India | CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon

26/07/2013

India, China trying to develop mechanism to prevent face-off: AK Antony

Daulat Beg Oldi is in northernmost Ladakh. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Times of India: “NEW DELHI: India and China are trying to develop effective mechanisms to prevent the “embarrassing” face-offs between their troops along the “disputed” points of the Line of Actual Control, defence minister AK Antony said here on Friday.

Terming the 21-day stand-off between the two sides in Depsang valley in Daulat Beg Oldi area as an “unusual” incident, the defence minister said the two countries will meet soon in Beijing to discuss issues and try to find a solution for such “unpleasant incidents”.

“Till the final settlement of the border issue, we are trying to find out more effective mechanisms to prevent occasional incidents. There are many points in the LAC that are disputed and they are patrolled by both sides. So, sometimes it leads to some face-off,” he told reporters on the 14th anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas.”

via India, China trying to develop mechanism to prevent face-off: AK Antony – The Times of India.

Chinese troops crossed Line of Actual Control 150 times this year (dnaindia.com)
India, China trying to find long-term solution to border dispute: Antony (indiavision.com)
China defends latest Ladakh incursion, says PLA was patrolling its side of LAC (ibnlive.in.com)
China shows off its horsepower: 50 Chinese soldiers enter Chumar on horseback and stake claim to it (dnaindia.com)
Chinese general warns India against ‘new trouble’ as AK Antony visits Beijing (ndtv.com)
Time to solve border dispute, says China premier Li Keqiang to AK Antony (ndtv.com)
China & India: All Not Quiet on the Western Front (thediplomat.com)
China plays down India’s strike corps move (thehindu.com)

Posted in China alert, Chindia Alert, Defence, Diplomacy, Foreign invasion, GeoPolitics, History, India alert, Military, Neighbour conflict, non-military intervention, peace keeping, Politics, Territorial dispute, war | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Beijing, China, Daulat Beg Oldi, defence minister, India, Kargil Vijay Diwas, Line of Actual Control, New Delhi

23/07/2013

Indian development: Beyond bootstraps

The Economist: “An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. By Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze. Allen Lane; 434 pages; £20. To be published in America in August by Princeton University Press; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AS A conundrum it could hardly be bigger. Six decades of laudably fair elections, a free press, rule of law and much else should have delivered rulers who are responsive to the ruled. India’s development record, however, is worse than poor. It is host to some of the world’s worst failures in health and education. If democracy works there, why are so many Indian lives still so wretched?

Social indicators leave that in no doubt. A massive blackout last summer caught global attention, yet 400m Indians had (and still have) no electricity. Sanitation and public hygiene are awful, especially in the north: half of all Indians still defecate in the open, resulting in many deaths from diarrhoea and encephalitis. Polio may be gone, but immunisation rates for most diseases are lower than in sub-Saharan Africa. Twice as many Indian children (43%) as African ones go hungry.

Many adults, especially women, are also undernourished, even as obesity and diabetes spread among wealthier Indians. Despite gains, extreme poverty is rife and death in childbirth all too common. Prejudice kills on an immense scale: as many as 600,000 fetuses are aborted each year because they are female. Compared even with its poorer neighbours, Bangladesh and Nepal, India’s social record is unusually grim.

“An Uncertain Glory”, an excellent but unsettling new book by two of India’s best-known development economists, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, sets out how and why this is so. They argue that Indian rulers have never been properly accountable to the needy majority. Belgian-born Mr Drèze has lived in India since 1979 and became an Indian citizen in 2002. Now at Allahabad University in the north, he is influential among Indian policymakers, particularly for pushing a right-to-information law. Mr Sen, a Nobel laureate, now at Harvard, famously showed how famines have never happened in democracies. The two men want a debate on India’s social failures and how to fix them.”

via Indian development: Beyond bootstraps | The Economist.

Posted in Economics, India alert, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Amartya Sen, India, Indian nationality law, Jean Drèze, politics

21/07/2013

How poverty wages for tea pickers fuel India’s trade in child slavery

The Observer: “When the trafficker came knocking on the door of Elaina Kujar’s hut on a tea plantation at the north-eastern end of Assam, she had just got back from school. Elaina was 14 and wanted to be a nurse. Instead, she was about to lose four years of her life as a child slave.

Saphira Khatun, whose daughter Minu Begum was trafficked to Delhi at the age of 12

She sits on a low chair inside the hut, playing with her long dark hair as she recalls how her owner would sit next to her watching porn in the living room of his Delhi house, while she waited to sleep on the floor. “Then he raped me,” she says, looking down at her hands, then out of the door. Outside, the monsoon rain is falling on the tin roof and against the mud-rendered bamboo strip walls, on which her parents have pinned a church calendar bearing the slogan The Lord is Good to All.

Elaina was in that Delhi house for one reason: her parents, who picked the world-famous Assam tea on an estate in Lakhimpur district, were paid so little they could not afford to keep her. There are thousands like her, taken to Delhi from the tea plantations in the north-east Indian state by a trafficker, sold to an agent for as little as £45, sold on again to an employer for up to £650, then kept as slaves, raped, abused. It is a 21st-century slave trade. There are thought to be 100,000 girls as young as 12 under lock and key in Delhi alone: others are sold on to the Middle East and some are even thought to have reached the UK.

Every tea plantation pays the same wages. Every leaf of every box of Assam tea sold by Tetley and Lipton and Twinings and the supermarket own brands – Asda, Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the rest – is picked by workers who earn a basic 12p an hour.

If it says Fairtrade on the box, or certified by the Rainforest Alliance or the Ethical Tea Partnership, it makes no difference: the worker received the same basic cash payment – 89 rupees (£1) a day, a little over half the legal wage for an unskilled worker in Assam of 158.54 rupees. To place that in context, a worker receives about 2p in cash for picking enough tea to fill a box of 80 tea bags, which then sells for upwards of £2 in the UK. The companies say they know the wages are low, and they are trying to make things better, but their hands are tied by the growers. The growers, who set the wages by collective bargaining, say it is all they can afford.

But there is a price for keeping wages so low, and it is paid by the workers who cannot afford to keep their daughters. When the traffickers come knocking, offering to take the girls away, promising good wages and an exciting new life, they find it hard to say no. “He said he would change our lives,” says Elaina, now 20. “The tea garden was closed when he came and my parents were not working, so my father wanted to send me.”

The trafficker had promised excitement and glamour: instead she started work every day at 4am and worked until midnight, and though he promised to give her 1,500 rupees a month, she was never paid. He kept her as a prisoner, unable to leave the house or contact her family.

“His wife was suspicious about what was happening. I told her he had raped me but he denied it and told me to shut up my mouth,” she says. “After that, I was always crying, but he kept me locked in the house. I was afraid. I had no money and he threatened that I would end up in a brothel.”

She was saved only when he sent her to a new owner who, on learning her story, sent her home.”

via How poverty wages for tea pickers fuel India’s trade in child slavery | World news | The Observer.

Posted in agriculture, deficit, demographics, India alert, Labour, Low income, poverty | 1 Comment »

Tags: Assam, Assam tea, Delhi, Ethical Tea Partnership, India, Lakhimpur district

21/07/2013

Kashmir militants rebuild their lives as hopes of a lasting peace grow

The Observer: “Shabir Ahmed Dar has come home. His children play under the walnut trees where he once played. His father, white-bearded and thin now, watches them. The village of Degoom, the cluster of traditional brick-and-wood houses in Kashmir where Dar grew up, is still reached by a dirt road and hay is still hung from the branches of the soaring chinar trees to dry.

Shabir Ahmed Dar with one of his children

But Dar has changed, even if Degoom has not. It is 22 years since he left the village to steal over the “line of control” (LoC), the de facto border separating the Indian and Pakistani parts of this long-disputed former princely state high in the Himalayan foothills. Along with a dozen or so other teenagers, he hoped to take part in the insurgency which pitted groups of young Muslim Kashmiris enrolled in Islamist militant groups, and later extremists from Pakistan too, against Indian security forces.

“I went because everyone else was going. The situation was bad here. I had my beliefs, my dream for my homeland. I was very young,” he said, sitting in the room where he had slept as a child.

The conflict had only just begun when he left. Over the next two decades, an estimated 50,000 soldiers, policemen, militants and, above all, ordinary people were to die. Dar’s aim had been to “create a true Islamic society” in Kashmir. This could only be achieved by accession to Pakistan or independence, he believed.

But once across the LoC, even though he spent only a few months with the militant group he had set out to join and never took part in any fighting, he was unable to return. “I was stuck there. I made a new life. I married and found work. I didn’t think I would ever come back here,” Dar said.

But now the 36-year-old has finally come home, with his Pakistani-born wife and three children. He is one of 400 former militants who have taken advantage of a new “rehabilitation” policy launched by the youthful chief minister of the state, Omar Abdullah.

Dar’s father heard of the scheme and convinced his son to return last year. “I am an old man. I wanted to see my son and grandchildren before I die. I wanted him to have his share of our land,” said Dar senior, who is 70.

The scheme is an indication of the changes in this beautiful, battered land. In recent years, economic growth in India has begun to benefit Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority state. At the same time, despite a series of spectacular attacks on security forces by militants in recent months, violence has fallen to its lowest levels since the insurgency broke out in the late 1980s. The two phenomena are connected, many observers say.

It is this relative calm that has allowed Dar and the others to return – and allows even some hardened veterans who have renounced violence to live unmolested. “A few years ago the [Indian intelligence] agencies would have shot this down because they would have seen it as another move to infiltrate [militants from Pakistan],” Abdullah, the chief minister, said.

The scheme is not, however, an amnesty. “If there are cases against them they will still be arrested [and] prosecuted … Largely this scheme has been taken up by those who have not carried out any acts of terrorism. Either they never came [across the LoC], or if they came we never knew about it,” Abdullah said.”

via Kashmir militants rebuild their lives as hopes of a lasting peace grow | World news | The Observer.

Posted in Defence, Dissident, India alert, Insurgency, Internal politics, Military, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Human rights, India, indian army, indian security forces, Jammu & Kashmir, Kashmir, Line of Control, middle-east, Omar Abdullah, Pakistan, politics, religion

20/07/2013

Joe Biden’s India Itinerary

WSJ: “U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrives in New Delhi Monday for a visit focused on improving business ties between the two nations.

Mr. Biden, 70, begins his four-day India tour with a trip to Gandhi Smriti in New Delhi, a museum dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, who led India to independence from Britain in 1947. The Democratic Party politician, who is visiting India with his wife, is also expected to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Mohammad Hamid Ansari, among other leaders, before travelling to Mumbai. Mr. Biden last visited India in 2008, when he was a member of the American Senate.

Mr. Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, will visit the Taj Mahal in Agra and is expected to address school children in Mumbai.

Relations between Washington and New Delhi have been warming in recent years, with the U.S. viewing India as an emerging superpower that can serve as a counterbalance to China’s growing influence in South Asia.

In a speech at the George Washington University in the U.S. on Friday, Mr. Biden singled out civil-nuclear cooperation, trade and investment as key issues the U.S. sought to collaborate on with India in the coming years. “There’s a lot of work to do,” Mr. Biden said in his speech, referring to strengthening India-U.S. ties. He also welcomed India’s decision this week to ease overseas-investment rules for telecom, defense and insurance.”

via Joe Biden’s India Itinerary – India Real Time – WSJ.

Posted in Diplomacy, Economics, GeoPolitics, India alert, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: India, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, manmohan singh, Mohammad Hamid Ansari, Pranab Mukherjee, Taj Mahal

19/07/2013

Strike Force Would Allow ‘War on Two Fronts’

WSJ: “The Indian government this week reportedly paved the way for the creation of a new military corps of 50,000 troops near its border with China. If correct, analysts say this is a sign that New Delhi, which has been largely focused on its frontier with Pakistan, is now shifting its attention to the long, disputed Sino-Indian boundary.

Government sources were quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying a new mountain strike corps costing nearly $11 billion over seven years, was approved by India’s cabinet committee on security Wednesday. The committee is headed by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The force will be headquartered at Panagarh, in the eastern state of West Bengal, the news agency reported. Attempts to confirm these reports with India’s ministries of defense and external affairs were not successful.

The creation of a strike corps would give India thousands of war-ready soldiers, trained and equipped to respond rapidly to a military threat, stationed close to the border between India and China, known as the Line of Actual Control.

Analysts say it would take five to seven years for such a force to be formed fully, as large numbers of soldiers would need to be recruited and trained for combat at high altitudes and in mountainous terrains.

“The process will be incremental,” said Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor in Chinese studies at the New-Delhi based Jawaharlal Nehru University. “There won’t be large-scale training, because there is no immediate threat.”

For decades, relations between India and China have been characterized by mistrust. The tensions boiled over into a war between the two in 1962, which China won by gaining control over a large swathe of Indian territory known as Aksai China.

Beijing is still in control of the 38,000 square kilometers of land, but Indian maps show Aksai Chin as a part of Jammu and Kashmir, it’s northernmost state. China also claims 90,000 square kilometers of land in Arunachal Pradesh, a state in India’s northeast.

Neither nation has shown any inclination to return to armed conflict since, but India’s decision to create a strike corps – which analysts say has been in the offing for over two years – reflects New Delhi’s growing concern that Beijing is becoming increasingly assertive in its territorial claims.

via Strike Force Would Allow ‘War on Two Fronts’ – India Real Time – WSJ.