Is India losing its clout because of bad politics?
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comSoutik Biswas
It’s an obvious question to ask at a time when powerful – and populist – regional parties are again flexing their muscles at a fickle federal government, key economic reforms are seemingly stuck in the bog of messy coalition politics, and the government is struggling under an avalanche of corruption charges. Economic growth and investment have cooled and inflation remains high.
So is it surprising that The Economist magazine, in one of its latest issues, says the politics is “preventing India from fulfilling its vast economic potential”?
Or when Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large with Time magazine, tells an audience in Delhi this week that India’s politicians are “out of touch… they try to portray India as a victim, not the victor”.
With uncharacteristic exaggeration, The Economist even invokes a return to the stifling days of the controlled economy.
“Lately, like a Bollywood villain who just refuses to die, the old India has made a terrifying reappearance,” says the magazine. It blames a “nastily divisive political climate” for the crisis and believes that India requires “energetic, active leaders, plus politicians who are ready to compromise”.
‘Corrupt and corroded’
Both the magazine and the pundit are right and wrong.
“Reformers need to be patient; there are no shortcuts in India”
The quality of India’s politicians, many argue, has declined drastically, as in many parts of the world. Most of them seem to be out of sync with modern day realities – expectations have fallen so ridiculously low that an iPad carrying politician is described by the media as a modern one!
Most are also seen as greedy, corrupt and disinterested in serious reform. The increasing number of politicians with criminal records and the brazen use of money to buy party tickets and bribe voters erodes India’s ailing democratic process.
It is not a happy picture. “Today the Centre is corrupt and corroded,” historian Ramachandra Guha wrote recently. “There are allegedly ‘democratic’ politicians who abuse their oath of of?ce and work only to enrich themselves; as well as self-described ‘revolutionaries’ who seek to settle arguments by the point of the gun.” Only serious electoral reform can ensure a better breed of politician.
But to believe that less politics is good economics is a bit fey. There is little evidence to argue that political instability has been bad for India’s economy.
India’s first flush of economic reforms was launched by a minority government headed by PV Narasimha Rao of the Congress party in the early 1990s. The reforms spluttered to a halt when the government secured a majority.
Later, a rag-tag 13-party coalition United Front government helmed by two prime ministers in 18 months in the mid-1990s undertook significant reforms, slashing taxes, deregulating interest rates and moving towards capital account convertibility.
One study by Kausik Chaudhuri and Sugato Dasgupta actually found that more investments take place when coalition governments are in power, one of the reasons being various regional interests are held together by “generous distribution of infrastructure projects”. Economist Surjit Bhalla has argued that political instability is actually good for economic reforms.
“The contention is that lack of political dominance means that politicians in power will make the extra reform in order to fight for marginal votes in a future election,” he has said. “And if political stability is present, the politicians are unlikely to make an effort because of their inherent short sightedness or complacence.”
Elitist biases
The problem, as Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha and Shankar Raghuraman argue succinctly in a study of coalition politics in India, is that privatisation – a key aspect of economic reforms – remains a dirty word with most of India’s politicians, trade unionists and opinion makers.
There is still a serious lack of political consensus on issues like foreign investment, lowering interest rates on deposits in pension funds and privatising profit-making state-run factories.
Public consensus is harder to come by in an awfully unequal society where the middle class and the rich root for further opening up of the economy, while the poor want the state to invest in health and education and check corruption. The elitist biases in public policy is made easier by a poorly-informed and often unlettered electorate with low expectations.
Many would argue that India never got any magic going, so there is no question of losing it.
Consensus is painfully slow in such a society, and sometimes only a crisis can provoke the government – and the people – to bite the bullet. Reformers need to be patient; there are no shortcuts in India.
How to become fearless
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comMeena Om
It is important to understand that the air never gets depleted from the universe no matter how much is consumed. We are floating in a pool.
Natural law is that what one may absorb, others may not be absorbing it. For example: A leaf takes green colour, the flower is not absorbing it….it is taking another colour.
If someone absorbs fear, he is making someone else fearless. That individual is creating that field, atmosphere around by being receptive to it…..
Don’t take fear. An environment of fear is self-created… enhancing the devil by feeling fearful of him. By being fearful, someone else is becoming fearless. This is how terrorists work!
Each one is poorn. The Supreme has made everyone a reflection of itself…. Be fearless and counter attack. Now we have to be fearless, aware and conscious. This is the message.
Understand the subtleties. Everything is floating in the universe. Universe balances all. Same sun rays fall on the cactus as on the flower, what they do not absorb, shows on them.
Doubts and fear come when you are fearful, karmheen.
Face your fears… counteract by saying: “Why should I be scared when I am truly working on my self?” People often become submissive. Say to yourself: “I am in surrender if I am truthful then divine help will always be there for me” Energy is depleted by being fearful. Forward your fears to the Universe. “I am on path of truth love karm and light, I am not taking it.”
Watch the body language change. Grace will descend…..Be a worthy medium of divine grace.
Sarkozy resorts to anti-immigrant politics
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comToo many immigrants. Too many foreigners. Too much halal meat. That’s what Nicolas Sarkozy is campaigning against in the French presidential election.
When politicians descend into cultural warfare, they are either mean or desperate.
Pauline Marois of the Parti Québécois, down in the dumps three years ago, fanned old-stock Quebecers’ insecurities by demonizing Muslims.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, on the ropes over massive government cutbacks, said Britain had “Christian values.” And he proclaimed multiculturalism dead.
So did Angela Merkel in Germany, multiculturalism being the code word for attacking Muslims.
The American Republican presidential candidates, bereft of any useful ideas on how to resurrect the economy, have also been flailing away at Muslims and Islam, along with illegal immigrants, gays, godless secularists, Obamite socialists, perfidious liberals, anti-gun elitists, etc.
Sarkozy is trailing badly in the polls, behind the Socialist François Hollande (who got the nomination after Dominque Strauss-Kahn, of IMF and Sofitel Hotel fame, pulled out in disgrace).
Sarkozy is also feeling threatened by third-placed Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front.
She inherited the party from her father, Jean-Marie. (Last month, he was fined $13,000 and given a three-month suspended jail term for saying that the Nazi occupation of France during World War II was not all that bad.)
Marine is cleverer. Along with the leaders of other far-right parties across Europe, she has traded the old anti-Semitism for anti-Islamism. She fans fears of Muslims, of whom there are about 5 million in France.
At a time of economic crisis — record 10 per cent unemployment; stagnant economic growth and salaries; France’s triple-A rating downgraded, etc. — she has been ventilating about the meat on sale in the greater Paris region being all halal.
She is “disgusted” that “the rules of a minority” are being imposed on the majority. And she feels the pain of “widespread animal suffering.” (Meat-eaters debate methods of animal slaughter; states weigh which form of death penalty is more humane.)
Sarkozy was initially dismissive of her, noting that only 2.5 per cent of the meat consumed in the Paris region was “kosher or halal,” both of which follow about the same rules of slaughter.
Interior Minister Claude Guéant tried to turn the issue against the Socialists: Their proposal to grant municipal voting rights to foreigners who have lived legally in France for five years was dangerous: It would lead to halal meat for all children in public school canteens.
Sarkozy promised to change the meat laws to have better labelling. He would also see to it that there would be no halal meat in public schools. And no separate swimming hours for Muslim women in public pools.
That angered both Muslims and Jews.
But Sarkozy kept upping the ante.
This son of Hungarian immigrants said Tuesday that there were clearly “too many foreigners” in France. And they were not integrating well. He would reduce immigrants from 180,000 a year to 100,000. (Canada, with half the population, takes about 250,000 immigrants a year).
The French use the terms “foreigners,” “immigrants” and Muslims interchangeably. Most Muslims are, in fact, third- or fourth-generation French, who are not integrated because they have not been allowed to.
French mythology has it that everyone living in France is French, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Yet in reality most “immigrants” are not deemed fully French precisely because of their religion and ethnicity.
Unemployment among French Muslims is nearly double the national average. It’s more than 30 per cent in the banlieues, the crowded social housing projects that were the scene of riots in 2005 and 2007. The jobless rate for French Muslim university graduates is five times the national average.
Post-riots, the government spent millions improving housing and infrastructure in the ghettoes — to little or no avail. Buildings and roads don’t buy equality, nor buy-in from the alienated.
Economic marginalization and social segregation, on the one hand. Demonization by Le Pen and even mainstream politicians, on the other. The result, inevitably, has been the rise of Islam — and halal. Nothing wrong with that, except that for many, religion has become their sole cultural identity.
The way to break this vicious cycle is not to parrot the extremism of the xenophobes but rather to tackle it head-on, by resurrecting the most fundamental premise of a liberal, secular, democratic polity — equality of all citizens and a level-playing field for them all.
-The Star
Empowering women
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comMia Pearson
March 10 marked the 101st anniversary of International Women’s Day. It’s a day when people around the world host events with the goal to inspire women and to celebrate their achievements. And while significant headway has been made in terms of women’s rights, progress continues to wane in the area of women in business.
A study by Grant Thornton International on the status of women in leadership roles at the top private companies shows that in 2011 only 20 per cent of those at the top were women. That’s a 24 per cent drop from the previous year. In the U.S., a mere 3.6 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs are female. Women continue to make up an almost equal share of the workforce, but represent the largest share of low- wage workers.
So what will it take to reverse the trend?
There’s much discussion about the need for more female role models in high-level positions. Experts will argue women need to feel more comfortable talking about their accomplishments and getting out there in a much more visible way. In the past, I’ve argued that women need to be profiled more in the press and that business magazines should feature more female CEOs on their covers.
But as I contemplated it from a personal perspective – zeroing in on the women who inspire me today – I began to view the issue slightly differently. Rather than bemoan the shortage of successful female business leaders to look up to, we need to leverage what we do through social media.
Think about how networking and mentoring used to work: We would ask someone to be our mentor and, if we were lucky, meet with that person for lunch once a month. Or we would attend a luncheon event, for example, to hear someone speak and then return to our day job, never to engage with that person again.
But the advent of social media has changed everything, including the one-way dialogue. Today we all have the opportunity to learn and draw inspiration from some of the most sought-after and successful business women in the world on a daily basis. All we have to do is follow them on Twitter or ‘Like’ them Facebook.
I think about Sheryl Sandberg, the chief financial officer at Facebook, who I had the chance to meet at an up-close and personal roundtable luncheon. She was amazing. You just have to watch her now-famous TED Talk on why we have too few female leaders to understand why I consider her one of the most inspiring women I have ever met.
The beauty of social media is that my relationship with Sheryl didn’t end at the one roundtable event. I am friends with her on Facebook and read articles she recommends and insights she posts regularly.
As a female entrepreneur, I also consider Arianna Huffington – who I follow on Twitter – an incredible female leader. She’s funny, smart and says exactly what’s on her mind. Born in Greece, she immigrated to the United States before starting Huffington Post in 2005. Her hard work and fearlessness helped grow the site to attract 25 million visitors every month. AOL took notice and bought the Huffington Post for $315-million (U.S.), making Ms. Huffington the head of the combined media company. Her’s is an incredible story which I heard first-hand at the 2010 Women’s Executive Network Top 100 event.
On the anniversary of International Women’s Day, I encourage young women and entrepreneurs to take advantage of social media and seek out mentors who will feed their passion for business. If role models truly make a difference and are needed to reverse the trend of why we have so few women in top leadership roles in Canada, don’t wait for them to come to you. There are influential women from different backgrounds, industries and walks of life out there sharing their stories and advice. All you have to do is find them and engage with them and hopefully over time, their bite-size bursts of wisdom will inspire you to grow as a woman and business leader.
Whither Our Human Morality?
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comSHOBHA SHUKLA – CNS
(CNS): It was a sad day indeed when the additional solicitor general (ASG) Mr Malhotra, recently came out strongly against homosexuality, while arguing on behalf of the Ministry of Home affairs, in the Supreme Court hearing challenging the Delhi High Court order of 2009 decriminalising consensual sex among gay adults. He junked homosexuality as immoral saying that it is against the order of nature and spreads HIV. He was of the view that, “Laws can’t run separately from society and the morals of the time.”
When the Supreme Court asked who decided what was immoral, the ASG said that society did so and argued that the Indian laws could not but reflect the views of its society, and as a vast section of Indian society still considers it to be immoral, the provision of Section 377 needs to be retained in full to reflect the society’s views.
Although the Home Ministry was quick to clarify that the ASG read out a wrong affidavit before the apex court (for three long hours), it is a sad commentary on the narrow mental attitude of the law enforcers and representatives of the Union Government. Perhaps they do not believe that constitutional morality must dominate over public morality and that no one should be deprived of one’s fundamental rights merely on the basis of societal disapproval on moral grounds.
Going by what we see, hear and read every day, a vast section of Indian society still believes in siring sons and aborting female foetuses; it cares two hoots about protecting the rights and dignities of women; it still commits atrocities against certain castes; it loves to spread communal/religious violence. So should our laws reflect and uphold the popular societal sentiments of beating/raping women, killing unborn girls, spurning the dalits….The list is endless. Several good laws in India (and perhaps elsewhere too) have been passed in total negation of what reflected the popular sentiments of society at that time. If the likes of Mr Malhotra had had their ways then there would have been no laws banning Sati pratha (burning of the widowed wife on funeral pyre of her husband), repression of widows, violence against women, female foeticide, etc.
We as a society are becoming more intolerant by the day. Our whole being has become so fragile that we feel threatened by an innocuous dig at our religious scriptures or a caricature of some deity or an innocuous joke about our lack of hygiene. Our energies seem to be wasted on clinging to reprehensive social norms, all in the name of protecting our culture. We call homosexuality immoral; we shun transgenders; we shudder even to pronounce the word ‘lesbian’; even though all of them have existed in our society since times immemorial. But our moral ineptitude forbids us to accept it. We have one of the highest rates of procreation in the world, but the mention of sex is still taboo. Overall we are very good at brushing everything under the carpet and show a dazzling exterior. But the internal rot is making our society sick and intolerant. We need to cleanse our souls (and not soles) of intolerance, hatred and jealousy which is slowly tearing away our social fabric.
We (at least those from the educated section of society) proudly proclaim our belief in the equality of sexes and profess that we treat our sons and daughters in the same manner. But, we still yearn for a male heir to the family; we do not hesitate to perform the abominable ritual of ‘kanyadan’ (giving away of the daughter in charity) of our dear daughter, who we lovingly call ‘paraya dhan’ or someone else’s (the husband’s) property, all in the name of tradition and culture. When it comes to abiding by the laws which give women equal rights and opportunities most of us prefer to look the other way. We worship female deities with aplomb but I wonder if any section of our society sanctions any fast which is observed for a wife or a daughter. (There are many observed by women for their sons and husbands). We cannot term these and other such rituals as mere tokenistic. They are symbolic of a mindset which is still not mature enough to have the courage to change the things which should be changed.
I am tempted to quote here the words of Honourable Justice A P Shah of the Delhi High Court that, “Moral indignation, howsoever, strong, is not a valid basis for overriding an individual’s fundamental rights and privacy. In our scheme of things, constitutional morality must outweigh the argument of public morality, even if it be the majority view.”
Of course passing good laws alone is not a panacea to cure the ills prevalent in society. Legal reforms will have to be complimented with societal acceptance, but they cannot always wait for universal acceptance, else the very existence of humanity may be under threat. (CNS)
SHOBHA SHUKLA – CNS
(The author is the Managing Editor of Citizen News Service (CNS). She is a J2J Fellow of National Press Foundation (NPF) USA. She has worked earlier with State Planning Institute, UP and taught physics at India’s prestigious Loreto Convent. She also co-authored a book (translated in three languages) “Voices from the field on childhood pneumonia” and a report on Hepatitis C and HIV treatment access issues in 2011. Email: shobha@citizen-news.org, website: http://www.citizen-news.org)
Is hope a fiction for India’s poor?
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comSoutik Biswas
More than half of Mumbai’s people live in slums
“We try so many things,” a girl in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai tells Katherine Boo, “but the world doesn’t move in our favour”.
Annawadi is a “sumpy plug of slum” in the biggest city – “a place of festering grievance and ambient envy” – of a country which holds a third of the world’s poor. It is where the Pulitzer prize winning New Yorker journalist Boo’s first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is located.
Annawadi is where more than 3,000 people have squatted on land belonging to the local airport and live “packed into, or on top of” 335 huts. It is a place “magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich’s people’s garbage”, where the New India collides with the Old.
Nobody in Annawadi is considered poor by India’s official benchmarks. The residents are among the 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when India embarked on liberalising its economy.
‘Garbage justice’
Boo’s story – a stirring and gritty non-fiction narrative, one of the best ever written by a foreigner on India – revolves around the self-immolation of a cantankerous, one-legged slum woman called Fatima Sheikh and how her neighbour and a hardworking, young garbage trader called Abdul and his family are framed on a charge of murdering her. Fatima’s death is a liberation from enervating poverty, and a chance for some neighbours to make money from Abdul’s family, who are making a bit more money than the rest from selling recyclables.
This is when Abdul realises that the Indian criminal justice system was a “market like garbage” – “innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags”.
Boo adopted what she calls the “vagrant-sociology approach” and followed Abdul and his neighbours of this unexceptional slum over the course of several years – November 2007 to March 2011 – to see “who got ahead and who didn’t, and why, as India prospered”.
Katherine Boo’s narrative is gripping and well-researched
She used more than 3,000 public records, many obtained using India’s right to information law, to validate her narrative, written in assured reported speech. The account of the hours leading to the self-immolation of Fatima Sheikh derives from repeated interviews of 168 people as well as police, hospital, morgue and court records. Mindful of the risk of over interpretation, the books wears its enormous research lightly.
Boo’s narrative is peopled by a vast range of gripping characters from Annawadi, the world from which New India shies away. An aspiring slum boss woman who volunteers for a local Hindu right wing party. A man who paints his horses with stripes and rents out the fake zebras to birthday parties of middle-class children. A corrupt nun who runs a children’s home. A deranged man who talks to a luxury hotel building skirting the slum.
Then there’s a bunch of young scavengers and thieves, ravaged by rats and high on white correction fluid, who live, work and die quickly. They are the young flotsam that India breathlessly parades as its demographic dividend when, in reality, the children, tired and brutalised, are already past their sell-by-date.
Bleak
The people of Annawadi are also caught up in the hideous web of corruption and official venality which hurts the poor most, and lead utterly dehumanising lives in a city that aspires to become India’s Shanghai. It is far removed from the dreadful stereotype of the happy-poor Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire.
The local councillor runs fake schools, doctors at free government hospitals and policemen extort the poor with faint promise of life and justice, and self-help groups operate as loan sharks for the poorest. The young in Annawadi drop dead like flies – run over by traffic, knifed by rival gangs, laid low by disease; while the elders – not much older – die anyway. Girls prefer a certain brand of rat poison to end their lives.
Behind The Beautiful Forevers is a bleak, heart-breaking book, which leaves you numb with anger, helplessness and pain. In this age of globalisation, Boo writes, hope is not a fiction. But hope flickers dimly in Annawadi as the “unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise”.
Boo asks some uncomfortable questions: What is the “infrastructure of opportunity” in India? What capabilities does the market offer? What capabilities are wasted? Why don’t places like Mumbai where filthy slums stand cheek-by-jowl with the world’s priciest buildings explode into violence? Why don’t unequal societies implode? What happens to the powerless when, among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity is “typically an insider trade”.
Boo has an interesting take on corruption, rife in societies like India’s. Corruption is seen as blocking India’s global ambitions. But, she writes, for the “poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained”.
On the other hand, Boo believes, corruption stymies our moral universe more than economic possibility. Suffering, she writes, “can sabotage innate capacities for moral action”. In a capricious world of corrupt governments and ruthless markets the idea of a mutually supportive community is a myth: it is “blisteringly hard”, she writes, to be good in such conditions. “If the house is crooked and crumbling”, Boo writes, “and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?
Till yesterday, news had it that Katrina Kaif was the leading lady opposite Rajnikanth in the film Kochadaiyaan. But now the latest news is that Deepika Padukone landed the coveted part.
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