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On Twitter, Confusion and Chuckles Over Nobel Peace Prize

October 12, 2012, 2:24 pm
By ERIC PFANNER
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to the 27-member European Union.

Last Updated, 3:48 p.m. PARIS - The surprise decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday to award its 2012 peace prize to the 27-national European Union amid its huge economic struggles that threaten its future prompted a lively discussion online that ranged from confusion to humor.

As my colleagues Alan Cowell and Walter Gibbs report, the committee “lauded the European Union's role over six decades in building peace and reconciliation among enemies who fought Europe's bloodiest wars,” even as it wrestles with economic strife.

Posts o n Twitter showed that Europeans may be struggling with the constraints of austerity, but they can still loosen their belts to enjoy a belly laugh - or vent their spleen. Some voices even praised the decision. But not many in Norway.

Wags of all political stripes took their cue from Henry A. Kissinger, who once wondered whose telephone number to dial if he wanted to “call Europe.” In the E.U., a political project in which a number of officials and institutions share power with 27 national leaders, who would go to Oslo to officially pick up the prize, asked Stanley Pignal, a financial writer in London?

In euroskeptic Britain, which is in the European Union but not in the euro zone, the news was met with derision by some.

Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph in London, posted on Twitter:

This joke, and variations on the theme, quickly made the rounds.

Some posts on Twitter applied a similar formula to the E.U.'s difficulty in surmounting disagreements between rich and cash-strapped member states, as did this post from Nick Malkoutzis, deputy editor of the English edition of Kathimerini Greek, which is published in partnership with The International Herald Tribune.

Britain's Channel 4 News noted in its report, “in recent years the E.U. has been ridden with social unrest and diplomatic tension, following the debt crisis of the eurozone, particularly in Greece. Greek protesters recently donned swastikas when German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the country this week, blaming Merkel for the worsening economic situation in the country, while there has also been a rise in extremism in the country and anger against immigrants.”

A translation of Twitter post by Marco Bardazzi, digital editor for La Stampa, a daily newspaper in Turin, Italy, reads: “Europe, Nobel for the (rest in) Peace.”

Others responded to the news with perplexity or even anger. “Peace prize?” wrote Simone Stefanini. “Wasn't it bombing Libya until a few months ago.”

As the BBC journalist Silvia Costeloe reported, the o fficial @WikiLeaks Twitter feed incorrectly called Norway “an E.U. member” in an update informing the group's 1.6 million followers that the prize is “an instrument of Norwegian foreign relations.”

That update was seconded more than a hundred times by readers of the feed before it was deleted.

Sara Goldberger, a public relations consultant based in Brussels, noted that it was easy for the Nobel Committee in Norway, which is neither in the E.U. nor the euro zone, to stay above the fray:

Ms. Goldberger also offered how much each person might get if the prize award was divvied up among the E.U.'s citizens.

Some posts on Twitter included jokes about possible financial market reaction to the news.

“S&P cuts Nobel prize committee rating by three notches to ‘junk,' negative outlook,” wrote Fabrizio Goria, a reporter for Linkiesta, an Italian financial newspaper.

Not everyone was offering sarcastic musings. E.U. politicians, and those from mainstream political parties in member states, mostly played it straight:

Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament and lawmaker for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, was among the first to post on Twitter about the news.

The European Commission also posted:

Calestous Juma, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said:

The Nobel committee set up its own social media platform, where contributors could send in “postcards” for all to see. Many of these praised the decision, though in some cases the sentiments had tinges of sarcasm.

“Thank you, as a member of E.U. I'm honored by this prize,” one of the contributors wrote. “This is my first Nobel Prize. Looking for more to come. Best.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome and Jennifer Preston and Robert Mackey from New York.



Can a Race Among Doped Cyclists Be Fair? One Former Armstrong Teammate Says No.

October 12, 2012, 9:17 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Last Updated | Saturday, 1:38 p.m. Since Lance Armstrong waived his right to appeal the United States Anti-Doping Agency's finding that his victories in the Tour de France were aided by systematic doping - confirmed in the sworn testimony of 11 former teammates made public this week - some of his fans have suggested that, since it now appears that most of the professional peloton was doping at the same time, Armstrong should still be considered the winner of those races.

One of Armstrong's former teammates, Levi Leipheimer, wrote in his confession that professional cycling until recently was “a sport where some team managers and doctors coordinated and facilitated the use of ba nned substances and methods by their riders. A sport where the athletes at the highest level - perhaps without exception - used banned substances. A sport where doping was so accepted that riders from different teams - who were competitors on the road - coordinated their doping to keep up with other riders doing the same thing.”

In their confessions, many of the riders said that they agreed to use drugs or blood transfusions only after concluding that it was impossible to beat a doped pack while clean. Some of them also said that they did not consider taking performance-enhancing drugs cheating, because almost all their rivals were using the same techniques.

That may also help to explain the apparently genuine indignation expressed by many riders like Floyd Landis, who were stripped of titles after failing drug tests, only to see the victories awarded to fellow dopers who had evaded detection. When ABC News asked Landis in 2010 if he was calling Armstrong a fraud, he replied: “Well, it depends on what your definition of fraud is. I mean it - look, if he didn't win the Tour, someone else that was doped would have won the Tour. In every single one of those Tours.”

The widespread nature of doping in the sport led the sportswriter Buzz Bissinger to write in a Newsweek cover story defending Armstrong in August, “even if he did take enhancers, so what?” Bissinger argued:

Professional cycling is a rotten sport like all professional sports are rotten (anybody who believes otherwise is a Pollyanna fool). “It's Not About the Bike,” as the title of Armstrong's bestselling biography states. It's about winning by any means possible and then hoping to figure out a medical way of covering it up. Doping has been a rite of passage in the Tour de France. According to The New York Times, at least a third of the top 10 finishers (Armstrong included) have either officially admitted to using performance enhancers or been officially suspected of doping.

Need we say more? If Armstrong used banned substances, he was leveling the playing field. He was still the one who overcame all odds.

In an interview with ESPN before the antidoping agency released hundreds of pages of evidence on what it said was the elaborate doping system on Armstrong's team, the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell took the argument about performance-enhancing drugs creating a level playing field a step further, essentially saluting him for cheating better than any of his rivals. In a part of the interview transcribed by Business Insider, Gladwell argued:

When you look at what Lance is alleged to have done, basically he was better than everybody else at using P.E.D.s. He was the guy who sat down and was rigorous and focused and thoughtful and intelligent and cutting edge in how to use them and apply them and make himself better. Like, I don't kno w, so why's that a bad thing? He's being rewarded for being the best at his game. It was an element in the competition, and he used that element better than anyone else. Why don't we just make that a part of the definition of what it means to be a great bicyclist?

Gladwell went on to suggest that bike races might be better thought of as akin to car races, where the application of science by a support team is part of the challenge.

Another former Armstrong teammate, Tyler Hamilton, described in his new memoir, “The Secret Race,” in minute detail how the medical team around a rider became - like a pit crew with drugs, syringes and blood bags - an essential part of the competition in those years.

After leaving the United States Postal Service team, Hamilton needed to find another doctor to work with, because, he said, Armstrong paid to keep the Italian specialist Dr. Michele Ferrari from helping his rivals. Hamilton ended up retaining Dr. Eufe miano Fuentes, who offered him a special service, at a cost of $50,000 a year, plus bonuses for any victories, that was reserved for a select few clients. According to Hamilton, the others included Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Alexandre Vinokurov - Armstrong's main rivals during his reign.

So, is a race among doped cyclists a fair one? Absolutely not, according to at least one of Armstrong's former teammates, the talented climber Jonathan Vaughters, who retired early when he concluded that it was impossible to win without doping and later founded Team Garmin-Sharp, a squad dedicated to riding clean. In his sworn statement to the antidoping agency, Vaughters, who rode in support of Armstrong in the 1999 Tour de France, described the team's systematic doping.

In a telephone interview with The Lede on Friday, Vaughters said that a race among doped cyclists did not reward the best athlete but the best doper, because some people get a much bigger boost in their performance than others from using the same doping techniques.

That being the case, he said, “if you just opened it all up and you said, ‘Let's legalize it and it's all fair if they all do it,' what you would have is you would have races that were being won by people who were most physiologically adapted to the drugs that were available to them. You would not have the best athlete, who trained the hardest, who had the best team, the best strategy on the day - that athlete would rarely win. It would normally be the person whose physiology just happened to adapt to whatever biotechnology had to offer at that period in time. So it's absolutely untrue and it absolutely applies to the generation of racing that I went through.”

Speaking theoretically, but with obvious firsthand experience, Vaughters also noted that the widespread use of doping products distorted the playing field in others ways too. “Athletes with greater resources are going to be able to contact better doctors,” he observed, and “there are going to be some people who are going to be willing to take much greater risks with their bodies and their health than other people.”

In the interview, which can be heard in full below, Vaughters expanded on his own confession, made in a New York Times Op-Ed in August.

He explained that, even after he left Armstrong's team to race on a French squad that encouraged clean riding, he found himself drifting back into doping in response to the pressure to get results. The rider ultimately decided to quit racing and found a new team with a strict antidoping policy.

Vaughters also suggested that another rider who admitted doping in a statement published on Wednesday, George Hincapie - who helped shield Armstrong from the wind all the way around France in each of his seven Tour victories - might well have had a more successful career if no one had been doping in the races. Given his natural talent, and the relatively high red-blood-cell count he was born with, Hincapie probably got a smaller boost than many other riders from doping, but competed during his entire career against riders who were able to use medical products to decrease his physical edge.

Like many cycling fans, who have become accustomed to arguing in fine detail about science and medicine, Vaughters has become so expert at certain aspects of physiology affected by doping products that he can sound more like a graduate student in biology than a cyclist at times. He also discussed the ways in which in doping distorts competition in an interview with Joe Lindsey published by Bicycling magazine in August.

One of the stranger aspects of information about pervasive doping in the sport trickling out over the past decade on blogs and Twitter feeds writt en by cycling fans and amateur racers is that very few fans with knowledge of professional cycling were at all surprised by this week's revelations. Among others, the authors of the @NYVelocity Twitter feed, Andy Shen and Dan Schmalz - who also write and illustrate a cult comic strip series following the soap-opera of professional cycling called, “As the Toto Turns” - took issue with Gladwell's level-playing-field defense of Armstrong.

The sports physiologists Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas, who write the Science of Sport blog and Twitter feed also noted that Gladwell's suggestion that bike racing should be compared to Formula 1 or Nascar racing - with riders' bodies treated like machines to be tweaked with science - ignores the fact that race cars are only allowed to be refined within set parameters.

While many active professional cyclists were hesitant to denounce Armstrong this week, one sportsman did speak out clearly. “It's good that they are trying to clean this sport up,” the Formula 1 driver Mark Webber told reporters. “It sends a message to lots of sports, and it's a good message.” A fan and keen amateur cyclist himself, Webber said, “It's been quite obvious in the last few years that this was going to come out.” He added: “Karma will come and get you.”



What Ended India\'s Land March?

October 12, 2012, 1:11 am
By HEATHER TIMMONS

A massive protest march involving tens of thousands of India's poorest people came to an abrupt halt Thursday, short of its New Delhi destination, after the central government agreed to introduce a national policy to give land to the landless.

The Ministry of Rural Development has agreed to craft the policy with the help of the march's organizers, particularly non-profit group Ekta Parishad. An agreement between the government and the march organizers includes promises by the Ministry to draft this policy in the next four to six months and to pressure states to protect land rights of lower classes and set up fast-track courts to deal with land issue.

Nearly 200 millio n Indians live in illegal slums, according to the United Nations, where they face eviction and constant disruption. Tens of millions more in rural areas don't own the land they farm or live on.

Read the full agreement between the Ministry and the march organizers.



Happy 80th Birthday, Air India

October 12, 2012, 2:47 am
By SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN

In a manner of speaking, Air India, India's foundering national airline, turns eighty on Monday â€" an octogenarian that started life with a spry hop from Karachi to Bombay. It should be a proud moment, except that it serves only to remind us of the irony that one of India's most dilapidated public-sector companies was launched by â€" and then wrested away from â€" one of India's most successful private corporations.

For Jehangir Tata, whose father's cousin had founded the Tata group in 1868, an obsession with flying began early. Much of young Jeh's boyhood was spent in the French town of Hardelot, where his family's beach house stood near another owned by Louis Blériot, the first man to cross the English Channel in an airplane. After Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927, Mr. Tata sketched an ink drawing of Mr. Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in his scrapbook. Just 12 days after a Flying Club opened in Bombay in early 1929, his biographer, R.M. Lala, recounts in “Beyond the Last Blue Mountain,” Mr. Tata had logged enough hours to fly solo; a further week later, he had his blue-and-gold pilot's license, issued by the Aero Club of India & Burma and serial-numbered 1. “No document has ever given me a greater thrill,” Mr. Tata would tell Mr. Lala many decades later. The photograph in the license shows a lissome Jehangir Tata, not yet 25, his hair slicked back with pomade, a toothbrush moustache perched perfectly below his nose, and his clear-eyed confidence spilling out of the frame.

Until November 1929, Mr. Tata contented himself with harum-scarum joyrides in India and Europe; in that month, howeve r, he spotted the Aga Khan's announcement of a 500-pound prize for the first Indian to fly solo between England and India. This was serious flying, and Mr. Tata could not help but be interested. (It is almost too delicious that one of Mr. Tata's rivals for the Aga Khan's prize was a pilot named Manmohan Singh, who, having taken off from Croydon, first lost his bearings over the English Channel and then, on a second attempt, found himself flummoxed by fog over Europe. A magazine named Aeroplane remarked: “Mr. Manmohan Singh called his aeroplane ‘Miss India' and he is likely to!”) From Karachi, Mr. Tata flew via Basra, Cairo and Naples, but by the time he reached Paris, another pilot, Aspy Engineer, had flown the same route in reverse and already landed in Karachi.

As far as aviation was concerned, therefore, Mr. Tata was already dry tinder. The spark came from Nevill Vintcent, a former prizefighter from South Africa and a Royal Air Force pilot who was barnstorming his way across India in the late 1920s. When he expressed, into the right ears, his desire to start a commercial air mail service, Mr. Vintcent was introduced to Mr. Tata. During a series of conversations with Mr. Lala, collected in a book called “The Joy of Achievement,” Mr. Tata said about Mr. Vintcent:

He was remarkable. A very fine man … He knew, the man that he was, that the Imperial Airways Airline was coming to India, to Karachi, as a first step towards Australia … but they would also go across to Delhi and Calcutta. The whole of south India would be blank and unserviced, and that's how he worked out a proposal to have a flight from Karachi to Ahmedabad to Bombay to Madras.

In Air & Space magazine, the journalist David Shaftel described how, writing to Mr. Tata in 1931, Mr. Vintcent presaged the debate over the liberalization of Indian aviation by several decades: “If the route is state operated I maintain that it will e ffectively put a stop to any further efforts by private firms to develop other routes, as they will argue that after the spade work has been done, the state reaps the benefit,” Mr. Vintcent wrote. “I also maintain that private enterprise will develop flying far more quickly than the state can hope to do, and will consequently provide more openings for Indians in this profession.”

Finally, in April 1932, a new company called Tata Aviation Services struck a 10-year contract with the government to haul mail from Karachi, where it arrived from London on Imperial Airways, to Bombay and thence to Madras. The negotiations had so frustrated Mr. Tata that he offered, in desperation, to charge the government nothing at all for the service and only a nominal rate per pound of mail carried. He was confident, as The Straits Times in Singapore reported in July 1932, that “although to start with the service will be a losing concern, within a short period the commercial commun ity … will appreciate the service and begin to use it, and thus enable the company to make it a paying proposition.” The Straits Times pointed out two disadvantages “with which the new service will start, namely, there will be no wireless equipment in the machines, as it is very costly and the promoters of the scheme cannot afford it, and there will be no night flying, as night flying ground facilities are not yet available in India.”

Poor mid-September weather forced Mr. Tata to push his inaugural flight to Oct. 15, when he took off, with more than 100 pounds of mail, in a single-engine De Havilland Puss Moth, from the Drigh Road aerodrome in Karachi. (Mr. Vintcent would fly the second leg, from Bombay via Bellary to Madras.) By train, the Karachi-Bombay route needed 45 hours to complete; Mr. Tata touched down on the mud flats of Juhu in less than eight hours, having stopped off in Ahmedabad to refuel his plane from four-gallon Burmah-Shell petrol cans transpo rted to the runway on a bullock cart. The postmaster of Bombay himself ceremonially collected the mail from Mr. Tata in Juhu; indeed, such an acute sense of occasion marked the entire enterprise that the envelopes â€" like the one addressed to “A. Achutten, Esqr., General Merchant, Bramagiri, Udipi” â€" were franked “Karachi-Madras, First Airmail.”

A photograph taken after the landing in Bombay shows Mr. Tata standing with his colleagues, left arm akimbo, his white trousers still so uncreased and his hair so immaculately in place that he looks for all the world like a county cricketer just about to have a leisurely bat before lunch. In reality, Mr. Lala reveals in “Beyond the Last Blue Mountain,” the flight had been hot and bumpy, and Mr. Tata battled headwinds throughout. Part of the way through, an unfortunate bird flew into Mr. Tata's cabin, forcing him to kill it before it endangered his flying. But in a conversation with Mr. Lala years later, Mr. Tata remembered that first flight as “delightful … We were a small team in those days. We shared successes and failures, the joys and heartaches, as together we built up the enterprise which later was to blossom into Air-India and Air-India International.”

This is the first of a two-part series. Next: How J.R.D. Tata lost his airline to the new government of independent India.



In Rural Haryana, Women Blamed for Rape Where Men Make the Rules

October 12, 2012, 9:03 am
By RAKSHA KUMAR

DANODA KALAN, Haryana

Disputes in this small Haryana farming village, 70 miles from Delhi, are settled by 11 men dressed entirely in white, who hear arguments in a roomy hall and then retire to an underground room to make a decision.

The group, the Sarva Jaateeya Venain Khap, is one of the largest khap panchayats, or unelected all-male village councils in Haryana, with a jurisdiction that extends to 52 villages. The system garnered national attention recently, after a series of rapes in the area were followed by a suggestion from a khap member that the marriage age be lowered to 16, thereby keeping women sexually satisfied, to prevent further rapes. The suggestion comes on the heels of several “hon or killings” in the area, in which families killed couples who had married against their wishes.

During an interview Thursday, a khap member, Balwan Singh Nain, a 48-year-old farmer, explained the khap's view this way: “Women maintain a family's honor. Not men. If she cannot keep her honor, it is solely her fault.”

This week in a nearby village under the khap's jurisdiction, a teenage lower-caste girl was raped by several teenager boys who dragged her into a house,  one of more than a dozen rapes this month in the area. On Wednesday, she committed suicide by setting herself on fire.

Khap members said in interviews Thursday that if the girl's family comes to them, they will ensure that the “right” culprits get punished. But, they said, they do not take up cases on their own.

Women are protected, they said. “If someone forces himself on her, the village will not let him lead his life peacefully,” said Mr. Nain . “We will all ensure he is punished.”

While khaps are technically illegal, and have recently been condemned by India's Supreme Court, their word is still de facto law in parts of Haryana and nearby states. Historically, the khaps were started by Jats, a caste of peasants who became land-owning farmers and are now a powerful voting bloc in these areas, to consolidate their power and position. Khap panchayats generally govern a cluster of villages whose dominant population is from a single gotra, or clan, but make decisions for all castes.

Khaps have existed for several hundred years in the north Indian states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, but are now in danger of extinction, their members say. “What existed through centuries of Mughal and British rule is being systematically demonized by the Indian government in 60 years,” said Raghuvir Singh Nain, 45, a member of the Sarva Jaateeya Venain Khap.

“Not once has the decision of the khap b een overridden in this village,” Mr. Nain said. “If anyone wants to challenge a decision they are free to go to the courts in this country,” he said. India's judicial system is notoriously slow, and prone to corruption, so for many, the khap system is the only solution.

Sabitri Nain, 62, is a resident of Danoda Kalan and follows the purdah system, which requires women to cover their face in front of men. She said that since the time of her grandmother, no khap has made a wrong decision. While she votes in elections for legal village leaders, she said she looks up to the khaps for all the decision making in the village.

Ranbir Singh, 32, another village resident, said he would never approach the legally elected sarpanch, or mayor, of the village, with a dispute. “They are politicians; they exploit us,” he said. “The khaps are our elders; they would never discriminate among us.”

Although the local khap is made up mostly of Jats, members say they are open to others. “This doesn't mean we discriminate against other castes or clans,” said Balwan Singh Nain, another member. “Our panchayat members include a Brahmin and a Shudra also,” referring to both the highest and lowest castes.

Because khaps are social organizations formed on the basis of trust and social standing, there are no records of the exact number of in India. At the annual Sarv Khap, or All Khap, meeting, the number of khaps varies every year, attendees say. “There are new khaps formed every now and then, if there is a person of great social standing in a particular village, and some weak ones tend to die out,” said Subhash Nain, a senior member of the Sarva Jaateeya Venain Khap.

Members are nominated through consensus, and usually a man of high social standing is put forth. “We see if he has made sacrifices for the society and if he is morally upright,” said Satyavan Nain, a junior member of the khap. The leader of the khap, ca lled the pradhan, retains the post until his death.

Despite their views on women and honor, the members of the Sarva Jaateeya Venain Khap are by no means elderly. Several are in their 30s and 40s, and some even send their children to prestigious schools in Delhi.

There is no khap with a woman member, but that is not because they are not allowed, members say. Because the area practices purdah, the women are not comfortable joining, they said.

If a rape is reported to the khap and a man found guilty, the punishment is even stricter than the law, members say. “We in the khaps punish the culprits of rape by taking away their property and banishing them from the village,” said Raghuvir Singh Nain. “Your courts tend to imprison them for not more than seven years, and that too, after decades-long court battles.”

The groups have been condemned in Delhi and elsewhere for encouraging honor killings, a charge that Raghuvir Singh Nain denied. “Do you th ink we can order honor killings?” he asked, with a smile. “Why would we want bloodshed in our villages?”

A khap, he explained, works on the principle of social pressure. If a man's “honor” is violated because his daughter or sister or wife “overstepped their social boundaries,” Mr. Nain said, then he cannot live in the village with his head held high. In order to save himself from that persecution, he might decide to kill his daughter or sister, he admitted.

Overstepping the social boundaries in this part of the country is not difficult, because residents of these villagers do not approve of marriages within their clans. “I cannot get my daughter married off to anyone with my gotra or my wife's gotra or my mother's gotra or my grandmother's gotra,” Raghuvir Singh Nain said.

So, who is left? “Many,” he said. “My father found my wife for me when I was 8, and she was from a neighboring khap.”

Another way to overstep social bound aries in the area is by marrying for love. “There is a fundamental difference between village life and city life,” said Subedar Surajvan Sharma, 71-year-old member of the khap. “We, here, have only arranged marriages.”

The reason is both social and economic, he said: the couple must be of equal social and economic standing to lead a comfortable life ahead. The reason for insisting on marriage outside one's own clan is also scientific, he said. Otherwise, “there will be genetic problems,” he said. “It is unhealthy.”

Khap members on Thursday reiterated that the right answer to the 13 rapes that were reported across three districts of Haryana in the past 30 days was to get girls married off at a young age. “They say empty mind is a devil's workshop, so if girls quit studying at the age of 15, how will they keep themselves engaged?” asked Balwan Singh.

The khap doesn't insist on early marriage, he said. “We said either educate them or get them married off. Many people here are not economically strong enough to educate their girls, so for their safety, they should marry them off,” he said.



Rahul Gandhi\'s 70 Percent Problem

October 12, 2012, 9:33 am
By HARI KUMAR and JIM YARDLEY

Rahul Gandhi swept into Chandigarh on Thursday and declared that the border state of Punjab has a drug crisis. He said that 7 out of every 10 youths in the state suffered from drug problems â€" a remark that brought swift criticism from several political opponents in the state.

As it turns out, Mr. Gandhi was right and wrong. He was right that Punjab is facing a terrible drug epidemic. But he appears wrong in saying that that 70 percent of the state's youth have drug problems. Nor is he the only one who has been wrong about it. That figure has often been cited in media accounts about the state.

So where did this figure come from, and why do peop le keep repeating it?

The answer can be found with Ranvinder Singh Sandhu, a professor at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar. Last April, while reporting a story on the Punjabi drug crisis, we visited Professor Sandhu and asked him about the widely reported statistic. Merely mentioning the figure frustrated him, since he said his study has been widely misquoted.

Here's what he says happened: in 2007, the governor of Punjab became interested in the drug problem and asked Guru Nanak Dev University to do a study. Mr. Sandhu spent about six months completing the study. His sample group was 600 people from different villages and urban areas in Punjab. Of these respondents, he found that 73 percent were between the ages of 16 to 35 with drug problems.

Sounds familiar, right?

Well, here's the catch: ALL of the 600 people in the survey were drug addicts. Mr. Sandhu selected only drug addicts for his sample group. In doing so, he discovered that 73 percent of them were young people. This, of course, is very different from saying that 73 percent of all Punjabi youth have drug problems. Any studies assessing the overall drug usage rate among youths in the state either haven't yet been done or haven't yet been made public.

Yet, to the professor's dismay, this is how his findings were interpreted in many media outlets after the study was made public. That figure was even cited in a court affidavit, he said.

“I have found that my study is frequently misquoted,” the professor said by telephone on Friday.

Despite the mixup, Mr. Sandhu said Punjab is suffering from a severe drug problem, as young people are becoming addicted to heroin and synthetic drugs. Drugs and alcohol often are often twinned together, and alcoholism is also rampant in the state. Yet Mr. Sandhu noted that the Punjabi government has a vested interest in not tackling that issue: the state has more than 8,000 state liquor shops, open at all hour s, which collect more than $720 million in taxes.

“You can't find a cup of tea in the morning but you can get a bottle,” he told us back in April.

On Friday, Manish Tewari, a Congress Party spokesman, continued to argue that Mr. Gandhi was not incorrect in his remark, and produced a copy of a court order citing the figure. (This is apparently the order that Mr. Sandhu says is inaccurate.)

In fact, three years ago, Mr. Sandhu said leaders of the local Youth Congress approached him. They are part of the party's youth division led nationally by, yes, Rahul Gandhi. They wanted advice on a problem to tackle. He suggested drug addiction among youths. The leaders returned later with news: Mr. Gandhi had approved their involvement in such a project. Mr. Sandhu said he later gave three lectures to leaders of the youth and student wings of the Congress Party.

Still, it seems few people actually get his study right.



Image of the Day: Oct. 12

October 12, 2012, 11:39 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Modi Ends Yatra on a Triumphant Note

October 13, 2012, 1:01 am
By HARESH PANDYA

Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, ended his one-month statewide political march on Thursday in Pavagadh by trumpeting his state's successes under his governance and pledging to the crowds that Gujarat “would not fall into the hands of the corrupt,” a clear dig at the Congress Party.

Though the ostensible purpose of Mr. Modi's journey throughout the state, called the Swami Vivekananda Yuva Vikas Yatra, was to “enlighten” Gujarat's youth about their progress, the yatra felt more like a campaign tour just before the most crucial election of Mr. Modi's career, with the Congress Party intensifying its efforts to make sure he does not win a fourth consecutive term as chief minister.

The yat ra covered nearly 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) in a month, during which the controversial chief minister announced the formation of seven new districts and 45 new talukas, or administrative units, in the state, which are expected to create new jobs. The Bharatiya Janata Party stalwart addressed rallies on 16 days and kept harping on his development plank while bashing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Gandhi family and any number of “enemies of Gujarat” in his 32 speeches.

Stunned by the Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi's massive rally in Rajkot in Gujarat last week, the state B.J.P. had ordered its crowd managers to try to drum up 200,000 people at Pavagadh for Mr. Modi's yatra-ending rally. Party officials worked overtime to mobilize people from across central Gujarat to get closer to the targeted number.

The efforts paid off, with the B.J.P. general secretary Vijay Rupani estimating that a little over 175,000 people attende d. The police had a tough time handling trucks, buses and all sorts of vehicles ferrying people around Pavagadh. Two district superintendents of police, 8 deputy superintendents of police, 27 police inspectors, 91 police sub-inspectors, 1,321 head constables and cops, 91 policewomen and four mounted policemen were pressed into service.

“I've come here to seek Goddess Kali's blessings,” he said as he greeted the crowds. “Not for me, but for the six crore (60 million) people of Gujarat.”

Mr. Modi's yatra was planned in such a way that it began and ended on important days in India's history. It began Sept. 11, exactly 119 years after Swami Vivekananda delivered his historic address at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, from the temple town Bahucharaji in north Gujarat. And Thursday marked the birthday of Jayaprakash Narayan, affectionately called Loknayak, or “people's leader,” who was an Indian independence activist and politician famous for strongly opposing Indira Gandhi's declaration of a state of emergency in the mid-1970s.

Thursday was also International Day of the Girl Child, and Mr. Modi spent a considerable part of his speech detailing his achievements in reducing female foeticide in the state, recalling how he had tears in his eyes when he saw the 2001 census figures showing a stark imbalance between the numbers of male and female infants.

Mr. Modi eventually launched a virulent onslaught on the Congress Party leaders, saying that it took him a lot of time to “wash away the sins” committed by the previous Congress governments in Gujarat. He said the Congress-led government needed to be taught a lesson and that he wanted to ask the premier why Gujarat is not treated as part of India.
But then Mr. Modi declared that he would not talk of the election, as people have already decided to have a “grand” and “divine” Gujarat, adding that Mrs. Gandhi may visit the state 50 times, “ but the state would not fall into the hands of the corrupt.”

The chief minister hailed the news on Thursday that Britain has decided to resume relations with Gujarat, ending a decade of estrangement in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots in 2002, which killed hundreds of people. The British Foreign Office minister in charge of India, Hugo Swire, has asked the British high commissioner in India, James Bevan, to visit Gujarat and meet Mr. Modi and senior functionaries.

“The U.K. has a broad range of interests in Gujarat,” Mr. Swire said in a statement. “We want to secure justice for the families of the British nationals who were killed in 2002. We want to support human rights and good governance in the state. We also want to provide the best possible support for British nationals who live in, work in or visit Gujarat; and to the many Gujaratis who now make up one of the most successful and dynamic communities in the U.K.”

“I welcome the U.K. govern ment's decision to send an envoy to Gujarat,” said an elated Mr. Modi in Pavagadh. “Gujarat should have been the Shanghai of India, but Manmohan Singh has ignored us. He may or may not understand us, but the British have.”
While concluding his speech, Mr. Modi walked a few decades back in India's history and echoed the famous words of Rani Lakshmibai, the queen of Jhansi and one of the country's leading freedom fighters: “Meri Jhansi nahi dungi!” (I'll not give my Jhansi!)

He then made the people take a pledge: “Nahi denge, nahi denge, hamara Gujarat nahi denge!” (“We'll not give our Gujarat!”)



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