Category: Asia360 News (Singapore)

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.”

…………………………..

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.