Category: Journalism

India’s main opposition party shoots itself in the foot by taking in graft-tainted politician

NEW DELHI (13 January 2012) —The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) decision to admit a corruption-tainted politician to its ranks ahead of the February elections in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) has significantly damaged its prospects in the upcoming elections. And the man in the centre of the controversy has now left the party too.

Babu Singh Kushwaha, who was wooed by the BJP in a bid to draw support for the party at the upcoming elections, asked the BJP party chief Nitin Gadkari on January 7 — four days after his induction — to put his party membership on hold until he cleared his name of all corruption charges.

Political experts see the “offer” by Kushwaha, who was expelled from both UP’s ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government and the BSP in November 2011 over allegations of misappropriation of federal government funds, as BJP’s attempt to wriggle its way out of the controversy.

BJP had hoped that Kushwaha, who commands substantial influence over the “backward” caste community that he belongs to, would help the party garner votes in the caste-based electoral politics of UP. Kushwaha’s community, which forms 9% of the votes in the state, is known to vote en bloc along caste lines.

But the decision by the party president Nitin Gadkari was met with reservations by senior leaders who were against the party becoming associated with a tainted person — especially when the party was projecting itself as a serious anti-corruption political force in the country.

Many other BJP leaders from UP expressed displeasure with the decision, with Uma Bharti, who is entrusted with leading the UP election campaigning, announcing to her intention to take a pause in her responsibilities on January 6.

Sensing the BJP’s troubles, the Congress party, the biggest constituent of the ruling federal coalition government, went on an immediate offensive against their rivals.

“The Youth Congress exposed him [Kushwaha] and his corrupt practices. He approached Congress and pleaded to take him in the party and save him. But, we refused and said, we would not save you. You will be sent to jail,” Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi said at an election rally in the eastern UP district of Gorakhpur on January 6. The BJP soon started facing derision in media reports too.

Senior political commentator Seema Mustafa, writing in the Daily News & Analysis a leading English daily, said that “the BJP has twisted its knickers by quietly bringing in a couple of nasty, corrupt ministers kicked out by the BSP”. Amid mounting criticism and the fear of likely political reversal in the politically vital state of UP, the BJP eventually, and ironically, reached out to Kushwaha to bail it out.

Unfortunately for the BJP, the matter did not end with the “resignation” of Kushwaha from the party.

Ramashish Rai, former youth wing leader of the party, alleged that a backroom financial deal was involved in the admission of Babu Singh Kushwaha into the BJP.

“Kushwaha had a deal with some leaders of the party and it seems monetary help was taken from him for contesting elections,” Rai claimed while talking to reporters in UP’s capital Lucknow on January 9.

A day later, Team Anna, the group leading India’s anti-corruption movement, decided it would no longer differentiate between the BJP and its original target, the Congress Party. It said it would hold both parties to equal account in upcoming elections in five states.

Many analysts believe that the Kushwaha fiasco has done irreparable damage to the BJP’s chances in the UP elections. With less than a month to go before voting, there may not be enough time to come up with a political platform other than the “anti-corruption” ticket.

Over 110 million voters of Uttar Pradesh will vote for a new legislature in a seven-phase poll staggered between February 8 and March 4 this year. The term of the present State Legislature is set to expire on May 20.

The battle over Muslim voters in Uttar Pradesh intensifies

NEW DELHI (20 January 2012) — The race is on to win over the pivotal Muslim vote in the key Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) ahead of the February-March elections, as politicians dangle the carrot of affirmative action.

Politicians are tripping over themselves to propose the inclusion of Muslims in the ‘reservation’ scheme, a largely caste-based affirmative action programme meant for historically marginalised social groups.

Law minister Salman Khurshid of the ruling Congress Party has proposed a 9% reservation of federal government jobs and university admissions for Muslims, to be carved out of the existing 27% for Other Backward Classes (OBC).

Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief of the state’s second biggest Samajwadi Party (SP) has also announced an 18% reservation for Muslims outside of the existing OBC reservation if his party was voted into power.

He also promises a commission to “survey the backwardness of Muslims” in the northern Indian state, he wrote to influential Syed Ahmed Bukhari, head cleric of Delhi’s Jama Masjid.

“I want to ask from where this 9% and 18% will come,” Nitin Gadkari, president of principal opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said at an election rally on January 17. “The game of reservation on religious grounds that is being played by the Congress and SP would one day prove to be dangerous not only for UP, but for the entire country,” he added.

The election commission is investigating whether Khurshid violated the poll code of conduct. India’s election code prevents the government from starting projects close to the polls that could bestow an unfair advantage. It also prevents politicians from making populist announcements to earn more votes.

The Congress Party has distanced itself from Khurshid’s reservation statement, describing it as his personal opinion.

Still, the opposition BJP has launched a campaign called “OBC bachao aandolan”: Agitation to save OBC. Three senior party leaders have been touring the backward constituencies of the state claiming that Congress was passing on their jobs to the Muslims.

“If the government wants to introduce reservation on the basis of religion, it should first declare India as a Hindu country. This is bad politics that Congress is indulging in for increasing its vote banks,” BJP leader Uma Bharti said.

The pot was first stirred by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which proposed a 4.5% quota for minorities within the OBC reservation quota just before the announcement of the UP election dates. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had also challenged the SP chief to reveal his stand on the issue. The Congress’ objective, it appears, was to split the Muslim and OBC vote, which generally goes to the SP.

The Muslim vote, which forms about 18% of UP’s electorate, has always been a pivotal factor in the state’s politics and influences results in more than 100 of the 403 legislative assembly seats of the state. In 70 of these seats, Muslims comprise 20% of the electorate; they make up 30-45% of the electorate in 36 other seats in the state.

The latest polls suggest that at least 50% of Muslims are likely to continue voting for the SP.

India’s law minister apologises for public spat with election commission

NEW DELHI (17 February 2012) — Law Minister Salman Khurshid avoided a showdown with his own government and the Election Commission (EC) by apologising for imprudent remarks he made during a public rally for the ongoing provincial elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP).

On February 11, while speaking in support of his wife who is contesting the Farrukhabad region of UP as a Congress Party candidate, Khurshid promised to include Muslims in the Hindu-majority country’s affirmative action programme.

The EC viewed the remarks as an inappropriate attempt to influence Muslim voters and a violation of election laws that bar political parties from campaigning on the promise of new policy incentives after election dates have been announced. But even after the EC’s censure, a defiant Khurshid said at another rally that he would continue to fight for Muslim inclusion in the programme even “if they [the EC] hang me”.

The Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) SY Quraishi said that the tone and gist of Khurshid’s remarks were “utterly contemptuous and dismissive” of the EC and “damaging to the level-playing field” in the UP election. Quraishi sought an “immediate and decisive” intervention by the president.

The EC’s appeal to the president was prompted by a complaint filed against Khurshid by India’s principal opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP also demanded Khurshid’s dismissal. The president forwarded the letter to the prime minister who called on Khurshid to clarify his position.

The pressure to apologise to the EC piled on Khurshid, who also holds the minorities affairs portfolio, when Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said he disapproved of Khurshid’s statement. The influential minister’s intervention came amid growing worry in the Congress Party that Khurshid’s controversial statements would spark a clash between the EC and the government.

Finding himself alienated, Khurshid wrote a letter to the EC on February 13 and apologised for his remarks, saying, “It has never been my intention to transgress the law and undermine the election code of conduct. I have great respect for the commission and the decisions it takes and has taken.”

Although the EC decided to put a lid on the issue, the opposition BJP seemed in no mood to let go.

“Khurshid should publicly apologise to the nation and to the Election Commission on the issue,” BJP spokesperson Prakash Javdekar said in a news conference on February 14.

Analysts believe that the BJP’s interest in extending the controversy lies in the fact that the affirmation action programme has the potential to polarise voters along religious lines in UP. Sectarian politics has always helped the BJP win bulk votes from its key constituency, the majority Hindu community in the state.

The Congress Party, meanwhile, is relieved that Khurshid’s spat with the EC may be blowing over. But there is also a view in the party that while Khurshid could have avoided defying the EC publicly, the commission’s decision to write to the president was also an unnecessarily extreme step.

Muslims form 18% of the UP electorate and the Congress Party has been trying hard to woo them through promises of affirmative action in employment and other areas. The election results on March 4 will show if Khhurshid’s controversy had a detrimental effect on his party’s chances.

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