Author: Anshuman Rawat

More than 1,000 young people, mostly women, die in so-called honour killings in India every year in a horrific practice that must stop

(20 January 2012) — Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, a 25-year-old Indian Sikh and naturalised Canadian, was brutally murdered in Punjab in 2000. After 11 years and seven convictions in India, the investigation continues. Earlier this year, her mother and uncle were arrested in a Vancouver suburb under Canada’s Extradition Act, suspected of ordering the murder by phone as hired killers held Jaswinder captive.

Indian police have alleged that her family ordered the killing after Jaswinder refused to divorce her husband, and instead flew from Canada to help him emigrate from India. The mother and uncle — 63-year-old Malkit Kaur Sidhu and 67-year-old Surjit Singh Badesha — made their first appearances on January 9 in a Vancouver court that would decide their extradition to India.

Indian authorities have long suspected that the mother and uncle orchestrated the alleged honour killing in disapproval of the wealthy beautician’s secret marriage to a poor Indian rickshaw driver of a lower caste.

But Jaswinder’s case is far from exceptional. Honour killings are a practice with ancient and deep roots in some parts of India, especially in the northern provinces. More than 1,000 young people in India die every year as a result, said legal experts Anil Malhotra and his brother Ranjit Malhotra.

“Forced marriages and honour killings are often intertwined. Marriage can be forced to save honour, and women can be murdered for rejecting a forced marriage and marrying a partner of their own choice who is not acceptable for the family of the girl,” they said in their joint paper Social-Legal Perspective of Forced Marriages, presented at a conference in 2010.

In June 2011, India’s ministry of law and justice drafted a bill to curb honour killings in the country. The proposed legislation aimed to better prosecute persons or groups — especially village councils — involved in issuing illegal orders to carry out honour killings to “restore the community’s honour”. The proposed legislation, which specifically prohibits the gathering of people with the intention of condemning a marriage, is still being discussed by the government. The supreme court has sent notices to seven states, as well as to the national government, to seek responses to measures being taken to address the problem.

Non-governmental groups across the country working to stop honour killings and lend support to inter-caste and love marriages believe there is an acute need to reform social attitudes, rather than simply passing more laws on the crime.

Inter-caste marriages are protected under Indian law, but in a joint 2006 survey by television channel CNN-IBN and the daily English-language newspaper Hindustan Times, 76% of respondents still deem the practice to be acceptable.

According to the survey, the majority of Indians continue to marry within their communities. Newspapers regularly carry marital advertisements in which parents, seeking to arrange a marriage for their son or daughter, specify caste or community group alongside desired attributes such as profession and education.

“This is part and parcel of our culture, that you marry into your own caste,” Dharmendra Pathak, the father of Nirupama Pathak (see box, right), told The New York Times a few days after his daughter’s death. “Every society has its own culture. Every society has its own traditions.”

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The death of Nirupama Pathak

Honour killings made grim international headlines and sparked debate in April 2010 when Nirupama Pathak, a 22-year-old journalist at a financial newspaper in New Delhi, was found murdered in her bedroom after she had gone home to visit her parents.

Though her family and neighbours suggested suicide, the postmortem report concluded that she had been suffocated. The police later arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, the only person home at the time of Nirupama’s death.

More details emerged in the days after the murder, and it was established that the suspected motive for the alleged murder was Nirupama’s decision to get secretly engaged to a man who belonged to a lower caste. Nirupama was also found to be pregnant, though it is unclear if her family had known about it.

Secondary cities represent the promise of the future — if they heed the warnings of the past

Asia’s urban landscape is in flux. The so-called megacities, with populations in excess of ten million people, are established features in the landscape. The newcomer is the emerging market city, also known as the secondary city.

China already has about 150 cities with at least a million inhabitants. Experts say that by 2020, this number will grow to between 220 and 400 cities, depending on the nation’s overall growth rate. And this is already driving some hitherto unknown cities onto the world stage.

According to a recent Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) research report commissioned by Citigroup, the Chinese cities (as separate entities from the larger administrative regions of the same name) of Tianjin, Shenzhen and Dalian top the global economic strength index, which takes into account a combination of market size, purchasing power and growth prospects.

The study, encompassing 120 of the world’s major cities, featured nine other Chinese cities in the top 20, with Guangzhou and Chongqing, along with megacities Shanghai and Beijing ranking in the top ten.

A similar scenario is being played out in India, albeit on a lesser scale. The EIU report ranks two Indian cities, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, among the top 20 global cities. Ahmedabad, along with China’s Tianjin, is witnessing double-digit economic growth and has the potential to grow even faster. Remarkably, the city ranks one place higher in the index than Hong Kong.

Ahmedabad is just one name in the long list of secondary cities that are helping India grow beyond the traditional economic hubs of New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Merely 200 kilometres from Ahmedabad is Surat, the fastest growing Indian city and the eighth fastest growing city in the world in GDP terms. Jaipur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Nashik, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad and Pune are some of the other unheralded Indian cities that now regularly feature in international benchmark indexes.

The United Nations’ human settlements agency, UN-Habitat, in its latest survey of 250 cities, found that the main economic reasons for the growth of the cities were the designation of special economic zones (SEZ), trade and investment in transport infrastructure and communications services, which in turn has produced another cycle of economic benfits.

The Chinese government says that the country’s economic growth and the accompanied migration of people from rural to urban areas to fill the jobs generated by developing secondary cities has helped lift more than 200 million people out of poverty.

In India, where the infrastructure in metropolises like Mumbai and New Delhi can hardly cope with the size of the population, the secondary cities, known as Tier-2 cities locally, offer new employment opportunities. The growth of Tier-2 cities has kick-started a cycle that includes the creation of many new markets and the resultant investment in those markets by national and global global businesses.

In both countries, the secondary cities have enabled an entire generation to lead a life that is qualitatively much better than their parents’, at a lesser cost than what their counterparts in megacities pay.

But not everyone is convinced of the viability of the phenomenon. Many experts believe the rise of secondary cities is only a repeat of the failed cycle of the existing megacities. They argue that many of the secondary cities are experiencing what UN-Habitat calls “premature urbanisation” — where the size of the city bears no resemblance to its ability to cope with the magnitude of associated challenges.

Land and housing shortages are common in many of the secondary cities, even as city administrators battle a myriad of challenges, ranging from unemployment, to pollution to traffic congestion.

At the human level, most migrant labourers receive low wages and are forced to live in conditions that are worse than what they left behind in their native rural or semi-urban areas. The UN-Habitat calls this worsening of their lives “urbanisation of poverty”.

Consequently, the challenges facing the emerging secondary cities are the same as those testing the megacities. In the decades ahead, the most pressing task for the secondary cities would be to focus their development not just on skyscrapers, wider roads and other infrastructural developments, but also on their ability to attract and develop talent — an aspect that is crucial to the sustainability of a city of any size.

Eventually, the secondary cities, like the megacities, will be evaluated on the basis of the quality of life that they offer their citizens in the form of education, healthcare, recreation and freedom of expression.

Unlike the megacities, the secondary cities have time on their side. AR

The US tries to shame Sri Lanka into accounting for atrocities during its civil war’s horrific final days

After numerous failed attempts at a reckoning over human rights atrocities during its bloody civil war, Sri Lanka faces a new bid by the United States to embarrass it into delivering belated justice to the victims.

On March 7, the US unveiled a draft resolution against Sri Lanka to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) calling on the government to “take concerted actions on the ground to foster national reconciliation and accountability,” following its 2009 defeat of rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Surprisingly, the draft affirms the need to implement the recommendations of the government’s largely discredited Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), set up to probe human rights abuses during the conflict. It acknowledges, however, that the LLRC’s report does not do enough to address allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law.

As such, it appears unlikely that the resolution will oblige either the government or members of the LTTE to account for abuses of which both stand accused, especially in the final stages of the 26-year war.

Sri Lanka’s government is assiduously working diplomatic channels to make sure the US resolution is not adopted by the UNHRC when it discusses the document during its current session in Geneva on March 22. Colombo claims to have secured the support from China, Russia and Pakistan, as well as a handful of developing countries.

With the US unlikely to press the issue, even the resolution’s most ardent backers see it as more of a moral indictment than setting up a process for delivering justice.

The UN estimates that 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed during the war, half of those in its final months. When the government failed to keep a promise made in 2009 to investigate wartime abuses, UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon appointed an Advisory Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka Allegations to undertake the task.

The panel, comprising former Indonesian human rights commissioner Marzuki Darusman, South African human rights expert Yasmin Sooka and US lawyer Steven Ratner, began work in September 2010.

The report from its six-month investigation chronicles a litany of indiscriminate killing of innocents by both sides, and also criticises the UN for failing to speak out forcefully enough on civilian casualties.

It found “credible” evidence of serious violations of international humanitarian conventions by both government and LTTE forces, possibly amounting to war crimes.

The report noted that between September 2008 and May 2009, the army had shelled upon ‘No Fire Zones’ after telling civilians to gather there, while also bombing the UN hub, food distribution lines, and ships arriving to pick up non-combatants from beaches.

“The government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines,” the report observed. “The government also systematically deprived people in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid. […] tens of thousands lost their lives from January to May 2009, many of whom died anonymously in the carnage of the final few days.”

The LTTE was upbraided for using civilians as human shields, as well as shooting civilians point blank as they tried to escape the conflict zone. “It also fired artillery in proximity of large groups of internally displaced people [IDPs],” the report said.

The LLRC, Sri Lanka’s own attempts to catalogue the horrors over seven years of the civil war, was rejected by all several human rights groups as lacking independence. The UN expert panel found “the LLRC [to be] deeply flawed, and does not meet international standards for an effective accountability mechanism”.

Critics of the new US draft resolution, predominantly the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora and international rights groups, said the US-led resolution was tainted by association with the LLRC and does not fully address the grievances of the island’s Tamil ethnic minority.

The US, however, appears to have adopted a strategy of putting the issue back on the international agenda as a first step towards a more substantive accounting of the barbarism of the war’s final days.

Unlikely to win a battle at the 47-member UNHRC, analysts say Washington is instead trying to shame Colombo into action. Its decision to highlight sections of the LLRC report may demonstrate Washington’s determination to prevent Sri Lanka from summarily dismissing the entire resolution. AR

US Congress resolution further strains already frayed US-Pakistan relations

Relations between the US and Pakistan hit a new low when Republican congresswoman and US house foreign affairs committee member Dana Rohrabacher proposed a nonbinding resolution on February 17 stating that the Baloch people, who live in Pakistan’s Balochistan province and also in parts of Iran and Afghanistan, “have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country”.

Terming Pakistan a hardcore two-faced enemy, Rohrabacher compared the “struggle of the people of Balochistan”, Pakistan’s largest province, to the struggle of the American colonies against the British Empire and said: “It’s important to begin a serious discussion about an issue that’s been ignored, but shouldn’t be ignored.”
Balochistan produces more than US$3 billion of natural gas each year. Baloch nationalists accuse the Pakistan civilian and military bureaucracy of pocketing more than 90% of the revenues and giving the local Baloch a pittance since independence. Accusations aside, the majority of the provine’s Bugti tribesmen live in abject poverty in the mineral-rich region.

The resolution has sparked widespread outrage in Pakistan, further complicating Washington’s efforts to revive its vital anti-terrorism alliance with Islamabad. That alliance has been on a downswing since Pakistan closed its Afghan border to NATO forces and stopped the US from using its bases for air strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, after NATO forces accidentally killed 24 Pakistan soldiers in November 2011.

The National Assembly, Pakistan’s parliament, on February 13 passed a unanimous resolution strongly condemning the resolution and calling it “blatant interference” of the US into Pakistan’s internal matters, while Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said the resolution could only aggravate Pakistan’s already strained relations with the US.

Responding to sharp reactions by the Pakistanis, US President Barack Obama’s administration rejected Rohrabacher’s call for an independent Balochistan. Still, several thousand Pakistanis poured onto the streets of Islamabad on February 19, chanting “death to America” at a rally attended by supporters of right-wing, religious and even banned organisations. It was the latest show of strength by Defence of Pakistan, a coalition of around 40 parties chaired by Maulana Sami ul-Haq.

When he said “America wants to break Pakistan into pieces”, a clear reference to Rohrabacher’s resolution, the crowd gathered in a bustling business zone shouted “Death to America” and “America deserves one treatment: jihad, jihad”.

The coalition has attracted huge turnouts at rallies across the country that some see as a build up to the next general election, which could be called by the end of the month by a government reeling under the corruption and Memogate scandals.

On the same day as the rally in Islamabad, unnamed Pakistani security and diplomatic officials told The Express Tribune, an English news daily, that the US resolution was part of US “pressure tactics”. The US has been trying to get Pakistan to allow it to establish bases near the Iranian border in Balochistan for intelligence operations against Iran.

The Rohrabacher resolution came just a day after the Iranian president arrived in Pakistan for a tripartite summit in Islamabad between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran, already in a tussle with the US over its nuclear programme, is worried that a long-term strategic agreement between the Afghan Taliban and the US, currently being discussed in Qatar, may lead to permanent US bases in Afghanistan, just across Iran’s border, said Tanwir Ahmad Khan, a former Pakistani ambassador to Iran, in his February 20 column in The Express Tribune.

The US has always blamed Pakistan for helping the Afghan Taliban in their fight against NATO forces. Now that the US is in talks with the Taliban, an angry Pakistan refused entry in January to an American special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who wanted to discuss the US-Afghan Taliban talks with the Pakistan administration.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai too is unhappy with the US for being kept away from the US-Afghan Taliban talks.
Sensing an opportunity in the present anger at the US in the region, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was said to have arrived in Pakistan with an intent to encourage Pakistan to move further away from US plans in the region.

A Pakistani columnist, Salim Safi, who has written extensively on Afghanistan, said the trilateral summit in Islamabad was in fact a “protest sit-in” against the US.
On February 17, the presidents of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan ended the trilateral summit in Islamabad with a a joint communiqué that took a categorical stance that regional issues should be resolved within the region, and without any foreign intervention. Many in Pakistan endorse the declaration and consider the presence of US and NATO forces as the root cause of instability and hostilities in the region.

On the other hand, Balochistan is crucial to US interests for a variety of reasons. Most of Pakistan’s oil and gas resources are located in Balochistan, a third of which are controlled by US oil companies. For the same reasons, the region has become an important operational area for groups like Al-Qaeda in their attempts to hurt US economic interests in Pakistan in retaliation for the US war against terrorism. The terrorist groups are said to receive assistance from anti-US segments of the local administrations on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border.

Significantly, security experts point out, Balochistan offers militants belonging to Al-Qaeda and other terrorist outfits an escape route by sea to countries like Yemen. But most importantly, in the heated US-Iran dispute on the issue of the latter’s nuclear programme, Balochistan forms an extremely helpful window into Iran. If the US decides to overthrow the Iranian regime, the pro-US Baloch tribes, particularly the Jamalis, could be useful to Washington.

At another level, Balochistan is extremely important for the world from a socio-political point of view. Though surrounded by three nations with an inclination towards radical Islam — Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan — and also lately attracting fundamentalist groups, Balochistan has historically been a secular society.

Today, amid fighting between secessionist groups and the Pakistani army, regional chauvinists and non-Balochs, especially Punjabis, and also between many of the province’s own tribal groups, the region is witnessing a huge exodus of progressive and liberal Balochs — similar to the kind witnessed in Western Balochistan, which falls in Iranian territory, after the Islamic revolution of 1979 there.

US military and civil experts believe the exodus of those vital sections of Baloch society might create a vacuum filled with Islamic fundamentalists from all over the world.

But as Pakistan’s reaction to the resolution has demonstrated, any external ‘help’ in Balochistan would only make things more volatile. Relations between the cold war allies is at an all-time low. The tabling of the resolution promises to make matters worse.

Less than three weeks before a summit between BRICS powers — Brazil, Russian, India, China and South Africa — the two Asian members of the group are trying to close ranks and resolve their differences.

Yang Jiechi, the Chinese foreign minister, met with his Indian counterpart SM Krishna on March 2 in New Delhi, in a clear bid to reduce tensions between the two countries ahead of the March 28-29 summit.

India will host the BRICS summit for the first time since the bloc’s original meeting in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in 2009 during the global financial crisis. The fourth summit will focus on managing the still-festering global economic downturn. And each of the participating states will be keen for a successful summit.

On the agenda for the emerging countries is a renewed pitch for reforming the global governance architecture. On the sidelines of a G20 meeting of finance ministers in Mexico City on February 26, BRICS finance ministers agreed to set up a multilateral bank that would be funded exclusively by the five countries, with a view to finance development projects in their states.

Emerging countries complain that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are always led by an American and a European respectively, neglect some of the needs and perspectives of developing and emerging economies. A BRICS bank would fill the gap, the finance ministers said.

The BRICS economies long ago outweighed the US and Europe. The World Bank said in 2011 that the BRICS accounted for 53% of global GDP growth between 2007 and 2010, at a tune of of US$7.2 trillion. US growth during this period, at US$592 billion, was a sixth of the BRICS GDP growth of $3.8 trillion.

In a March 2 meeting with Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, Chinese foreign minister Yang said that the BRICS summit should send a signal of ‘win-win’ cooperation and unity among its members, especially China and India, who will work for world economic growth and their people’s well-being.

He further stated that China is ready to support India to ensure the success of the BRICS summit and would like to use this opportunity to “further enhance coordination and cooperation with India on international and regional affairs and promote regional and global peace and prosperity”.

Clearly, both sides made the right noises during the two-day bilateral meeting. Experts believe that many small steps are needed to address a range of seemingly intractable differences between the two powers.

To this end, India and China — who are not only regional rivals but nuclear-armed neighbours — agreed at the March 2 meeting to hold a dialogue on maritime cooperation, including joint operations against pirates and sharing seabed research technology.

The agreement follows sharp exchanges in October last year, after India’s state-owned oil company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) announced plans to explore for resources near Vietnam, in the disputed South China Sea. China claims exclusive territorial rights over the those waters and sees any exploration by other powers as an encroachment on China’s sphere of action.

For its part, India has raised similar concerns. In November, the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association acquired exclusive rights to explore 10,000 square kilometres of seabed in the southwest Indian Ocean, near the coast of Africa — far from China. India’s Directorate of Naval Intelligence feels that a Chinese firm in the Indian Ocean could have strategic security implications.

The maritime cooperation proposal was an attempt at a new start for the two countries. But it is not just on the high seas that China and India disagree over territory.

Border brawls

The mountaineous Sino-Indian border is perhaps the single biggest stumbling block to improving bilateral relations. A recent visit by AK Antony, India’s defence minister, to the northeastern Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh, provoked a chilling message from Beijing to not “complicate” matters. China lays claim over the state by describing it as a part of south Tibet.

The visit included an aerial demonstration of India’s top-of-the-line fighter jets, the Russian-made Sukhoi-30s, which were stationed just outside Arunachal Pradesh last year to counter the Chinese threat.

Responding in equal measure, Antony called China’s comments “most unfortunate” and “really objectionable”.

India not only rejects China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh but also challenges China’s occupation of a vast stretch of snow-covered plateau in the Kashmir region. India’s army has deployed roughly 36,000 additional troops near Arunachal Pradesh and plans to raise two more mountain divisions, while its air force has been upgrading landing strips throughout the Himalayas.

Though a full-blown war between India and China is unforeseeable, a small border skirmish cannot be ruled out unless the two sides arrest the slide in relations.

A start in that direction was made when, at the March 1 meeting in New Delhi, the foreign ministers announced the new “Working Mechanism for

Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs”, with an initial meeting scheduled for the middle of March in Beijing.

But resolving border disputes will inevitably require the two countries to deal with their problems over Tibet. Yang and Krisha, during their meeting, discussed the ever-present possibility that Tibetan protestors — a source of anxiety for the Chinese — could steal the BRICS summit limelight by staging a demonstation in New Delhi.

Tibet troubles

And as if on cue, 14 Tibetan exiles materialised outside the venue where the foreign ministers were meeting, protesting what they called China’s “occupation” of the Himalayan nation. Yang, the Chinese foreign minister, can only expect more of the same for the upcoming BRICS summit.

Holding Tibetan flags, the activists, including women, were draped in green and yellow ‘Free Tibet’ jackets and held placards condemning China. They also shouted the demand, “No border talks without a free Tibet”, in reference to longstanding border disputes between the two countries.

India, for its part, reiterated its commitment to promoting a vibrant society that embraces freedom of expression while expressing disapproval of demonstrations against foreign dignitaries — a balancing act between espousing its own principles and cultivating better relations with the Chinese.

India’s continued cordial relations with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and the presence of the Tibetan ‘government-in-exile’ in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, are two of India’s main irritants for China.

China cancelled high-level border talks late last year after India declined to withdraw permission for an international Buddhist conference planned around the same time. The Dalai Lama is also the world’s leading Buddhist figure.

Maritime cooperation is well and good. A new round of border talks is encouraging. But India and China will want to ensure that their wider interests are ensured ahead of the BRICS summit. By squaring away some of their differences, the summit has less chance of being derailed by squabbles in what is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the bloc. Longstanding disputes give them each plenty of chances to stumble so they must tread carefully.

Modern day socio-political reasons, and not culture, drive today’s extreme protests

In 1963 a Buddhist procession led by Trang Nha Quang Duc stopped at a major intersection in Saigon, Vietnam. The elderly monk then assumed the lotus position, as other monks around him doused him in gasoline. Moments later, he set himself on fire.

A simple monk’s extreme protest against the alleged persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam government sent shockwaves around the world.

But it was not an impulsive act. Michael Biggs, a lecturer in sociology at Oxford university, wrote in his 2005 paper Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963-2002 that the Vietnamese monks worked to maximise the impact of the self-immolation.

“They made sure that there were plenty of media watching, and there was one American journalist who could take photographs. Lots of other Buddhist supporters around him blocked the fire engines from reaching him.”

Within weeks of the event, four other monks and a nun followed his example, and burned themselves to death. Months later, the Vietnamese regime was overthrown.
The success of the act is said to have encouraged people in other parts of the world to believe that the method can be used to achieve a similar result in their society too.

Over the next four decades, incidents of self-immolation moved beyond Vietnam and were recorded in countries including India, South Korea, Hungary, Britain, the USSR, Pakistan, Japan, Algeria and Tunisia.

The last act, by Mohamed Bouazizi, led to the ousting of the Tunisian government and the birth of the ‘Arab Spring in 2011.
Inspired, perhaps, first by Quang Duc and lately by the movement in the Arab world, 23 Tibetan monks have been confirmed to have self-immolated since February 27, 2009 — 15 have died.

Self-immolation has existed in some sections that follow Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism, and it has been practiced for many centuries, especially in India, in a range of contexts including Sati, which involves a woman joining her husband on his funeral pyre.

But most of those traditions are no longer as prevalent, if at all existing — primarily because of the evolution of the societies, and partly because of stringent laws against them.

The present instances of self-immolations form a modern-day tool of political protest. The widespread coverage in western media of the protest, which is seen as an individual’s supreme sacrifice for the collective cause, has established the method as a newsworthy and effective one.

Biggs says that self-immolation “provides a terrible, gruesome image, but not one that is too gruesome to be shown on television or in a newspaper”.

The tool of protest may be different, but the same realisation about making extreme impact seems to be exploited by people in other parts of the world, too.

Last year in India, social activist and anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare forced the entire political class to accept the demand of an immediate discussion on a new anti-graft law in the parliament, 12 days after he began his indefinite hunger strike at a public ground in the Indian capital New Delhi.

With over 50 news channels in India and thousands of newspapers and magazines reporting a minute-by-minute account of Anna’s failing health, the spectacle of a 70-year-old being examined on a stage in front of thousands of people sent temperatures soaring in the nation of 1.2 billion — with city after city across the nation reporting people coming on to the streets to support the man who was “willing to die for them”. It was pressure that the government, in the end, could not withstand.

But an ‘indefinite hunger strike’ has long been an essential form of resistance in India, since the early days of the nation’s struggle for independence from the British Empire. Numerous hunger strikes by Mahatma Gandhi, who is credited with making the extreme mode of protest ‘popular’ in India, achieved dramatic results during the period.

Some analysts believe that Gandhi was quick to realise that in a country where hunger was endemic and where it is often said that one cannot (even) pray on an empty stomach (“bhookey pet bhajan nahin hote”), hunger, whether natural or forced, would work as a potent tool to make people sympathise with his cause.

Others, however, say that the theatrical value of Gandhi’s protests, which included his friends and news agencies from overseas in good measure, went a long way in helping his cause.

The fact that extreme forms of protest, but without the same amount of mass support from either people or the media, have not produced quite the same results seems to support this argument.

Last year, while Anna’s anti-corruption movement was at a high in India, a Hindu monk in the holy city of Hardwar died a lonely death after 73 days of fasting. He was protesting against the rapidly deteriorating state of river Ganga — not an issue that has exercised Indians in recent months.

Similarly, 39-year-old Irom Sharmila, who in 2005 was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, has been fasting for the last 11 years to demand the repeal of India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which has been in effect in her home state of Manipur since 1958. AFSPA gives India’s federal armed forces absolute powers of search, seizure, arrest, and provides immunity to military personnel accused of abuses against the civilian population.

The Indian authorities have interpreted Sharmila’s fast as a suicide attempt, for which the maximum sentence is a one-year jail term. At the start of each year, since 2000, she has been arrested, kept in a security ward, and force-fed a mixture of vitamins and nutrients twice a day through a nose tube. She is released at the end of each year — only to be arrested again the next day.

The bureaucratic and physical barriers are so overwhelming for the outside world that only a trickle of images and anecdotal stories have managed to escape from the prison ward in Imphal, capital city of Manipur, where she has been in solitary confinement since November 2000.

Sharmila’s resolve has remained unchanged but the strength in her slender frame has diminished to worrying levels over the past decade. But there are no signs whatsoever that her protest is going to yield the desired fruit — perhaps because Sharmila’s protest has not yet embraced the true philosophy of extreme protests.

“As an act of protest, it [extreme protest] is intended to be public in at least one of two senses: performed in a public place in view of other people, or accompanied by a written letter addressed to political figures or to the general public. In addition, this is not always a solitary act; two or more individuals may coordinate their sacrifice,” says Biggs.

It is not unique to Asia, even though the fact that a majority of cases of extreme protest are reported from the region may seem to suggest so.

The fact is that most cases of extreme protests in the region are accompanied by similar factors such as a lack of representation, the intransigence of authorities, and an absolute desperation to do something about it. Making a public statement seems to be the only avenue left for protesters to shake the status quo.

Waiting eagerly for them in public squares is their newest supporter, the mass media.