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A Conversation With: Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda

September 18, 2012, 2:27 am
By PAMPOSH RAINA and HEATHER TIMMONS

NEW DELHIâ€" Bhupinder Singh Hooda has been chief minister of Haryana since 2005, and is currently serving his second term. The state, which hugs India's capital, is said to be the site of the epic battle described in the Mahabharata; it is now home to just over 2 percent of India's people, some 25 million.

Lately, Haryana has been known for the triumphs and shortcomings of Gurgaon, the sprawling city that has become an outsourcing center, and as the home of the Maruti Suzuki auto plant that was recently wracked by violent strikes. While improving, Haryana's gender ratio, at 877 women per 1,000 men, is still well below the national average of 940, and a series of recent crimes has highlighted questions about women's safety there.

A Congress party stalwart, Mr. Hooda often refers to himself as the son of a farmer, one who attracted billions in investment to the largely agrarian state. The 65-year-old former tennis champion said he hoped to make Haryana an educational mecca by building numerous universities and partnering with international schools.

He spoke to India Ink recently from his New Delhi bungalow in a wide-ranging interview on topics including honor killings, crime and electricity.  

Mr. Hooda said his surname's similarity to HUDA, or the Haryana Urban Development Authority, a state administrative body, has often amused people, so he has dubbed himself the “Haryana Overall Development Authority.”

What have been the biggest challenges in your job as the chief minister?

The biggest challenge when I took over was the law and order situation prevailing at that time.  Peop le lacked confidence in the system, the administration, power generation and employment opportunities. My state was at No. 14 among Indian states as far as per capita investment was concerned.

Basically my state is an agrarian state, to get more was a tough job. I brought in a new industrial policy, which was investment-friendly. For industry you need land, that was also a problem, so I came up with a new land acquisition policy, which was a pro-farmer acquisition policy. Being a son of a farmer, I know what it means to lose land.

I made a policy in which farmers were partners and they would get annuity for 33 years.  I have further improved upon that and have come up with the land pooling policy. Out of one acre, the land owner will get 1,000 square yards of developed land, of his choice, in a residential area, in lieu of compensation, and 100 yards of commercial land so he could open a shop.  I have made them partners in development and that is quite successf ul.

When I took over, the state's own power generation was 1,587 megawatts. And my state came into being in 1966. From 1966 to 2005 when I took over, only one thermal power station was added. From 2005 to 2009, in my last term itself, I added up to four new thermal power stations.  I have raised the capacity from 1587 to 5,050 [megawatts].

Second, I have tried and am still trying to make a qualitative change in the education system. I introduced the semester system in schools, colleges and universities.

How does the semester system help?

There were many dropouts among the poor, since they could not afford the education. Haryana is the first state that came out with an innovative scheme: Any girl child or boy admitted to class one [first grade] in a government school receives scholarship - 150 rupees [$2.7] per month to a girl child and 100 rupees [$1.8] to a boy.

About 20 lakh [two million] students are getting these scholarships.

So, has this reduced the dropout rate?

Yes, considerably. I have opened bank accounts in the name of students and their parents, and students who attend get a scholarship every month. Education is free for the poor; in addition, scholarships are given, and separately they are also given uniforms.

[The chief minister's office, which supplied exact figures after the interview, says the dropout rate for first to fifth grade in government schools has gone down from 12.7 percent for the 2004-05 academic year to 1.3 percent in the 2011-12 academic year. From sixth to eighth grade, the dropout rate has dropped from 24.5 percent to 3.7 percent over the same period, according to Mr. Hooda's office.]

I have a dream to make my state an educational hub, of an international standard. I think I have succeeded in that to some extent. In the next five to seven years you will observe that it has become an educational hub.

You mentioned your pro-farmer land acquisition polici es. But how do you explain recent protests by farmers?

There is no unrest among farmers. You go to Gorakhpur [a village in Fatehabad district],  where a nuclear power plant will come up. About a month back, there was news that it needs 1,500 acres of land. Politicians with vested interests went there to instigate farmers not to give up their land. But when I started the project, we had already compensated farmers for 1,344 acres of land and taken possession of it.

My acquisition policies are farmer-friendly. I am the son of a farmer.  There is no unrest, we take farmers into confidence.

You said that the law and order situation in your state was out of hand when you took over as the chief minister. How have you changed that?

At that time people felt there were many criminals who were operating from jail. There was a criminal nexus that was being sponsored by the government, that's what people felt.

I gave no concession to lawbreakers. The firs t thing I did was to tell the police that every FIR [First Information Report] has to be registered and then investigate. If you don't take the first step, you can't reach the second step. In the previous regimes FIRs were not registered.

Recent crime statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau indicate that crime in your state has increased by over 11 percent in the last five years.

Crime has not gone up. The number of registered cases have gone up, because I said that every case has to be registered.  Earlier they were not being registered.

From No. 14 my state now ranks No. 1 in per capita investment among the Indian states, and that is because of the law and order situation and the atmosphere in the state.

There is a perception that Haryana is a particularly difficult state to be a woman in - in terms of gender ratio and crimes against women.

No, it is just a perception. Previously orthodox thinking was there, but not any more. People are getting education. I have enrolled women in the police force, there is a separate cadre for women police constables, about 10 percent of the police constables are women.

We have set up special help lines for women as well. I have come up with many women-friendly schemes.

But still, the female birthrate is much lower than in many other states.

It is improving, in 0-6 [age group], with these policies.

What's the most important thing you introduced that you think helped in the improvement?

First, 33 percent of seats were reserved in teaching jobs for women. Second, I introduced the “ladli” [a Hindi term of endearment for a girl] scheme, to change the mindset of people.

Any couple having a second girl child gets a benefit of more than 5,000 rupees ($92) every year for five years.  So that there is no burden of marriage on the parents when the girl turns 18.

In my state, the old age pension is given to both husband and wife, if they are 60 and above. But couples having only girls start getting a pension at the age of 45. Any electricity meter that is registered in the name of a woman gets a concession of 10 paisa [one-tenth of a rupee] per unit [of electricity consumed]. And any property registered in the name of women gets a 2 percent concession on stamp duty. There are several other schemes as well, such as reservation of seats for women in technical institutes.

What do you do about situations like the honor killings that we saw in your state recently?

That happens in Canada also. Why my state only, it's a mindset. As far as honor killing, I don't know why you call it honor killing. What you call honor killing is done by either a girl's parents or a boy's parents, the society has nothing to do with it. Nobody likes it. But such cases are not on the increase, I can say that. It is condemnable.

The recent violence at the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar echoed similar episodes of l abor unrest in the past. Why do such incidents keep recurring?

What happened in Maruti was unfortunate, but it did not occur because of labor unrest.

It happened because of a clash between two people due to a sudden provocation and it flared up. For that I have made sure that culprits are not spared. A special investigation team has been formed, a special prosecutor, Mr. Tusli [K.T.S. Tulsi], has been appointed.

The number of strikes in 2002 were 30, in 2005 there were 17, and in 2012 the number of strikes and lockouts in the state were three. The incidents of strikes in Haryana are among the lowest in the country.

Are you feeling pressure from Gujarat, which is aggressively trying to court business investment?

Every state tries. I have been all around the world to market my state and I have been successful. From 1966 to 2005, the total investment in Haryana was 41,000 crore [41 billion rupees]. But, from 2005 to 2012, 60,000 crore [60 billion r upees] investment has already come to the state and 100,000 crore [100 billion rupees] is in the pipeline.

From No. 14, I have become No. 1, said an ASSOCHAM [The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India] report, of September 2010. Haryana received 81 percent of the total investment that was pledged to India, much ahead of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The state continues to be a preferred investment destination.

From the first day the management of Maruti was on record, there is no question, they are furthering their investment. Seventy percent of the total Japanese investment is in the state of Haryana. Every second car running on the Indian road is manufactured in Haryana.

The chairman of the Suzuki Corporation came and met me, he was very satisfied.

Are there new investments coming into the state?

Suzuki motorcycles is coming up with a research and development center, the biggest in India. Maruti is coming up with a third plant in Manesar. Hero is also there. Mitsui, National Panasonic, Asian Paints, textiles, footwear industry.

Some people might argue that your attempts to attract investment have been too successful. In a city like Gurgaon, which has been a big success, people who live and work there have been very frustrated because of the power problem, water problem and weak infrastructure.

The power problem happened this time as there was a drought-like situation in Haryana. So to save my crop I had to cut power to the industry to give it to farmers. And there were no rains, and coal was in short supply for thermal plants.  But that has been resolved.

For water also, we have built a new canal from Gurgaon that is coming from Yamuna [river]. Drinking water is not a problem. I just passed a budget of more than 400 crore [four billion rupees] for Gurgaon.

Delhi and Haryana seem to have constant rows over water sharing. What is the problem?

Haryan a is a water-scarce state. The problem is this that water comes through Haryana, and when there are floods, Delhi starts saying that Haryana has released water. They do not understand, if water is released by Haryana, first it will flood Haryana and then Delhi. If it is in my hands, why will I let Haryana get flooded?  

Water comes from the hills. Delhi is our national capital, it gets double its share at the cost of Haryana because of the Supreme Court order, and we are contesting that case.  Otherwise, whenever there is an acute shortage of water in Delhi, we always try to help.

Are you getting the kind of support that you need from the central government?

The central government gives support to every state. The UPA government has done a lot of work for farmers and poor people, which has helped me develop my state. I thank the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.



Maverick Minister in India Is as Perplexing as She Is Powerful

Piyal Adhikary/European Pressphoto Agency

Mamata Banerjee, the head of the West Bengal State, in April.

KOLKATA, India - When Mamata Banerjee, a 5-foot-tall dynamo in flip-flops, finally defeated the Communists last year after decades of misrule here, she became one of the most powerful but unpredictable politicians in India. Now the country is left to guess whether she will announce on Tuesday that she intends to try to pull down India's governing coalition.

Ms. Banerjee is the chief minister of West Bengal, a state more populous than Germany, and she leads a regional party with 19 ministers in Parliament, a crucial block of votes for the governing United Progressive Alliance. Indeed, she is so influential that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton paid her a special visit on a recent trip to India, a highly unusual honor for any regional leader.

On Thursday and Friday, the government pushed through several sweeping policy changes, including one that would allow Walmart and Ikea to set up shop in India. Ms. Banerjee has repeatedly opposed plans to open India up to more competition. She is in some ways more leftist than the Communists she replaced.

But while she has vowed to protest the changes, it is unclear whether she will go further on Tuesday and push for early elections after she meets with her party leaders. As is often the case with Ms. Banerjee, her public statements are often contradictory.

“We are not supporting these anti-people decisions,” she posted on her Facebook account on Friday. “We are very much serious about these developments and ready to take hard decisions if these issues are not reconsidered.” But the next day, she announced several times at a rally: “We don't want to topple the government.”

The 15 months of her administration in West Bengal, of which Kolkata, also known as Calcutta, is the capital, demonstrate just how hopeless it is to try to predict how Ms. Banerjee will behave.

Not long after taking office, she announced that a rape victim was lying even though the police found evidence supporting the victim's allegations. She demanded the arrest of a farmer after he asked her a question about rising fertilizer prices.

She angrily marched out of a televised session with college students after accusing those in the audience of being Maoists. Her government arrested a university professor after he forwarded an e-mail with a political cartoon criticizing her. She has claimed that there is a global conspiracy to kill her.

Many are still hopeful that Ms. Banerjee, who is often referred to here as “Didi” (elder sister), will be able to reverse her state's long decline and contribute to India's resurgence. But even her allies are beginning to wonder whether her volcanic temper, off-the-wall statements and increasingly nasty battle with the news media will be her undoing as chief minister, a position akin to that of a governor.

“She never picked up the skills to hold her anger in check so that she can administer and govern,” said Laveesh Bhandari, director of Indicus, an economic research firm.

And there is a palpable sense from top ministers in the central government of what seems to be a bad case of “Mamata fatigue.” When asked about Ms. Banerjee's impending decision, Renuka Chowdhury, a spokesman for the Congress Party, the primary group in the governing coalition, said: “We remain optimistic, while we appreciate her limitations and compulsions.”

Ms. Banerjee declined requests for an interview.

In her place, Amit Mitra, Ms. Banerjee's finance minister, dismissed the many controversies she has been involved in as little more than a tempest in a teapot.

“These are concerns only for the English-speaking upper class,” he said. Referring to the Communists, known locally as the C.P.M., he added: “The C.P.M. would have beat that farmer to death. He got away because she believes in democracy.”



Newsweek\'s \'Muslim Rage\' Cover Mocked Online

September 17, 2012, 7:52 pm
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO - After a week of violent protests over an online video demeaning the Prophet Muhammad, the American news media has conducted a searching psychoanalysis of the Muslim mind to ask why such an offense should trigger such wrath. Essayists have generalized about resentments dating back to the 8th century, an anachronistic discomfort with modernity, or the excesses of Islamist politics, among other familiar themes.

On Monday, some Muslims online began to turn the tables, poking fun at the whole inquiry. Seizing on Newsweek's invitation to discuss its provocative cover story under the Twitter hashtag #MuslimRage, thousands of Muslim users of the social network mocked the premise by listing a few of the real and imagined irritants that make them mad.

Some t raded inside jokes about the incongruities of living in a Westernized world.

Jokes about the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, formed a genre of their own.



Iranian Cleric Says Rushdie\'s Murder Could Stop Insults to Islam\'s Prophet

September 17, 2012, 6:42 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Michiko Kakutani explains in her review of Salman Rushdie's new memoir, an Iranian religious foundation reportedly raised the price on the author's head over the weekend to $3.3 million. The cleric who leads the foundation claimed that the novelist's murder would stop others from disrespecting Islam's founder, The Associated Press reported from Tehran.

The Indian-born author's book, “Joseph Anton,” describes the nine years he spent in hiding, after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced him to death in 1989, for basing a fictional character on the Prophet Muhammad in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” In an interview with BBC Radio 4 broadcast on Saturday, Mr. Rushdie spoke of th e parallels between the anger at his novel and the past week's violent protests by fundamentalist Muslims offended at the trailer for a crude film mocking the prophet posted on YouTube in July.

Although Mr. Rushdie resurfaced in 1998, after a reformist Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, made it clear that his government had no intention of carrying out the death sentence, hardliners in Iran insist that the late Ayatollah Khomeini's religious edict, or fatwa, cannot be rescinded.

Ayatollah Hassan Saneii, an Iranian cleric whose foundation first offered millions for the murder of Mr. Rushdie more than a decade ago, said in a statement published on Sunday in the hard-line daily Jomhuri Islami: “As long as the exalted Imam Khomeini's historical fatwa against apostate Rushdie is not carried out, it won't be the last insult. If the fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have contin ued would have not happened.”

The senior cleric's comments echoed remarks made two days earlier by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, who said in a statement on the film, “this great and unforgivable sin would not have been committed,” if the United States and other countries “had refused to support the previous links in this evil chain - namely, Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoonist and Koran-burning American pastors.”

Speaking to the BBC as protests unfolded across the Muslim world, Mr. Rushdie deplored the “extraordinary, thin-skinned, paranoid reaction” to “this idiotic video.” The author also described the crude biopic of Muhammad - which was apparently directed by a Coptic Christian extremist in California who duped actors into participating in the film by calling the main character “George” during the shoot - as “a piece of garbage that would be better named ans such and dismissed.” But, he added, “the idea that you react to that by holding an entire nation and its diplomatic representatives responsible for something which they weren't remotely aware of is ugly and wrong.”

The author also told the BBC: “The events surrounding ‘The Satanic Verses' created, I think, a climate of fear that has no dissipated, and that, I think, makes it harder for books - not even books critical of Islam… anything about Islam, to be published. This idea of respect, which is a code word for fear, is something that we have to overcome.”

Writing on Twitter over the weekend, Mr. Rushdie recommended an essay by William Saletan for Slate headlined, “Internet Videos Will Insult Your Religion. Get Over It.”

In the essay, Mr. Saletan observed:

To day, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors' mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody-literally nobody-came to watch it.

Indeed, it does appear that the fury is over a film that might have disappeared without a ripple, if an Islamist television host in Egypt had not discovered it online and driven hundreds of thousands of viewers to the trailer on YouTube. Steve Klein, a Christian fundamentalist who claims to have acted as a consultant on the film, told Bloomberg News that no one came to the film's sole screening, at a cinema on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. “I got there about a half hour before the movie starte d and stayed a half hour after it started,” Mr. Klein told the news agency, “and I saw zero - nada, none, no people - go inside.”



Protests Over Anti-Islam Film Taper Off, but Effects Linger

September 17, 2012, 2:45 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

ITN television footage of the aftermath of protests in Afghanistan.

Protests against an anti-Islam film spilled into a second week on Monday, although they appeared to be tapering off in size and taking place in fewer countries compared with last week.

As my colleagues Matthew Rosenberg and Sangar Rahimi reported, hundreds of Afghans burned tires and threw rocks at the police during the unrest, which took place along the Jalalabad road that leads out of the capital, Kabul. At one point the protesters came close to scaling the walls of a major military base.

There were demonstrations and violence in more than 20 countries starting from l ast Tuesday, when the American ambassador in Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was killed in an attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi. But even as the protests taper off, some say the backlash could take other forms.

Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, noted there could be more of what are known as insider, or green-on-blue, attacks in Afghanistan, for example - green being American military parlance for indigenous forces, blue for its own.

In Indonesia, the police fired tear gas and water cannons against hundreds of demonstrators outside of the American Embassy in Jakarta. In Pakistan, protests flared near the consulates in Karachi and Lahore, while in Islamabad, the American Embassy said it had halted public services. The embassy also noted that protests in Pakistan were often spontaneous and issued travel restrictions.

But some bloggers and writers suggested a growing weariness with the impetus generated by the anti-Islam film, while elsewhere people were being killed in drone strikes, in the war in Syria and in a factory fire in Pakistan. One Pakistani writer, Shiraz Hassan, noted that amid the protests over the film last week, hundreds of workers were killed in those fires last week.

The issue of censorship has also come up as governments, including that of the United States, tried to block the film's widespread dissemination. A Web site news editor, Jahanzaib Haque, wrote on his blog about how the unrest was fomented on social medi a but he, like others, condemned efforts to block YouTube.

Ali Dayan of Human Rights Watch wrote:

But the video was still providing grist in what my colleague David Kirkpatrick described over the weekend as having the potential to inspire local dynamics to fan the flames.

As word spread on social media about the protest activities, on Monday the largest outpouring of protest appeared to be the one organized by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Still, a journalist there, Lucy Kafanov, reported on her Twitter feed th at there was little violence.

An activist and writer, Mhamad Kleit, wrote that it was not just a Shiite protest, but that Sunni clerics, Christians and Druze were among the large turnout.



Image of the Day: September 17

September 17, 2012, 11:15 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Why We Blame America for Anti-Muslim Film

September 17, 2012, 10:19 am
By BETWA SHARMA

SRINAGARâ€" Three young men picked a shady, grassy spot, out of earshot from the crowds bustling about the University of Kashmir campus, to talk on Saturday afternoon.

A day earlier, they had helped organize an on-campus protest against the anti-Islam video that has sparked violent protests in several Muslim countries. The business students asked that only their first names be used because they feared punishment by the university. “We don't want to get caught,” said Faraz, 21.

For these students, the film has provided a fresh vent to express their deep-rooted resentment against the United States. “We see it as one more deliberate insult toward the Muslim world af ter invading our lands for 10 years,” said Tanveer, 24, as his friends nodded.

The “Innocence of Muslims,” an amateur trailer for a film that does not appear to exist, depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, child molester and crook. The trailer led to international protests after it was uploaded on YouTube and translated into Arabic. Kashmiri Muslims described the video as “unbearable,” and thousands flooded the streets of Srinagar to protest against the film on Friday.

The demonstrations have broken a relatively peaceful period in Kashmir, which has seen a two-decade-long conflict between militants and the Indian Army. Violent protests, which wracked Srinagar a few years ago, have subsided. Tourists, especially Indians, are flooding in. The valley is divided between those who pray for stability and others who describe the calm as a temporary illusion imposed by the military boot.

Some believe that anti-Americanism is one the rise in Kashmir because of the United States' continued presence in Afghanistan and countries in the Middle East, and a feeling that right-wing Christian and Jewish groups have outsize influence in the United States.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a resident of California, has been identified as the one of the people behind the film, although most Kashmiris interviewed referred to him as “Sam Bacile” â€" the name used to upload the film to You Tube.

The students are supporters of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a hard-line Kashmiri separatist, who said in an interview that he blames the United States for the film because it was made on American soil. The 82-year-old leader, who is often placed under house arrest at his home in Srinagar, also criticized Britain, Israel and India, along with the United States, for being “involved” in acts that hurt Muslim sentiments.

“The strike is also against their attitude, against their policies and against their actions against the Muslim Ummah (community) and against Islam,” he said. “We can give our life, but we cannot tolerate anything which will be against the respect of our lovely Prophet.”

Last week, four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were killed when Islamist militants attacked the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, over the film. Protests spread over the weekend to about 20 countries, and on Monday to Afghanistan.

Kashmiri leaders have condemned the killings. “We are not liking these things,” said Mr. Geelani. “Innocent people who are not directly involved in any film or any injuries toward the Muslim community should not be targeted.”

Still, some young Kashmiris found it logical to blame the actions of the filmmaker on the United States. “After all, Osama bin Laden's 9/11 was blamed on the entire Muslim world,” said Junaid, 23, the third student. “Sam Bacile is one American, but then we can take it as all of America,” he s aid.

Arguments in favor of free speech do not carry much weight here. Junaid pointed to India, where the cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was recently slapped with sedition charges for insulting the national emblem in a cartoon about corruption. “When this arrest can be done for nationalism, then why not religion?” he asked. “To us, religion is the most important because the whole Muslim nation is one.”

Tanveer added that he doesn't care if the West makes fun of Jesus Christ in books or movies. “Their society may now be secular, but we have retained our allegiance to God,” he said. “Why are they imposing their ways on us?”

Young people in Kashmir are being influenced by Wahhabism, a conservative form of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, said Muhammad Shafi Pandit, the first Kashmiri Muslim to join the Indian Administrative Service in 1969. Kashmir has seen a perceptible rise of Wahhabism, he said, and more young Kashmiris are taking hard-line position s. “Their ways are not part of Kashmir,” he said. “Our pluralistic ethos should not be lost.”

For separatist groups, the film has also triggered anger against the United States because it has not pressured India for Kashmir's independence. They recalled that the United States supported Kashmir's cause for self-determination in United Nations Security Council during the 1950s and 1960s. Since the turn of this century, though, the United States and the Indian government have grown closer, they say, as have India and Israel.

Gul Mohammad Wani, a well-known political science professor at the University of Kashmir, sees the film as a harbinger of future troubles. It is one example of a “right-wing deviation of United States foreign policy,” which he said is reflected in statements made by the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who called Jerusalem the “capital of Israel” while visiting the city in July. “This is so wrong at a time when it 's in the United States' interest to engage with the Muslim world,” he said.

The video, however, has produced a stronger reaction among young people than among their leaders. For instance, Mr. Geelani's supporters expressed surprise that he hasn't called for stronger action.

“We have not said, enough is enough,” the elderly separatist leader told India Ink. “We do not give any strike, any program without necessity.”

Jammu and Kashmir Mutahida Ulmayee Aehlay Sunnah, an umbrella group for several Muslim organizations, has appealed to all Kashmiris for a complete shutdown on Tuesday.

During the press conference on Sunday, its leaders spoke more about the United States- Israeli nexus than about the film. They shared plans to boycott American and Israeli goods in Kashmir as well. “The American and Israeli machinery is working against Muslims,” said Mirwaiz Qazi Ahmed Yasir, a spokesman for the group.

In an interview, Kashmir's top relig ious leader, Grand Mufti Bashiruddin Ahmad, mentioned the possibility of issuing a fatwa of death against the filmmaker after a full investigation. “It could be of death or it could be some other punishment,” Mr. Ahmad said. “If a person has insulted the Prophet Mohammed and if he remains adamant on the disrespect, then the punishment is death.”

But not all Kashmiris are preoccupied by these religious matters. Hilal, a young driver who declined to give his last name, was too busy driving tourists around to have participated in the protests. “The number of people who visited this year is unbelievable,” he said.

The relative peace over the past few years has been a huge boost for the hospitality business in the valley. After the hotels filled up in the summer, people offered makeshift accommodation to the tourists streaming in.

Last week, Mr. Ahmad called for American tourists to leave. The religious leader, whose order found little support with o ther Kashmiri leaders, now insists that he only asked Americans to leave for their own safety. “I welcome all tourists, any tourist. Even Israelis come here,” he said. “I can give a statement against them to not allow them here, but I haven't done it because I am not an extremist.”



An Unconventional Romance

The lovers in Anurag Basu's engagingly odd “Barfi!” - he's deaf and mute, she's autistic - are a particularly pure expression of a cherished Bollywood theme: love is the supreme goal. (Cue the songs: the movie does.) Stripped of conventional social expectations, Barfii (Ranbir Kapoor) and Jhilmil (a deglamorized Priyanka Chopra) have nothing to follow but their hearts, and nothing to battle but kidnappings, death and venality.

“Barfi!” is billed as a romantic comedy, and there are several nods to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The deaf Barfii - his own contortion of his real name, Murphy - plays the silent clown, and Mr. Kapoor, who gets better as the movie goes along, often seems to be channeling his grandfather Raj Kapoor, who incorporated aspects of Chaplin's Tramp in his screen persona.

The comedy registers mostly as pathos, but the silent-movie influence remains strong. “Barfi!” has long sequences with minimal or no dialogue, putting the emphasis on the visuals. In one scene Barfii blows bubbles that enclose fireflies, mesmerizing Jhilmil. The two sometimes communicate with light, bouncing its reflection off mirror shards. (Ravi Varman did the movie-lush cinematography.)

Bollywood isn't afraid to be mawkish. “Barfi!” is at times, though not noticeably more so than most Hindi movies, despite its premise of special lovers with a special lesson to teach. And at 150 minutes, it may try your patience. Or it may wear you down (another Hindi movie specialty) as it builds its emotional slow burn. Against your will, you may even shed a tear.



Will India Ever Rid Itself of Corruption?

September 17, 2012, 7:03 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“We will vote, but we are losing faith in politics,” said a student at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. ”Young people are very pessimistic, and don't think voting will change anything.”

“Corruption?” another student asked. ”We are disgusted, but not surprised.”The New York Times, November 12, 1989.

“His business rivals never fully understood how Manoj Jayaswal got so rich so fast, except that he often seemed joined at the hip with powerful politicians. He hosted them at lavish parties, entertained them at his daughter's opulent Thai wedding and stood among them at India's presidential palace” Jim Yardley and Vikas Bajaj wrote in The New York Times, of the businessman who i s now embroiled in a $34 billion coal mining scandal dubbed Coalgate.

“Today in India, politicians are so powerful,” Santosh Hegde, a former Supreme Court justice who recently led a sweeping investigation of a different mining scandal in southern India told Mr. Yardley and Mr. Bajaj. “All together, they are looting the country.”

Coalgate is the latest in a numbingly long line of scandals that seem to bloom, unchecked, as politicians and businessmen rub elbows in India, each estimated to cost the country's citizens more than the last as India's economy grows. The very first happened just ten years after independence, Samanth Subramanian wrote earlier this year, involving Life Insurance Corporation and a businessman who was arrested at Claridges Hotel in New Delhi. There was the 1969 collapse of the Kerala government, after a vote related to investigation into corruption in land distribution, the Bofors defense deal scandal in the 1980s and scores of others.

So many, Edward A. Gargan wrote in The New York Times in November of 1992, that “for the first time many Indians are openly questioning not only whether honest government is even possible, but also whether the country's very soul has been irredeemably warped.”

Will India ever shake off corruption? Leave your comments below.



For India\'s Children, Philanthropy Isn\'t Enough

September 17, 2012, 7:09 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“E-mails started to pour in the next morning,” Sonia Faleiro wrote in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times describing the response to her article in India Ink about “a family's daily life in the impoverished eastern state of Bihar.”

After their mother died of starvation three years ago, the children, Meena, 10, her brother Sunil, 11, and the eldest 14-year-old Anil, were left to fend for themselves. Anil, driven by the desperate poverty found work in a brick kiln in a neighboring state.

A record producer in Los Angeles “offered to pay all three children's education and living expenses until they turned 18, an amount equal to $1,200 per year,” Ms. Fa leiro wrote.

“It was an opportunity of a lifetime. Why, then, did the children's relatives refuse to let them take it?,” she said.

Read the full article.



In Conversation With: Investigative Reporter Sasha Chavkin

September 17, 2012, 7:48 am
By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI

A mysterious illness plagues dozens of villages in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, according to a report published today by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news group based in Washington. The disease, a type of chronic kidney ailment, has affected about a third of the population in some areas in the region of Uddanam, the journalist Sasha Chavkin writes.

Mr. Chavkin published a report last year about a vast swath of Central America stricken by a similar, and similarly unexplained, epidemic. Now, he reports that India isn't a stranger to the disease either. Mr. Chavkin shares his findings with India Ink, including theories on what's causing the disease and what is beh ind the mounting death toll.

[Full disclosure: Mr. Chavkin was my classmate at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York and we have stayed in touch since graduating. I have also helped put him in touch with a potential source for his reporting from Andhra Pradesh.]

Could you start by telling me what chronic kidney disease, or C.K.D., is? How dangerous is it?

Chronic kidney disease is a common illness worldwide that occurs when your kidneys get damaged and no longer filter your blood properly. In its early stages, it can be managed by changing your diet and lifestyle, but once it gets severe enough you need dialysis and ultimately a kidney transplant to survive.  The main causes globally are diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

But the outbreaks we encountered are totally different from most chronic kidney disease. The victims don't have any of the usual risk factors and are mostly relatively young farm wo rkers. So it's a mystery why their kidneys are failing.

You wrote about Nicaragua's “Island of the Widows,” so named because of the deaths of their husbands from C.K.D. there. You've also found the disease in Sri Lanka. What tipped you off that something similar was happening in India?

A researcher who was investigating the disease in Nicaragua sent us an unpublished study examining what was happening in Andhra Pradesh. The similarity of their findings was uncanny: rural workers getting sick in the prime of their lives, a very specific geographic area affected, and the disease being discovered by doctors in the 1990s. The crucial tip was when we heard that workers in both places were getting the same very rare kind of damage to a part of the kidney called the tubules â€" which is consistent with severe dehydration and toxic exposure.

What did you find in Uddanam? Who exactly has it affected?

The victims in Uddanam are mostly rural farm workers, an d the main crops are cashews, coconuts and rice paddy. Many of them are breadwinners for their families, so when they get sick it devastates the whole community â€" it leaves a trail of widows and orphans. One of the most dangerous things about C.K.D. is that unless you get tested, you wouldn't notice it until you're already in the late stages of the disease and you need very expensive treatment such as dialysis to survive.

How many people are dying because of this disease in Uddanam?

There aren't definitive statistics on how many people have the disease, partly because its not officially recognized and tracked separately from ordinary C.K.D.. But we do know that over the last five years in Uddanam, 1,520 people have gotten treatment for this type of kidney failure through the Andhra Pradesh state health insurance plan, Aarogyasri. Since these are the people who are already advanced enough in the disease to get sick and seek out treatment, we think several times that number are currently in earlier stages of C.K.D.

Has this occurred outside of Uddanam in India?

We don't have clear evidence of other outbreaks in India. But we've heard that similar cases have been reported in Tamil Nadu and we're encouraging people with evidence of other outbreaks to tell us about them with a short e-mail form. If you've heard about other cases, we want to know.

You report there are no clear answers as to what's causing this disease. What are some of the theories?

The leading theory in Uddanam is that there is some kind of toxic contamination, most likely in the drinking water or possibly in the soil. There are two teams that are studying the disease â€" one from Harvard University working in partnership with the Andhra Pradesh government, and the other from Stony Brook University in New York. Both are focused on toxic contamination, possibly from pesticides or other chemicals used in the fields, but neither has come up with an y clear answers.

In Sri Lanka the government and World Health Organization conducted a massive three-year study and announced just this June that they believe they have identified the culprits: the toxic heavy metals cadmium and arsenic, which they say have gotten into the food chain.  But they haven't released any data to support this or explained how they think the contamination occurred. There are still many questions and doubts about their findings. Until the cause is proven, we also can't be sure whether it's the same culprit from Sri Lanka to India to Central America.

What are the measures being taken to tackle C.K.D. in India?

Ravi Raju Tatapudi, a leading nephrologist in the area, worked for years to persuade to government to recognize and take action against the disease. Recently, he became the director of medical education for the Andhra Pradesh government, and during the three years he served he succeeded in constructing several state-of-the-art dialysis units. But none of them are in Uddanam itself, and there is still a far greater need that the government is able to meet.

What's the most unexpected thing you found?

It's shocking that there is a type of disease that overall has killed tens of thousands of people and affects at least three different regions, but no one in the scientific or international communities is connecting the dots or responding strongly enough to solve the problem. Scientists are convinced that the deaths from this illness could be prevented if they could figure out the cause.  No one has made the kind of investment in research that is necessary to solve a problem that has a real solution, and to save lives that really could be saved.

Is the C.K.D. in India similar to the epidemic in Sri Lanka and Central America? How is it different?

In many ways the disease is similar in each place â€" farm workers, relatively young victims, who have tubulo-interstitial kidney dama ge. But there is one notable difference: in India both men and women seem to get the disease about equally, while in Sri Lanka and Central America the victims are overwhelmingly male. Researchers in Uddanam say this leads them suspect that the cause is some kind of exposure to the community as a whole, such as contamination of the drinking water.

How has C.K.D. affected the community in Uddanam? You mention it's hard for residents to get married there.

The effect on the community is devastating â€" not just in lives lost but economically and psychologically. A number of people in Uddanam told us that families are scared to send a bride or groom to live there, or sometimes to accept a marriage into their family by a person from Uddanam. There is a fear that young people from Uddanam will develop C.K.D. and not live long enough to support a family, and a fear that the region itself is contaminated and people who move there will get sick.

We spoke to two siste rs-in-law â€" they called themselves co-sisters because they lived in the same compound â€" who had married two brothers and moved to a village in Uddanam called Varaka. Both brothers died of C.K.D. within a month of each other in 2007, when they were in their mid-30s. The family had to sell most of their land to pay for medical care, and the co-sisters now struggle to get by in part by working in what remains of the fields that previously belonged to their husbands.

Do you think C.K.D. is affecting other countries as well? Are you planning to explore that possibility?

When I first started investigating this epidemic, it was a story about a single sugar plantation in Nicaragua. Then it kept getting wider and wider â€" a second plantation, then a nearly 700-mile stretch of Central America's Pacific Coast. Now something very similar is happening in India and Sri Lanka.

We think this may be a broader international epidemic that is just now coming to light.

[The India page of Center for Public Integrity's report will go live Wednesday and can be accessed here.]



\'Here We All Are, and Hooray For Us\'

September 17, 2012, 3:20 am
By MONISHA RAJESH

LONDON â€" It had been several years since the author Salman Rushdie was shadowed by London's Special Branch officers, but on Friday night they were once again by his side. However, this was a celebratory occasion - to join him for the release of his latest book, “Joseph Anton: A Memoir,” in South Kensington.

Accompanied by the actors Stephen Fry and Eric Idle, the authors Ian McEwan and Hanif Kureishi, the rock legends David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, and fifty publishers who had flown in from around the world, Salman Rushdie devoted the night to those who had supported him since Valentine's Day in 1989, the day that changed his life.

T hat morning, Mr. Rushdie received a phone call from a BBC reporter who informed him that Ayatollah Khomeini had sentenced him to death for the publication of his novel, “The Satanic Verses,” and asked how he felt. “It doesn't feel good,” he replied. He then left his home in the London neighborhood of Islington, never to return, and spent the next nine years living under the fatwa â€" until the Iranian government lifted it in 1998.

“Joseph Anton,” which is under strict embargo until its worldwide release on Tuesday, takes its title from the name that the British Special Branch, or counterintelligence police, used to refer to Mr. Rushdie during the fatwa, a hybrid of the authors Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, and is written in the third person, divulging details of how Mr. Rushdie lived under the fatwa, and the involvement of those who helped him through.

“One of the extraordinary pleasures of writing this book was being able to say at last after al l these years, who did what, who helped and who went beyond the call of duty,” Mr. Rushdie said Friday night. The party, held at the Collection restaurant and bar on Brompton Road, was organized by Rushdie Media, the public relations agency owned by Zafar, Mr. Rushdie's elder son.

Speaking from halfway up a staircase, Mr. Rushdie and his editors from Random House leaned down to address the crowd, which packed the room. “I have never been in the same room as so many of my publishers at the same time and I thank them for their support. Many of these are people who stood up for me when it was difficult to stand up for me.”

Mr. Rushdie drew special attention to William Nygaard, his Norwegian publisher, who worked for Aschehoug and who was shot three times in the back by an assassin outside his home in Oslo. Mr. Nygaard not only survived, but made a full recovery and went on to reprint “The Satanic Verses” in defiance.

“One of the great things about this affair is the way in which ordinary people, people in publishing companies and people in bookstores held the line and did not cave in. I've always felt the front line of what happened was not me, the front line was the bookshop.”

Both the Collets and Dillons bookstores in London were firebombed for stocking “The Satanic Verses,” and significant attacks took place in Australia and in California. Store owners were threatened on a daily basis for stocking the book. “Their response,” Mr. Rushdie said, “was to put it in the window. It took heroic courage from my booksellers during this time, and it is one of the most important aspects of what happened and I salute them.”

He continued: “I think this has been one of the greatest defenses of free speech of our time and I'm really proud to have been associated with all these people who stood up not just for me, not just for my book, but for the mighty principle which stands behind it, which is the pri nciple upon which the entire edifice of a free society stands. And if that falls then everything falls.”

Free speech is an issue with which Mr. Rushdie continues to battle, particularly in India, where Deepa Mehta's film of his novel, “Midnight's Children,” has not yet found a distributor, according to Indian news media.

In an interview, Mr. Rushdie said he was optimistic about the film's prospects in India: “I think the Indian press jumped the gun, really. I spoke to the producer just yesterday and he said that we are talking to distributors at the moment.”

On the subject of the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, during which he cancelled his appearance after numerous threats, Mr. Rushdie was less positive. “I have been back to India since the furor at Jaipur and it was fine, so my presence is not a problem. As for Jaipur, it's a long story but I was not impressed with the way that it was organized, or the organizers â€" not Willie,â € he stressed, referring to William Dalrymple the festival's co-director, “but the others.”

Addressing his guests, Mr. Rushdie declared: “There was an attempt to suppress the book, which was not suppressed and is available in 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the author, who was not suppressed and is now here talking to you. What happened to me was a small precursor to a much larger narrative and we are still living that narrative and we still need to fight that fight.”

Supporters of Mr. Rushdie were just as adamant. “The fatwa was just disgusting,” the actor and author Stephen Fry said in an interview. “I've read ‘The Satanic Verses' and it really is a comical book. Salman is a great ironist and people took it so seriously, which was rather ridiculous.”

Mr. Rushdie himself said he also saw the funny side of the whole affair. He recounted an evening during the fatwa spent at having dinner at the home of Hanif Kureishi. As he was leaving, Mr. Kureishi came running out into the street, waving a gun above his head that a Special Branch officer had left on his couch, shouting: “Here, you forgot your shooter.”

And on a separate occasion a member of Special Branch persuaded Mr. Rushdie to wear a wig in public: “I got out of a police car across the road from Harrods and people started laughing and I heard one of them shout: ‘Look there's that bastard Rushdie in a wig!'” He never wore the wig again, he said.

The evening's emphasis, though, was Mr. Rushdie's gratitude toward his friends and colleagues, who he said allowed him to live a relatively normal life. He ended his speech by saying: “Bill Buford, who was editing Granta magazine at the time, said to me: ‘Your friends are going to form an iron ring around you and you will be able to live inside it.' And that is exactly what they did for twelve years.”

And remember, he added, “this is literary London, this is the l eakiest organization on Earth. These are the people who can't keep a secret to save their lives and yet from this world came this group of people who never leaked one word, who kept this secret for over a decade and allowed me to come and go and to be amongst them. They knew where I lived and they would come and see me and no one ever found out. The fact that this secret was kept in such an extraordinary way, there is no question that I owe them a great deal. This was something we did together, and here we all are, and hooray for us.”



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