SRINAGAR, India // Writing last week in a popular Indian newsweekly, Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief, warned India against “doing an America” following the Mumbai attack. He advised New Delhi to be firm with Pakistan, take responsibility and turn northwards.
“The Kashmir issue clearly incites Pakistani and Indian Islamists, as well as those associated with or inspired by al Qa’eda,” Mr Scheuer wrote. “Whether those Islamists are right or wrong is irrelevant. India’s positions on and actions in Kashmir motivates them.”
Since its disputed accession to India in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars over this predominantly Muslim region of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. A bloody insurgency against Indian rule began in 1989, leading to more than 60,000 dead yet little progress regarding the territorial tug-of-war.
After the Mumbai attacks, analysts and observers from Washington to Waziristan have suggested ways to cut the Gordian knot that both binds and repels India and Pakistan. Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist group and the prime suspect in the Mumbai attacks, sprung from the Kashmir dispute, along with about a dozen militant groups – a handful of which the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies have armed as part of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts policy against India.
Some advisers to US president-elect Barack Obama argue that solving Kashmir will help solve Pakistani terrorism. Others warn against such simplistic reasoning. But Mr Scheuer distills the point down to its essence: India’s stance in Kashmir incites Islamist terrorists. Their al Qa’eda-style insurrection threatens to rock the foundations of the Indian state, to topple Pakistan and Afghanistan and endanger western targets as well.
If the world’s terrorism nexus is Pakistan, its roots lie in this lush, war-torn Himalayan valley, which may be more ripe for resolution than at any moment in recent memory. Violence has plummeted, dropping steadily every year since 2001. Although still only a trickle, travel and trade between the two sides of Kashmir – Indian and Pakistani – have further reduced tensions. And last summer, mass pro-freedom marches outlined a new movement of Gandhian non-violence, less hard line and perhaps open to dialogue.
Finally, over the past month Kashmiris have turned out impressively for state assembly elections – double, even triple the 2002 turnout in some districts – suggesting that many have moved beyond their tired separatist leadership and are amenable to a lesser, more India-friendly form of freedom.
Further afield the outlook is also bright. Both houses of the US Congress passed resolutions urging Pakistan to root out extremist groups and prevent its territory from being used to launch attacks. The UN Security Council has banned the Lashkar front, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and is applying strong pressure on Pakistan to crack down on terrorism. And the incoming Obama administration has hinted at a regional approach to Afghanistan that will include resolving Kashmir as a crucial element of ensuring Pakistani military support.
India could use this domestic and international consensus as leverage to pressure Pakistan – not only to root out terrorism, but to hack at the roots of regional terrorism by moving towards a resolution on Kashmir. Yet presented with this golden opportunity, India has buried its head in the sand.
“The attack on Mumbai has nothing to do with India-Pakistan relations or with Kashmir,” the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said at a press conference in Srinagar last week.
As the dispute’s more powerful party, India has long been satisfied with the status quo and has therefore seen little reason to allow international intervention or to negotiate openly with Pakistan. But after the devastating attack on Mumbai, the Indian state must realize that the Kashmir dispute is no longer a stable, self-serving stalemate but a malignant tumor. Both parties now have an urgent interest in finding a resolution; India and its people will gain security, as will Pakistan and the world beyond.
Led by Asif Ali Zardari, the president, Pakistan’s democratic government has acknowledged that the greatest threat to its integrity is not India but locally based, state-supported terrorism outfits. The jailing of dozens of alleged terrorists and a ban on Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a good start. But the real test will be the Pakistani military, which has controlled the levers of power and wielded terrorism as a proxy for decades. Its leadership may be getting the message as well.
“The civilian and military leadership has to do some serious introspection about the cost-benefit ratio of these outdated and failed policies,” Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant-general in the Pakistan army, wrote in the Daily Times last week.
“Has Pakistan come any closer to achieving its objectives in Jammu and Kashmir by supporting militancy and proxies?” he asked. “The best option for Pakistan is to strictly confine its support to the Kashmir cause to the political and diplomatic domain.”
Kashmiris widely cheered the election of Mr Obama as the next US president, perhaps with good reason. At the urging of advisers like Mr Scheuer and a soon-to-be-published report from Gen David Petreaus, the architect of the Iraqi surge now overseeing the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is likely to prod India and Pakistan to come to the negotiating table on Kashmir – with or without international assistance. Considering the grave threat exposed by the Mumbai attack and the golden opportunity before it, New Delhi would be wise to heed the call.
-- published Dec 21 in The National, www.thenational.ae.
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
12.20.2008
Kashmiris Hope for Christmas Poll Gift
Srinigar // Waiting for Santa Claus will be particularly excruciating for Kashmiris this year.
After Wednesday’s vote, Kashmir has gone to the polls six times since mid-November, and six times they have turned out impressively. The seventh and final vote – on Christmas Eve here in the state’s winter capital – will put a new state government in place, bring an unsettled populace into focus and perhaps put an end to a virulent yet non-violent pro-freedom movement that seemed to trouble New Delhi more than militancy.
Since a bloody insurgency against Indian rule began in 1989, more than 60,000 have died in this landlocked and predominantly Muslim region of Jammu and Kashmir state. Violence has slowed in recent years as more than half a million Indian troops have imposed New Delhi’s will.
Yet when blockaded roads threatened local traders during a land row late last summer, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris thronged the streets in a furious mass catharsis – releasing almost two decades of frustration and rage with chanting, dancing and the crying of pro-freedom slogans.
The central government banned the marches, beefed up security and called for snap elections. Although separatists say voting strengthens New Delhi’s hand, turnout in the early phases of polling hit nearly 70 per cent in some districts and has remained high despite daytime curfews, occasional police clashes and ubiquitous checkpoints on polling days.
The ground has shifted in Kashmir, but exactly how remains unclear.
“Everything has changed,” said Malik Sajad, 21, a student and political cartoonist for the valley’s leading daily newspaper. “That time you had people on the road. Now there are troops, and people are either inside or getting beat – I feel my childhood days are returned.”
Some of the 1990s danger has returned – security forces killed two commanders of militant group Hizb-ul-Mujihadeen in a shoot-out on Wednesday – even as voters went to the polls. In embracing Indian democracy and turning against what so many demanded so vocally so recently, have Kashmiris betrayed themselves?
“People going back and forth, protesting and voting, is not unprecedented in Kashmir,” said Zarief Ahmad Shah, a political analyst and retired government servant, citing historical antecedents in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Pointing to the continued presence of hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and the poor strategies of the separatist leaders, he said: “People are confused, not sure of what they want.”
Individuals seemed sure during Wednesday’s polling, as south Kashmir’s hilly Anantnag district saw 57 per cent turnout in a chilly drizzle. Kashmiris as a group, however, did not.
“We don’t have schools, good roads or a hospital, and there is unemployment,” said Khaleda Sheikh, a 37-year-old mother of two, while waiting to vote in the riverside village of Kashiteng Zarpara. “The government will help us.”
At a polling place a few kilometres away in the village of Kanalwan, a group of men had another perspective.
“We are voting so that they solve the Kashmir issue,” 58-year-old farmer Haji Mohammed Abdullah Shah said to murmurs of approval. “All this other stuff – roads, education, jobs – that’s nothing. This is about solving Kashmir.”
Queueing to vote nearby, Ghulam Nabi Karchoo explained. “There are several types of azaadi,” said the 45-year-old father of four, using the local word for independence. “There’s complete independence, but there’s also the ability to move freely, to cross borders and not deal with so much security.”
Others believe the quest for azaadi must remain pure. Outside a polling station in Anantnag, the district capital, several dozen men gathered to protest the elections.
“People in the government are puppets, and the strings are in Delhi,” said Mohammed Asim, 26, a computer engineer sporting sunglasses, a long beard and a black, leather jacket. He was surrounded by a group of agitated men. Some had voted, but they broke into anti-India chants at the slightest urging.
“These people who are voting – they don’t realise what they are doing,” said Mr Asim, a supporter of hard-line separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. “Voting gives India the power to say we are with them.”
The accuracy of that stance will be tested with the final vote in Srinagar, which represents a fifth of the valley’s five million population. Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, a key separatist politician and religious leader, has called for a boycott and pro-freedom march.
Shops will be shut, streets will be silent and security forces will patrol the city. Turn out is expected to be low, between 15 per cent and 30 per cent.
“The results of these elections don’t mean anything,” said Mr. Shah, the political analyst. Their apparent success, however, “is a big blow for separatists”, he said.
“If people lose heart, India has won.”
The city’s urbane youth are aware of greater international scrutiny post-Mumbai; familiar with popular YouTube videos such as “Bleeding India”, which depicts the deaths of several young Kashmiris at the hands of security forces; and frustrated by restrictive government dictates, such as a ban on text messaging, ongoing since July.
They were also at the head of the nonviolent campaign for self-determination this year.
“I don’t think I will vote because there is nobody who can represent us,” said Mr Sajad, the cartoonist. “I don’t think the protests are over. They will be over only when the government starts listening.”
For many, such meaningful dialogue is a long way off.
“The protests sent the message that we will accept nothing less than independence,” said Mr Asim, the Anantnag computer engineer.
“Are we willing to embrace violence again? We don’t want to, but if that’s the only way.”
Mr Asim raised his eyebrows. The men around him began nodding their heads.
-- published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 19.
After Wednesday’s vote, Kashmir has gone to the polls six times since mid-November, and six times they have turned out impressively. The seventh and final vote – on Christmas Eve here in the state’s winter capital – will put a new state government in place, bring an unsettled populace into focus and perhaps put an end to a virulent yet non-violent pro-freedom movement that seemed to trouble New Delhi more than militancy.
Since a bloody insurgency against Indian rule began in 1989, more than 60,000 have died in this landlocked and predominantly Muslim region of Jammu and Kashmir state. Violence has slowed in recent years as more than half a million Indian troops have imposed New Delhi’s will.
Yet when blockaded roads threatened local traders during a land row late last summer, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris thronged the streets in a furious mass catharsis – releasing almost two decades of frustration and rage with chanting, dancing and the crying of pro-freedom slogans.
The central government banned the marches, beefed up security and called for snap elections. Although separatists say voting strengthens New Delhi’s hand, turnout in the early phases of polling hit nearly 70 per cent in some districts and has remained high despite daytime curfews, occasional police clashes and ubiquitous checkpoints on polling days.
The ground has shifted in Kashmir, but exactly how remains unclear.
“Everything has changed,” said Malik Sajad, 21, a student and political cartoonist for the valley’s leading daily newspaper. “That time you had people on the road. Now there are troops, and people are either inside or getting beat – I feel my childhood days are returned.”
Some of the 1990s danger has returned – security forces killed two commanders of militant group Hizb-ul-Mujihadeen in a shoot-out on Wednesday – even as voters went to the polls. In embracing Indian democracy and turning against what so many demanded so vocally so recently, have Kashmiris betrayed themselves?
“People going back and forth, protesting and voting, is not unprecedented in Kashmir,” said Zarief Ahmad Shah, a political analyst and retired government servant, citing historical antecedents in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Pointing to the continued presence of hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and the poor strategies of the separatist leaders, he said: “People are confused, not sure of what they want.”
Individuals seemed sure during Wednesday’s polling, as south Kashmir’s hilly Anantnag district saw 57 per cent turnout in a chilly drizzle. Kashmiris as a group, however, did not.
“We don’t have schools, good roads or a hospital, and there is unemployment,” said Khaleda Sheikh, a 37-year-old mother of two, while waiting to vote in the riverside village of Kashiteng Zarpara. “The government will help us.”
At a polling place a few kilometres away in the village of Kanalwan, a group of men had another perspective.
“We are voting so that they solve the Kashmir issue,” 58-year-old farmer Haji Mohammed Abdullah Shah said to murmurs of approval. “All this other stuff – roads, education, jobs – that’s nothing. This is about solving Kashmir.”
Queueing to vote nearby, Ghulam Nabi Karchoo explained. “There are several types of azaadi,” said the 45-year-old father of four, using the local word for independence. “There’s complete independence, but there’s also the ability to move freely, to cross borders and not deal with so much security.”
Others believe the quest for azaadi must remain pure. Outside a polling station in Anantnag, the district capital, several dozen men gathered to protest the elections.
“People in the government are puppets, and the strings are in Delhi,” said Mohammed Asim, 26, a computer engineer sporting sunglasses, a long beard and a black, leather jacket. He was surrounded by a group of agitated men. Some had voted, but they broke into anti-India chants at the slightest urging.
“These people who are voting – they don’t realise what they are doing,” said Mr Asim, a supporter of hard-line separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. “Voting gives India the power to say we are with them.”
The accuracy of that stance will be tested with the final vote in Srinagar, which represents a fifth of the valley’s five million population. Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, a key separatist politician and religious leader, has called for a boycott and pro-freedom march.
Shops will be shut, streets will be silent and security forces will patrol the city. Turn out is expected to be low, between 15 per cent and 30 per cent.
“The results of these elections don’t mean anything,” said Mr. Shah, the political analyst. Their apparent success, however, “is a big blow for separatists”, he said.
“If people lose heart, India has won.”
The city’s urbane youth are aware of greater international scrutiny post-Mumbai; familiar with popular YouTube videos such as “Bleeding India”, which depicts the deaths of several young Kashmiris at the hands of security forces; and frustrated by restrictive government dictates, such as a ban on text messaging, ongoing since July.
They were also at the head of the nonviolent campaign for self-determination this year.
“I don’t think I will vote because there is nobody who can represent us,” said Mr Sajad, the cartoonist. “I don’t think the protests are over. They will be over only when the government starts listening.”
For many, such meaningful dialogue is a long way off.
“The protests sent the message that we will accept nothing less than independence,” said Mr Asim, the Anantnag computer engineer.
“Are we willing to embrace violence again? We don’t want to, but if that’s the only way.”
Mr Asim raised his eyebrows. The men around him began nodding their heads.
-- published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 19.
Ideals collide in Kashmiri elections
Patelbagh, India // Asadullah Bhat is no stranger to polls, but he is not sure why he keeps coming back.
“My wishes have not been met, change has not taken place,” the 45-year-old paddy farmer said while waiting to vote for the seventh time in 25 years, all in this village a few dozen kilometres south-west of Srinagar. “But we have to vote because the government will be formed either way – so I keep hoping.”
Voters in parts of Kashmir went to the polls amid heavy security on Saturday in the fifth phase of staggered elections to choose the Jammu and Kashmir state assembly. Protests and deadly violence flared and accusations of vote-rigging flew as the people of this war-torn Himalayan valley continued their conflicted duet with Indian democracy.
The predominantly Muslim region has been gripped by conflict since 1989 when separatists took up the gun against India. About 60,000 have died and although violence has slowed in recent years, separatists see elections as a show of fealty towards New Delhi.
Yet turnout in the early phases of polling had reached nearly 70 per cent in some districts. Though numbers have begun to droop as voting moves into less India-friendly regions, Saturday’s results – nearly 50 per cent turnout in two Kashmir districts – represent significant increases from the previous elections in 2002.
Observers see an emerging line of thinking that separates independence from day-to-day governance.
“Why not delink voting from azaadi?” said Shabir Hussain, editor and publisher of a local daily, Kashmir Newsline, using the Urdu word for independence. “Unless we make ourselves a party to these elections, India will continue to thrust jokers and tricksters upon us. We have to consider what kind of damage we are doing to ourselves.”
That damage has been visible throughout the elections — in beefed up security across the valley, in empty streets every Friday and every polling day as bands of Indian troops enforce daytime curfews and in violent flashes from police, who beat up a handful of journalists attempting to cover an anti-election rally on the previous day of polling, Dec 7.
Kashmir election days rarely pass without trouble. On Saturday an early morning protest in Koil village escalated to stone throwing, prodding security forces to open fire – killing a 21-year-old student and injuring two others.
Yet thousands of Kashmiris stood in slow moving lines under cloudy skies to make their mark. Their differing voices revealed the complexity of Kashmir.
Saba Settar, 18, was idealistic about her first vote. “I hope I can choose a candidate who will solve our problems,” said the Pampore resident.
Ms Settar placed education before independence, saying “of first importance is our future”.
Naseer Ahmad, 22, a university student, participated in the mass anti-India protests this year but saw no contradiction in voting.
“I support independence first, but I also vote,” he said, queuing up with friends in Pampore. “We can’t let Jammu get all the government attention.”
In Patelbagh village, Abdul Rahim Yattoo, 70, a farmer, seemed to contradict himself.
“I don’t want all our men that have been killed in the last 20 years to have died in vain, so I want azaadi,” he said. “But I’m happy with India, so I’m voting.”
In traditionally separatist Shopian and Tral, locals are less happy. Several dozen young men chant anti-India slogans outside a Shopian town polling place. Inside, a Congress party poll minder was roughly ejected after accusing an opponent of helping burqa-wearing women to vote twice.
In the village of Nikas, near Shopian, villagers said soldiers had come the previous night and urged them to visit the polls. By noon Saturday voting stood at 12 per cent.
“This is democracy, we have the right to boycott,” said Arshad Hussain, a Nikas resident who did not vote. The 28-year-old is unemployed despite a master’s degree in history from Kashmir University. “India is taking only our blood, not giving anything in return.”
Yesterday, Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, spoke of giving back at a Congress party campaign rally near Shangas, in Anantnag district, which will vote on Wednesday. He announced a reconstruction programme of 26 billion Indian rupees (Dh1.97bn), along with planned power projects, roads and colleges.
“Autonomy and self-rule is also possible if the Congress is brought back to power,” he told a crowd of less than 1,000 supporters. Mr Singh congratulated Kashmir for its participation in the elections, saying “this proves that you have full faith in democracy”.
Mr Hussain, the Nikas resident, foresaw a dark future. “People are not joining together, taking one line,” he said. “Sometime they are with India, sometime azaadi.”
Mr Bhat, the Patelbagh paddy farmer, may have hit on why.
“The mainstream politicians cheat people and among the separatists there are no good leaders,” he said. “[Politicians’] children are studying in another country, in the US, but look at ours — they have no education, no future. What kind of leadership is that?”
-- published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 15.
12.07.2008
Political revamp far off despite bloodshed
They could not even let the blood dry.
Indian officials’ post-Mumbai opportunism and finger-pointing began while lives remained in danger, and has continued long after. They have bickered, bumbled and placed blame, but have done very little of what they are paid to do: lead.
As commandos prepared for a final assault on the Oberoi Hotel, Narendra Modi, who is the Gujarat chief minister and a divisive, charismatic national figure for the opposition BJP, offered 10 million rupees compensation to the family of the Mumbai antiterror squad leader Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the attack. The family rejected the offer, perhaps because the previous week Mr Modi had verbally abused Karkare’s squad for implicating Hindu nationalists in a previous bomb attack.
That same day, the BJP ran a political advertisement on the front page of the Hindustan Times (national parliamentary elections are scheduled for early next year). Immediately below an editorial calling for political unity, the blood-splattered ad blamed the “brutal terrorist attacks” on a “weak and incapable government."
Hours after terrorists were finally evicted from the rooms of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, took a celebrity film director on an official visit to the hotel. “Many people come to such places,” he said. Such nonchalance apparently trickles down. Of the assault, Mr Deshmukh’s deputy, R R Patil, said, “small incidents like this do happen in big cities”.
But the impropriety may have peaked with V S Achuthananthan, the chief minister of Kerala, who was turned away when he tried to offer condolences at the home of a commando killed in the attack. “Had it not been a martyr’s house,” he said later, “not even a dog would have gone there.”
For Ramachandra Guha, historian and author of India After Gandhi, this has not been a proud moment for India. “There’s just no excuse for this shameful, vulgar behaviour,” he said.
“It’s a consequence of the weakness and shortsightedness of Indian politicians. There’s also a larger systemic cause, this fragmented polity, wherein every coalition is extremely vulnerable and looking at short-term survival as opposed to the efficacy of security, education, health policy or anything else.”
Indeed, the leadership in New Delhi has fared little better. The Mumbai reaction speech by Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, conveyed neither confidence nor conviction. And after the resignation of Shivraj Patil, the home minister, who as terror attacks piled up in recent months looked more and more like a deer in headlights, P Chidambaram, the finance minister, stepped into the post.
Mr Singh, an economist himself, temporarily assumed the finance portfolio – leaving India without a full-time finance minister during the 21st century’s first global financial crisis.
Combined with the jaw-dropping security and intelligence failures that led to the assault, the inability of any public leader to adequately frame the nation’s roiling mix of anger, fear, outrage and sorrow has revealed the fragility of the Indian state. Urban, informed Indians have responded to the leadership vacuum with a groundswell of venom.
In thousands of online forums and viral text messages, young Indians are denouncing their opportunistic, deceitful and inept politicians. An angry, anti-politician demonstration outside the Taj hotel attracted nearly 20,000 Mumbaikars on Wednesday – a huge number for the normally laissez-faire metropolis.
Leading columnists, well-known authors and Bollywood stars are prodding Indians to be accountable and ask the same of their leaders. Others have urged people to refrain from voting or to stop paying taxes. Perversely, the anger seems directed more towards politicians than terrorists. Perhaps because the Mumbai assault targeted not just foreigners but the Indian upper class, who were suddenly moved to act.
“All the horror and outrage is because it’s the Taj, a symbol of aspiration for a very long time,” Mr Guha said. India’s poor suffer similar upheavals practically every day.
The death toll from a cyclone that hit the Tamil Nadu coast on the first full day terror gripped Mumbai, for instance, has passed 180 – making it more deadly than the terror attack. The storm has also displaced nearly 2.5 million, yet elicited barely a whimper from either the media or the newly activist urbanites.
So will this vague, narrow-minded rage result in a political reckoning? Some early signs are encouraging.
Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir have each held state elections since the Mumbai assault, and all recorded higher than average voter turnout.
The Association for Democratic Reforms, a network of 1,200 democracy advocate organisations across the country, is pushing to include a “none of the above” option on ballots and pressing for the right to recall candidates.
Yet if crying for change is no silver bullet, neither is removing politicians, as it is impossible to ensure the rise of effective successors. For now, the focus should be on improving security, and the creation of a central intelligence agency for terrorism based on the model of the US Department of Homeland Security is a good first step.
The next is depoliticising a hoary security system in which senior appointments are made by politicians. “In that kind of situation, where the security apparatus is always looking to please political masters, you cannot have efficient functioning,” Mr Guha said.
Grossly incompetent intelligence and security institutions; flailing, venal, and morally questionable leadership; and a populace separated by yawning divisions of income and geography: is India the world’s largest democracy or its biggest banana republic?
“Because India is so diverse and complicated it will always be vulnerable to conflict and attacks of this kind,” Mr Guha said. “This will not lead to the collapse of Indian democracy. We will stumble along, hopefully we will learn something and move on.”
--- ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 7.
Indian officials’ post-Mumbai opportunism and finger-pointing began while lives remained in danger, and has continued long after. They have bickered, bumbled and placed blame, but have done very little of what they are paid to do: lead.
As commandos prepared for a final assault on the Oberoi Hotel, Narendra Modi, who is the Gujarat chief minister and a divisive, charismatic national figure for the opposition BJP, offered 10 million rupees compensation to the family of the Mumbai antiterror squad leader Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the attack. The family rejected the offer, perhaps because the previous week Mr Modi had verbally abused Karkare’s squad for implicating Hindu nationalists in a previous bomb attack.
That same day, the BJP ran a political advertisement on the front page of the Hindustan Times (national parliamentary elections are scheduled for early next year). Immediately below an editorial calling for political unity, the blood-splattered ad blamed the “brutal terrorist attacks” on a “weak and incapable government."
Hours after terrorists were finally evicted from the rooms of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, took a celebrity film director on an official visit to the hotel. “Many people come to such places,” he said. Such nonchalance apparently trickles down. Of the assault, Mr Deshmukh’s deputy, R R Patil, said, “small incidents like this do happen in big cities”.
But the impropriety may have peaked with V S Achuthananthan, the chief minister of Kerala, who was turned away when he tried to offer condolences at the home of a commando killed in the attack. “Had it not been a martyr’s house,” he said later, “not even a dog would have gone there.”
For Ramachandra Guha, historian and author of India After Gandhi, this has not been a proud moment for India. “There’s just no excuse for this shameful, vulgar behaviour,” he said.
“It’s a consequence of the weakness and shortsightedness of Indian politicians. There’s also a larger systemic cause, this fragmented polity, wherein every coalition is extremely vulnerable and looking at short-term survival as opposed to the efficacy of security, education, health policy or anything else.”
Indeed, the leadership in New Delhi has fared little better. The Mumbai reaction speech by Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, conveyed neither confidence nor conviction. And after the resignation of Shivraj Patil, the home minister, who as terror attacks piled up in recent months looked more and more like a deer in headlights, P Chidambaram, the finance minister, stepped into the post.
Mr Singh, an economist himself, temporarily assumed the finance portfolio – leaving India without a full-time finance minister during the 21st century’s first global financial crisis.
Combined with the jaw-dropping security and intelligence failures that led to the assault, the inability of any public leader to adequately frame the nation’s roiling mix of anger, fear, outrage and sorrow has revealed the fragility of the Indian state. Urban, informed Indians have responded to the leadership vacuum with a groundswell of venom.
In thousands of online forums and viral text messages, young Indians are denouncing their opportunistic, deceitful and inept politicians. An angry, anti-politician demonstration outside the Taj hotel attracted nearly 20,000 Mumbaikars on Wednesday – a huge number for the normally laissez-faire metropolis.
Leading columnists, well-known authors and Bollywood stars are prodding Indians to be accountable and ask the same of their leaders. Others have urged people to refrain from voting or to stop paying taxes. Perversely, the anger seems directed more towards politicians than terrorists. Perhaps because the Mumbai assault targeted not just foreigners but the Indian upper class, who were suddenly moved to act.
“All the horror and outrage is because it’s the Taj, a symbol of aspiration for a very long time,” Mr Guha said. India’s poor suffer similar upheavals practically every day.
The death toll from a cyclone that hit the Tamil Nadu coast on the first full day terror gripped Mumbai, for instance, has passed 180 – making it more deadly than the terror attack. The storm has also displaced nearly 2.5 million, yet elicited barely a whimper from either the media or the newly activist urbanites.
So will this vague, narrow-minded rage result in a political reckoning? Some early signs are encouraging.
Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir have each held state elections since the Mumbai assault, and all recorded higher than average voter turnout.
The Association for Democratic Reforms, a network of 1,200 democracy advocate organisations across the country, is pushing to include a “none of the above” option on ballots and pressing for the right to recall candidates.
Yet if crying for change is no silver bullet, neither is removing politicians, as it is impossible to ensure the rise of effective successors. For now, the focus should be on improving security, and the creation of a central intelligence agency for terrorism based on the model of the US Department of Homeland Security is a good first step.
The next is depoliticising a hoary security system in which senior appointments are made by politicians. “In that kind of situation, where the security apparatus is always looking to please political masters, you cannot have efficient functioning,” Mr Guha said.
Grossly incompetent intelligence and security institutions; flailing, venal, and morally questionable leadership; and a populace separated by yawning divisions of income and geography: is India the world’s largest democracy or its biggest banana republic?
“Because India is so diverse and complicated it will always be vulnerable to conflict and attacks of this kind,” Mr Guha said. “This will not lead to the collapse of Indian democracy. We will stumble along, hopefully we will learn something and move on.”
--- ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 7.
12.03.2008
'It's an Attack on Everything'
As the most audacious terrorist attack in Indian history wound down, David Lepeska, Foreign Correspondent, met with Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi-based think tank that studies regional terrorism and insurgency. Mr Sahni is also the executive editor of Faultlines, an Indian quarterly, and writes frequently about South Asian conflict and Indian security dilemmas. In his offices not far from the seat of Indian power, Mr Sahni spoke about the implications of the Mumbai assault, the suspected involvement of Pakistan and the outlook for counter-terrorism in India.
Q: Many are calling this India’s September 11. Your thoughts?
A: The entire approach to terrorism in India is sensationalist and tragically transient. Somebody called Mumbai the “soul of India”. Then I would like to say that the soul of India has been attacked again and again and again. What’s the big deal? We did nothing last time. The attacks in 1993 and 2006 both had greater numbers killed. Why does this become September 11? I don’t see that.
This was a meticulously planned operation involving dozens of operatives and lengthy planning – and it came two months after a known terrorist group warned authorities of an attack on Mumbai. Yet Indian intelligence found no clues, no warning signs?
This is not at all surprising. We have no intelligence capacity. Everybody believes the Intelligence Bureau is some million-armed octopus with a presence everywhere in this country. The reality of IB is that it has 3,500 intelligence gatherers across the country. The force dedicated to counter-terrorism is about 200 personnel – this in a country of 1.2 billion. Considering that, I am amazed we are not blown up more often.
Rate the security response to this attack.
I see exemplary courage, exemplary leadership and exemplary dedication to duty, in everybody who responded from the security forces. I see people who are given virtually nothing to fight with and putting everything they have into the fight, with many losing their lives.
And yet finally seven hours after the beginning of the incident the so-called elite counter-terrorism force arrives. That is an absolute structural failure. A terrorism operation can only be contained, in terms of its potential, in the first few minutes, which means the first respondents have to be equipped, trained and capable of if not neutralising than at least containing the terrorists. If the first batch of police had come and immediately engaged with the terrorist they probably would have been able in both of these hotels to isolate the terrorists in small corners of the hotel and minimise the damage.
Many are blaming the police for the extent of the damage and the protraction of the assault.
Look, we are among the most under-policed countries in the world. We have a primitive police force, an early 20th century force trying to tackle a 21st century scourge. They’re just not trained, they’re not equipped. I could be lugging a weapon of whatever efficacy, for 10 years, without having the opportunity to use it. And then suddenly I am confronted with terrorists, well-trained, well-equipped, capable of blowing the crap out of me – and I barely know how to hold my gun straight. That is the state of Indian policing.
The reality is that nobody in India, no political party, wants a professional police force.
What do you mean by that?
During the ongoing investigations into the Malegaon blasts [in which Hindu nationalists have been arrested and charged], all the parties related to the Hindu right have been consistently attacking the very people who have laid down their lives in this Mumbai encounter. They have vilified them, they have denigrated them, they have abused them, they have accused them of torture, with the fabrication of case.
Why? Because they are trying to protect certain accused.
Every political party in this country wants to make sure the police investigates only what it wants them to investigate. They do not want an efficient, independent, professional police force. They want to use the police as their partisan thugs. Just a tool, and not a tool for the management of law and order, its declared purpose, but a tool for my political party.
So what will it take to change the mindset?
We have a problem in this country. We have an electorate that is more or less illiterate and ignorant. We have fed the world nonsense about the natural and instinctive wisdom of the people, but the people have no wisdom. They are a rabble and they are more easily led by caste or communal mobilisation than on issues. Unless we are able through public action and the media to generate so much pressure on politicians that they begin to address these issues, the politician himself has shorter routes to power, he will take those.
Early signs point to Pakistan-based Lashkar-i-Taiba, do you agree?
Absolutely. And if there is an Indian role it will be the Students Islamic Movement of India, in a secondary role. I do not see Simi having achieved the capacities to execute an operation of this nature independently.
What is their intent, their goal with this audacious attack?
It’s an attack on everything. It’s an attack to weaken India where you can. And if we can’t weaken India, never mind, just kill as many people as you can. It’s part of a larger campaign that is pan-Islamist. And the second, underlying motivation is Pakistan’s strategic interests. And these have been married into an ideological mobilisation that instrumentalises Islamism.
Is the targeting of foreigners in India a new twist?
As long as local Indian cadres with comparatively local objectives were involved, they were hitting local targets. As they become part, more and more, of the pan-Islamist movement, and their exposure to al Qa’eda ideology becomes deeper and deeper – they start looking for the wider target.
So if it is traced back to Lashkar, how will this affect Indo-Pak relations?
Not at all.
Same old, same old?
Same old, same old. What’s new?
Lashkar’s 2001 attack on the Indian parliament certainly changed Indo-Pak relations [India and Pakistan went to the brink of war].
No country has ever argued that a strong and stable enemy is in its interests. India has now argued that. The entire leadership – the military leadership of this country – is convinced that a strong and stable Pakistan is in our interests, even if Pakistan remains hostile. I have never come across greater and more entrenched stupidity.
You believe the leadership of Pakistan is at the very least aware of these attacks?
Absolutely, without question.
President (Asif Ali) Zardari, Prime Minister (Yusaf Raza) Gilani?
As far as I’m concerned there is only one leadership in Pakistan, that’s the military leadership. I don’t care who’s in government. Democracy makes no difference, elections make no difference, the people in charge are the people with the guns.
Might those people start attacking this problem?
I don’t see the necessary ideological or strategic shift. Everyone in the Pakistan army still believes that India is its principle enemy. And the only instrument they have for India’s containment is terrorism. And the only instrument they have for terrorist mobilisation against India is extremist Islam. So the sheer logic of their belief systems and their strategic calculations means they cannot abandon terrorism, either against India or against Afghanistan.
What about input from foreign sources – Scotland Yard, for instance, the FBI?
No one can come and fight India’s wars. I’m not saying we have nothing to learn, but I have found the ignorance of western experts to be terrifying. They come here and say: ‘Why don’t you do this?’ I say: ‘Have you seen our police stations in India?’ I know that I cannot have a Scotland Yard or Federal Bureau of Investigation here. I would have a parody of the FBI here.
We need to learn from western experience, but western expertise cannot solve our problems.
So India must deal with terrorist attacks for some time to come?
Even if the leadership changes tomorrow, in its intent and orientation, if we begin to fight this within the existing apparatus of government it will take decades. If we have a leadership that starts to fight this on a war footing it will still take years. You don’t understand how complex it is, we see it from the inside and it frightens us.
-- ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 1.
Q: Many are calling this India’s September 11. Your thoughts?
A: The entire approach to terrorism in India is sensationalist and tragically transient. Somebody called Mumbai the “soul of India”. Then I would like to say that the soul of India has been attacked again and again and again. What’s the big deal? We did nothing last time. The attacks in 1993 and 2006 both had greater numbers killed. Why does this become September 11? I don’t see that.
This was a meticulously planned operation involving dozens of operatives and lengthy planning – and it came two months after a known terrorist group warned authorities of an attack on Mumbai. Yet Indian intelligence found no clues, no warning signs?
This is not at all surprising. We have no intelligence capacity. Everybody believes the Intelligence Bureau is some million-armed octopus with a presence everywhere in this country. The reality of IB is that it has 3,500 intelligence gatherers across the country. The force dedicated to counter-terrorism is about 200 personnel – this in a country of 1.2 billion. Considering that, I am amazed we are not blown up more often.
Rate the security response to this attack.
I see exemplary courage, exemplary leadership and exemplary dedication to duty, in everybody who responded from the security forces. I see people who are given virtually nothing to fight with and putting everything they have into the fight, with many losing their lives.
And yet finally seven hours after the beginning of the incident the so-called elite counter-terrorism force arrives. That is an absolute structural failure. A terrorism operation can only be contained, in terms of its potential, in the first few minutes, which means the first respondents have to be equipped, trained and capable of if not neutralising than at least containing the terrorists. If the first batch of police had come and immediately engaged with the terrorist they probably would have been able in both of these hotels to isolate the terrorists in small corners of the hotel and minimise the damage.
Many are blaming the police for the extent of the damage and the protraction of the assault.
Look, we are among the most under-policed countries in the world. We have a primitive police force, an early 20th century force trying to tackle a 21st century scourge. They’re just not trained, they’re not equipped. I could be lugging a weapon of whatever efficacy, for 10 years, without having the opportunity to use it. And then suddenly I am confronted with terrorists, well-trained, well-equipped, capable of blowing the crap out of me – and I barely know how to hold my gun straight. That is the state of Indian policing.
The reality is that nobody in India, no political party, wants a professional police force.
What do you mean by that?
During the ongoing investigations into the Malegaon blasts [in which Hindu nationalists have been arrested and charged], all the parties related to the Hindu right have been consistently attacking the very people who have laid down their lives in this Mumbai encounter. They have vilified them, they have denigrated them, they have abused them, they have accused them of torture, with the fabrication of case.
Why? Because they are trying to protect certain accused.
Every political party in this country wants to make sure the police investigates only what it wants them to investigate. They do not want an efficient, independent, professional police force. They want to use the police as their partisan thugs. Just a tool, and not a tool for the management of law and order, its declared purpose, but a tool for my political party.
So what will it take to change the mindset?
We have a problem in this country. We have an electorate that is more or less illiterate and ignorant. We have fed the world nonsense about the natural and instinctive wisdom of the people, but the people have no wisdom. They are a rabble and they are more easily led by caste or communal mobilisation than on issues. Unless we are able through public action and the media to generate so much pressure on politicians that they begin to address these issues, the politician himself has shorter routes to power, he will take those.
Early signs point to Pakistan-based Lashkar-i-Taiba, do you agree?
Absolutely. And if there is an Indian role it will be the Students Islamic Movement of India, in a secondary role. I do not see Simi having achieved the capacities to execute an operation of this nature independently.
What is their intent, their goal with this audacious attack?
It’s an attack on everything. It’s an attack to weaken India where you can. And if we can’t weaken India, never mind, just kill as many people as you can. It’s part of a larger campaign that is pan-Islamist. And the second, underlying motivation is Pakistan’s strategic interests. And these have been married into an ideological mobilisation that instrumentalises Islamism.
Is the targeting of foreigners in India a new twist?
As long as local Indian cadres with comparatively local objectives were involved, they were hitting local targets. As they become part, more and more, of the pan-Islamist movement, and their exposure to al Qa’eda ideology becomes deeper and deeper – they start looking for the wider target.
So if it is traced back to Lashkar, how will this affect Indo-Pak relations?
Not at all.
Same old, same old?
Same old, same old. What’s new?
Lashkar’s 2001 attack on the Indian parliament certainly changed Indo-Pak relations [India and Pakistan went to the brink of war].
No country has ever argued that a strong and stable enemy is in its interests. India has now argued that. The entire leadership – the military leadership of this country – is convinced that a strong and stable Pakistan is in our interests, even if Pakistan remains hostile. I have never come across greater and more entrenched stupidity.
You believe the leadership of Pakistan is at the very least aware of these attacks?
Absolutely, without question.
President (Asif Ali) Zardari, Prime Minister (Yusaf Raza) Gilani?
As far as I’m concerned there is only one leadership in Pakistan, that’s the military leadership. I don’t care who’s in government. Democracy makes no difference, elections make no difference, the people in charge are the people with the guns.
Might those people start attacking this problem?
I don’t see the necessary ideological or strategic shift. Everyone in the Pakistan army still believes that India is its principle enemy. And the only instrument they have for India’s containment is terrorism. And the only instrument they have for terrorist mobilisation against India is extremist Islam. So the sheer logic of their belief systems and their strategic calculations means they cannot abandon terrorism, either against India or against Afghanistan.
What about input from foreign sources – Scotland Yard, for instance, the FBI?
No one can come and fight India’s wars. I’m not saying we have nothing to learn, but I have found the ignorance of western experts to be terrifying. They come here and say: ‘Why don’t you do this?’ I say: ‘Have you seen our police stations in India?’ I know that I cannot have a Scotland Yard or Federal Bureau of Investigation here. I would have a parody of the FBI here.
We need to learn from western experience, but western expertise cannot solve our problems.
So India must deal with terrorist attacks for some time to come?
Even if the leadership changes tomorrow, in its intent and orientation, if we begin to fight this within the existing apparatus of government it will take decades. If we have a leadership that starts to fight this on a war footing it will still take years. You don’t understand how complex it is, we see it from the inside and it frightens us.
-- ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Dec 1.
Mumbai Assault Offers Second Chance To Go After Pak Terror
On a hazy December morning seven years ago, a boxy white Ambassador crashed through the outer gates of New Delhi’s Parliament House and slammed into the car of India’s vice president, fortuitously parked to block the building entrance. Five gunmen emerged and began spraying bullets towards the interior, where some of India’s highest-ranking elected leaders were assembled. After half an hour, the attackers had been shot dead by security men, but not before they had killed five policemen, a security guard and a gardener.
The next day, India demanded Pakistan clamp down on Lashkar-I-Taiba (Lit) and Jaish-I-Mohammed (JiM), two terrorist groups suspected in the attack. New Delhi demanded raids on safe houses, leaders captured and financing cut off. Pakistan stood firm, prodding India to deploy troops to its Kashmir and Punjab borders and inciting a tense nuclear stand-off. Fortunately, the parliament attack occurred shortly after September 11, enabling New Delhi to join forces with the United States, which was at the time also strong-arming Pakistan to address its internal terrorism problem.
Responding to the pressure, Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president at the time, banned Lit and JIM in Jan 2002 and vowed that Pakistani territory would not be used to launch cross-border terrorism. About 2,000 members of banned militant groups were rounded up, including Masood Azhar, the head of JIM. In March, US agents, aided by Pakistani intelligence, tracked down and captured an al Qa’eda commander, Abu Zubaydah. Several more raids in the ensuing days corralled more than 60 al Qa’eda suspects, nearly half of whom were foreign-born.
But India was soon distracted by domestic religious violence and the United States by Iraq, allowing Pakistan and the terrorist outfits to return to business as usual. Mr Azhar was released a few months after his capture. Lit and JiM shifted military operations to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, where an ambiguous legal status means minimal governmental oversight. Within Pakistan proper, Lit continued to operate under its political wing, Jamaat-ud Dawa – whose Nov 2002 conclave attracted more than 100,000 people. Al Qa’eda regrouped in Pakistan’s remote, lawless tribal areas, gaining operational confidence along with the Taliban and the newly formed Pakistani Taliban.
The result? A rash of monstrous terrorist attacks within Pakistan, including the Dec 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the recent bombing of the Islamabad Marriott; a growing Taliban insurgency that threatens to topple Afghanistan’s toddler democracy; and, finally, a series of bombings across urban India that culminated in last week’s assault in Mumbai.
The Mumbai investigation is ongoing, but as in Dec 2001, early signs point to Lit and JiM. Both have a recent history of fedayeen attacks within India. Much like Mumbai, these are gun-spraying, kamikaze raids on government sites, police stations or other high-profile targets in which the attackers do not expect to survive.
Both, furthermore, have ties to the Pakistani establishment. Although direct links are hard to pin down, Pakistan’s military has for decades been training and supporting jihadi outfits – which its intelligence service, the ISI, then wields as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. The Pakistani government may not have had any knowledge of the Mumbai assault, but its links to terrorism mean it shoulders some responsibility.
So seven years on, here is a second chance to hack at the roots of international terrorism. Although unpopular at home, where enraged citizens are calling for action, India’s muted response is wise. Any act of aggression would play into the hands of terrorists, who seek to destabilise the region.
Refraining from brinkmanship will also increase international sympathy for India and support for its ensuing antiterrorism efforts – including the support and co-operation of terrorism’s greatest victim, Pakistan, whose president, Asif Ali Zardari, has sworn to act on good evidence. Finally, quick strikes are not the answer; rooting out terrorists in Pakistan will take years, not weeks or months.
Condeleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, arrives in New Delhi today. With Pakistan warning it would shift up to 100,000 troops away from its unstable western border to address a possible Indian threat to the east, the United States is worried about Afghanistan. New Delhi can use this leverage to its advantage and agree not to attack Pakistan or threaten to do so as long as Washington does the following:
a) Pushes for complete transparency from Pakistan, including zero tolerance of terrorist outfits from the Pakistani military and the handing over of terrorist bigwigs, such as JiT chief Hafiz Saeed, the JiM leader Azhar and Dawood Ibrahim, a mafia don who masterminded the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed more than 250. With Ms Rice already urging Pakistan to follow wherever the investigation leads, this is little more than an extension of current US policy.
b) Embraces Indo-US counter-terrorism co-operation, involving sharing of all intelligence on Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan-based terrorist outfits. Terrorism is a global problem based in the South Asian region – only such co-operation will snuff it out.
In return, India should offer to open negotiations with Pakistan on Kashmir. This may seem like rewarding an alleged tormentor, yet neither Pakistan’s new government nor the majority of its people have any blood on their hands. Further, the broader regional vision of the US president-elect, Barack Obama, which sees a resolution on Kashmir as a key to regional peace, is looking prescient.
Apart from religious differences, Kashmir is the wellspring of Indo-Pak tension and distrust. Both Lit and JIM base their Indian antagonism in Kashmir. And in his 2007 book, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam, Zahid Hussain, a veteran Pakistan journalist, had this to say about Pakistan’s broader internal terrorism problem: “As long as the Kashmiri issue remains unresolved, the government seems prepared to embrace it.”
While the sting of recent failure remains fresh, India, Pakistan and the United States must ensure this golden opportunity does not slip away.
-- ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, Dec 3.
The next day, India demanded Pakistan clamp down on Lashkar-I-Taiba (Lit) and Jaish-I-Mohammed (JiM), two terrorist groups suspected in the attack. New Delhi demanded raids on safe houses, leaders captured and financing cut off. Pakistan stood firm, prodding India to deploy troops to its Kashmir and Punjab borders and inciting a tense nuclear stand-off. Fortunately, the parliament attack occurred shortly after September 11, enabling New Delhi to join forces with the United States, which was at the time also strong-arming Pakistan to address its internal terrorism problem.
Responding to the pressure, Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president at the time, banned Lit and JIM in Jan 2002 and vowed that Pakistani territory would not be used to launch cross-border terrorism. About 2,000 members of banned militant groups were rounded up, including Masood Azhar, the head of JIM. In March, US agents, aided by Pakistani intelligence, tracked down and captured an al Qa’eda commander, Abu Zubaydah. Several more raids in the ensuing days corralled more than 60 al Qa’eda suspects, nearly half of whom were foreign-born.
But India was soon distracted by domestic religious violence and the United States by Iraq, allowing Pakistan and the terrorist outfits to return to business as usual. Mr Azhar was released a few months after his capture. Lit and JiM shifted military operations to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, where an ambiguous legal status means minimal governmental oversight. Within Pakistan proper, Lit continued to operate under its political wing, Jamaat-ud Dawa – whose Nov 2002 conclave attracted more than 100,000 people. Al Qa’eda regrouped in Pakistan’s remote, lawless tribal areas, gaining operational confidence along with the Taliban and the newly formed Pakistani Taliban.
The result? A rash of monstrous terrorist attacks within Pakistan, including the Dec 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the recent bombing of the Islamabad Marriott; a growing Taliban insurgency that threatens to topple Afghanistan’s toddler democracy; and, finally, a series of bombings across urban India that culminated in last week’s assault in Mumbai.
The Mumbai investigation is ongoing, but as in Dec 2001, early signs point to Lit and JiM. Both have a recent history of fedayeen attacks within India. Much like Mumbai, these are gun-spraying, kamikaze raids on government sites, police stations or other high-profile targets in which the attackers do not expect to survive.
Both, furthermore, have ties to the Pakistani establishment. Although direct links are hard to pin down, Pakistan’s military has for decades been training and supporting jihadi outfits – which its intelligence service, the ISI, then wields as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. The Pakistani government may not have had any knowledge of the Mumbai assault, but its links to terrorism mean it shoulders some responsibility.
So seven years on, here is a second chance to hack at the roots of international terrorism. Although unpopular at home, where enraged citizens are calling for action, India’s muted response is wise. Any act of aggression would play into the hands of terrorists, who seek to destabilise the region.
Refraining from brinkmanship will also increase international sympathy for India and support for its ensuing antiterrorism efforts – including the support and co-operation of terrorism’s greatest victim, Pakistan, whose president, Asif Ali Zardari, has sworn to act on good evidence. Finally, quick strikes are not the answer; rooting out terrorists in Pakistan will take years, not weeks or months.
Condeleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, arrives in New Delhi today. With Pakistan warning it would shift up to 100,000 troops away from its unstable western border to address a possible Indian threat to the east, the United States is worried about Afghanistan. New Delhi can use this leverage to its advantage and agree not to attack Pakistan or threaten to do so as long as Washington does the following:
a) Pushes for complete transparency from Pakistan, including zero tolerance of terrorist outfits from the Pakistani military and the handing over of terrorist bigwigs, such as JiT chief Hafiz Saeed, the JiM leader Azhar and Dawood Ibrahim, a mafia don who masterminded the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed more than 250. With Ms Rice already urging Pakistan to follow wherever the investigation leads, this is little more than an extension of current US policy.
b) Embraces Indo-US counter-terrorism co-operation, involving sharing of all intelligence on Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan-based terrorist outfits. Terrorism is a global problem based in the South Asian region – only such co-operation will snuff it out.
In return, India should offer to open negotiations with Pakistan on Kashmir. This may seem like rewarding an alleged tormentor, yet neither Pakistan’s new government nor the majority of its people have any blood on their hands. Further, the broader regional vision of the US president-elect, Barack Obama, which sees a resolution on Kashmir as a key to regional peace, is looking prescient.
Apart from religious differences, Kashmir is the wellspring of Indo-Pak tension and distrust. Both Lit and JIM base their Indian antagonism in Kashmir. And in his 2007 book, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam, Zahid Hussain, a veteran Pakistan journalist, had this to say about Pakistan’s broader internal terrorism problem: “As long as the Kashmiri issue remains unresolved, the government seems prepared to embrace it.”
While the sting of recent failure remains fresh, India, Pakistan and the United States must ensure this golden opportunity does not slip away.
-- ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, Dec 3.
11.26.2008
Somali Pirates Provoke Rising Power
Pirates have captured the public imagination for centuries, from the exploits of Blackbeard to Hollywood's jaunty Jack Sparrow and the hijacking of the oil tanker Sirius Star just last week. Brisk adventure and jaw-dropping booty – high seas thievery has long been easy to romanticize and far more difficult to denounce for the serious criminal activity it is.
So it goes for the Somali pirates that have wreaked increasing havoc in the Gulf of Aden and along the coast of Somalia in recent months. Piracy in the region has tripled this year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, with over 120 attacks resulting in 40 hijackings, hundreds of hostages and at least seven dead crew. Estimates of Somali pirates' 2008 ransom income range from $30 million to $150 million.
A recent rash of brazen attacks has upped the ante. The Star hijacking took place a full 450 nautical miles from the coast of Kenya, meaning the pirates have put all area shipping routes at risk. Feeling the heat, major commercial shipping firms – including the world's largest carrier, Copenhagen-based AP Moller-Maersk – have begun diverting their liners away from the area, even though the alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope means millions in extra costs. Analysts estimate up to half a billion dollars lost shipping revenue this year.
Yet rapt news reports highlight the pirates' shiny mansions, advanced weaponry and high-tech gadgets. The international community appears baffled, responding with concern but minimal focus. Most agree that a long-term solution involving the establishment of a stable Somali government could take up to a decade. About short-term responses there has been no such consensus.
In a hastily arranged meeting with its neighbors, Egypt tried last week to forge a joint regional anti-piracy strategy, to no avail. The United Nations has authorized asset freezes and travel bans, despite the fact that Somali pirates live off cash ransoms dropped from helicopters. NATO has dispatched several warships, but like the US and the EU, points out that it has no jurisdiction to attack hijacked ships. The possibility of attacking pirate ships is rarely addressed.
The United States has been particularly feeble. Last week the US Navy told shipping companies to ensure their own security by hiring private contractors. Yet over three years ago Navy Admiral Michael Mullin, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested a global security partnership to tackle maritime piracy and terrorism. The only result is the US-run Global Fleet Station, a pilot version of which was launched last year in the Caribbean, suggesting the US is either living in the past or watching too many movies.
Contrast all this with the confident clarity coming from India. Ever since Indian shipowners and seafarers' unions outlined the pirate threat – tens of thousands of Indian sailors and more than a third of India's sea trade pass through the region every year – Delhi has moved with laser-like focus. The navy dispatched a warship to the region in mid-October, and its personnel have in recent weeks foiled three attempted hijackings and sunk a pirate mother ship – the only nation to do so. Last week the Indian government authorized hot pursuit of pirate vessels, announced the imminent dispatch of three more warships and a reconnaissance aircraft and urged the United Nations to orchestrate joint action. The International Maritime Bureau has praised India's response and urged the international community to follow it.
India has been facing down piracy since making maritime history with the rescue of a Japanese vessel from pirate hands in the Arabian Sea in 1999. Indian frigates escorted US warships headed to Afghanistan through the pirate-infested Malacca Straits in 2002. And after the devastating 2004 tsunami as well as after Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar earlier this year, Indian ships were first to deliver aid and relief supplies.
Yet last week's missions marked a sea change – the first time the Indian Navy had fired shots in anger so far from home. The world's largest democracy has long sought to transform its economic growth into military and diplomatic might, and is in the process of acquiring the hallmarks of a naval power – aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. These recent maneuvers, 1800 miles from its shores, represent a more aggressive stance, an effort to exert control over the waters from Djibouti to Indonesia – a stretch of open and not-so-open sea through which 20,000 commercial vessels and crucial regional energy supplies pass each year.
Paired with a successful moon landing earlier this month and the recently completed civilian nuclear deal with the US, India's anti-pirate aggression is the act of a rising world power seizing the opportunity on a flood-lit stage. And this new regional sheriff may be inspiring its neighbors. South Korea is hinting it will soon send a warship to the Horn. Japan, too, is considering sending navy vessels. And just last week, Coast Guard officers from 10 countries – including Russia, China and Korea – received anti-piracy lessons from Indian officers in the waters off Chennai.
The most oft-told pirate tale is that of Caesar's bloody revenge: the confident 25-year-old nobleman persuaded the Cilicians to double their ransom demand, which was duly paid; months later, after raising a navy, Caesar returned to capture and crucify all of his captors. Less familiar is what followed, as Cilician pirates tormented the Roman Empire for nearly a decade, until Roman military leader Pompey waged a fierce, months-long campaign to eradicate them.
Today's crisis in the Horn is not dissimilar, and will require much more than a single battle.
“The only solution I see is a coordinated effort by various naval forces,” said Fred Burton, analyst with Stratfor, a U.S.-based risk assessment agency. “The problem is that no single country wants to take the lead.”
In the past couple weeks India has done just that, but its Caesar-like, lone-wolf aggression will not end the threat. A UN Security Council draft resolution that calls upon capable navies to dispatch armed vessels and combat the menace would be a good first step. But whether the international community is ready to follow India's lead and take on Somali piracy with the seriousness it deserves remains to be seen.
-- edited version of this op-ed ran on page 1A of The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 24.
So it goes for the Somali pirates that have wreaked increasing havoc in the Gulf of Aden and along the coast of Somalia in recent months. Piracy in the region has tripled this year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, with over 120 attacks resulting in 40 hijackings, hundreds of hostages and at least seven dead crew. Estimates of Somali pirates' 2008 ransom income range from $30 million to $150 million.
A recent rash of brazen attacks has upped the ante. The Star hijacking took place a full 450 nautical miles from the coast of Kenya, meaning the pirates have put all area shipping routes at risk. Feeling the heat, major commercial shipping firms – including the world's largest carrier, Copenhagen-based AP Moller-Maersk – have begun diverting their liners away from the area, even though the alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope means millions in extra costs. Analysts estimate up to half a billion dollars lost shipping revenue this year.
Yet rapt news reports highlight the pirates' shiny mansions, advanced weaponry and high-tech gadgets. The international community appears baffled, responding with concern but minimal focus. Most agree that a long-term solution involving the establishment of a stable Somali government could take up to a decade. About short-term responses there has been no such consensus.
In a hastily arranged meeting with its neighbors, Egypt tried last week to forge a joint regional anti-piracy strategy, to no avail. The United Nations has authorized asset freezes and travel bans, despite the fact that Somali pirates live off cash ransoms dropped from helicopters. NATO has dispatched several warships, but like the US and the EU, points out that it has no jurisdiction to attack hijacked ships. The possibility of attacking pirate ships is rarely addressed.
The United States has been particularly feeble. Last week the US Navy told shipping companies to ensure their own security by hiring private contractors. Yet over three years ago Navy Admiral Michael Mullin, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested a global security partnership to tackle maritime piracy and terrorism. The only result is the US-run Global Fleet Station, a pilot version of which was launched last year in the Caribbean, suggesting the US is either living in the past or watching too many movies.
Contrast all this with the confident clarity coming from India. Ever since Indian shipowners and seafarers' unions outlined the pirate threat – tens of thousands of Indian sailors and more than a third of India's sea trade pass through the region every year – Delhi has moved with laser-like focus. The navy dispatched a warship to the region in mid-October, and its personnel have in recent weeks foiled three attempted hijackings and sunk a pirate mother ship – the only nation to do so. Last week the Indian government authorized hot pursuit of pirate vessels, announced the imminent dispatch of three more warships and a reconnaissance aircraft and urged the United Nations to orchestrate joint action. The International Maritime Bureau has praised India's response and urged the international community to follow it.
India has been facing down piracy since making maritime history with the rescue of a Japanese vessel from pirate hands in the Arabian Sea in 1999. Indian frigates escorted US warships headed to Afghanistan through the pirate-infested Malacca Straits in 2002. And after the devastating 2004 tsunami as well as after Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar earlier this year, Indian ships were first to deliver aid and relief supplies.
Yet last week's missions marked a sea change – the first time the Indian Navy had fired shots in anger so far from home. The world's largest democracy has long sought to transform its economic growth into military and diplomatic might, and is in the process of acquiring the hallmarks of a naval power – aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. These recent maneuvers, 1800 miles from its shores, represent a more aggressive stance, an effort to exert control over the waters from Djibouti to Indonesia – a stretch of open and not-so-open sea through which 20,000 commercial vessels and crucial regional energy supplies pass each year.
Paired with a successful moon landing earlier this month and the recently completed civilian nuclear deal with the US, India's anti-pirate aggression is the act of a rising world power seizing the opportunity on a flood-lit stage. And this new regional sheriff may be inspiring its neighbors. South Korea is hinting it will soon send a warship to the Horn. Japan, too, is considering sending navy vessels. And just last week, Coast Guard officers from 10 countries – including Russia, China and Korea – received anti-piracy lessons from Indian officers in the waters off Chennai.
The most oft-told pirate tale is that of Caesar's bloody revenge: the confident 25-year-old nobleman persuaded the Cilicians to double their ransom demand, which was duly paid; months later, after raising a navy, Caesar returned to capture and crucify all of his captors. Less familiar is what followed, as Cilician pirates tormented the Roman Empire for nearly a decade, until Roman military leader Pompey waged a fierce, months-long campaign to eradicate them.
Today's crisis in the Horn is not dissimilar, and will require much more than a single battle.
“The only solution I see is a coordinated effort by various naval forces,” said Fred Burton, analyst with Stratfor, a U.S.-based risk assessment agency. “The problem is that no single country wants to take the lead.”
In the past couple weeks India has done just that, but its Caesar-like, lone-wolf aggression will not end the threat. A UN Security Council draft resolution that calls upon capable navies to dispatch armed vessels and combat the menace would be a good first step. But whether the international community is ready to follow India's lead and take on Somali piracy with the seriousness it deserves remains to be seen.
-- edited version of this op-ed ran on page 1A of The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 24.
11.20.2008
India's Divisive, Dark Ages Politics
A small independent film was banned from Mumbai theatres this week. Unremarkable in another place and time, “Deshdrohi” just happened to hit on the incendiary issue of Mumbai society today: migrant workers. Thus the release of this tale of a north Indian laborer trying to make it in the big city has been delayed for 60 days. “Some of the scenes in the film are such that they can provoke a law-and-order situation,” a police spokesperson said.
A roiling wave of xenophobia first welled here in February, when rising right-wing politician Raj Thackeray bashed workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh – two poor, north Indian states – for taking all of Mumbai's taxi and auto-rickshaw driver jobs. Such work is for “sons of the soil,” he said, referring to speakers of Marathi, the local tongue. In the days that followed, local youths attacked immigrant drivers viciously, injuring dozens and killing two.
Thackeray continued his anti-outsider campaign and the wave swelled, cresting in late October when goons from his political party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS, attacked north Indians as they were taking exams for local positions with the Indian railways. The next day police arrested Thackeray for inciting violence, which touched off widespread riots and acts of arson by MNS members and brought Mumbai to a near standstill.
By the time he was released the following day on bail, Thackeray had struck fear into outsiders and captured the hearts of millions of dissatisfied locals. When a week later Bihari immigrant Rahul Raj was shot dead by police after commandeering a bus with a pistol and threatening to kill Thackeray, few were surprised.
Mumbai is India's commercial heart and most cosmopolitan city, and immigrants have long been integral to its evolution. Indo-Iranians first settled this stretch of Arabian Sea coast in the third century BC. Marathi speakers arrived en masse only after the collapse of the Maratha empire in the early 19th century. In recent decades, as the Indian economy has boomed, skilled and unskilled workers have poured into the city to seek their fortune. Today, Marathi speakers represent less than 50 percent of Mumbai's 17 million population, and migrant workers – the majority from north Indian states – snatch up the low-paying jobs disdained by suddenly middle class Maharashtrians. They keep banks and businesses secure, build homes and office buildings, clean streets and pick up trash, drive locals from place and place and deliver Hinduism's most revered consumable – milk. Without them, the city would grind to halt.
To combat their progress, Raj has followed in the anti-outsider footsteps of his uncle Bal Thackeray, who founded the Shiv Sena in 1966 with the stated goal of securing jobs for Maharashtrians in the face of steady north Indian immigration. A local political icon partially retired at 82 years old, Bal claims to admire Adolf Hitler and hates without prejudice: outsiders, foreigners, Muslims, Christians, you name it. He is alleged to have coordinated the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims during Mumbai's religious riots in 1993 and, a few months ago, called for Hindu suicide bombers in response to a recent rash of bomb attacks in Indian cities.
Following that line, Raj's aggressively hate-filled, pro-Marathi stance has touched a vein of disenchantment and stirred an angry young army of committed indoctrinates. With each unchecked incident, each arrest, his power has grown. “Far too much latitude had been shown to Raj Thackeray and the MNS,” Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wrote in a recent letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. “We need to dispel any impression that people from one part of the country are not welcome in another, and cannot live in peace anywhere they choose.”
In its inherent ignorance and incitement to violence, Thackeray's stance brings to mind a darker age, in which fearful citizens of fortified city-states were protected from the mysterious, dangerous other by warlords who unleashed their minions on invaders. Such divisive, Dark Ages politics remain effective in India partially because they offer such great spectacle. Images of desperate, blood-splattered outsiders, flaming taxis and carnage in the streets, marauding gangs of angry young defenders and inflammatory remarks are played repeatedly on dozens of news channels and displayed prominently in local, regional and national newspapers. For ratcheting up the fear and subtly validating defense of the homeland in its sensationalist, non-stop coverage, the media must accept a portion of the blame for Thackeray's rise.
And he is not alone. Taking its lead from the Raj era British policy of divide and rule, politicians across India – in Andhra Pradesh and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam – have begun to exploit the uneducated lower classes, appealing to local fears and highlighting regional divides in order to blame the other for the sad state of the majority – when in fact it is the politicians themselves who have failed to serve the people.
The trend is particularly worrisome as India has long been both strung together and pushed apart by its astonishing diversity. One of the Upanishads, a series of ancient and influential Hindu scriptures, claimed “the whole world is my family,” more than 2500 years ago.“The roots of this culture go back to ancient times and it has developed through contact with many races and peoples,” south Indian intellectual Kota Shivarama Karanth wrote more recently. “Hence, among its many ingredients, it is impossible to say surely what is native and what is alien, what is borrowed out of love and what has been imposed by force.” And sixty years after his death Gandhi remains the world's defining symbol of non-violence.
Yet even he was assassinated, and the country he fathered was born in one of the last century's great orgies of violence, Partition, which has been followed by lesser if also horrifying spasms: against Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and during a recent anti-Christian pogrom in Orissa, to name a few. Historically, such disputes have hinged on religion, but politicians have shown few qualms with shifting their focus to linguistic and regional divisions. Now the hate that dare speak its name threatens, according to Singh, to “undermine the unity and integrity of the country.”
A world away, another, almost equally diverse democracy recently made history by electing a dark-skinned minority to its highest office. Around the time Barack Obama began his campaign on a message of unity and change, an upstart Maharashtrian politician began his own political career with a call for inclusiveness.“I am seeking a chance, with a clean slate, to show you that change is possible,” Raj Thackeray told a Mumbai crowd in January 2007.
That Thackeray's embrace of Dark Ages divisiveness over the past year has garnered him much greater support is a sad commentary on the state of Indian politics. One that suggests it may have been unreasonable to hope that “Deshdrohi,” with its simple depiction of a migrant laborer tossed about and finally killed by an unwelcoming metropolis, might spark a little understanding.
-- an edited version ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 16.
In new India, age-old festival losing ground
Sonepur, India // Krishna Kanhai Singh sat on his front porch in this rural Bihar village last weekend watching the kick-off of the Sonepur Mela, an age-old religious festival and animal market that suddenly seemed unfamiliar.
“It’s sad, our festival is shrinking and changing,” said Mr Singh, 53, whose family has lived for a century in a rickety wooden house on the grounds of the event, long known as Asia’s largest cattle fair. “The government is not funding the animal market and the people don’t care.”
A series of conditions – new federal laws on animal trade, shifting societal and governmental interests, rampant lawlessness and the impact of a summer flood – have conspired to stifle the animal market and transform a revered, centuries-old festival into something more foreign to locals.
As lowing cows, bathing elephants and straggly bearded holy men have in recent years given way to sleek advertisements, tractor display rooms and high-end gadgets, Mr Singh’s stoop has served as a front-row seat to the changing face of India.
“All these changes are bad for the fair and bad for Biharis,” said Mr Singh, surrounded by a dozen children and grandchildren. “I don’t know if it will die, but I almost wish it would.”
For aeons, Hindu pilgrims have gravitated to Sonepur on the first full moon of November for a visit to the Vishnu temple and an auspicious bath at the confluence of the Gandak and the Ganges, Hinduism’s holiest river. Animal traders, meanwhile, trace the festival’s market back to the ancient king Chandragupta Maurya, who is said to have bought horses and elephants here.
Historically the festival stretched across more than a dozen villages, but by the mid-20th century it had settled into a grassy expanse at the meeting of the two rivers.
Earlier this week barkers droned into microphones as Hindi tunes blared across muddy, meandering bazaars lined with kitchenware, noodle stands, sweetmeats and a dizzying selection of knick-knacks, like a shrivelled plant, dubbed “the one that brings dead to life”, that blossomed in water.
A family of gypsy musicians roamed the animal stalls, plopping down in the dirt to play traditional songs amid gathering crowds. And a warren of caged parrots and parakeets, white rabbits, Dobermans, dachshunds and a lone Rhesus monkey watched the passing human circus.
Yet from the millions-strong crowds in the mid-1990s, the fair, which continues into December, will welcome an estimated 150,000 visitors this year, most of whom arrived early and departed quickly. Two decades ago a visitor could contemplate the spectacle of 50,000 cattle, up to a thousand elephants and the same number of horses. This year there were less than 1,000 cattle, about 500 ponies and horses and no more than 50 elephants.
“Success is not in how many cattle came, that’s just one component, there are other things like markets, jeeps, and the religious aspect,” said Ashok Kumar Chouhan, the festival organiser and local government commissioner. He said the festival budget, at six million rupees (Dh442,700), had risen in recent years.
Ramjanam Diwari, 58, an elephant seller, had a different perspective. He swept his arm across a stretch of recently built homes and explained how the festival had in the past 20 years lost three-fourths of its acreage.
“The government has failed us,” said Mr Diwari. “They used to fix up the roads, add street lights, construct temporary roadside inns, but now there’s nothing, maybe five per cent of the facilities that were here. They are gradually and systematically killing the mela.”
Death may not be imminent, but the contraction of the animal market is likely to continue. Fewer animals are arriving from other states because of increasing transport costs and a recent law banning transport of for-sale cattle across state lines. Corrupt officials ask for increasingly large bribes, according to traders, both during transport and to secure a stall at the fair. And as the state government pushes development and industrialisation, Bihar’s younger generation seems more interested in iPod’s and Levis than traditional pastoral pursuits.
Hetukar Jha, a retired Patna University sociology professor who has studied regional animal husbandry, pointed out a few more reasons.
“Because of increased lawlessness in rural areas, people find it less safe to move around with lots of money or with valuable goods, like livestock,” he said. “Horses are not used for transport anymore, nor elephants or camels. And because so many people are moving to urban areas, they don’t have room to keep these big animals.”
The Indian government banned the sale of elephants in 2003 because of a rise in unauthorised sales that led to mistreatment and illegal ivory procurement.
But a loophole was quickly found: sellers now hand over the elephant as a “gift” and receive a large “donation” in return. Thus B B Singh, a wealthy landowner, donated nearly 2.5m rupees in return for the gift of two elephants.
“We have had an elephant in our family for 150 years,” said Mr Singh, as his mahout, chief negotiator, assistant and bodyguard looked on. “Other people have jeeps and SUV’s, I have an elephant; in Bihar it’s still a status symbol.”
It might not be for long. According to the fair organiser, the shift away from animals is by design.
“Last year I had to learn a few things,” said Mr Chouhan, the organising committee chairman for the past two years. “Now, instead of putting the focus on cattle we are trying to convert the mela, to rebrand it as a rural auto-expo and create a modern, industrialised fair.”
The latest edition presented more than a whiff of modernity, with ads for mobile phones and powdered cappuccino. Locals peered into shops hawking major appliances and large vehicles like John Deere tractors and Tata conversion vans but few stepped inside.
“I’m not sure how effective government implemented change can be,” said Mr Jha, the sociologist. “It was always the people’s mela, and that’s the way it will stay.”
For many people the outlook was grim. With declining attendance, merchant revenues have drooped. One samosa seller tried to charge two Dutch tourists 10,000 rupees (Dh 739) for four of the snacks, which typically cost three rupees each.
The cow dealer Mundrika Prasad Yadav, a 72-year-old from the state capital Patna, had been coming to the fair for 30 years and said the steep decline began around 2000. “My business is 10 per cent of what it was a decade ago,” he said.
Mr Diwari, the veteran elephant seller, was keeping close watch on his prized animals, which were co-operatively owned by members of his village. “Whatever I get in donations from these two will be distributed to all the villagers,” said Mr Diwari, from Taribara village in Uttar Pradesh. “But there’s not much interest this year.”
Jimhi Lal Rai, a 48-year-old cattle trader from nearby Hajipur, sold 20 cows last year, but this year had sold only two.
“Right now I’ve lost about 70,000 rupees on this festival,” he said. “If I don’t sell the rest of my cows I will have to start working as a labourer.”
Mr. Jha, however, sounded a hopeful note.
“Melas will change with the times, the items on offer will shift. But because the religious aspect will always be there, the festival will never die.”
-- published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 20.
“It’s sad, our festival is shrinking and changing,” said Mr Singh, 53, whose family has lived for a century in a rickety wooden house on the grounds of the event, long known as Asia’s largest cattle fair. “The government is not funding the animal market and the people don’t care.”
A series of conditions – new federal laws on animal trade, shifting societal and governmental interests, rampant lawlessness and the impact of a summer flood – have conspired to stifle the animal market and transform a revered, centuries-old festival into something more foreign to locals.
As lowing cows, bathing elephants and straggly bearded holy men have in recent years given way to sleek advertisements, tractor display rooms and high-end gadgets, Mr Singh’s stoop has served as a front-row seat to the changing face of India.
“All these changes are bad for the fair and bad for Biharis,” said Mr Singh, surrounded by a dozen children and grandchildren. “I don’t know if it will die, but I almost wish it would.”
For aeons, Hindu pilgrims have gravitated to Sonepur on the first full moon of November for a visit to the Vishnu temple and an auspicious bath at the confluence of the Gandak and the Ganges, Hinduism’s holiest river. Animal traders, meanwhile, trace the festival’s market back to the ancient king Chandragupta Maurya, who is said to have bought horses and elephants here.
Historically the festival stretched across more than a dozen villages, but by the mid-20th century it had settled into a grassy expanse at the meeting of the two rivers.
Earlier this week barkers droned into microphones as Hindi tunes blared across muddy, meandering bazaars lined with kitchenware, noodle stands, sweetmeats and a dizzying selection of knick-knacks, like a shrivelled plant, dubbed “the one that brings dead to life”, that blossomed in water.
A family of gypsy musicians roamed the animal stalls, plopping down in the dirt to play traditional songs amid gathering crowds. And a warren of caged parrots and parakeets, white rabbits, Dobermans, dachshunds and a lone Rhesus monkey watched the passing human circus.
Yet from the millions-strong crowds in the mid-1990s, the fair, which continues into December, will welcome an estimated 150,000 visitors this year, most of whom arrived early and departed quickly. Two decades ago a visitor could contemplate the spectacle of 50,000 cattle, up to a thousand elephants and the same number of horses. This year there were less than 1,000 cattle, about 500 ponies and horses and no more than 50 elephants.
“Success is not in how many cattle came, that’s just one component, there are other things like markets, jeeps, and the religious aspect,” said Ashok Kumar Chouhan, the festival organiser and local government commissioner. He said the festival budget, at six million rupees (Dh442,700), had risen in recent years.
Ramjanam Diwari, 58, an elephant seller, had a different perspective. He swept his arm across a stretch of recently built homes and explained how the festival had in the past 20 years lost three-fourths of its acreage.
“The government has failed us,” said Mr Diwari. “They used to fix up the roads, add street lights, construct temporary roadside inns, but now there’s nothing, maybe five per cent of the facilities that were here. They are gradually and systematically killing the mela.”
Death may not be imminent, but the contraction of the animal market is likely to continue. Fewer animals are arriving from other states because of increasing transport costs and a recent law banning transport of for-sale cattle across state lines. Corrupt officials ask for increasingly large bribes, according to traders, both during transport and to secure a stall at the fair. And as the state government pushes development and industrialisation, Bihar’s younger generation seems more interested in iPod’s and Levis than traditional pastoral pursuits.
Hetukar Jha, a retired Patna University sociology professor who has studied regional animal husbandry, pointed out a few more reasons.
“Because of increased lawlessness in rural areas, people find it less safe to move around with lots of money or with valuable goods, like livestock,” he said. “Horses are not used for transport anymore, nor elephants or camels. And because so many people are moving to urban areas, they don’t have room to keep these big animals.”
The Indian government banned the sale of elephants in 2003 because of a rise in unauthorised sales that led to mistreatment and illegal ivory procurement.
But a loophole was quickly found: sellers now hand over the elephant as a “gift” and receive a large “donation” in return. Thus B B Singh, a wealthy landowner, donated nearly 2.5m rupees in return for the gift of two elephants.
“We have had an elephant in our family for 150 years,” said Mr Singh, as his mahout, chief negotiator, assistant and bodyguard looked on. “Other people have jeeps and SUV’s, I have an elephant; in Bihar it’s still a status symbol.”
It might not be for long. According to the fair organiser, the shift away from animals is by design.
“Last year I had to learn a few things,” said Mr Chouhan, the organising committee chairman for the past two years. “Now, instead of putting the focus on cattle we are trying to convert the mela, to rebrand it as a rural auto-expo and create a modern, industrialised fair.”
The latest edition presented more than a whiff of modernity, with ads for mobile phones and powdered cappuccino. Locals peered into shops hawking major appliances and large vehicles like John Deere tractors and Tata conversion vans but few stepped inside.
“I’m not sure how effective government implemented change can be,” said Mr Jha, the sociologist. “It was always the people’s mela, and that’s the way it will stay.”
For many people the outlook was grim. With declining attendance, merchant revenues have drooped. One samosa seller tried to charge two Dutch tourists 10,000 rupees (Dh 739) for four of the snacks, which typically cost three rupees each.
The cow dealer Mundrika Prasad Yadav, a 72-year-old from the state capital Patna, had been coming to the fair for 30 years and said the steep decline began around 2000. “My business is 10 per cent of what it was a decade ago,” he said.
Mr Diwari, the veteran elephant seller, was keeping close watch on his prized animals, which were co-operatively owned by members of his village. “Whatever I get in donations from these two will be distributed to all the villagers,” said Mr Diwari, from Taribara village in Uttar Pradesh. “But there’s not much interest this year.”
Jimhi Lal Rai, a 48-year-old cattle trader from nearby Hajipur, sold 20 cows last year, but this year had sold only two.
“Right now I’ve lost about 70,000 rupees on this festival,” he said. “If I don’t sell the rest of my cows I will have to start working as a labourer.”
Mr. Jha, however, sounded a hopeful note.
“Melas will change with the times, the items on offer will shift. But because the religious aspect will always be there, the festival will never die.”
-- published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 20.
10.24.2008
Sacred Fight of the Dongria
For a secluded tribe in the Indian state of Orissa, Niyamgiri Mountain is both home and sacred temple. Abundant natural resources have allowed the Dongria Kondh people to live an isolated and spiritual lifestyle on its slopes, disconnected from the outside world. But that way of life is now under threat, as an Indian subsidiary of UK-based mining giant Vedanta Resources plans an aluminium refinery on their land. Tribe member Jitu Jakesika, 21, explains why his people would rather die than let heavy industry onto their sacred mountain
For us, this is our sacred place. We worship Niyam Raja, which means lord of our lord. There are many gods, but he is the most powerful for us, so he is the Niyam Raja. Here on our mountain there is forest, wildlife and medicinal plants. We get all of our food here on Niyamgiri – everything we need, except salt. We can go for a month without having to travel down to the market.
We don't hunt very often, only around special occasions like the Meriha sacrifice. This is the most important festival for the Dongria. If our village wants to celebrate the Meriha we invite all the surrounding villages to join us. A lot of villagers come to see us, bringing axes, arrows and knives. They come to our village dancing and singing songs. The priest welcomes everyone.
Then we make a bamboo fence around a buffalo and when the priest says OK we start to hit him with our knives and axes. He gets angry and runs around. It can be messy and very bloody but we keep hitting him until he dies. I have done this two or three times in my life. I feel sad to see this strong animal die, but it makes our people very happy – we believe it gives us strength.
When the girls reach maturity they don't like to sleep with their families any more, so they go to a dormitory. Every village has a girls' dormitory. Every week young boys from different villages come by dancing, drumming and playing instruments, and they sing of the mountain and the forest and the river, and declare their love for their girl. When I was young I did this many times. Sometimes we slept together. This is done without marrying, like girlfriend and boyfriend. We Dongria, you see, can love 100 girlfriends; it is not like in Indian culture.
Some get married at 15, others at 18, and some wait until they are even older. Once a couple is married the man is allowed to have girlfriends. That is OK, the wife never minds. But if the woman takes a boyfriend the husband would be very angry.
Already, the aluminium refinery has changed things here. Now when it rains there is dust everywhere, a white-coloured covering on our fields. Our crops don't grow so well. Also, the river is poisoned. I know this because five cows died when they went to drink water from the river. And some people who bathed in the river developed sores on their body.
Nobody came and warned us about this; we had to learn about it by ourselves. Now that I have learned I am telling everyone. Just today I visited three villages. When I arrive I call all the villagers and explain to them what is happening. I tell them how we will fight and that we have to remain strong at this moment. I have talked to different activists, and sometimes they come with me to help our people to understand what's happening.
We have to protect our culture. OK, we can be educated and developed, but these young children – we have to teach them about our way of life, our beliefs. What will happen when the older generation dies?
The government says that it will make a decision, but then it they delays and delays. It is still trying to convince us it will be OK. But our people don't want any development from this company, and we don't want money. Why destroy our nature? God has given us this nature – this is how our people think.
The company cannot take this mountain. It can try to plant trees and make a forest, but it can't remake it. The company says: "We’ll give you new houses, new land, a new village!" But all we want is our mountain. Every family, every young boy and girl, every person, wants to stay. Nobody wants to leave this mountain.
If the government decides to allow for mining, we will have to fight. This is our land; for generations we've been living here. They have money, power, guns; they can kill us in five minutes. So we'll tell the government: "Please kill us all and then you can have your mine. Because without Niyamgiri we cannot live."
• Jitu Jakesika was speaking to David Lepeska in Orissa.
This interview was published at http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/, on October 20.
7.31.2008
These Jokers Are Serious
India's terror tally: 6 days. 58 bombs. 3 cities. 53 dead.
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Just before he kills his victims the villain of The Dark Knight, this summer's white hot Hollywood blockbuster, likes to ask them a question: "Why so serious?" The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, does not expect an answer. But as the victims realize the end is near, he relishes their rising fear – it suggests they hadn't been taking him seriously enough.
The terrorists who set off dozens of bombs in Bangalore and Ahmedebad last weekend and scattered handfuls more around the Gujarat port city of Surat seek a similar response. As with the Joker, the horrors have come rapid-fire, yet each has lingered longer than the last. Bangalore's eight blasts occurred over 15 minutes, killing 2. In Ahmedebad the 21 explosions took more than an hour, and have now killed 51. Surat residents discovered 21 slow-ticking bombs across the city over a period of nearly 30 hours.
A few of the Surat bombs were found in public garbage cans. One was placed behind a hoarding under a traffic flyover. Another had been secured in a low-hanging tree branch. Nobody knew where or when the next might appear, or whether it might reveal itself more rudely than the others. Was that part of the plan? Unsure whether the bombs were intended to explode, the police have theorized that they may have been a distraction, or a test to measure response times. Whatever the case, Surat may have been saved from physical damage but by all accounts the city is psychologically shattered.
Ahmedabad, too, has been scarred. Monday commuters leaped from a smoking city bus, later found to be suffering from an overheated engine. In the Ghodasar neighborhood an unclaimed tiffin prodded locals to call the police, whose investigations revealed the offending lunch case had been forgotten by a young boy. Residents have been phoning in false bomb alarms and mental health professionals in both cities report a spike in anxiety and stress disorders.
A Joker-like strategy of inciting fear is not the only cinematic homage hidden in this week's terror. The pattern of the Ahmedebad blasts closely follow the Bollywood film Contract, which arrived in local cinemas the previous week. In the movie a terrorist leader details his plan for a series of bomb blasts in Mumbai, followed an hour later with several blasts at city hospitals. The Ahmedebad bombs followed this very outline – with an extended first round of strikes followed by blasts at two major area hospitals, with the latter doing the lion's share of harm and ratcheting up the horror.
Dozens of analysts have outlined detailed policy proposals on the editorial pages of India's daily newspapers. Most cite the need for a unified central intelligence agency and various multi-pronged initiatives intended to redouble surveillance and security, increase Muslim development and foster community awareness.
Fine ideas all, but we should first grapple with what we are facing. These terrorists have three objectives: to incite widespread fear and make over a billion Indians ill at ease; to throw a wrench in India's widely lauded economic progress, its rise to superpower status; and finally, to sew religious enmity, particularly between Hindus and Muslims.
On the first score their success has been obvious and widespread. The fear has even reached Delhi, where the Japanese embassy was evacuated and shuttered Wednesday after receiving an anonymous bomb threat via email, and the southern state of Kerala, where a bomb-warning phone call panicked police.
On the second point the bad guys have made decent headway. Bangalore is a global IT hub. Ahmedabad is one of India's leading manufacturing centers. Surat operates one of the country's biggest and busiest ports. All three are now less attractive to local and international investors and businesses. Foreign trepidation has already risen its head; Japan recently warned its citizens about traveling in India. And in an email from Indian Muhajideen received minutes before the Ahmedabad blasts began, the attackers put leading businessman Mukesh Ambani and four major Muslim film stars in their crosshairs. These targets are well chosen; India's global profile has grown due in large part to its business dynasties – with the Ambanis, Tatas, and Birlas in the vanguard – and Bollywood celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan.
The third and most combustible objective has not yet come to pass, despite the seeming efforts of the opposition BJP. Party leaders have called the ruling UPA government "soft on terror," and a spokesperson said the problem "requires a Kashmir-type operation to tackle terrorism and root out the outfits supporting it." Strange choice of model, because India's war against a Pakistan-backed insurgency there has droned on for nearly two decades and resulted in some 50,000 dead. Further, this week the BJP urged residents of Jammu, the state's predominantly Hindu winter capital, to create a blockade in order to keep crucial goods such as meat, vegetables and dairy products from reaching the mostly Muslim Kashmir Valley. This in a region rife with long-simmering religious tensions.
The Dark Knight climaxes with the Joker's most insidious stunt. Two ferries – one full of criminals, the other full of law-abiding Gotham citizens – have been wired to explode. The Joker gives each boat a detonator for the bombs on the other boat, then gleefully announces to all passengers that if neither pushes their button for 30 minutes, both boats will blow. It's a moral dilemma, a deadly game of chicken, and Gothamites find it in themselves to stay calm and embrace life.
Can India do the same, or will its impressive progress be stalled by fear and communal rage? A good question, and just cause to get serious.
-- published in Aug 4 Tehelka, an Indian newsweekly.
7.21.2008
Up From The Ashes
SRINIGAR, INDIA: Surging China is a dragon, roaring India a tiger. But what is Rising Kashmir? It's a sleek new daily newspaper, for one, launched here last Monday with all the pomp of the latest Apple gadget. Despite predictable jeers, the hopeful moniker might apply.For 18 years this emerald-green Himalayan valley has been ravaged by fierce conflict between the Indian Army and independence-seeking insurgents, resulting in over 50,000 dead. But the uprising lost steam last year, with a third fewer violent incidents leading to 777 conflict-related deaths, a steep drop from the 4500 of six years prior. Indian authorities estimate only 450 insurgents remain, down from about 4000 a decade ago. And that number is dwindling as nearly every week a few haggard militants clamber down from mountain redoubts to surrender for lack of manpower and funding.
Meanwhile the siren song of progress has gained voice. Protest marches remain frequent, but these days locals cry for development as much as azaadi, or independence. Just last week hundreds of road transport employees demonstrated for increased wages and benefits and dozens of doctors marched for enhanced security and better-trained assistants. Both won a measure of success.
Kashmir's economic growth – 6 % and gaining speed – is slower than that of broader India but impressive for a disputed region. “The change is quite obvious and visible,” says Kashmir University Business Professor S. Fayaz Ahmad. High-profile national banks HDFC and ICICI recently opened Srinagar branches. Sleek mobile phone shops have popped up in the central business district. Construction of commercial complexes as well as overpasses and apartments has real estate prices soaring. A 500 sq. ft. space along increasingly posh Residency Road now sells for $250,000, about 80 times what it cost before the violence flared and double the rate of just a few years back. With its hopeful new flying-dove logo, the J&K (Jammu & Kashmir) Bank is the flagship of the local economy and one of India’s fastest growing financial institutions. Its $75m profit through three-fourths of fiscal 2008 points toward 35 % annual growth.
For students, the lure of lucre has overtaken the appeal of militancy. Prof. Ahmad points to a sudden keen interest in business courses, and with good reason. The first graduating class of KU’s popular new two-year Master's in Finance course recently passed out with 100 % high-level job placement, against 10 % for all graduates.
For aid and development organizations the region is safer and more responsive. NGO's Save the Children and Action Aid India ramped up their local efforts last year and the Asian Development Bank recently began a $250m Valley-wide infrastructure rehabilitation program.
For outsiders Kashmir is a paradise reborn. A 1970’s Bollywood film was not complete without a giddy duet set against a vertiginous Kashmiri backdrop. But Indian filmmakers shunned the Valley during the conflict – only two major productions visited from 1989 to 2003. Now Bollywood is returning, with five films shot locally since 2004 and more in the works. Perhaps consequently, Kashmir welcomed nearly 420,000 tourists in 2007, the highest total in nearly twenty years. In Kashmir, tourism is the tide that lifts all boats. Lodgings, restaurants and handicrafts all feel the boon, and a gorgeous early spring points toward a banner 2008.
One boat may be taking on water. The livelihoods of thousands of locals are under threat as India’s Geographical Indications Registry debates whether to award Kashmir sole ownership of the pashmina brand. Sheared from the downy coats of Himalayan mountain goats, the impossibly soft fabric originated in Kashmir and is now among the world’s most coveted. With increased global demand over the past decade -- annual sales now approach $125m – production has proliferated. Pashmina is made across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, as well as in New Zealand, Nepal, and China, often with automated machines that undercut the time-consuming labor of Kashmir’s expert hand-weavers. Without a Kashmir-specific patent a significant segment of the local economy remains under threat.
Local spirits seem unbowed. Rising Kashmir, that new daily, flew off newsstands this week; several downtown hawkers were sold out by noon. Could be a passing fancy, like many signs of progress here. Could also be a phoenix taking wing.
-- sold to Economist in April 2008.
The Maturation of Microfinance
Sudden, awkward growth spurts, new and unpredictable forms of self-expression, and acts of rebellion against authority figures? It can only mean one thing: microfinance has hit puberty.
Under attack from analysts, academics and policymakers who argue that microloans rarely help alleviate poverty, the industry is redefining itself in myriad ways - going corporate, moving upmarket and broadening the very meaning of the term.
"Ten years from now the sector will be considerably less recognizable," said Jonathan Morduch, professor of public policy and economics at New York University's Wagner School of Graduate Studies.
A Poverty Killer Is Born
Modern-day microcredit began in 1976 when Muhammad Yunus - then an economics professor at Bangladesh's Chittagong University - left academia, went to the village of Jobra and lent $27 to a group of 42 villagers. They used the money to start soap-making and basket-weaving businesses and repaid their loans without default. Yunus then founded Grameen Bank, which grew exponentially and, as of April 2008, had lent over $6.5 billion to more than 5 million borrowers, with a loan repayment rate of 98 percent.
Then came the deluge. The United Nations declared 2005 the "International Year of Microfinance." Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year for his work with Grameen. Philanthropic moguls like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar, of Microsoft and eBay, respectively, pledged hundreds of millions of dollars and celebrity supporters appeared as if out of thin air. The global microfinance market doubled between 2004 and 2006, when more than 3,100 microfinance institutions lent nearly $4.5 billion to over 130 million borrowers.
But what do microloans accomplish? Within academic and economics circles, an anti-microfinance movement, building for years, came to the fore in early 2008.
"Microcredit is making people's lives better around the world," George Mason University Economics Professor Tyler Cowen argued in the Winter 2008 Wilson Quarterly, in an essay written with Karol Boudreaux, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. "But for the most part, it is not pulling them out of poverty."
What Microloans Can Do
Microloans typically range from $50 to $500 in developing countries, with no collateral. Relying instead on peer pressure to ensure weekly repayment, microfinance institutions lend to groups of borrowers. Women make up over three-fourths of microcredit customers worldwide, the United Nations estimates, because most MFIs see them as more reliable and more focused on responsible family financing. And 70 percent of microlending is in Asia, although the share of Africa and Latin America is on the rise.
Several studies from the past decade have concluded that microloans improve lives: Barbara MkNelly and Chris Dunford report that two in three Bolivian borrowers saw their incomes increase after joining the lending program. An Indonesian study found microloan borrowers' incomes increased more than four times those of a control group that received no loan. Three-fourths of the clients of SHARE, a major Indian microfinancer, reported significant improvements in well-being and half graduated out of poverty.
Yet the exact impact of microloans on the lives of borrowers is extremely hard to determine. External factors such as a country's overall economic growth, an alteration in national policies, and the impact of other development projects in that region as well as shifts in a group or family's income-generating abilities are nearly impossible to quantify.
The problems with microfinance don't end there. Most MFIs charge monthly interest rates of 5-8 percent (or 60-100 percent annually) on loans that are paid off within weeks or months. This interest rate cuts into the profits an entrepreneur might re-invest. But even if they were to reinvest, several studies, including that of Cowen and Boudreaux, have found that the businesses microloans fund are almost always owner-run and unlikely to expand beyond the family.
"From a tiny, owner-run business to having and paying employees, that's a big jump," said Morduch.
Further, many MFI's will only fund an existing business, as opposed to a start-up, which suggests the business may have been sustainable without a microloan, and undercuts Yunus' argument that microloans create entrepreneurs.
Microloans are often used to finance consumption and domestic expenses. Cowen and Boudreaux found that many borrowers use the money on personal expenses - fixing their roof, sending kids to school, purchasing a mobile phone - rather than on a small business. A Tanzanian microlender told them that 60 percent of his loans were used to send kids to school and a study of microcredit in Indonesia found that 30 percent of loans were spent on food and other consumer goods.
"For better or worse, microborrowing often entails a kind of bait and switch," Cowen and Boudreaux wrote. "The borrower claims that the money is for a business, but uses it for other purposes."
The duo called it "a sad reality that many microcredit loans help borrowers to survive or tread water more than they help them get ahead."
Survival is better than the alternative. Most of the developing world's poor have for decades borrowed from unlicensed moneylenders. These profiteers charge annual interest rates of up to 300 percent. Many demand collateral and, if repayment is not made on time, reputedly resort to intimidation and violence. Monstrous moneylender debt has played a key role in thousands of farmer suicides across India. In comparison, microcredit seems a pot a gold.
But when it comes to creating jobs and broader economic growth, microloans fall short.
"If it's employment generation you're after, microfinance isn't going to give you a big kick," said Morduch, the New York University professor. He remains a supporter of micronfinance, but acknowledged, "these businesses really aren't growing."
An Upmarket Shift
In developing countries, large corporations receive investment funding from major banks while poorer borrowers have access to microcredit. Long left out of the action are the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that create more than 60 percent of all jobs in the developed world, according to James Suroweicki, who writes the New Yorker's financial page. Analysts are increasingly pointing to this "missing middle" to jumpstart growth and many donors and banking institutions have started to move upmarket.
"Businesses that can generate jobs for others are the best hope of any country trying to put a serious dent in its poverty rate," Suroweicki wrote in a March column. "Sustained economic growth requires companies that can make big investments - building a factory, say - and that can exploit the economies of scale that make workers more productive and, ultimately, richer."
Aliya Khawari, a researcher at Germany's Hamburg Institute of International Economics, reviewed several microloan impact studies in 2004 and found that higher-income borrowers experience a greater income boost from the loans.
"This is because clients above the poverty line are more willing to take risks and invest in technology for the efficiency or advancement of their activities that would in turn most probably increase income flows," she reasoned.
Many have concluded that as loan size increases reinvestment and company growth will do the same.
"A good question is how far upmarket do you need to go to have business that are creating a lot of jobs," Morduch said. "I think you have to go pretty far upmarket."
The U.S. Agency for International Development, one of the first to lend to SMEs, didn't go very far. The agency established an SME program in Pakistan in 2003 and added a second a couple years later. Called Widening Harmonized Access to Microfinance (WHAM), the latter initiative provided consulting, training, and technology to commercial banks and MFIs and helped disburse nearly 40,000 loans and $16 million in three years. The loans ranged from PRs 40,000 to 1.8 million (approximately US$650 to US$32,000), with annual interest around 17 percent.
Shorebank International, which implemented the USAID program, vetted, selected, and then helped nine Pakistani lenders identify borrower businesses with the best potential.
"Do each of these small enterprises grow and start to build factories and become multinationals?" Gregory Chen, director of Shorebank International's Pakistan operations, asked during an interview with Devex. "Definitely not - most small businesses stay small businesses."
The loans are not necessarily intended to help the businesses build factories or create jobs by the hundreds.
"The goal is to make them more profitable, more efficient, it's sort of an intermediate goal, and that might lead to the next stage," said Chen, who has been studying the impact of microcredit for more than a decade.
The idea is that every borrower has an optimal loan size, which would improve operations and possibly lead to job creation.
"The goal of Shorebank and USAID at the end of the day is to help build sustainable economies and a big part of that is poverty alleviation and improving people's standard of living," he said. "Finding the right loan size is just a means to an end."
One group argues the right loan size is rather large, and is in fact not a loan at all. The Omidyar Network has teamed with the Soros Economic Development Fund and Google.org to create a $17 million firm that will invest in small and medium enterprises. The company, to be based in Hyderabad, India, will invest between $500,000 and $3.5 million in SMEs and work closely with the Base of the Pyramid Lab at the Indian School of Business, which has considerable experience with SMEs.
"We want to show that SMEs can be profitable investments," says the firm's Web site. "We will do this by focusing on lowering transaction costs, deepening capital markets to increase liquidity, and catalyzing capital for investment."
This description omits two traditional goals of microfinance: poverty reduction and job creation. Omidyar has long advocated microfinance as a profit-making commercial sector, butting heads with idealistic first movers like Yunus as a result. In 2006 he donated $100 million in eBay stock to Tufts University, his alma mater, for efforts to promote the commercialization of microfinance.
At least one observer questions the planned SME fund.
"I think they're ahead of the evidence on this one," Morduch said. "I'm happy to see the money coming in to the market, but we don't have the evidence to make an informed choice regarding loans of that size."
Microfinance Changes Its Stripes
With the impact of SME loans uncertain, many are working to making microfinance better.
"Microcredit is not a miracle cure that can eliminate poverty in one fell swoop," Yunus wrote in "Banker to the Poor," his bestselling 2003 book. "Combined with other innovative programs that unleash people's potential, microcredit is an essential tool in our search for a poverty-free world."
Some lenders have broadened the microfinance umbrella to include health care, education and other social services while financial services firms invested an estimated $4 billion in 2007, tilting the microfinance field towards commercialization.
Hussain Tejany, the president of Pakistan's First Microfinance Bank, the country's first bank geared towards microlending, applauds this development.
"Poverty alleviation involves a series of tools - microfinance is just one," he said. "Education and health are others; we try to get involved in all."
First Microfinance was one of the nine lending institutions in USAID's WHAM program. Yet despite moving temporarily upmarket, the company continues to grant mostly smaller loans: The firm's average loan size remains around PRs 16,000 (about US$250), according to Tejany.
"Yes, it is good to build businesses and create jobs," he said, explaining that First Microfinance subsidizes health care offers financial education to poorer borrowers. "But our goal is to strengthen those people involved in small businesses, so they become capable of taking care of their family first, then we look on to the wider community."
Tejany is particularly pleased with one recent statistic: the percentage of women in micro-borrower families that are involved in some sort of business has increased fivefold in the past two years.
"There's no doubt about it," he said. "The smaller loans are better."
Reducing poverty is not only about money; it is also about, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen put it, "expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy." Social and political freedoms, certainly, but more importantly the things many in the developed world take for granted - public safety, basic education, public health and infrastructure. Dubbed "microfinance plus," these more holistic initiatives are making considerable headway with South Asia MFI's.
One pioneer is Vijay Mahajan, who in 1996 founded Basix India to improve livelihoods of the rural poor.
"Mahajan started with something very simple," Morduch said. "Creating this holding company that has a microfinance element alongside a livelihood strategy, drinking water linkages, technical services - it's seeing microfinance much more broadly."
Mahajan and Basix are now held up as models of industry innovation.
A program in Orangi, Karachi's sprawling squatter settlement, has been setting an example for much longer. Begun in 1986, the Orangi Pilot Project's microfinance program has handed out 21,000 loans, averaging around PRs 12,000 (about US$90, at PRs 65 to the dollar) each.
"We've supported a wide variety of businesses and created hundreds of jobs," said Nylah Ghias, the program's co-director.
Today, the dirt lanes of Orangi - Asia's largest slum in terms of population and geographic size - are filled with wallet-making, flower-stringing, and embroidery businesses. Women and young men spend long days sewing sequins and bold designs into silk shawls. Twelve-year-old boys work four to five hours after school to supplement their family income. And the microfinance program is just a small part of the Orangi Pilot Project's broader mission, which includes sanitation, sewage disposal, education, and housing construction.
Ujjivan, another "microfinance plus" lender, is indicative of the booming and innovative microfinance market in India. The firm, which was launched with seed funding from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and Bellwether Microfinance Fund and lends to small groups of women in poor urban areas, opened its first branch office in Bangalore in September 2005. Less than three years on Ujjivan has 47 branches and 67,000 clients across the Bangalore, Calcutta and Delhi metropolitan areas.
"We realize that their needs can be unpredictable, so we offer alternatives," said Manoj Dwivedi, chief operating officer of Ujjivan's Delhi offices.
Ujjivan offers loans for businesses, emergencies, and A combination of business and family expenses. The firm also educates women on financial services and, with backing from Viacom, the entertainment conglomerate, has opened dispensaries and clinics in borrowers' neighborhoods. Further, Ujjivan is adding technical and vocational education programs across its markets.
"We insist our customers go to these dispensaries, where for prescriptions and check-ups doctors will not charge any fee," Dwivedi said.
Tip of the Iceberg
Many financial services and venture capital firms have stayed out of microfinance, primarily because it takes thousands of $75 loans to make the sort of profit a single $40 million investment might provide. But an unexpected nugget of data has emerged in recent years to change that dynamic: Small loans to the poor are generally more profitable for lenders than larger loans to businesses and wealthier clients.
"The return on investment for [investing in] smaller firms tends to be considerably higher," Chen said.
Higher interest rates and fewer defaults are partly responsible for profits nearly double those of loans to large businesses.
Chen added another reason: "Because they're poor these borrowers don't have an office - they're in their living rooms."
Commercial investment has come to the fore in recent years, as donors such as the World Bank and USAID are replaced by the likes of Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley. And for good reason: Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that half of the world's 3 billion poor people still lack access to institutional lending and credit. Financial ratings firm Standard & Poor's says the market could expand 10-fold, to $150 billion in microloans.
Already, nearly 100 investment funds are buying equity in microfinance institutions, according to the World Bank-managed Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, a microfinance industry association. CGAP estimates that these firms invested $4 billion in the sector in 2007. Morduch has been told this number may be as high as $7 billion. Either way, the corporate dollars bode well for the industry's future.
"I think successful microfinance has to be commercial," Cowen said in an e-mail. "There just aren't enough charitable dollars to go around; there will always be hard cases but overall commercialization is the way to go."
Critics worry about the hefty profits some MFIs take from the poor. Mexico's Banco Compartamos, for instance, charges interest rates of up to 100 percent annually. A June 2007 report from CGAP faulted the bank's rates as well as profits of more than 50 percent.
Meanwhile, other initiatives have found ways to lower interest rates. India's Women's Initiative for Self-Employment is a social business that strives to break even by offering microloans at the shockingly low rate of one percent monthly interest. It has no office and maintains no automatic teller machines. Still, since Kiran Rawat founded the firm in September 2006, loans of IRs 4,000 to IRs 5,000 (US$100-125) have helped dozens of rural women run bakeries, dairies, and toy-making businesses.
"There's so much money going into microfinance," said Morduch. "The sector just doesn't have the absorbent capacity, so there's pressure to move the money somewhere."
Thus the rise of SME loans, social businesses and various versions of "microfinance plus," not to mention insurance and savings programs, technology initiatives that provide access to smart cards and banking via mobile phone. Morduch said much of the flood of cash was a result of Yunus' Nobel Prize.
"Ironically, it was meant to go into microfinance initiatives, but now it's going far beyond that," Morduch said.
With microfinance now backed by the deep pockets of corporate finance, such innovations and permutations will continue for the foreseeable future. Chen is all for such diversification.
"All these market segments are equally important in different kinds of ways," he said.
Chen remains focused on the boom in Pakistani microfinance. With the number of loans expected to double in the next two years, the sector is going to need qualified staff, and quick.
"We have 5,000 employees in the microfinance sector," he said, noting that Shorebank International is helping to establish training centers and assisting Pakistani institutions with recruitment. "We need 20,000 three years from now."
Who says microfinance doesn't create jobs?
-- posted on devex.com on 16 July 2008
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