Category Archives: Politics

Saving Simba – the FME Approach

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It’s probably not a surprise that I’m a big fan of Free Market Environmentalism (FME). FME is caricatured by detractors as laissez faire oil refineries sitting on wetlands. But in the real world, it (like much of Libertarianism) should instead be understood as recognition that for many ends – in this case environmental – applying / directing market forces can be a better means of achieving that goal.

FME often stands in stark contrast to prevailing currents in conservation / ecology which attempt to use government & regulation to eliminate markets altogether. FME advocates assert that this approach is a recipe for potentially even more destructive black markets – especially when coupled with rampant public sector corruption as is found in India.

TCS‘s Barun Mitra has a great little article on India’s dwindling tiger population & how FME could be applied –

…in the US trade of live tigers is permitted, tiger numbers are in excess of 15,000, where in India, their numbers have dwindled to around 3,500. The problem is that Indian wildlife is seen as nationalised property and placed outside the discipline of the marketplace. While many call for more stringent action to stop the illegal trade in wildlife and for more prosecutions of poachers, this ignores the fact attempts to stem supply have merely driven up price through illegal trade… Under the present system of prohibition, forest dwellers have no interest in protecting tigers, poachers and traffickers have a field day. Unscrupulous traders profit from selling spurious tiger products. The high profitability attracts the criminal mafia. …The babus wielded the power, smugglers oiled the wheels, blackmarketeers made a killing and the law enforcers took their cut.

Mitra includes the following stat which many, admittedly, might find repulsive –

The tiger, top of the food chain in its ecosystem, would also be at the top of the economic ladder because of its market value. There is a demand for virtually every part of the tiger. The total value of tiger parts from its nose to its tail could easily come to USD 40,000.

Distateful, perhaps, but it may be the best way to save Simba. Continue reading →

The Battle of Waziristan

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Stratpage’s ever excellent Kaushik Kapistahalam (check out his body of work!) provides an excellent & probing article about the lawless western provinces of Pakistan, the hunt for Al Qaeda and a disastrous battle in Waziristan –

June 13, 2005: Few things have captured American imagination in the war on terror like the idea of soldiers chasing terrorists in the mountainous “tribal areas” near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. However, US media coverage of the Pakistani operations has been clichéd and superficial. Analysis reveals that the performance of Pakistani troops against small bands of foreign and tribal fighters has produced mixed results…

As usual, stratpage.com has no permalinks so I’m gonna excerpt some large chunks of the article below. I highly recommend visiting the site ASAP to get the rest of the meat…. Continue reading →

Tunku: Why do Indians Excel in Spelling Bees?

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kashyap.gifMy favorite resident Desi @ the WSJ – Tunku Varadarajan – felt compelled to explain to his colleagues & readers the improbable desi performance at the Spelling Bee –

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week–the fifth time in seven years in which a child from that ethnic group has won this stirringly absurd contest–my first reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of the U.S. population.) …For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation. But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization–the result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a moral virtue, and certainly as a caste “signifier,” to use a clumsy anthropological term.) So the act of sitting down for months with dictionary on lap, chanting aloud the spellings of abstruse words and then committing them to memory probably taps into an atavistic stream coursing through the veins of Indian bee-children. A friend tells the story of how, in his childhood, he’d had an Indian boy home for a sleep-over. He awoke in the middle of the night to find his guest poring over the host family’s Random House dictionary. “I own an Oxford dictionary,” the boy had said, by way of bizarre, nocturnal explanation. “This American dictionary is so different!”

Heh, an interesting argument but, admittedly, only a partial explanation.

180px-Plato.pngNevertheless, I do whole-heartedly concur with Tunku that there’s a deeply inscribed Indian respect for purely mental and somewhat eccentric pursuits at the expense of more practical, physical ones. Many, many strands of desi philosophy & culture take a rather extreme position on the age-old Mind-Body problem. Long before Plato himself, Desi philosophers were advocating the basics of Platonic Forms and that it’s the physical which taints the mental ideal.

It’s pretty darn hard to envisage an activity more concerned with esoteric forms and less physical than a spelling bee. Continue reading →

The animals were loaded two by two

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There is a controversy brewing at the Tulsa Zoo in Oklahoma. Zoo officials there want to display an exhibit that explains the creation of animals by means of the biblical account. We all know that creationism is on the rise at an alarming rate in school districts across the country. Now they want it in the zoos as well? Why? Well it turns out that the impetus for this stupid idea might be one Ganesh. USA Today reports:

The Tulsa Zoo will add a display featuring the biblical account of creation following complaints to a city board about other displays with religious significance, including a Hindu elephant statue.

The Tulsa Park and Recreation Board voted 3-1 Tuesday in favor of a display depicting the account in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

The vote came after more than two hours of public comment from a standing-room-only crowd.

Zoo employees, religious leaders and others spoke in opposition, saying religion shouldn’t be part of the taxpayer-funded scientific institution.

But those who favored the creationist exhibit, including Mayor Bill LaFortune, argued that the zoo already displayed religious items, including the statue of the Hindu god, Ganesh, outside the elephant exhibit and a marble globe inscribed with an American Indian saying, “The earth is our mother. The sky is our father.”

Is this merely a petty attempt to counter the Ganesh statue with some Christianity? Lord knows we don’t want decent God-fearing Oklahomans to go to the zoo, get converted, and turn Hindu on us when they see a Ganesh statue in front of them. We might as well battle that possibility with some Genesis. So why was the Ganesh statue there anyways?

Zoo officials argued that the zoo, as a scientific institution, does not advocate religion and that displays like the elephant statue are meant to show the animal’s image among cultures. The same exhibit includes the Republican Party’s elephant symbol.

And of course I have to finish with a quote that will make you smack your forehead in disgust:

“I see this as a big victory,” said Dan Hicks, the Tulsa resident who approached the Tulsa Zoo with the idea for the exhibit. “It’s a matter of fairness. To not include the creationist view would be discrimination.”

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Edison may get an Asian-American mayor

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Jun Choi, the Asian-American mayoral candidate for Edison, NJ who was dissed by the Jersey Guys, upset the incumbent mayor 55%-45% in the Democratic primary (thanks, Saurav). That virtually guarantees the 34-year-old’s victory in November:

It is the first time in Edison history that the mayoral candidate backed by the Democratic Party was defeated in a primary… [Home News Tribune]

… [The incumbent] said he could think of two reasons why he didn’t win: The flap over the 101.5 FM “Jersey Guys” show when one of the hosts made a derogatory comment about Choi and Asian Americans, and a feeling that voters simply wanted a change after nearly 12 years with him as mayor. [Newsday]

I’d like to say it’s pretty clear what happened, that Edison resoundingly voted against anti-Asian racism. But it seems the Jersey Guys’ complaint that Choi was targeting minority voters was accurate, not that there’s anything wrong with that:

Choi’s primary victory is seen as a sign that Asian-Americans have arrived as a political force in the state’s fifth largest municipality, where nearly one in three voters is of Asian descent. “It shows the graduation of the Asian-American community to a level of sophistication, where they can impact an election,” said Edison Council President Parag Patel, the first Indian-American elected in the township…

But Asian officials and others say what pushed Choi over the top in Tuesday’s election was his campaign’s decision to target the burgeoning Asian-American population with literature printed in Asian languages and ads in ethnic media… a strategy Patel said helped him get elected, too… The New York-based [AALDEF]… found nearly 10 percent of the respondents were first-time voters. “This is a very high number, particularly in a primary election…” [Star-Ledger]

And the Jersey Guys, jockeying with Paris Hilton for the Chutzpah Stakes, took credit for the win. Unbelievable:

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Reappeared

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In April, Abhi posted about two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers. The girls were held under Orwellian secrecy, but the case seemed dubious from the start:

“Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers,” the [FBI] official added… “We’re not spun up about this case,” said a Homeland Security Department source. [NY Daily News]

After six weeks virtually incommunicado in detention, one girl was released, and the other is being deported to Bangladesh:

… after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family… Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed FBI declarations, and orders barring attorneys from disclosing government information. [NYT, reprinted in Kansas City Star]

So that’s what happens under the USA FASCIST Act if you’re a 16-year-old Muslim girl who writes a school essay about Islam. Like Guantánamo Bay, you can be jailed without charges for life, and nobody will confirm that you exist. The same behavior by King George III sparked the American Revolution; the same behavior by Cuba, North Korea and Iran lands them on our various axes of evil.

Now what happens if you’re a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned, non-Muslim murderer with a criminal assault record, and you show up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor?

You get served coffee and let into the U.S.

Have a nice day!

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest… Mr. Despres… has a 10-inch swastika tattooed on his lower back… Mr. Young said the U.S. customs agents appeared to be joking around… “When I come back in (to the room) they were giving him a coffee,” he said. “He got processed faster than I did.” [Ottawa Citizen]

U.S. customs agents… let him into the United States… The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom… On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton’s son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August. [CNN]

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Quit BJP? Advani did.

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advani.jpg After stating what very well could be a fact while on a trip to Pakistan, BJP leader LK Advani has asked his party to “relieve” him of his duties. Or, to put it bluntly, he’s resigned after much drama.

A chief architect of the political ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990’s and the current opposition leader in Parliament, L. K. Advani, resigned today as head of his party, amid a storm of criticism from within his own ranks over remarks he made while in Pakistan.
Last weekend, on a visit to Karachi, where he was born, Mr. Advani stood at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and praised him as a “secular” leader.

Now I was raised to hate on Jinnah like most good, slightly perplexed toddlers were; my father vividly remembered an “India” that still contained an unbroken Punjab and like many of his generation, he bitterly resented Jinnah for “what he did to us”.

I never really thought of or questioned this until today, when I started to see these stories on NYT and the Beeb. I went to trusty Wikipedia to see about Jinnah. What if Advani was right, and gasp he WAS secular?

A common view, especially in India, is that it was Jinnah who was responsible for “the division of India”, creating Pakistan. The portrayal is that of a religious leader completely committed to his community having a country of its own. Jinnah himself, however, was a very secular person. Most of his career till about 1930 was spent trying either to bring the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League to work together or getting mainstream parties like the Congress (of which he was a member much longer than the League) to be sensitive to minority priorities. When the League was founded in 1905, he was probably the only major Muslim personality to refuse to join.

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A house divided?

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The SJ Mercury dissects the conflict between Indian American technocrats and religious/cultural leaders in the Bay Area. This may well be a microcosm of what we’ll soon see in other areas of the country where large Indian American communities exist:

When Dr. Romesh Japra was building his cardiology practice at Washington Hospital 25 years ago, Hindus wanted their own temple. Fremont’s then-mayor, the late Bill Ball, told the doctor the Seventh-day Adventists were moving out of their church. Japra wrote a personal check for $10,000 to cover part of the down payment and the Fremont Hindu temple was born. The first in the Bay Area, it became part of the bedrock for Silicon Valley’s Indo-American community.

Since the late 1970s, when Japra established himself as a leader in the Indo-American community, thousands have arrived from India, many armed with engineering degrees. The 2000 census revealed that 40 percent of all Bay Area high-tech workers were Asian, and many high-profile Silicon Valley companies were founded or co-founded by Indians.

Despite their land of common origin — which they remind outsiders is a complex mix of more than 1 billion people — the high-tech engineers and the Indo-Americans who preceded them are not united. Some old-timers say the technocrats care more about making money than about the grass-roots community. And to some highly skilled high-tech workers, Japra is a maharaja — Hindu prince — who reflects a past they came to America to escape.

The rift has played a part in preventing the community from realizing its shared goal: gaining political power.

“We have to stop backbiting,” said Mahesh Pakala, 40, a Fremont entrepreneur who is friends with both groups. “We’re killing ourselves. We have to think big. We have to get ourselves a politician.”

We’ve all observed this sort of thing before. It’s the classic old world mentality vs. new world mentality that we see in discussions with our parents. The technocrats have an organization that they claim to run like a “start-up” and the old-timers put on their yearly fair for networking and building community ties. In theory the former is run with business-like efficiency and thus can influence big time politics with money and connections. The latter relies on “who you know” and a turning-out-the-vote model.

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Baby saved by a jury of peers

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A peeing baby is costly in Kerala (thanks, Turbanhead):

The parents of a baby who urinated on his mother inside an Indian temple have won an appeal to overturn a stiff fine imposed by temple officials. Anil Kumar was told to pay 1,001 rupees… to fund cleansing ceremonies when his baby son urinated during prayers at the temple at Trichur in Kerala state…

“I respect the views of the temple priests. But this penalty business is very pre-historic,” KC Venugopal, Kerala state minister responsible for temple affairs, told the BBC. “If they want to conduct a cleansing ceremony, let the money be taken from the temple funds. It should not be taken from worshippers…”

“I am always so nervous to carry my two-year-old son to a temple… What if he throws up or urinates?”

… according to tradition, it is considered unclean if babies urinate or vomit inside temple premises. A purification ceremony must be held to restore the sanctity of the temple…

I have two adorable baby nephews. We also ‘consider it unclean’ when they spit up or pee. Our own ‘cleansing ceremony’ involves paper towels and soap and costs Rs. 0. It has more to do with the sanctity of the hardwood floors than the sanctity of the temple though.

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Mano-a-mano goes to Washington

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Preparations are already underway for when Indian Prime Minister Mano-a-mano Singh comes to town next month. Rediff reports:

Co-chairs of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans — US Representatives Gary Ackerman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — have written to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, urging him to convene a joint session of the US Congress (both the Houses of the American parliament) for an address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his visit to Washington July 17 to 19 at President George W Bush’s invitation.

Dr Singh will be on his first official visit to the United States.

It will be the first visit by an Indian prime minister in nearly five years.

Ackerman and Ros-Lehtinen, senior members of the House International Relations Committee, wrote that ‘an official invitation to address a joint session of Congress will send an unequivocal message to the government and people of India that the US stands in full support of their commitment to democracy, peace, and prosperity for all; and it will show the American people the enduring significance of the relationship between our two great nations.’

‘For this reason,’ the lawmakers said, ‘we would encourage a joint session of Congress to allow Prime Minister Singh to share his thoughts directly on India’s role as a regional power, its economic development, its progress toward religious tolerance, and the benefits of increased economic, security, and cultural cooperation between India and the United States.’

USINPAC’s website has more:

Sanjay Puri, Chairman of USINPAC said, “the first State visit to the United States by Prime Minister Singh has already generated excitement among the Indian American grassroots and on Capitol Hill. We are also pleased by the Bipartisan support.”

All out efforts are being made to ensure that Prime Minister Singh’s address to the Joint Session of the United States Congress becomes a reality. In this connection USINPAC is working closely with the House International Relations Committee (HIRC) and has briefed senior members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat.

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