Category Archives: Politics

Capitalism: Gujus vs. Bengalis

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Prashant points us at yet another interesting, Desi economic history piece by Gautam Bastian. In it, Gautam quotes a provocative Telegraph OpEd that discusses a surprising diversity in the Desi Intellegentsia’s attitudes towards the market. Instead of the uniform, Pavlovian rejection Uncle Milt experienced, the Telegraph’s Ramachandra Guha points at a specific braindrain of Guju econ knowledge –

Back in the Sixties, it used to be said that India’s most successful export were economists. Our economy was resolutely insulated from the rest of the world, but our economists occupied high posts in famous universities in Europe and America. Later, the joke was amended to say that the reason India’s economy was mediocre was because its economists were world-class. No South Korean was a professor of political economy at Cambridge; no Malaysian had been awarded the Nobel Prize. But their economies grew at an impressive 8 per cent, whereas ours stayed stuck at 3.5 per cent, also known as the “Hindu” rate of growth.

My own theory about Indian economists is more specific and hopefully less facetious. It runs as follows; Gujarati economists place faith in the market, while Bengali economists are prone to trust the state. In the Fifties, when P.C. Mahalonobis drafted the Soviet-inspired second five year plan, A.D. Shroff responded by starting the Forum of Free Enterprise. In the Sixties and the Seventies, about the only economist of pedigree advocating Indian integration with the world economy was the Gujarati, Jagdish Bhagwati. He was opposed by an array of Marxists, many of whom (naturally) were Bengali.

As Gautam notes, several prominent thinkers have attacked the the broad question of “if intellectuals are so smart, how come so many have been so wrong about markets?” (Heck, little old me, in my blogging youth tried to add on to Nozick). But by slicing and dicing across socio-cultural lines within India, Guha takes the question in a different direction. While I’d heard the stereotype of Bengali Marxists (keep in mind that my homestate – Kerala – has its fair share as well) I wasn’t aware that Guju’s were responsible for the counter pole. Biz friendly Gujus, eh? I suppose many stereotypes start with a grain of truth somewhere….

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Muhammad Yunus receives his Nobel Prize

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The award ceremony of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize took place today. Muhammad Yunus was accompanied by nine village women, elected representatives of Grameen Bank’s borrowers. The full text of his speech is an interesting read. He re-tells the story of the founding of the bank and describes the different ways it has branched out, from its program for beggars to its mobile phone, food, and medical care initiatives. He also gives a sense of his personal economic philosophy, which he grounds in an embrace of the free market and globalization. It’s an argument similar to that made for “double bottom line” or “triple bottom line” investment and accounting, which seeks social or environmental value creation along with financial profit. It’s a good read; you can find it here. Continue reading →

It’s not easy being green

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A few weeks ago, six imams were removed from an USAIR flight originating from Minneapolis where they had just been attending a conference of Imams held at the Mall of America on building bridges. Their suspicious behavior? Praying out loud while they waited and asking for seatbelt extensions. (Here’s an argument that their behavior was truly suspicious and here’s an argument saying it wasn’t). Coulter: Profiling Muslims is … like profiling the Klan

Before they knew it, airport police swarmed onto the plane, and the six imams were herded out, handcuffed and interrogated for hours… After the FBI cleared them, US Airways still refused to allow them to fly. The imams bought tickets on Northwest Airlines and flew back to Phoenix… [Link]

The event has produced widely differing reactions. Ann Coulter piped up to argue that it is good to profile Muslims and Arabs (she makes little distinction), saying:

After the attacks of 9/11, profiling Muslims is more like profiling the Klan. [Link]

Washington DC area talk show host Jerry Klein went the other direction, staging an event to demonstrate how deep bigotry towards Muslims was. First he suggested that “all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band,” a suggestion that was supported by manycallers. One went further, saying:

… that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver’s licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. “What good is identifying them?” he asked. “You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans…” [Link]

At the end of the hour long show, where many people had called in to argue that visual identification of Muslims would make other Americans safer, the host turned the tables on his callers:

Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. … “I can’t believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said,” he told his audience … “For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people’s bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver’s license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It’s beyond disgusting.

“Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen … We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous…” [Link]
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India in Focus on World AIDS Day

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THE VIRUS. The fever. The disease. The cocktail. The alphabet soup. The death. By any other red ribbon or name, today is December 1, World AIDS Day, and much of the day’s significant news on the topic comes, for better or worse, from India. (Photo: “An Indian sex worker wears AIDS symbols as she takes part in a rally in Siliguri,” AFP via Yahoo! News.)

aidsday06.jpgFor better, former US president Bill Clinton announced yesterday in Delhi a deal to dramatically reduce the price of effective treatment for children with HIV/AIDS. Among other things this is a fascinating example of a new approach to achieving health outcomes that combines public action with market tools. With funding from five countries, three European and two South American, the foundation has negotiated volume discounts on behalf of 40 destination countries. Thanks to the bulk purchase, the Indian generic manufacturers Cipla and Ranbaxy can sell single-pill tri-therapy drugs at 460 for a whole year’s supply. So the $35 million put up by France, Britain, Norway, Brazil and Chile ends up going a long, long way. $35 million! That’s NOTHING. Imagine if, say, the United States tossed in a little spare change from its daily Iraq expenditure. Grrrrr…..

Anyway, here’s a news story with details:

Only about 80,000 of the 660,000 children with AIDS who need treatment now get it, the United Nations AIDS agency estimates, and half the children who do not get the drugs die by the time they turn 2 years old. The United Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef, has described children as the invisible face of the AIDS pandemic because they are so much less likely than adults to get life-saving medicines. …

Cipla and Ranbaxy Laboratories, Indian generic drug manufacturers, will be providing pills that combine three antiretroviral drugs into a single tablet, a formulation that is easier to transport, store and use than multiple pills and syrups. The combination tablets also need no refrigeration, an important advantage in poor countries lacking electricity, and can be dissolved in water for babies and infants too young to swallow pills.

Sandeep Juneja, the H.I.V. project head for Ranbaxy, said in a telephone interview that the company was able to provide the lower prices because of the larger volume of sales and because the Clinton Foundation, buying on Unitaid’s behalf, would consolidate many small purchases. He explained that the market for pediatric AIDS drugs was relatively small, fragmented and spread thinly across many countries.

“It would be a nightmare handling those small orders,” he said.”Imagine 40 to 60 countries buying a few hundred bottles individually, with no way to predict how many bottles would be needed.”

The new prices for 19 pediatric AIDS drugs are on average 45 percent less than the lowest rates offered to poor countries in Doctors Without Borders’ listing of AIDS drug prices, and were more than 60 percent lower than the prices the World Health Organization reported were actually paid by developing countries, the foundation said.

On the other hand — and here’s the “for worse” part — even the most abundant supply of inexpensive drugs can’t overcome poor distribution networks and, even worse, bonehead ignorance, especially when it comes from the people in charge of administering AIDS programs. Here’s a horror story this week from rural Gujarat: Continue reading →

InstaReview: SAWCC’s “In a State of Emergency?” Exhibition

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sawccemergency.jpgEarlier this evening I checked out the opening of “In a State of Emergency? Women, War & the Politics of Urban Survival,” an exhibition presented by the South Asian Women’s Creative Collaborative here in New York. The show is up at the Alwan Center for the Arts in Lower Manhattan through December 9th. It features photography, video, multimedia and installation pieces by nine desi sisters: Salma Arastu, Meherunnisa Asad, Kiran Chandra, Mona Kamal, Bindu Mehra, Carol Pereira, Maryum Saifee, Tahera Seher Shah, and Vandana Sood.

I’ll go straight to the insta-review, dangerous as that is since I only just got back and the air-kissing, red-wine-in-plastic-cups opening atmosphere perhaps wasn’t the most conducive to critical contemplation (though I did stay away from the wine). So I hope other folks will chime in with their own impressions. Visually, I most enjoyed Shah’s “Jihad Pop” series of digital prints, with their stencils of desi and Islamic iconography set amid fields of sheer black and white. The most thought-provoking to me was Saifee’s series of “Postcards from the Middle East,” which she bills as self-portraits stemming from her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan: as she explains in the catalog, “my skin color made my authenticity as an American up for debate. On the street, I would either be mistaken as a Sri Lankan maid or as a Bollywood film star.” And I found Arastu’s “New York and I” series frustrating: visually fabulous in their superimpositions of New York street and subway scenes with armies of unhinged, chattering silhouettes, but marred by the poems written into each piece, which struck me as trite and superfluous.

The show is a project of SAWCC, the estimable organization that is now in its tenth year and that sponsors, among other events, the annual literary conference that a number of Mutineering types attended last year. SAWCC (pronounced, delightfully, “saucy”) continues to do the Lord’s work for culturally minded macacas, and they deserve all our support.

A show like this one, however, also suffers from self-imposed boundaries. It is imbued with a very 1990s, hyper-theoretical approach to the politics of representation that makes the inherent whimsy and improvisation of artistic creation — and, importantly, artistic consumption — feel secondary. The catalog essay, and the shorter version handed out on flyers, are nearly illegible, and I’ve got Ivy degrees and a reasonably honed appreciation for theory. It frustrates me no end — and this is not a knock on this exhibition specifically; far from it, it’s a common problem — when art is “explained” by its sponsors and presenters using language like this:

These increasingly paranoid urban spaces harbour fears of the irrational violence equated with terrorism, inducing a society of control in which surveillance, intimidation, and the erosion of personal liberty forces forms of resistance that employ the strategies of the absurd. Increasingly aware of the machine that governs and questioning the methods and motives of the state, the artists in this exhibition rely on the absurd, irrational, and uncanny to produce counter hegemonic narratives to ideological, religious, cultural, and social modes of control.

Like the artists of Dada, these contemporary practitioners respond to the presence of war, excess, and other degenerate transgressions of contemporary urban life. Like the women of Dada, they also respond to issues of identity altered by male repression and subjugation, aware of a world in which urban social orders are based on the governance of space, each system of control based on meta-structuring agents, making each space, city, and response, culturally specific. Such disciplinary systems of control exude masculinity, often necessitating a physical, emotional, and psychological domination of women, placing them in a “state of emergency.”

Got that? Read it again: It’s not gibberish, it just feels like it is. There is plenty of meaning, and indeed, a viable argument or several in those hyper-extended, comma-laden sentences. The problem is, those arguments are being beaten into us with the implicit presumption that, ultimately, there is a right way and a wrong way to apprehend this art. And that, plainly, is bullshit. For one thing, taken as theory alone, the argument above merits unpacking; it cobbles together numerous assumptions and interpolations about the world about us with verbs like “induce,” “force,” and “necessitate,” that are dead giveaways of a lack of interest in, or openness to, the serendipitous and the unexpected. Rigidity and art make poor companions, as previous uses of the word “degenerate” in the context of art criticism have made abundantly clear; and I think it’s a disservice to a whole class of potentially interested viewers, as well as to the artists themselves, to fence a potentially interesting exhibition behind such a grim gateway. Continue reading →

Who’s objecting?

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I find the Misbah “Molly” Rana story to be a particularly interesting one insofar as it seems to very handily illustrate the whole “desi-but-not-desi” dialectic that many of my peers and I seem to have undergone over the years. Well, in my case the whole social misfit scenario was a little bit more complicated, what the liking of the mens and the persistent crushing on Saif Ali Khan (call me!), but leaving that aside, there were always certain cultural divides that we were constantly trapped within, both self-imposed and those brought to bear by the parental units—“go abroad to study, only speak English at school, but then come back here as soon as you graduate, because we’re alone and need you, and everyone hates Muslims in the West and don’t you dare question anything we say because we’re a good traditional family and that’s just how things are.”

My caveat, since this seems to have been cropping up just a teeny-tiny bit: I am not making any representations as to a multitude of opinions, perspectives or experiences other than my own, as a gay Pakistani male from a fairly privileged social background. I just want to put that out there so I donÂ’t have to spend another forty minutes deleting angry e-mails accusing me of trivialising the desi experience, because in case anyoneÂ’s confused, IÂ’m not Indian, IÂ’m not British, IÂ’m not American, and seriously I donÂ’t really claim to speak with any authority on issues relating to any/all of those perspectives. Continue reading →

Munnabhai beats the rap, mostly

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sanjay-dutt.jpg Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt (star of the Munnabhai movies) has been acquitted on the terrorism charge that’s been on his head since 1993. The judge did find him guilty of illegal possession of arms, but it appears that charge is much less of a concern: though he may still do years of prison time, according to the New York Times, Dutt’s family and friends are celebrating.

Some background on the case is available at Wikipedia:

Mumbai was engulfed in riots as the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid complex in Ayodhya in December 1992. The resulting riots claimed hundreds of lives and it is during this time that Sanjay Dutt claims to have asked his under world friends to provide him with a fire arm for protection. He however had not conveyed to police any threats to his life.

As per the CBI case filed in a TADA court Abu Salem and his men went to Dutt’s house on January 16, 1993 and gave him three AK-56 rifles, 25 hand grenades, one 9 mm pistol and cartridges. He returned two AK-56 rifles, hand grenades and cartridges to Hanif Kadawala and Samir Hingora but kept one AK-56 rifle with himself. (link)

Admittedly, the Wikipedia article is a bit slanted towards Dutt here, as it presumes that Dutt’s purpose in buying a weapon was self-defense. But the problem with this interpretation is Dutt’s supplier, Abu Salem, a notorious terrorist seen as one of the key organizers of the terrible 1993 blasts in Bombay. While it’s fair to imagine that a half-Muslim actor might want protection following some nasty communal riots (December 1992-January 1993), it’s also fair to speculate that he knew Abu Salem was up to something unsavory by the spring of 2003. Even if Sanjay Dutt wasn’t actively involved in the bombings that took place in March of 1993, isn’t it possible he knew something about the plans given his association with Abu Salem?

I guess I lean towards Dutt a bit in this case. While I do find Abu Salem’s involvement disturbing, it’s hard to imagine that Dutt would have been actively involved in terrorism given his famous parents and his status as an actor. That said, if this were the U.S., and Sanjay Dutt had bought an AK-56 rifle from, say, Mohammed Atta, he would probably be permanently locked up in Guantanamo Bay. (Sometimes, the Indian legal system seems more rational than the current American one.)

Dutt served 18 months in jail immediately following his arrest, but within a few years was back and more popular than ever in Bollywood. The 2000s have been the peak of his career, with the two superhit Munnabhai movies. As I recall from the comments to one of my earlier posts on Lage Rago Munnabhai, some people at least have been aware of the irony of an actor in a movie about “Gandhi-giri” being found guilty of possessing an assault rifle. Well, at least he has one thing in common with the Mahatma — they both did lots of jail time. Continue reading →

Posted in Law

The cost of illness

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A friend working in public health once told me that while mortality rates were highest in Africa, morbidity rates (the rate of non-fatal illness) were highest in India. If I remember correctly, she told me that this had to do with relatively high rates of innoculation – which cut all the nasty childhood diseases that lead to low life expectancy at birth – but a poor health system over all.

While I’m not sure if this is still true, what I do know is that getting sick is expensive, anywhere. Consider the impact of illness on financial health in the USA:

50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses… Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. [Link]

And this is even though “68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance” [Link].

If illness wipes out the savings of relatively high (by world standards) earning Americans, you can imagine what it does to the poor in India. While the cost of medical care is cheaper in absolute terms in India, it is still a large share of already meager resources. Couple that with lost earnings, and the impact can be dire.

About one-fourth of hospitalized Indians fall below the poverty line as a direct result of their hospital expenses, according to a 2002 World Bank report. Many people take out steep loans or sell their homes in order to pay. And for the poor, losing even a day’s wages while waiting in the hospital can be devastating.

“A health event is a bigger risk to farmers than an unsuccessful crop. Once they sell their land or livestock, they become indentured laborers. That takes a generation to fix,”… [Link]
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Aishah, You’re Fired.

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The debate over multi-culturalism is back in the news ‘cross the pond, in the land of the pickled: Niqab.jpg

An Indian origin Muslim teaching assistant in west Yorkshire, suspended earlier for refusing to remove her veil during school hours, has now been dismissed from the job.[link]
Aishah Azmi, 24, lost a discrimination and harassment case at an employment tribunal last month, and saw support collapse among parents at Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, over what was seen as an uncompromising stand.[link]

That “lost the support of parents”-angle is extra interesting, considering

The school where Azmi was teaching had 530 students, aged seven to 11, and 92 percent were Muslim, mainly from India and Pakistan.[link]

A bit of backstory:

Mrs Azmi, who was awarded £1,000 by the tribunal in Leeds because of mishandled disciplinary processes, was dismissed yesterday after a hearing at the school. She started work a year ago but was suspended in the spring when she refused a male teacher’s request that she remove the veil when helping children in her role as a bilingual support assistant.[link]

This latest controversy comes on the heels of a column written by Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, which provoked international debate about veiling and identity:

Straw wrote in a newspaper column last month that he asks women who visit his district office wearing veils that cover almost their entire face to remove the garment when they meet with him…
He said the piece he published in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph newspaper had been thoughtful and respectful, and that he had never challenged women’s right to wear a veil.
He emphasized that he only requested — and never demanded — that women remove the veils in his office and said he did not support banning the coverings.
He said those living in Britain should have a stronger sense of shared identity based on the country’s democratic values.[link]

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Mahmood the Atheist

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Mahmood Farooqui is among the bloggers signed on to a new group blog project called Kafila, which I discovered via DesiPundit. (Other names on the roster include Shivam Vij, the omnipresent progressive blogger/journalist, and Nivedita Menon, a well-known, Delhi-based academic).

For his first post at Kafila, Farooqui reprints an essay he had published in Tehelka, on the uncomfortable position he finds himself in as a secular — indeed, atheist — Muslim intellectual in today’s India. The place to start might be where he lays his cards on the table:

Let me explain my locus. I am an atheist, I follow none of the Islamic taboos, but I live in a locality in the capital that can only be called a ghetto. I lived here for five years, when I was a student, when I was very self-consciously opposed to the Indian Muslim stereotype. I had grown up on Chandamama and Nandan, Holi was my favourite festival, Karna my hero, Shiva the great God, Hinduism a highly tolerant religion and I had dreams of attaining martyrdom fighting Pakistan. I was studying history and detested medieval Muslim rulers; I would expatiate on the reasons why Islam had trouble with modernity; I admired Naipaul and Rushdie; supported Mushirul Hasan during the Satanic Verses controversy — a novel I deeply admire in spite of its undoubted blasphemies — and I detested many things about Indian Muslims, except, predictably, Urdu literature and Sufism. I was, in short, a model Hinduised-Indian-Muslim, who always put India before Islam. I was desperate to leave Okhla. (link)

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