Category Archives: Politics

Election day in PA-Go Vote!

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Tuesday is primary day in the state of Pennsylvania. My cousin Manan Trivedi is vying for the Democratic party’s nomination against Doug Pike. The winner will face the Republican incumbent in a district that has a real chance of switching hands in November and will therefore be the focus of national attention. For obvious reasons I have been following this battle pretty closely and here are three observations:

1) Money rules, and being independently wealthy rules more. It doesn’t matter if you rack up double or triple the endorsements of your opponent. It might not even matter if you out-fundraise them. If he/she can afford to put their face up on TV more often than you then its an uphill battle until the end.

And the fundraising is going well for Trivedi. Because of the impending primary, the candidates had to filed with the FEC yesterday for their sums raised from April 1 through April 28. Here’s your totals:

Trivedi: $41,478.50
Pike: $9,381.00

In the month before the election, less than $10,000 raised? That’s Martha Coakley-level complacency not only compared to Trivedi but to other regional Dems who face no primary challenges — Bryan Lentz, in neighboring PA-07, also raised over $40,000 in April, for instance. [Kos]

2) You can enter a race “late,” “come from out of nowhere,” and have a South Asian name and still compete if you have good ideas and know how to communicate them. I believe this is the single most important thing I have learned from this race. I am not sure who will win tomorrow but it was amazing to see that sound policy knowledge resulted in such a lopsided endorsement tally and such a toss-up on election day.

Going into the final full week of campaigning during the primary election season, Manan Trivedi has received the endorsement from two very influential women and an organization devoted to advocating for women’s equality.

The National Organization for Women (NOW/PAC) chair, Terry O’Neill stated that “Manan Trivedi has demonstrated to us that he will stand up for the full equality of girls and women. We are looking forward to joining forces with him in that pursuit.” [Link]

3) Anything can happen in a primary (see Bob Bennett). Primaries are ruled by the most hard-core activists in the party. The people that vote are the ones that probably vote in every election or the ones that feel passionately about a particular candidate or their policies. There aren’t any real polls that have attempted to predict the outcome of this race but we know with absolute certainty that it will come down to anywhere from a couple thousand to a couple hundred votes (more likely the latter). If you live in PA-6th and were debating whether or not to vote then I’d tell you that a primary vote is where your voice will be heard the loudest.

If you live in the PA-6th and vote, please tell us about your voting experience in the comments below.

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In Support of Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood

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Nilanjana Roy, at Akhond of Swat, has done a pretty thorough round-up of the recent controversy surrounding Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood’s decision to accept a prestigious Israeli literary prize, and I won’t rehash it all here. Ghosh and Atwood were offered the Dan David Prize this spring, and were urged to refuse to accept it by pro-Palestinian groups, including a significant number of academics from the Indian left (based both in India and in western universities).

I just wanted to put in my own two-cents’ worth: I support the decision made by Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood to accept the prize. In contrast to many of my colleagues who signed the recent open letter to Ghosh, I do not think there was anything to be gained by boycotting a cultural prize given by an institution outside of the Israeli government. Far better to stay, to continue to engage, and to dissent where necessary.

A viable argument against “cultural” boycotts is that they simply don’t do anything, though defenders of the practice might say that the symbolic value and media coverage is worth it. (Note that I’m not talking about economic boycotts, which may be more effective.) Ghosh himself points out that in writing In an Antique Land, he worked with Israeli as well as Arab academics to learn the written language (Judeo-Arabic) used by Abraham Ben-Yiju; a boycott would have made that project impossible. Similarly, this kind of cultural boycott would also lead us to be unable to engage with dissenting Israeli cultural expression, such as the recent film Waltz With Bashir.

But for me the most compelling argument against this way of reacting to Israeli cultural institutions is that, as bad as things are for the Palestinians, what the U.S. itself has engaged in over the past decade — especially the debacle of an unjustifiable and badly executed war in Iraq — is far worse. By any reasonable standard, if we’re boycotting Israel, we should be boycotting ourselves! (And similar kind of accusations could be made against India or Pakistan, for any number of reasons.) In short, this kind of thing doesn’t get us anywhere. Structurally, if we pay taxes and receive benefits from a government, we are all “complicit” in what that government does. Continue reading →

David Cameron in India, 2006: on Globalization

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Here are excerpts from a speech David Cameron gave in India in 2006, relating to globalization:

I would especially recommend the last 30 seconds or so of the clip.

Isn’t David Cameron essentially a reprisal of Tony Blair and the “Third Way,” with an only slightly more “conservative” complexion? How is this rhetoric any different from the pro-globalization, pro-liberalization line taken by Blair/Clinton centrists since the early 1990s? Finally, do you find his references to “compassion” convincing?

Cameron also made several other stops he made along the way during a 2006 India trip: here. He did make a stop in the Mumbai slums (link), and stop to ride the Delhi Metro (link). And he seemed to respond with appropriate sobriety when a minibus accompanying his motorcade had an accident with a pedestrian that left a woman critically injured.

Of course, this was a few years ago, when he had just become the Conservative party leader, and was not yet a household name. (I’m sure the trip would look very different now.)

And here’s a speculative question: how might the UK/India and UK/Pakistan relationships change under the new Conservative/LibDem. government? Continue reading →

“Internet Hindus”: Another Twitter-versy

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After reading the recent article in the New York Times on corruption in the IPL, I went over to Amit Varma’s blog, India Uncut, to see if he had any comments on Lalit Modi et al. I didn’t find anything right off, but instead a reference to yet another Twitter controversy that I’d missed, in this post.

A journalist with IBN Live, Sagarika Ghose, had posted a few Tweets (for example) lamenting that a group of what she called “Internet Hindus” had attacked her for comments she had made: “Internet Hindus are like swarms of bees. they come swarming after you at any mention of Modi Muslims or Pakistan!”

Other journalists have also picked up on the phrase. Here is an interesting column by Ashok Malik in the Hindustan Times that picks up on the critique. Amit also linked to a column by Kanchan Gupta defending the “Internet Hindus” here, along the lines of “screw the pseudo-secular MSM,” though I personally wasn’t all that impressed by the overblown rhetoric. (Call me an Internet Skeptic.)

Actually, Amit Varma’s own comments on the phenomenon of extremism on the internet seemed wisest to me:

If Ghose was, indeed, bothered by trolls, she would have done well to keep in mind the old jungle saying, ‘Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty and the pig enjoys it.’ The internet empowers loonies of all kinds by giving them a megaphone–but no one is forced to listen to them. The noise-to-signal ratio is way out of whack on the net (Sturgeon’s Law), and any smart internet veteran will tell you that to keep your sanity, you need to ignore the noise. Ghose, poor thing, had tried to engage with it.

We all know that people are more extreme on the net than they are in real life. The radical Hindutva dude who wants to nuke Pakistan on the net will, in the real world, sit meekly at Cafe Coffee Day arguing the relative merits of Atif Aslam and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. (link)

Yes, exactly. Varma goes on to discuss Cass Sunstein’s recent study on “group polarization,” and has some thoughts on what that might mean for India-Pakistan relations. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Meanwhile, here is my own humble contribution. There is indeed such a thing as an “Internet Hindu” — by which I mean, someone who expresses extreme views online while living a very moderate or even secular lifestyle in the real world. But there are also Internet Muslims, Internet Sikhs, Internet Christians, and Internet Marxsts — all of them potentially irksome if you say something they don’t like. Hindus do not have a monopoly on saying extremist things online.

I’m really not interested in having a discussion along the lines of “who are the worst offenders?” if it’s at all possible not to go down that route. (Pretty please?)

Rather, I would be curious as to whether we could use this as an opportunity to reflect on the issue of “group polarization” Varma mentions, and how and whether the habit of talking to people on the internet is a factor in magnifying differences. How have your own views and habits changed as a result of being on the internet, talking about issues related to the Indian subcontinent? What are some positive effects, and what are some negatives? Continue reading →

Dubai Can Bite Me, Ctd

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We have often had harsh things to say about the treatment of South Asian guest workers in Dubai/UAE in many posts here (for instance), but here is one that hit home for me as an academic.

Syed Ali is an American citizen of Indian descent who teaches sociology at Long Island University. In 2007, he was in Dubai on a Fulbright with his family. One day before he was to leave the country, he got a knock on the door, and five men in white robes and a woman in police uniform asked him to come with them. What followed was a rather bizarre kind of interrogation by the UAE police:

Then the questioning began. Why are you here? Who do you know? He explained that he was a Fulbright scholar, on a grant by the very U.S. government that was the United Arab Emirates’ main strategic partner.

Ali, now 41, was in Dubai researching about second-generation expatriates from South Asia for an academic paper about how professional Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in the Persian Gulf were adjusting to life and work far from home, in a place where they could live in for decades but could never gain permanent residency. He was shocked that his line of inquiry would set off alarm bells.

“It ended up I was interviewing people who were quite well off,” he said. “That’s why I was so really stunned. I never had any sense that there was anything objectionable about what I was doing. No one had any serious complaints about being there.”

Yet despite the reams of information they had on him, “there was a lack of basic information that they didn’t get or have or really understand,” said Ali, who wrote about his experiences in Dubai for Britain’s Guardian newspaper. They didn’t seem to get what a Fulbright was. “‘We think you’re working for the ‘Jewish,’ ” one interrogator accused Ali, who is a secular Muslim. “‘Maybe also the CIA.'” (link)

Note that he was researching white collar workers, not the folks working in construction (whose miserable working and living conditions have been amply documented). Eventually they let him go, warning him not to return to the country to do any further research: “The research you are doing is creating divisions in our society and we will not allow it” (See Syed Ali’s original account of his experience here.) They also took his laptop and the IPod he had been using to record interviews. They later returned the computer without its hard disk, and bought him a new IPod instead of returning the old one. So much for the months of research!

Now Syed Ali’s book, Dubai: Gilded Cage is out from Yale University Press. Revenge is a dish best served with coverage in the Chicago Tribune (above), The LA Times, and the Independent.

Maybe someone should mail a copy to Dubai’s secret police: here’s that scurrilous book by the “Jewish” “CIA” agent named … umm… Syed Ali. Continue reading →

Chemical Cremation?

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A bill headed to the California State Assembly, and expected to pass, will be of special interest to our Hindu readers, especially “environmentally conscious” ones. The question is, should chemical cremation be legalized as an alternative to combustion cremation (the latter having a larger carbon footprint)?

Funeral homes and crematoria want to use a liquid chemical process to dissolve bodies instead of cremating them with fire.
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“It’s green. It’s clean. It’s environmentally friendly and it reduces the carbon footprint,” said California state Assemblyman Jeff Miller (R-Corona), who wrote legislation to make the so-called bio-cremation method legal.

Miller said his bill was prompted by a funeral home director in his district who might may buy a bio-cremation machine. The measure would broaden the definition of cremation to include the use of either both fire or and water. Two committees already have approved the measure unanimously, and the full Assembly must pass it before it goes to the Senate. [LAT]

Chemical cremation is properly known as “resomation.” The website of a Scottish company explains the process and benefits:

The coffin is placed in a special chamber and, instead of fire, resomation uses a water and alkali based method which uses the same chemistry as in natural decomposition but is much quicker…

The resomation process takes roughly the same time as cremation and the funeral ceremony will be the same. However, it uses less energy than cremation and produces significantly less CO2 and avoids putting mercury and other harmful contaminants into the atmosphere…

After resomation, bone remains are left behind in the form of pure white ash. As with cremation these remains can be placed in an urn and returned to the loved ones. Relative to cremated ash, resomated ash is fine and pure white as can be seen in the photographs on the right of the page. [Link]

So far only one state, Florida, has passed a law legalizing this form of cremation (although services are not yet operational).

So what do the Hindus out there think? The resomated ash does look finer and should be easier to disperse. This process has the side benefit of making it really difficult to go all Sati. But in all seriousness, part of the point of cremation is that you are doing away with your body because it is a discarded piece of nothing once your eternal soul has left. The act of turning the body to ash aids in releasing the soul. If one believes that, then resomation should be no problem. Right?

Continue reading →

In Britain, the Ethnic Hostility is a Tad Less Subtle…

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British National Party (BNP) Parliamentary candidate Bob Bailey ran into a group of three Desi toughs in East London while campaigning earlier today, and the following is the result:

If you look at the reaction in the YouTube comments, as well as in the coverage of the story at the Daily Mail, there is an overwhelming consensus by readers that the Asian “thugs” got what was coming to them.

And yes, it’s hard to deny that the smaller South Asian kid in black started the physical altercation by spitting in Bob Bailey’s face. Unfortunately, the commenters on these sites are using the incident to unleash wads of racist bile… Pretty disgusting to read.

At least at Pickled Politics, the commentary on the incident is more sane. My favorite comment there is “Platinum786,” who writes: “If someone spits at you and you punch them, fair enough it’s almost instinct. If that leads to someone punching you back, pushing you, you fight back, again that is instinct. Once they’re on the ground, kicking them, that’s BNP” (link)

My own question is this: what exactly was Bob Bailey saying as the youths approached him on the street? My suspicion is that they thought he was accusing them of being “robbers,” but he may not have intended to say that. Can anyone work it out?

In the end, it doesn’t really matter that much — a brawl is still a brawl. But I can’t help but wonder: was this thing was the result of a misunderstanding caused partially by British accent differences?

Update: Here’s a little bit of backstory on Bob Bailey. Quite the character! (Now I understand better why he was on foot to begin with…) Continue reading →

Why does he hate our freedoms?

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Today, at noon, Joe Lieberman will introduce legislation designed to strip American citizenship from anybody who chooses to affiliate with a foreign terrorist organization.

The bill is a reaction to the fact that Shahzad was read his Miranda rights, something that Lieberman claims will make it harder to fight terrorism even though (a) anybody arrested in America is read their rights (citizen or not) and (b) Shahzad has been singing like a canary.

Why will Lieberman’s political grandstanding effect you? After all, you’re not planning on becoming a terrorist. One reason is that the Lieberman’s remarks suggest that this bill will be incredibly broad:

under federal law, the “choice” to affiliate or associate with terrorism may be an innocent, unknowing financial sale or purchase, or it may simply entail making a charitable donation for humanitarian purposes to a group that the executive branch suspects of terrorism. [cite]

Remember that under current law, even human rights advocates working with non-violent political groups to help them resolve their conflicts non-violently can be charged with giving material support to terrorists if they also have an armed wing which is classified as a terrorist organization.

Another reason why you should be worried is that he is suggesting doing this by administrative means, even though you would have the right to contest such a finding in court:

Continue reading →

Go Chili, Go Chili…

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Just a brief post on this: Surya Yalamanchili, the Democratic congressional candidate from Ohio we mentioned last week, just won the primary in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District.

He defeated David Krikorian by 650 votes; last week, Krikorian made comments about the difficulty a person with the name “Yalamanchili” might have in winning an election. Yalamanchili is going on to face the sitting representative for the district, Jean Schmidt, in the general election in November.

Surya Yalamanchili has won the Democratic primary for the 2nd District congressional seat.

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Yalamanchili appeared to have beaten David Krikorian by 650 votes and Jim Parker by more than 4,400 votes.

The race took an unexpected turn last week, when Ohio and Hamilton County party officials condemned remarks attributed to Krikorian about Yalamanchili.

State and county Democratic officials and Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt sent letters saying that Krikorian owed an apology to Yalamanchili and the Indian-American community.(link)

At least now he can cross “best known for being a candidate on TV’s The Apprentice” off his resume. Continue reading →

Outsourcing Issue Also Not Dead: More Nasty Politicking

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Via DailyKos, I came across this ad, in the current Arkansas Senatorial Primary race. Bill Halter is a Democratic challenger to the sitting Democratic Senator, Blanche Lincoln. The ad is technically sponsored by the Arkansas Chamber of Congress, not Blanche Lincoln’s campaign.

You thought it was dead, didn’t you? Nope, the “our jobs are going to India” bogie is also still alive and well in American politics.

According to Kos, the backstory is that Halter was once on the Board of Directors of a firm called WebMethods Inc., which had opened an office in Bangalore some years ago, though there’s no evidence that the opening of that office actually cost any American jobs. This type of ad is a bad precedent, since it basically puts anyone who has run a high-tech company or a financial services company at risk of attack.

The ad is also clearly a form of “race-baiting” — a cousin of the nasty kind of racial attack ad that would prominently feature some sort of threatening black person (sometimes a criminal) to scare white voters. But apparently it’s not Willie Horton with which these folks are trying to scare people in Arkansas, it’s smiling middle-class people in Bangalore!

Here’s Bill Halter’s website. Continue reading →