bubble, particularly in real estate. And some of the grand fortunes are linked to corruption by government officials. One friend, the son of a Politburo member, once told me that he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by a Chinese company just to be on its board. That way, the company could persuade local governments to give it land at reduced prices.
What are we to make of such a country?
That it contains multitudes. And that at this time of rising China-United States tensions, any simplistic black or white view of it may well be right — but also incomplete and misleading.  
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opini ... emc=tha212
May 28, 2011
Slums Into Malls
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KOLKATA, India
I first visited Kolkata, better known as Calcutta, in 1982 as a backpacking law student. I stayed at a hostel in the Howrah slums and regretted that my camera could record only images, not the equally memorable stench.
In my visits over the next 25 years, Kolkata — and much of India — seemed little changed. China, where the national bird was jokingly said to be the crane, would be transformed every year or two, while Kolkata was always the same: a decrepit city where barefoot men pulled rickshaws beside fetid canals.
That’s why India has been a bit of an embarrassment for those of us who believe in democracy, especially when compared with China. The Communist Party in China did a much better job fighting poverty than democratically elected Indian governments. India tolerated dissent, but it also tolerated inefficiency, disease and illiteracy.
But after my trips to India and China this year, I think all that may be changing. Despite the global economic slowdown, India’s economy is now hurtling along at more than 8 percent per year. Yep, India is now a “tiger economy.”
The technology zones around Bangalore in southern India have been booming for years, but what is changing is that the rise is gaining traction across the country — even here in Kolkata. It’s stunning to see the new high-rise towers in Kolkata, new air-conditioned shopping malls, new infrastructure projects, new businesses.
In elections this month, the longtime Communist Party government here in the state of West Bengal was ousted, and the new chief minister is a woman and a dynamo, Mamata Banerjee. After the latest elections, she’s part of a broader trend of charismatic female politicians: one-third of India’s people are now ruled by chief ministers who are women.
The northern state of Bihar used to be even more of an embarrassment. For many years, gangsters played a major role in government there, and nothing worked. I once visited a health clinic in Bihar where employees dumped medicines in a pit in the ground, so they wouldn’t have to dispense them. I visited a school in Bihar where teachers never bothered to show up. I visited villages where gangsters raped, robbed and ruled at their pleasure. Businesses fled, kidnapping became rampant, and Bihar seemed hopeless.
Yet Bihar has, wondrously, turned around since 2005, when a reformer named Nitish Kumar took over as chief minister. There are still enormous inefficiencies, but crime has been suppressed, corruption has diminished, and the local economy is booming at double-digit rates. And if Bihar can turn around, any Indian region can.
Look, India still lags far behind China, it faces risks of Pakistani extremism, it needs further economic reforms, and it too readily accepts inefficiency as the natural order of the universe. India’s education and health system is a disgrace, especially in rural areas; Bangladesh does a much better job, despite being poorer. But change is in the air in India. Infant mortality is dropping, voters are pushing for better governance, and I think India has three advantages over China in their economic rivalry in the coming decades.
First, India’s independent news media and grass-roots civic organizations — sectors that barely exist in China — are becoming watchdogs against corruption and inefficiency. My hunch is that kleptocracy reached its apogee and is now waning in India, while in China it continues to get worse. I’ve written scathingly about India’s human trafficking and oppression of women, but it’s also true that civil society is addressing these issues.
Second, China’s economy may be slowed by the aging of its population, while India’s younger population will lead to a “demographic dividend” in coming decades. (Indian overpopulation is still a problem, but the average woman now has 2.6 children, and the figure is dropping.) Likewise, China already reaped the economic advantages of empowering its women, while India is just beginning to usher the female half of its population into the formal labor force.
Third, India has managed religious and ethnic tensions pretty well, aside from the disgraceful anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002. The Sikh challenge in the Punjab has dissipated. Muslims have been president of India three times, and are prominent in business and the movie industry; perhaps as a result, India has the world’s third-largest Muslim population (after Indonesia and Pakistan) but few jihadis. And while India has sometimes behaved brutally in Kashmir, civil society watchdogs are pressing for better behavior there. In China, by contrast, tensions with ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs are worsening.
China’s autocrats are extraordinarily competent, in a way that India’s democrats are not. But traveling in India these days is a heartening experience: my hunch is that the world’s largest democracy increasingly will be a source not of embarrassment but of pride.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opini ... emc=tha212
Slums Into Malls
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KOLKATA, India
I first visited Kolkata, better known as Calcutta, in 1982 as a backpacking law student. I stayed at a hostel in the Howrah slums and regretted that my camera could record only images, not the equally memorable stench.
In my visits over the next 25 years, Kolkata — and much of India — seemed little changed. China, where the national bird was jokingly said to be the crane, would be transformed every year or two, while Kolkata was always the same: a decrepit city where barefoot men pulled rickshaws beside fetid canals.
That’s why India has been a bit of an embarrassment for those of us who believe in democracy, especially when compared with China. The Communist Party in China did a much better job fighting poverty than democratically elected Indian governments. India tolerated dissent, but it also tolerated inefficiency, disease and illiteracy.
But after my trips to India and China this year, I think all that may be changing. Despite the global economic slowdown, India’s economy is now hurtling along at more than 8 percent per year. Yep, India is now a “tiger economy.”
The technology zones around Bangalore in southern India have been booming for years, but what is changing is that the rise is gaining traction across the country — even here in Kolkata. It’s stunning to see the new high-rise towers in Kolkata, new air-conditioned shopping malls, new infrastructure projects, new businesses.
In elections this month, the longtime Communist Party government here in the state of West Bengal was ousted, and the new chief minister is a woman and a dynamo, Mamata Banerjee. After the latest elections, she’s part of a broader trend of charismatic female politicians: one-third of India’s people are now ruled by chief ministers who are women.
The northern state of Bihar used to be even more of an embarrassment. For many years, gangsters played a major role in government there, and nothing worked. I once visited a health clinic in Bihar where employees dumped medicines in a pit in the ground, so they wouldn’t have to dispense them. I visited a school in Bihar where teachers never bothered to show up. I visited villages where gangsters raped, robbed and ruled at their pleasure. Businesses fled, kidnapping became rampant, and Bihar seemed hopeless.
Yet Bihar has, wondrously, turned around since 2005, when a reformer named Nitish Kumar took over as chief minister. There are still enormous inefficiencies, but crime has been suppressed, corruption has diminished, and the local economy is booming at double-digit rates. And if Bihar can turn around, any Indian region can.
Look, India still lags far behind China, it faces risks of Pakistani extremism, it needs further economic reforms, and it too readily accepts inefficiency as the natural order of the universe. India’s education and health system is a disgrace, especially in rural areas; Bangladesh does a much better job, despite being poorer. But change is in the air in India. Infant mortality is dropping, voters are pushing for better governance, and I think India has three advantages over China in their economic rivalry in the coming decades.
First, India’s independent news media and grass-roots civic organizations — sectors that barely exist in China — are becoming watchdogs against corruption and inefficiency. My hunch is that kleptocracy reached its apogee and is now waning in India, while in China it continues to get worse. I’ve written scathingly about India’s human trafficking and oppression of women, but it’s also true that civil society is addressing these issues.
Second, China’s economy may be slowed by the aging of its population, while India’s younger population will lead to a “demographic dividend” in coming decades. (Indian overpopulation is still a problem, but the average woman now has 2.6 children, and the figure is dropping.) Likewise, China already reaped the economic advantages of empowering its women, while India is just beginning to usher the female half of its population into the formal labor force.
Third, India has managed religious and ethnic tensions pretty well, aside from the disgraceful anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002. The Sikh challenge in the Punjab has dissipated. Muslims have been president of India three times, and are prominent in business and the movie industry; perhaps as a result, India has the world’s third-largest Muslim population (after Indonesia and Pakistan) but few jihadis. And while India has sometimes behaved brutally in Kashmir, civil society watchdogs are pressing for better behavior there. In China, by contrast, tensions with ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs are worsening.
China’s autocrats are extraordinarily competent, in a way that India’s democrats are not. But traveling in India these days is a heartening experience: my hunch is that the world’s largest democracy increasingly will be a source not of embarrassment but of pride.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opini ... emc=tha212
June 8, 2011
In India, Dynamism Wrestles With Dysfunction
By JIM YARDLEY
GURGAON, India — In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world’s most respected corporations.
Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.
With its shiny buildings and galloping economy, Gurgaon is often portrayed as a symbol of a rising “new” India, yet it also represents a riddle at the heart of India’s rapid growth: how can a new city become an international economic engine without basic public services? How can a huge country flirt with double-digit growth despite widespread corruption, inefficiency and governmental dysfunction?
In Gurgaon and elsewhere in India, the answer is that growth usually occurs despite the government rather than because of it. India and China are often considered to be the world’s rising economic powers, yet if China’s growth has been led by the state, India’s growth is often impeded by the state. China’s authoritarian leaders have built world-class infrastructure; India’s infrastructure and bureaucracy are both considered woefully outdated.
Yet over the past decade, India has emerged as one of the world’s most important new engines of growth, despite itself. Even now, with its economy feeling the pressure from global inflation and higher interest rates, some economists predict that India will become the world’s third largest economy within 15 years and could much sooner supplant China as the fastest-growing major economy.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world ... s&emc=tha2
In India, Dynamism Wrestles With Dysfunction
By JIM YARDLEY
GURGAON, India — In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world’s most respected corporations.
Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.
With its shiny buildings and galloping economy, Gurgaon is often portrayed as a symbol of a rising “new” India, yet it also represents a riddle at the heart of India’s rapid growth: how can a new city become an international economic engine without basic public services? How can a huge country flirt with double-digit growth despite widespread corruption, inefficiency and governmental dysfunction?
In Gurgaon and elsewhere in India, the answer is that growth usually occurs despite the government rather than because of it. India and China are often considered to be the world’s rising economic powers, yet if China’s growth has been led by the state, India’s growth is often impeded by the state. China’s authoritarian leaders have built world-class infrastructure; India’s infrastructure and bureaucracy are both considered woefully outdated.
Yet over the past decade, India has emerged as one of the world’s most important new engines of growth, despite itself. Even now, with its economy feeling the pressure from global inflation and higher interest rates, some economists predict that India will become the world’s third largest economy within 15 years and could much sooner supplant China as the fastest-growing major economy.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world ... s&emc=tha2
November 20, 2011
How China Can Defeat America
By YAN XUETONG
Beijing
WITH China’s growing influence over the global economy, and its increasing ability to project military power, competition between the United States and China is inevitable. Leaders of both countries assert optimistically that the competition can be managed without clashes that threaten the global order.
Most academic analysts are not so sanguine. If history is any guide, China’s rise does indeed pose a challenge to America. Rising powers seek to gain more authority in the global system, and declining powers rarely go down without a fight. And given the differences between the Chinese and American political systems, pessimists might believe that there is an even higher likelihood of war.
I am a political realist. Western analysts have labeled my political views “hawkish,” and the truth is that I have never overvalued the importance of morality in international relations. But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers.
I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage.
It was perhaps the greatest period for Chinese thought, and several schools competed for ideological supremacy and political influence. They converged on one crucial insight: The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership. Rulers who acted in accordance with moral norms whenever possible tended to win the race for leadership over the long term.
China was unified by the ruthless king of Qin in 221 B.C., but his short-lived rule was not nearly as successful as that of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, who drew on a mixture of legalistic realism and Confucian “soft power” to rule the country for over 50 years, from 140 B.C. until 86 B.C.
According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, there were three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny. Humane authority won the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny — based on military force — inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic powers lay in between: they did not cheat the people at home or cheat allies abroad. But they were frequently indifferent to moral concerns and often used violence against non-allies. The philosophers generally agreed that humane authority would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny.
Such theories may seem far removed from our own day, but there are striking parallels. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once told me that he believed that ancient Chinese thought was more likely than any foreign ideology to become the dominant intellectual force behind Chinese foreign policy.
The fragmentation of the pre-Qin era resembles the global divisions of our times, and the prescriptions provided by political theorists from that era are directly relevant today — namely that states relying on military or economic power without concern for morally informed leadership are bound to fail.
Unfortunately, such views are not so influential in this age of economic determinism, even if governments often pay lip service to them. The Chinese government claims that the political leadership of the Communist Party is the basis of China’s economic miracle, but it often acts as though competition with the United States will be played out on the economic field alone. And in America, politicians regularly attribute progress, but never failure, to their own leadership.
Both governments must understand that political leadership, rather than throwing money at problems, will determine who wins the race for global supremacy.
Many people wrongly believe that China can improve its foreign relations only by significantly increasing economic aid. But it’s hard to buy affection; such “friendship” does not stand the test of difficult times.
How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.
This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness.
In other countries, China must display humane authority in order to compete with the United States, which remains the world’s pre-eminent hegemonic power. Military strength underpins hegemony and helps to explain why the United States has so many allies. President Obama has made strategic mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but his actions also demonstrate that Washington is capable of leading three foreign wars simultaneously. By contrast, China’s army has not been involved in any war since 1984, with Vietnam, and very few of its high-ranking officers, let alone its soldiers, have any battlefield experience.
America enjoys much better relations with the rest of the world than China in terms of both quantity and quality. America has more than 50 formal military allies, while China has none. North Korea and Pakistan are only quasi-allies of China. The former established a formal alliance with China in 1961, but there have been no joint military maneuvers and no arms sales for decades. China and Pakistan have substantial military cooperation, but they have no formal military alliance binding them together.
To shape a friendly international environment for its rise, Beijing needs to develop more high-quality diplomatic and military relationships than Washington. No leading power is able to have friendly relations with every country in the world, thus the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.
China must also recognize that it is a rising power and assume the responsibilities that come with that status. For example, when it comes to providing protection for weaker powers, as the United States has done in Europe and the Persian Gulf, China needs to create additional regional security arrangements with surrounding countries according to the model of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a regional forum that includes China, Russia and several central Asian countries.
And politically, China should draw on its tradition of meritocracy. Top government officials should be chosen according to their virtue and wisdom, and not simply technical and administrative ability. China should also open up and choose officials from across the world who meet its standards, so as to improve its governance.
The Tang dynasty — which lasted from the 7th century to the 10th and was perhaps China’s most glorious period — employed a great number of foreigners as high-ranking officials. China should do the same today and compete with America to attract talented immigrants.
OVER the next decade, China’s new leaders will be drawn from a generation that experienced the hardships of the Cultural Revolution. They are resolute and will most likely value political principles more than material benefits. These leaders must play a larger role on the world stage and offer more security protection and economic support to less powerful countries.
This will mean competing with the United States politically, economically and technologically. Such competition may cause diplomatic tensions, but there is little danger of military clashes.
That’s because future Chinese-American competition will differ from that between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Neither China nor America needs proxy wars to protect its strategic interests or to gain access to natural resources and technology.
China’s quest to enhance its world leadership status and America’s effort to maintain its present position is a zero-sum game. It is the battle for people’s hearts and minds that will determine who eventually prevails. And, as China’s ancient philosophers predicted, the country that displays more humane authority will win.
Yan Xuetong, the author of “Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power,” is a professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. This essay was translated by Zhaowen Wu and David Liu from the Chinese.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/opini ... emc=tha212
How China Can Defeat America
By YAN XUETONG
Beijing
WITH China’s growing influence over the global economy, and its increasing ability to project military power, competition between the United States and China is inevitable. Leaders of both countries assert optimistically that the competition can be managed without clashes that threaten the global order.
Most academic analysts are not so sanguine. If history is any guide, China’s rise does indeed pose a challenge to America. Rising powers seek to gain more authority in the global system, and declining powers rarely go down without a fight. And given the differences between the Chinese and American political systems, pessimists might believe that there is an even higher likelihood of war.
I am a political realist. Western analysts have labeled my political views “hawkish,” and the truth is that I have never overvalued the importance of morality in international relations. But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers.
I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage.
It was perhaps the greatest period for Chinese thought, and several schools competed for ideological supremacy and political influence. They converged on one crucial insight: The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership. Rulers who acted in accordance with moral norms whenever possible tended to win the race for leadership over the long term.
China was unified by the ruthless king of Qin in 221 B.C., but his short-lived rule was not nearly as successful as that of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, who drew on a mixture of legalistic realism and Confucian “soft power” to rule the country for over 50 years, from 140 B.C. until 86 B.C.
According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, there were three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny. Humane authority won the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny — based on military force — inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic powers lay in between: they did not cheat the people at home or cheat allies abroad. But they were frequently indifferent to moral concerns and often used violence against non-allies. The philosophers generally agreed that humane authority would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny.
Such theories may seem far removed from our own day, but there are striking parallels. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once told me that he believed that ancient Chinese thought was more likely than any foreign ideology to become the dominant intellectual force behind Chinese foreign policy.
The fragmentation of the pre-Qin era resembles the global divisions of our times, and the prescriptions provided by political theorists from that era are directly relevant today — namely that states relying on military or economic power without concern for morally informed leadership are bound to fail.
Unfortunately, such views are not so influential in this age of economic determinism, even if governments often pay lip service to them. The Chinese government claims that the political leadership of the Communist Party is the basis of China’s economic miracle, but it often acts as though competition with the United States will be played out on the economic field alone. And in America, politicians regularly attribute progress, but never failure, to their own leadership.
Both governments must understand that political leadership, rather than throwing money at problems, will determine who wins the race for global supremacy.
Many people wrongly believe that China can improve its foreign relations only by significantly increasing economic aid. But it’s hard to buy affection; such “friendship” does not stand the test of difficult times.
How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.
This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness.
In other countries, China must display humane authority in order to compete with the United States, which remains the world’s pre-eminent hegemonic power. Military strength underpins hegemony and helps to explain why the United States has so many allies. President Obama has made strategic mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but his actions also demonstrate that Washington is capable of leading three foreign wars simultaneously. By contrast, China’s army has not been involved in any war since 1984, with Vietnam, and very few of its high-ranking officers, let alone its soldiers, have any battlefield experience.
America enjoys much better relations with the rest of the world than China in terms of both quantity and quality. America has more than 50 formal military allies, while China has none. North Korea and Pakistan are only quasi-allies of China. The former established a formal alliance with China in 1961, but there have been no joint military maneuvers and no arms sales for decades. China and Pakistan have substantial military cooperation, but they have no formal military alliance binding them together.
To shape a friendly international environment for its rise, Beijing needs to develop more high-quality diplomatic and military relationships than Washington. No leading power is able to have friendly relations with every country in the world, thus the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.
China must also recognize that it is a rising power and assume the responsibilities that come with that status. For example, when it comes to providing protection for weaker powers, as the United States has done in Europe and the Persian Gulf, China needs to create additional regional security arrangements with surrounding countries according to the model of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a regional forum that includes China, Russia and several central Asian countries.
And politically, China should draw on its tradition of meritocracy. Top government officials should be chosen according to their virtue and wisdom, and not simply technical and administrative ability. China should also open up and choose officials from across the world who meet its standards, so as to improve its governance.
The Tang dynasty — which lasted from the 7th century to the 10th and was perhaps China’s most glorious period — employed a great number of foreigners as high-ranking officials. China should do the same today and compete with America to attract talented immigrants.
OVER the next decade, China’s new leaders will be drawn from a generation that experienced the hardships of the Cultural Revolution. They are resolute and will most likely value political principles more than material benefits. These leaders must play a larger role on the world stage and offer more security protection and economic support to less powerful countries.
This will mean competing with the United States politically, economically and technologically. Such competition may cause diplomatic tensions, but there is little danger of military clashes.
That’s because future Chinese-American competition will differ from that between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Neither China nor America needs proxy wars to protect its strategic interests or to gain access to natural resources and technology.
China’s quest to enhance its world leadership status and America’s effort to maintain its present position is a zero-sum game. It is the battle for people’s hearts and minds that will determine who eventually prevails. And, as China’s ancient philosophers predicted, the country that displays more humane authority will win.
Yan Xuetong, the author of “Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power,” is a professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. This essay was translated by Zhaowen Wu and David Liu from the Chinese.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/opini ... emc=tha212
October 2, 2012
China Needs Its Own Dream
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Nov. 8, China is set to hold the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party. We already know who will be the next party leader: Vice President Xi Jinping. What we don’t know is what matters: Does Xi have a “Chinese Dream” that is different from the “American Dream?” Because if Xi’s dream for China’s emerging middle class — 300 million people expected to grow to 800 million by 2025 — is just like the American Dream (a big car, a big house and Big Macs for all) then we need another planet.
Spend a week in China and you’ll see why. Here’s a Shanghai Daily headline from Sept. 7: “City Warned of Water Resource Shortage.” The article said: “Shanghai may face a shortage of water resources if the population continues to soar. ... The current capacity of the city’s water supply was about 16 million tons per day, which is able to cover the demand of 26 million people. However, once the population reaches 30 million, the demand would rise to 18 million tons per day, exceeding the current capacity.” Shanghai will hit 30 million in about seven years!
“Success in the ‘American Dream,’ ” notes Peggy Liu, the founder of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, or Juccce, “used to just mean a house, a family of four, and two cars, but now it’s escalated to conspicuous consumption as epitomized by Kim Kardashian. China simply cannot follow that path — or the planet will be stripped bare of natural resources to make all that the Chinese consumers want to consume.”
Liu, an M.I.T. graduate and former McKinsey consultant, argues that Chinese today are yearning to create a new national identity, one that merges traditional Chinese values, like balance, respect and flow, with its modern urban reality. She believes that the creation of a sustainable “Chinese Dream” that breaks the historic link between income growth and rising resource consumption could be a part of that new identity, one that could resonate around the world.
So Juccce has been working with Chinese mayors and social networks, sustainability experts and Western advertising agencies to catalyze sustainable habits in the emergent consuming class by redefining personal prosperity — which so many more Chinese are gaining access to for the first time — as “more access to better products and services, not necessarily by owning them, but also by sharing — so everyone gets a piece of a better pie.”
That means, among other things, better public transportation, better public spaces and better housing that encourages dense vertical buildings, which are more energy efficient and make shared services easier to deliver, and more e-learning and e-commerce opportunities that reduce commuting. Emphasizing access versus ownership isn’t just more sustainable, it helps ease friction from the differences between rich and poor. Indeed, Juccce translates Chinese Dream as “Harmonious and Happy Dream” in Mandarin. (“Green” doesn’t sell in China.)
Chinese are more open to this than ever. A decade ago, the prevailing attitude was, “Hey, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years. Now it is our turn.” A couple of weeks ago, though, I took part in the opening day of Tongji University’s Urban Planning and Design Institute in Shanghai and asked students whether they still felt that way. I got a very different answer. Zhou Lin, a graduate student studying energy systems, stood up and declared, with classmates nodding, “You can politicize this issue as much as you want, but, in the end, it doesn’t do us any good.” It is not about fairness anymore, he said. It is in China’s best interest to find a “cleaner” growth path.
To say China needs its own dream in no way excuses Americans or Europeans from redefining theirs. We all need to be rethinking how we sustain rising middle classes with rising incomes in a warming world, otherwise the convergence of warming, consuming and crowding will mean we grow ourselves to death.
China’s latest five-year plan — 2011-15 — has set impressive sustainability goals for cutting energy and water intensity per unit of G.D.P. All of these goals are critical to the greening of China, but they are not sufficient, argues Liu. With retail sales growing 17 percent a year since 2005 and urban incomes up 150 percent in the last decade, “the government must also have a plan to steer consumer behavior toward a sustainable path,” adds Liu. “But it doesn’t yet.”
So Xi Jinping has two very different challenges from his predecessor. He needs to ensure that the Communist Party continues to rule — despite awakened citizen pressure for reform — and that requires more high growth to keep the population satisfied with party control. But he also needs to manage all the downsides of that growth — from widening income gaps to massive rural-urban migration to choking pollution and environmental destruction. The only way to square all that is with a new Chinese Dream that marries people’s expectations of prosperity with a more sustainable China. Does Xi know that, and, if he does, can he move the system fast enough? So much is riding on the answers to those questions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/opini ... h_20121003
China Needs Its Own Dream
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Nov. 8, China is set to hold the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party. We already know who will be the next party leader: Vice President Xi Jinping. What we don’t know is what matters: Does Xi have a “Chinese Dream” that is different from the “American Dream?” Because if Xi’s dream for China’s emerging middle class — 300 million people expected to grow to 800 million by 2025 — is just like the American Dream (a big car, a big house and Big Macs for all) then we need another planet.
Spend a week in China and you’ll see why. Here’s a Shanghai Daily headline from Sept. 7: “City Warned of Water Resource Shortage.” The article said: “Shanghai may face a shortage of water resources if the population continues to soar. ... The current capacity of the city’s water supply was about 16 million tons per day, which is able to cover the demand of 26 million people. However, once the population reaches 30 million, the demand would rise to 18 million tons per day, exceeding the current capacity.” Shanghai will hit 30 million in about seven years!
“Success in the ‘American Dream,’ ” notes Peggy Liu, the founder of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, or Juccce, “used to just mean a house, a family of four, and two cars, but now it’s escalated to conspicuous consumption as epitomized by Kim Kardashian. China simply cannot follow that path — or the planet will be stripped bare of natural resources to make all that the Chinese consumers want to consume.”
Liu, an M.I.T. graduate and former McKinsey consultant, argues that Chinese today are yearning to create a new national identity, one that merges traditional Chinese values, like balance, respect and flow, with its modern urban reality. She believes that the creation of a sustainable “Chinese Dream” that breaks the historic link between income growth and rising resource consumption could be a part of that new identity, one that could resonate around the world.
So Juccce has been working with Chinese mayors and social networks, sustainability experts and Western advertising agencies to catalyze sustainable habits in the emergent consuming class by redefining personal prosperity — which so many more Chinese are gaining access to for the first time — as “more access to better products and services, not necessarily by owning them, but also by sharing — so everyone gets a piece of a better pie.”
That means, among other things, better public transportation, better public spaces and better housing that encourages dense vertical buildings, which are more energy efficient and make shared services easier to deliver, and more e-learning and e-commerce opportunities that reduce commuting. Emphasizing access versus ownership isn’t just more sustainable, it helps ease friction from the differences between rich and poor. Indeed, Juccce translates Chinese Dream as “Harmonious and Happy Dream” in Mandarin. (“Green” doesn’t sell in China.)
Chinese are more open to this than ever. A decade ago, the prevailing attitude was, “Hey, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years. Now it is our turn.” A couple of weeks ago, though, I took part in the opening day of Tongji University’s Urban Planning and Design Institute in Shanghai and asked students whether they still felt that way. I got a very different answer. Zhou Lin, a graduate student studying energy systems, stood up and declared, with classmates nodding, “You can politicize this issue as much as you want, but, in the end, it doesn’t do us any good.” It is not about fairness anymore, he said. It is in China’s best interest to find a “cleaner” growth path.
To say China needs its own dream in no way excuses Americans or Europeans from redefining theirs. We all need to be rethinking how we sustain rising middle classes with rising incomes in a warming world, otherwise the convergence of warming, consuming and crowding will mean we grow ourselves to death.
China’s latest five-year plan — 2011-15 — has set impressive sustainability goals for cutting energy and water intensity per unit of G.D.P. All of these goals are critical to the greening of China, but they are not sufficient, argues Liu. With retail sales growing 17 percent a year since 2005 and urban incomes up 150 percent in the last decade, “the government must also have a plan to steer consumer behavior toward a sustainable path,” adds Liu. “But it doesn’t yet.”
So Xi Jinping has two very different challenges from his predecessor. He needs to ensure that the Communist Party continues to rule — despite awakened citizen pressure for reform — and that requires more high growth to keep the population satisfied with party control. But he also needs to manage all the downsides of that growth — from widening income gaps to massive rural-urban migration to choking pollution and environmental destruction. The only way to square all that is with a new Chinese Dream that marries people’s expectations of prosperity with a more sustainable China. Does Xi know that, and, if he does, can he move the system fast enough? So much is riding on the answers to those questions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/opini ... h_20121003
February 5, 2013
India vs. China vs. Egypt
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NEW DELHI
It’s hard to escape a visit to India without someone asking you to compare it to China. This visit was no exception, but I think it’s more revealing to widen the aperture and compare India, China and Egypt. India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society, bubbling with elections and associations at every level. China has a muscular central government but a weak civil society, yet one that is clearly straining to express itself more. Egypt, alas, has a weak government and a very weak civil society, one that was suppressed for 50 years, denied real elections and, therefore, is easy prey to have its revolution diverted by the one group that could organize, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the one free space, the mosque. But there is one thing all three have in common: gigantic youth bulges under the age of 30, increasingly connected by technology but very unevenly educated.
My view: Of these three, the one that will thrive the most in the 21st century will be the one that is most successful at converting its youth bulge into a “demographic dividend” that keeps paying off every decade, as opposed to a “demographic bomb” that keeps going off every decade. That will be the society that provides more of its youth with the education, jobs and voice they seek to realize their full potential.
This race is about “who can enable and inspire more of its youth to help build broad societal prosperity,” argues Dov Seidman, the author of “How” and C.E.O. of LRN, which has an operating center in India. “And that’s all about leaders, parents and teachers creating environments where young people can be on a quest, not just for a job, but for a career — for a better life that doesn’t just surpass but far surpasses their parents.” Countries that fail to do that will have a youth bulge that is not only unemployed, but unemployable, he argued. “They will be disconnected in a connected world, despairing as they watch others build and realize their potential and curiosity.”
If your country has either a strong government or a strong civil society, it has the ability to rise to this challenge. If it has neither, it will have real problems, which is why Egypt is struggling. China leads in providing its youth bulge with education, infrastructure and jobs, but lags in unleashing freedom and curiosity. India is the most intriguing case — if it can get its governance and corruption under control. The quest for upward mobility here, especially among women and girls, is palpable. I took part in the graduation ceremony for The Energy and Resources Institute last week. Of 12 awards for the top students, 11 went to women.
“India today has 560 million young people under the age of 25 and 225 million between the ages of 10 and 19,” explained Shashi Tharoor, India’s minister of state for human resource development. “So for the next 40 years we should have a youthful working-age population” at a time when China and the broad industrialized world is aging. According to Tharoor, the average age in China today is around 38, whereas in India it’s around 28. In 20 years, that gap will be much larger. So this could be a huge demographic dividend — “provided that we can educate our youth — offering vocational training to some and university to others to equip them to take advantage of what the 21st-century global economy offers,” said Tharoor. “If we get it right, India becomes the workhorse of the world. If we get it wrong, there is nothing worse than unemployable, frustrated” youth.
Indeed, some of India’s disaffected youth are turning to Maoism in rural areas. “We have Maoists among our tribal populations, who have not benefited from the opportunities of modern India,” Tharoor said. There have been violent Maoist incidents in 165 of India’s 625 districts in recent years, as Maoists tap into all those left out of the “Indian dream.” So there is now a huge push here to lure poor kids into school. India runs the world’s biggest midday lunch program, serving 250 million free school lunches each day. It’s also doubled its number of Indian Institutes of Technology, from eight to 16, and is planning 14 new universities for innovation and research.
But this will all be for naught without better governance, argues Gurcharan Das, the former C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble India, whose latest book is “India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State.” “The aspirational India has no one to vote for, because no one is talking the language of public goods. Why should it take us 15 years to get justice in the courts or 12 years to build a road? The gap between [youth] aspirations and government performance is huge. My thesis is that India has risen despite the state. It is a story of public failure and private success.”
That is what Das means by India grows at night, when government sleeps. “But India must learn to grow during the day,” he said. “If India fixes its governance before China fixes its politics that is who will win. ... You need a strong state and a strong society, so the society can hold the state accountable. India will only get a strong state when the best of society join the government, and China will only get a strong society when the best Mandarins go into the private sector.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/opini ... h_20130206
India vs. China vs. Egypt
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NEW DELHI
It’s hard to escape a visit to India without someone asking you to compare it to China. This visit was no exception, but I think it’s more revealing to widen the aperture and compare India, China and Egypt. India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society, bubbling with elections and associations at every level. China has a muscular central government but a weak civil society, yet one that is clearly straining to express itself more. Egypt, alas, has a weak government and a very weak civil society, one that was suppressed for 50 years, denied real elections and, therefore, is easy prey to have its revolution diverted by the one group that could organize, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the one free space, the mosque. But there is one thing all three have in common: gigantic youth bulges under the age of 30, increasingly connected by technology but very unevenly educated.
My view: Of these three, the one that will thrive the most in the 21st century will be the one that is most successful at converting its youth bulge into a “demographic dividend” that keeps paying off every decade, as opposed to a “demographic bomb” that keeps going off every decade. That will be the society that provides more of its youth with the education, jobs and voice they seek to realize their full potential.
This race is about “who can enable and inspire more of its youth to help build broad societal prosperity,” argues Dov Seidman, the author of “How” and C.E.O. of LRN, which has an operating center in India. “And that’s all about leaders, parents and teachers creating environments where young people can be on a quest, not just for a job, but for a career — for a better life that doesn’t just surpass but far surpasses their parents.” Countries that fail to do that will have a youth bulge that is not only unemployed, but unemployable, he argued. “They will be disconnected in a connected world, despairing as they watch others build and realize their potential and curiosity.”
If your country has either a strong government or a strong civil society, it has the ability to rise to this challenge. If it has neither, it will have real problems, which is why Egypt is struggling. China leads in providing its youth bulge with education, infrastructure and jobs, but lags in unleashing freedom and curiosity. India is the most intriguing case — if it can get its governance and corruption under control. The quest for upward mobility here, especially among women and girls, is palpable. I took part in the graduation ceremony for The Energy and Resources Institute last week. Of 12 awards for the top students, 11 went to women.
“India today has 560 million young people under the age of 25 and 225 million between the ages of 10 and 19,” explained Shashi Tharoor, India’s minister of state for human resource development. “So for the next 40 years we should have a youthful working-age population” at a time when China and the broad industrialized world is aging. According to Tharoor, the average age in China today is around 38, whereas in India it’s around 28. In 20 years, that gap will be much larger. So this could be a huge demographic dividend — “provided that we can educate our youth — offering vocational training to some and university to others to equip them to take advantage of what the 21st-century global economy offers,” said Tharoor. “If we get it right, India becomes the workhorse of the world. If we get it wrong, there is nothing worse than unemployable, frustrated” youth.
Indeed, some of India’s disaffected youth are turning to Maoism in rural areas. “We have Maoists among our tribal populations, who have not benefited from the opportunities of modern India,” Tharoor said. There have been violent Maoist incidents in 165 of India’s 625 districts in recent years, as Maoists tap into all those left out of the “Indian dream.” So there is now a huge push here to lure poor kids into school. India runs the world’s biggest midday lunch program, serving 250 million free school lunches each day. It’s also doubled its number of Indian Institutes of Technology, from eight to 16, and is planning 14 new universities for innovation and research.
But this will all be for naught without better governance, argues Gurcharan Das, the former C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble India, whose latest book is “India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State.” “The aspirational India has no one to vote for, because no one is talking the language of public goods. Why should it take us 15 years to get justice in the courts or 12 years to build a road? The gap between [youth] aspirations and government performance is huge. My thesis is that India has risen despite the state. It is a story of public failure and private success.”
That is what Das means by India grows at night, when government sleeps. “But India must learn to grow during the day,” he said. “If India fixes its governance before China fixes its politics that is who will win. ... You need a strong state and a strong society, so the society can hold the state accountable. India will only get a strong state when the best of society join the government, and China will only get a strong society when the best Mandarins go into the private sector.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/opini ... h_20130206
Not just largest economy, 26 other ways China has surpassed US
China remains the biggest foreign holder of US government debt, holding an estimated $1.27 trillion in US Treasury bonds.
In terms of purchasing power, China now has the largest economy on the entire planet, but that is not the only area where China has surpassed the United States.
China also accounts for more total global trade than the U.S. does, China consumes more energy than the U.S. does, and China now manufactures more goods than the U.S. does. In other words, the era of American economic dominance is rapidly ending.
Global economic power is making a dramatic shift to the east, and that is going to have huge implications for our future. We already owe the Chinese well over a trillion dollars, and as our economic infrastructure crumbles we are feverishly borrowing even more money in a desperate attempt to prop up our falling standard of living. We can’t seem to match the work ethic, inventiveness and determination of China and other Asian nations and it is showing. If we continue down this path, what will the future look like for future generations of Americans?
In terms of raw GDP, the U.S. is still number one, at least for now. But according to the IMF, China is now the number one economy on the entire planet in terms of purchasing power…
The simple logic is that prices aren’t the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than San Francisco, so it’s not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.
So the IMF measures both GDP in market exchange terms, and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world’s biggest economy.
When I first learned about this, I was quite stunned.
I knew that China’s economy had been roaring, but like most Americans I just assumed that the U.S. would continue to remain head and shoulders above everyone else.
Unfortunately, things are changing at a pace that is much faster than most people ever thought possible. The following are 26 other ways that China has surpassed America…
#1 When you add up all imports and exports, China now accounts for more total global trade than the United States does.
#2 There is now more total corporate debt in China than there is in the United States.
#3 During 2013, we sold about 121 billion dollars worth of stuff to the Chinese, but they sold about 440 billion dollars worth of stuff to us. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#4 China is now the leading manufacturer of goods in the entire world.
#5 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China’s high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports.
#6 The United States had been the leading consumer of energy in the world for about 100 years, but during the summer of 2010 China took over the number one spot.
#7 China now has the largest new car market in the entire world.
#8 China has more foreign currency reserves than anyone else on the planet.
#9 China is the number one gold producer in the world.
#10 China is also the number one gold importer in the world.
#11 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles. But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.
#12 China is also expected to soon become the global leader in patent filings.
#13 China awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.
#14 China has the world’s fastest train and the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network.
#15 China uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.
#16 Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.
#17 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.
#18 There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork producing nations combined.
#19 China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.
#20 China produces more than twice as much cotton as the United States does.
#21 China produces more than three times as much coal as the United States does.
#22 China now produces 11 times as much steel as the United States does.
#23 China controls over 90 percent of the total global supply of rare earth elements.
#24 An investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services found more than one million counterfeit Chinese parts in the Department of Defense supply chain.
#25 According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment. According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, the number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash.”
#26 Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.
The Chinese are using some of their new wealth to buy up land, properties and businesses here in the United States. In fact, just the other day we learned that a group from China is buying New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.
For much, much more on this trend, please see some of my previous articles…
-“The Chinese Are Acquiring Large Chunks Of Land In Communities All Over America”
-“45 Signs That China Is Colonizing America”
-“Meet Your New Boss: Buying Large Employers Will Enable China To Dominate 1000s Of U.S. Communities”
And most Americans don’t realize this, but Chinese-made cars will soon be sold in the United States.
The following is from a recent WND article…
Chinese-made cars will be making their way to the U.S. next year, and guess which company is going to start exporting them to our shores?
A Chinese company, of course.
Chinese-owned Volvo’s parent company, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, will begin exporting its S60L from China to the United States as early as next year, according to a Reuters report which quoted a senior Volvo executive.
Volvo is trying to take advantage of two new Chinese factories that will make up an export hub to send vehicles to the U.S. and Russia.
Everywhere you look, China is dominating and America is in decline.
If this was a sporting event for little kids, the “mercy rule” would have been invoked by now.
Unfortunately, there is no “mercy rule” on the global economic stage.
The United States is going to have to get things together if it wants to have any hope of competing with the Chinese in the future.
The Chinese are kicking our tails and they know it.
One survey found that 75 percent of those living in China believe that their country is on the right track.
On the other hand, Americans are not nearly as optimistic.
According to one average of recent surveys, only 28 percent of Americans believe that the United States is on the right track.
I think that those numbers say a lot. We have been in decline for quite some time, but we can never seem to get the ship righted.
Hopefully our leaders can start coming up with some solutions soon, because we are running out of time
China remains the biggest foreign holder of US government debt, holding an estimated $1.27 trillion in US Treasury bonds.
In terms of purchasing power, China now has the largest economy on the entire planet, but that is not the only area where China has surpassed the United States.
China also accounts for more total global trade than the U.S. does, China consumes more energy than the U.S. does, and China now manufactures more goods than the U.S. does. In other words, the era of American economic dominance is rapidly ending.
Global economic power is making a dramatic shift to the east, and that is going to have huge implications for our future. We already owe the Chinese well over a trillion dollars, and as our economic infrastructure crumbles we are feverishly borrowing even more money in a desperate attempt to prop up our falling standard of living. We can’t seem to match the work ethic, inventiveness and determination of China and other Asian nations and it is showing. If we continue down this path, what will the future look like for future generations of Americans?
In terms of raw GDP, the U.S. is still number one, at least for now. But according to the IMF, China is now the number one economy on the entire planet in terms of purchasing power…
The simple logic is that prices aren’t the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than San Francisco, so it’s not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.
So the IMF measures both GDP in market exchange terms, and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world’s biggest economy.
When I first learned about this, I was quite stunned.
I knew that China’s economy had been roaring, but like most Americans I just assumed that the U.S. would continue to remain head and shoulders above everyone else.
Unfortunately, things are changing at a pace that is much faster than most people ever thought possible. The following are 26 other ways that China has surpassed America…
#1 When you add up all imports and exports, China now accounts for more total global trade than the United States does.
#2 There is now more total corporate debt in China than there is in the United States.
#3 During 2013, we sold about 121 billion dollars worth of stuff to the Chinese, but they sold about 440 billion dollars worth of stuff to us. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#4 China is now the leading manufacturer of goods in the entire world.
#5 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China’s high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports.
#6 The United States had been the leading consumer of energy in the world for about 100 years, but during the summer of 2010 China took over the number one spot.
#7 China now has the largest new car market in the entire world.
#8 China has more foreign currency reserves than anyone else on the planet.
#9 China is the number one gold producer in the world.
#10 China is also the number one gold importer in the world.
#11 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles. But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.
#12 China is also expected to soon become the global leader in patent filings.
#13 China awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.
#14 China has the world’s fastest train and the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network.
#15 China uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.
#16 Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.
#17 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.
#18 There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork producing nations combined.
#19 China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.
#20 China produces more than twice as much cotton as the United States does.
#21 China produces more than three times as much coal as the United States does.
#22 China now produces 11 times as much steel as the United States does.
#23 China controls over 90 percent of the total global supply of rare earth elements.
#24 An investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services found more than one million counterfeit Chinese parts in the Department of Defense supply chain.
#25 According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment. According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, the number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash.”
#26 Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.
The Chinese are using some of their new wealth to buy up land, properties and businesses here in the United States. In fact, just the other day we learned that a group from China is buying New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.
For much, much more on this trend, please see some of my previous articles…
-“The Chinese Are Acquiring Large Chunks Of Land In Communities All Over America”
-“45 Signs That China Is Colonizing America”
-“Meet Your New Boss: Buying Large Employers Will Enable China To Dominate 1000s Of U.S. Communities”
And most Americans don’t realize this, but Chinese-made cars will soon be sold in the United States.
The following is from a recent WND article…
Chinese-made cars will be making their way to the U.S. next year, and guess which company is going to start exporting them to our shores?
A Chinese company, of course.
Chinese-owned Volvo’s parent company, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, will begin exporting its S60L from China to the United States as early as next year, according to a Reuters report which quoted a senior Volvo executive.
Volvo is trying to take advantage of two new Chinese factories that will make up an export hub to send vehicles to the U.S. and Russia.
Everywhere you look, China is dominating and America is in decline.
If this was a sporting event for little kids, the “mercy rule” would have been invoked by now.
Unfortunately, there is no “mercy rule” on the global economic stage.
The United States is going to have to get things together if it wants to have any hope of competing with the Chinese in the future.
The Chinese are kicking our tails and they know it.
One survey found that 75 percent of those living in China believe that their country is on the right track.
On the other hand, Americans are not nearly as optimistic.
According to one average of recent surveys, only 28 percent of Americans believe that the United States is on the right track.
I think that those numbers say a lot. We have been in decline for quite some time, but we can never seem to get the ship righted.
Hopefully our leaders can start coming up with some solutions soon, because we are running out of time
China’s Big Plunge in Pakistan
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia have missed out on Asia’s economic boom, leaving them vulnerable to unrest. Ideally, China’s project would promote growth in Pakistan, weaken the extremists, encourage the Pakistani Army to support peace efforts in Afghanistan and begin to knit together a fragmented region with new development and trade.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/opini ... d=45305309[/b]
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia have missed out on Asia’s economic boom, leaving them vulnerable to unrest. Ideally, China’s project would promote growth in Pakistan, weaken the extremists, encourage the Pakistani Army to support peace efforts in Afghanistan and begin to knit together a fragmented region with new development and trade.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/opini ... d=45305309[/b]
Counterrevolutionary Russia
TALLOIRES, France — For much of the 20th century Russia was a revolutionary state whose objective was the global spread of communist ideology. In the 21st century it has become the preeminent counterrevolutionary power.
The escalating conflict between the West and Moscow has been portrayed as political, military and economic. It is in fact deeper than that. It is cultural. President Vladimir Putin has set himself up as the guardian of an absolutist culture against what Russia sees as the predatory and relativist culture of the West.
To listen to pro-Putin Russian intellectuals these days is to be subjected to a litany of complaints about the “revolutionary” West, with its irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, euthanasia, homosexuality and other manifestations of “decadence.” It is to be told that the West loses no opportunity to globalize these “subversive” values, often under cover of democracy promotion and human rights.
Putin’s Russia, by contrast, is portrayed in these accounts as a proud bulwark against the West’s abandonment of religious values, a nation increasingly devout in its observance of Orthodox Christianity, a country convinced that no civilization ever survived by “relativizing” sacred truths.
Beyond Putin’s annexation of Crimea and stirring-up of a small war in eastern Ukraine (although large enough to leave more than 6,000 dead), it is this decision to adopt cultural defiance of the West that suggests the confrontation with Russia will last decades. Communism was a global ideology; Putinism is less than that. But a war of ideas has begun in which counterrevolution against the godless and insinuating West is a cornerstone of Russian ideology. To some degree, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey shares Putin’s view of the West. China, meanwhile, finds uses in it.
Gone is the post-Cold War illusion of benign convergence through interdependence. Something fundamental has shifted that goes far beyond a quarrel over territory. Putin has decided to define his power in conflict with the West. The only question is whether he has limited or all-out conflict in mind.
This Russian decision has strategic implications the West is only beginning to digest. It involves an eastward pivot more substantial than President Obama’s to Asia. Putin is now more interested in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose core is China and Russia, than he is in cooperation with the G-8 (from which Russia has been suspended) or the European Union.
China reciprocates this interest to some degree because a Moscow hostile to the West is useful for the defense of its own authoritarian political model and because it sees economic opportunity in Russia and former Soviet Central Asian countries. But China’s fierce modernizing drive cannot be accomplished through backward-looking Russia. There are clear limits to the current Chinese-Russian rapprochement.
As a senior European official attending a conference organized by Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs put it, Russia’s is a “loser’s challenge” to the West, because it has given up on modernization and globalization, whereas China’s is potentially a “winner’s challenge,” because it is betting everything on a high-tech, modern economy.
Of course, being irrational and quixotic, losers’ challenges are particularly dangerous. Putin has gobbled a chunk of Ukraine after it pursued a trade pact with the European Union. He has said he’s adding 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to Russia’s stockpile. He has increased flights of nuclear-capable bombers. The message is clear: We’re leaning in on nukes.
How should the West respond? It cannot alter the appeal of its values to the world — witness the hordes of people dying in the attempt to get into the European Union. (Rich Russians have also been pouring into the West in search of the rule of law.) So what Russia sees as Western “subversion” (like the tilt of sane Ukrainians toward Europe) will continue — and it should.
The West must protect the right of peoples in the East-West in-between lands. The citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia and other states have the right to attain Western prosperity through Western institutions if they so choose. Poland and the Baltic states, now protected by membership of NATO, are inevitably magnets to them.
This new protection should borrow from the policies behind Cold War protection of Germany: firmness allied to dialogue. The West, in the words of Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s defense minister, has been “excessive” in its caution. Holding NATO exercises in Latvia, creating a new 5,000-strong rapid-reaction NATO “spearhead force,” and moving 250 tanks and other equipment into temporary bases in six East European nations is something. But the permanent and significant deployment of heavy weapons in the region is needed to send a message to Putin, as is greater European defense spending, and a clear commitment to maintain sanctions as long as Ukraine is not made whole with full control of its borders.
In the end, the very Western ideas and institutions Putin demeans will be the West’s greatest strength in the long looming struggle against Russian counterrevolution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/opini ... d=45305309
TALLOIRES, France — For much of the 20th century Russia was a revolutionary state whose objective was the global spread of communist ideology. In the 21st century it has become the preeminent counterrevolutionary power.
The escalating conflict between the West and Moscow has been portrayed as political, military and economic. It is in fact deeper than that. It is cultural. President Vladimir Putin has set himself up as the guardian of an absolutist culture against what Russia sees as the predatory and relativist culture of the West.
To listen to pro-Putin Russian intellectuals these days is to be subjected to a litany of complaints about the “revolutionary” West, with its irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, euthanasia, homosexuality and other manifestations of “decadence.” It is to be told that the West loses no opportunity to globalize these “subversive” values, often under cover of democracy promotion and human rights.
Putin’s Russia, by contrast, is portrayed in these accounts as a proud bulwark against the West’s abandonment of religious values, a nation increasingly devout in its observance of Orthodox Christianity, a country convinced that no civilization ever survived by “relativizing” sacred truths.
Beyond Putin’s annexation of Crimea and stirring-up of a small war in eastern Ukraine (although large enough to leave more than 6,000 dead), it is this decision to adopt cultural defiance of the West that suggests the confrontation with Russia will last decades. Communism was a global ideology; Putinism is less than that. But a war of ideas has begun in which counterrevolution against the godless and insinuating West is a cornerstone of Russian ideology. To some degree, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey shares Putin’s view of the West. China, meanwhile, finds uses in it.
Gone is the post-Cold War illusion of benign convergence through interdependence. Something fundamental has shifted that goes far beyond a quarrel over territory. Putin has decided to define his power in conflict with the West. The only question is whether he has limited or all-out conflict in mind.
This Russian decision has strategic implications the West is only beginning to digest. It involves an eastward pivot more substantial than President Obama’s to Asia. Putin is now more interested in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose core is China and Russia, than he is in cooperation with the G-8 (from which Russia has been suspended) or the European Union.
China reciprocates this interest to some degree because a Moscow hostile to the West is useful for the defense of its own authoritarian political model and because it sees economic opportunity in Russia and former Soviet Central Asian countries. But China’s fierce modernizing drive cannot be accomplished through backward-looking Russia. There are clear limits to the current Chinese-Russian rapprochement.
As a senior European official attending a conference organized by Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs put it, Russia’s is a “loser’s challenge” to the West, because it has given up on modernization and globalization, whereas China’s is potentially a “winner’s challenge,” because it is betting everything on a high-tech, modern economy.
Of course, being irrational and quixotic, losers’ challenges are particularly dangerous. Putin has gobbled a chunk of Ukraine after it pursued a trade pact with the European Union. He has said he’s adding 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to Russia’s stockpile. He has increased flights of nuclear-capable bombers. The message is clear: We’re leaning in on nukes.
How should the West respond? It cannot alter the appeal of its values to the world — witness the hordes of people dying in the attempt to get into the European Union. (Rich Russians have also been pouring into the West in search of the rule of law.) So what Russia sees as Western “subversion” (like the tilt of sane Ukrainians toward Europe) will continue — and it should.
The West must protect the right of peoples in the East-West in-between lands. The citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia and other states have the right to attain Western prosperity through Western institutions if they so choose. Poland and the Baltic states, now protected by membership of NATO, are inevitably magnets to them.
This new protection should borrow from the policies behind Cold War protection of Germany: firmness allied to dialogue. The West, in the words of Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s defense minister, has been “excessive” in its caution. Holding NATO exercises in Latvia, creating a new 5,000-strong rapid-reaction NATO “spearhead force,” and moving 250 tanks and other equipment into temporary bases in six East European nations is something. But the permanent and significant deployment of heavy weapons in the region is needed to send a message to Putin, as is greater European defense spending, and a clear commitment to maintain sanctions as long as Ukraine is not made whole with full control of its borders.
In the end, the very Western ideas and institutions Putin demeans will be the West’s greatest strength in the long looming struggle against Russian counterrevolution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/opini ... d=45305309
China’s Global Ambitions, With Loans and Strings Attached
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/busin ... d=45305309
Excerpt:
While China has been important to the world economy for decades, the country is now wielding its financial heft with the confidence and purpose of a global superpower. With the center of financial gravity shifting, China is aggressively asserting its economic clout to win diplomatic allies, invest its vast wealth, promote its currency and secure much-needed natural resources.
It represents a new phase in China’s evolution. As the country’s wealth has swelled and its needs have evolved, President Xi Jinping and the rest of the leadership have pushed to extend China’s reach on a global scale.
China’s currency, the renminbi, is expected to be anointed soon as a global reserve currency, putting it in an elite category with the dollar, the euro, the pound and the yen. China’s state-owned development bank has surpassed the World Bank in international lending. And its effort to create an internationally funded institution to finance transportation and other infrastructure has drawn the support of 57 countries, including several of the United States’ closest allies, despite opposition from the Obama administration.
Even the current stock market slump is unlikely to shake the country’s resolve. China has nearly $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves, which it is determined to invest overseas to earn a profit and exert its influence.
China’s growing economic power coincides with an increasingly assertive foreign policy. It is building aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and stealth jets. In a contested sea, China is turning reefs and atolls near the southern Philippines into artificial islands, with at least one airstrip able to handle the largest military planes. The United States has challenged the move, conducting surveillance flights in the area and discussing plans to send warships.
China represents “a civilization and history that awakens admiration to those who know it,” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador proclaimed on Twitter, as his jet landed in Beijing for a meeting with officials in January.
China’s leaders portray the overseas investments as symbiotic. “The current industrial cooperation between China and Latin America arrives at the right moment,” Prime Minister Li Keqiang said in a visit to Chile in late May. “China has equipment manufacturing capacity and integrated technology with competitive prices, while Latin America has the demand for infrastructure expansion and industrial upgrading.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/busin ... d=45305309
Excerpt:
While China has been important to the world economy for decades, the country is now wielding its financial heft with the confidence and purpose of a global superpower. With the center of financial gravity shifting, China is aggressively asserting its economic clout to win diplomatic allies, invest its vast wealth, promote its currency and secure much-needed natural resources.
It represents a new phase in China’s evolution. As the country’s wealth has swelled and its needs have evolved, President Xi Jinping and the rest of the leadership have pushed to extend China’s reach on a global scale.
China’s currency, the renminbi, is expected to be anointed soon as a global reserve currency, putting it in an elite category with the dollar, the euro, the pound and the yen. China’s state-owned development bank has surpassed the World Bank in international lending. And its effort to create an internationally funded institution to finance transportation and other infrastructure has drawn the support of 57 countries, including several of the United States’ closest allies, despite opposition from the Obama administration.
Even the current stock market slump is unlikely to shake the country’s resolve. China has nearly $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves, which it is determined to invest overseas to earn a profit and exert its influence.
China’s growing economic power coincides with an increasingly assertive foreign policy. It is building aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and stealth jets. In a contested sea, China is turning reefs and atolls near the southern Philippines into artificial islands, with at least one airstrip able to handle the largest military planes. The United States has challenged the move, conducting surveillance flights in the area and discussing plans to send warships.
China represents “a civilization and history that awakens admiration to those who know it,” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador proclaimed on Twitter, as his jet landed in Beijing for a meeting with officials in January.
China’s leaders portray the overseas investments as symbiotic. “The current industrial cooperation between China and Latin America arrives at the right moment,” Prime Minister Li Keqiang said in a visit to Chile in late May. “China has equipment manufacturing capacity and integrated technology with competitive prices, while Latin America has the demand for infrastructure expansion and industrial upgrading.”
The Need for Restraint in Kashmir
More than 50 years after India and Pakistan were created in the partition of the British colonial empire, the disputed region of Kashmir remains a dangerous flash point. Cross-border violence has surged in recent months, raising new fears that the attacks could spiral out of control and set off another war between the two nuclear-armed adversaries.
In the last week alone, India and Pakistan have traded heavy gunfire and mortars almost daily across the Line of Control, which divides Kashmir into regions controlled by each side. Many civilians have been killed or wounded in the violence, including eight killed and 14 wounded on Sunday, according to officials.
Each side blames the other. Experts say Pakistan has been testing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who, in a break with his predecessor, has vowed not to ignore attacks by Pakistan-backed militants on Indian targets. On July 27, gunmen dressed in military fatigues attacked an Indian police station near the border with Pakistan and at least nine people were killed.
The incident came after Mr. Modi met Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, during a regional meeting in Russia. Pakistan’s army, which draws its power from a constant state of tension with India, has often interfered when political leaders have tried to improve relations between the two countries.
Mr. Modi’s wish to strike back is understandable after many years of Indian restraint. But India, which is considerably stronger and more successful than Pakistan, has the most to lose if another war erupts. Mr. Modi recently became the first Indian prime minister in 34 years to visit the United Arab Emirates, which had been one of Pakistan’s biggest supporters but now sees the value in closer ties with India. In a joint statement, India and the emirates condemned the use of religion to justify terrorism and agreed to cooperate in counterterrorism operations.
In a sign of heightened concern over Kashmir, the United States and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, have urged India and Pakistan to exercise restraint and solve their differences through dialogue. They will have a chance to heed that advice when top Indian and Pakistani national security advisers meet later this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/opini ... d=45305309
More than 50 years after India and Pakistan were created in the partition of the British colonial empire, the disputed region of Kashmir remains a dangerous flash point. Cross-border violence has surged in recent months, raising new fears that the attacks could spiral out of control and set off another war between the two nuclear-armed adversaries.
In the last week alone, India and Pakistan have traded heavy gunfire and mortars almost daily across the Line of Control, which divides Kashmir into regions controlled by each side. Many civilians have been killed or wounded in the violence, including eight killed and 14 wounded on Sunday, according to officials.
Each side blames the other. Experts say Pakistan has been testing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who, in a break with his predecessor, has vowed not to ignore attacks by Pakistan-backed militants on Indian targets. On July 27, gunmen dressed in military fatigues attacked an Indian police station near the border with Pakistan and at least nine people were killed.
The incident came after Mr. Modi met Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, during a regional meeting in Russia. Pakistan’s army, which draws its power from a constant state of tension with India, has often interfered when political leaders have tried to improve relations between the two countries.
Mr. Modi’s wish to strike back is understandable after many years of Indian restraint. But India, which is considerably stronger and more successful than Pakistan, has the most to lose if another war erupts. Mr. Modi recently became the first Indian prime minister in 34 years to visit the United Arab Emirates, which had been one of Pakistan’s biggest supporters but now sees the value in closer ties with India. In a joint statement, India and the emirates condemned the use of religion to justify terrorism and agreed to cooperate in counterterrorism operations.
In a sign of heightened concern over Kashmir, the United States and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, have urged India and Pakistan to exercise restraint and solve their differences through dialogue. They will have a chance to heed that advice when top Indian and Pakistani national security advisers meet later this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/opini ... d=45305309
India’s Attack on Free Speech
London — IN today’s India, secular liberals face a challenge: how to stay alive.
In August, 77-year-old scholar M. M. Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstitions.
These killings should be seen as the canary in the coal mine: Secular voices are being censored and others will follow.
While there have always been episodic attacks on free speech in India, this time feels different. The harassment is front-page news, but the government refuses to acknowledge it. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence is being interpreted by many people as tacit approval, given that the attacks have gained momentum since he took office in 2014 and are linked to Hindutva groups whose far-right ideology he shares.
Earlier this month, a leader of the Sri Ram Sene, a Hindu extremist group with a history of violence including raiding pubs and beating women they find inside, ratcheted up the tensions. He warned that writers who insulted Hindu gods were in danger of having their tongues sliced off. For those who don’t support the ultimate goal of these extremists — a Hindu nation — Mr. Modi’s silence is ominous.
This is a turning point for India, a country that has taken pride in being a liberal democracy and that often adopts a high-minded tone when neighbors fall short of the same standards.
When the liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer was assassinated in 2011, the Indian journalist M. J. Akbar, now the national spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., chided, “If Salman Taseer had been an Indian Muslim, he would still have been alive.” In the run-up to the 2014 general elections in Bangladesh, India expressed concern over the future of the country’s democratic institutions.
We should be worrying instead about what’s happening in India, and recognize that it could go the way of the very neighbors it criticizes. As Nikhil Wagle, a prominent liberal journalist based in Mumbai, told me, “Without secularism, India is a Hindu Pakistan.”
The murders in India share striking similarities with the killings of four Bangladeshi bloggers this year. But while there was a global outcry over what happened in Bangladesh, India is hiding behind its patina of legitimacy granted by being the world’s largest democracy.
Like the murdered bloggers, the Indian victims held liberal views but were not famous or powerful. Mr. Kalburgi had publicly expressed skepticism toward idol worship in Hinduism, but he didn’t pose a threat to anyone.
While the authorities are pursuing the culprits on a case-by-case basis, the overarching attack on free speech has not been addressed. The threats and killings have created an atmosphere of self-censorship and fear.
Some of the killers are still on the loose, and while in one hand they wield a gun, in the other they wave a list. On Sept. 20, Mr. Wagle, the journalist, learned from a source that intercepted phone calls had revealed that members of yet another right-wing Hindu group, Sanatan Sanstha, had marked him as their next victim. The extremists who celebrated the August murder of Mr. Kalburgi were more direct: They used Twitter to warn K. S. Bhagwan, a retired university professor who is critical of the Hindu caste system, that he would be next.
The goal of transforming India from a secular state to a Hindu nation, which seems to be behind the murders, is abetted not just by the silence of politicians, but also by the Hindu nationalist policies of the ruling B.J.P.
Over the past few months, the government has purged secular voices from high-profile institutions including the National Book Trust and the independent board of Nalanda University. The government is not replacing mediocre individuals: The chancellor of Nalanda was the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. It is replacing luminaries with people whose greatest qualification is faith in Hindutva ideology. The new appointees are rejecting scientific thought in favor of religious ideas that have no place in secular institutions.
One of the government’s chief targets is the legacy of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular nation. Last month, having nudged out the director of the Nehru Museum and Library in New Delhi, the government announced plans to rename the museum and change its focus to highlight the achievements of Mr. Modi. This is akin to repurposing the Washington Monument as an Obama museum.
In addition to erasing the contributions of long-dead liberals, B.J.P. leaders are busy promoting violent Hindu nationalists. Sakshi Maharaj, a B.J.P. member of Parliament, described Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, as a “patriot.” Although Mr. Maharaj later retracted his statement, his opinion is shared by many of his party colleagues. Gandhi’s assassin was a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an armed Hindu group, with which Mr. Modi has been associated since he was 8 years old.
THE B.J.P.’s efforts to reshape institutions that embody secular values — values they dismiss as “Western” — was certainly anticipated. It came as no surprise when the culture and tourism minister, Mahesh Sharma, recently promised to “cleanse every area of public discourse that had been westernized.” Mr. Sharma is well aware of the connotations of the word he used.
It’s also not surprising that Hindu fundamentalists would feel empowered in the shadow of a Hindu nationalist government. Still, few expected that freedom of speech would become a contestable commodity and that some who exercised it would lose their lives.
The realization has made for decisions that were once unthinkable.
Last December, the acclaimed author Perumal Murugan informed the police that he’d received threats from Hindu groups angered by a novel he wrote in 2010. Extremists staged burnings of his book and demanded a public apology from him. The police suggested he go into exile. Realizing he was on his own, in January Mr. Murugan announced the withdrawal of his entire literary canon. On Facebook, he swore to give up writing, in essence apologizing for his life’s work out of fear for his family’s safety.
It’s hard to accept what is happening in India. It is easier to ignore or dismiss the attacks and the threats as a liberal persecution complex or a phase that will last only as long as the B.J.P. is in power. But the country is undergoing a tectonic shift that will have long-term repercussions.
The attacks in India should not be seen as a problem limited to secular writers or liberal thinkers. They should be recognized as an attack on the heart of what constitutes a democracy — and that concerns everyone who values the idea of India as it was conceived and as it is beloved, rather than an India imagined through the eyes of religious zealots. Indians must protest these attacks and demand accountability from people in power. We must call for all voices to be protected, before we lose our own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opini ... olkar.html
London — IN today’s India, secular liberals face a challenge: how to stay alive.
In August, 77-year-old scholar M. M. Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstitions.
These killings should be seen as the canary in the coal mine: Secular voices are being censored and others will follow.
While there have always been episodic attacks on free speech in India, this time feels different. The harassment is front-page news, but the government refuses to acknowledge it. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence is being interpreted by many people as tacit approval, given that the attacks have gained momentum since he took office in 2014 and are linked to Hindutva groups whose far-right ideology he shares.
Earlier this month, a leader of the Sri Ram Sene, a Hindu extremist group with a history of violence including raiding pubs and beating women they find inside, ratcheted up the tensions. He warned that writers who insulted Hindu gods were in danger of having their tongues sliced off. For those who don’t support the ultimate goal of these extremists — a Hindu nation — Mr. Modi’s silence is ominous.
This is a turning point for India, a country that has taken pride in being a liberal democracy and that often adopts a high-minded tone when neighbors fall short of the same standards.
When the liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer was assassinated in 2011, the Indian journalist M. J. Akbar, now the national spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., chided, “If Salman Taseer had been an Indian Muslim, he would still have been alive.” In the run-up to the 2014 general elections in Bangladesh, India expressed concern over the future of the country’s democratic institutions.
We should be worrying instead about what’s happening in India, and recognize that it could go the way of the very neighbors it criticizes. As Nikhil Wagle, a prominent liberal journalist based in Mumbai, told me, “Without secularism, India is a Hindu Pakistan.”
The murders in India share striking similarities with the killings of four Bangladeshi bloggers this year. But while there was a global outcry over what happened in Bangladesh, India is hiding behind its patina of legitimacy granted by being the world’s largest democracy.
Like the murdered bloggers, the Indian victims held liberal views but were not famous or powerful. Mr. Kalburgi had publicly expressed skepticism toward idol worship in Hinduism, but he didn’t pose a threat to anyone.
While the authorities are pursuing the culprits on a case-by-case basis, the overarching attack on free speech has not been addressed. The threats and killings have created an atmosphere of self-censorship and fear.
Some of the killers are still on the loose, and while in one hand they wield a gun, in the other they wave a list. On Sept. 20, Mr. Wagle, the journalist, learned from a source that intercepted phone calls had revealed that members of yet another right-wing Hindu group, Sanatan Sanstha, had marked him as their next victim. The extremists who celebrated the August murder of Mr. Kalburgi were more direct: They used Twitter to warn K. S. Bhagwan, a retired university professor who is critical of the Hindu caste system, that he would be next.
The goal of transforming India from a secular state to a Hindu nation, which seems to be behind the murders, is abetted not just by the silence of politicians, but also by the Hindu nationalist policies of the ruling B.J.P.
Over the past few months, the government has purged secular voices from high-profile institutions including the National Book Trust and the independent board of Nalanda University. The government is not replacing mediocre individuals: The chancellor of Nalanda was the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. It is replacing luminaries with people whose greatest qualification is faith in Hindutva ideology. The new appointees are rejecting scientific thought in favor of religious ideas that have no place in secular institutions.
One of the government’s chief targets is the legacy of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular nation. Last month, having nudged out the director of the Nehru Museum and Library in New Delhi, the government announced plans to rename the museum and change its focus to highlight the achievements of Mr. Modi. This is akin to repurposing the Washington Monument as an Obama museum.
In addition to erasing the contributions of long-dead liberals, B.J.P. leaders are busy promoting violent Hindu nationalists. Sakshi Maharaj, a B.J.P. member of Parliament, described Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, as a “patriot.” Although Mr. Maharaj later retracted his statement, his opinion is shared by many of his party colleagues. Gandhi’s assassin was a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an armed Hindu group, with which Mr. Modi has been associated since he was 8 years old.
THE B.J.P.’s efforts to reshape institutions that embody secular values — values they dismiss as “Western” — was certainly anticipated. It came as no surprise when the culture and tourism minister, Mahesh Sharma, recently promised to “cleanse every area of public discourse that had been westernized.” Mr. Sharma is well aware of the connotations of the word he used.
It’s also not surprising that Hindu fundamentalists would feel empowered in the shadow of a Hindu nationalist government. Still, few expected that freedom of speech would become a contestable commodity and that some who exercised it would lose their lives.
The realization has made for decisions that were once unthinkable.
Last December, the acclaimed author Perumal Murugan informed the police that he’d received threats from Hindu groups angered by a novel he wrote in 2010. Extremists staged burnings of his book and demanded a public apology from him. The police suggested he go into exile. Realizing he was on his own, in January Mr. Murugan announced the withdrawal of his entire literary canon. On Facebook, he swore to give up writing, in essence apologizing for his life’s work out of fear for his family’s safety.
It’s hard to accept what is happening in India. It is easier to ignore or dismiss the attacks and the threats as a liberal persecution complex or a phase that will last only as long as the B.J.P. is in power. But the country is undergoing a tectonic shift that will have long-term repercussions.
The attacks in India should not be seen as a problem limited to secular writers or liberal thinkers. They should be recognized as an attack on the heart of what constitutes a democracy — and that concerns everyone who values the idea of India as it was conceived and as it is beloved, rather than an India imagined through the eyes of religious zealots. Indians must protest these attacks and demand accountability from people in power. We must call for all voices to be protected, before we lose our own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opini ... olkar.html