Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Communism Lite
This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Kochi (Cochin)—Party politics in this tropical state are as peppery as the cuisine, protest demonstrations are akin to street theater, and red banners blazoned with the hammer and sickle are as much roadway icons as shrines to Hindu gods and the ubiquitous images of Jesus. In 1957, arguably for the first time anywhere, Communists came to power here through a genuinely free election. Over five decades, Keralites have regularly switched from Communist-led coalitions to centrist blocs led by the Congress Party. In 2006, voters again awarded the Communists a five-year term.
So it was with some curiosity that we prepared to meet a sitting Communist official, Chairman K.P. Raveendran, who heads the municipal council in Thalassery. He greeted us in his office, where a dozen aides crowded around us. Coconuts with straws were politely offered, as well as a sheet in handwritten English celebrating the district’s history.
The forty-something chairman dressed informally—no one wears ties in Kerala—and tended to the opaque commonplaces one hears from local party bosses everywhere. His career? He rose through the youth wing of the Communist Party then became a full time organizer and a member of the municipal council. But, we wondered, since there are far more shopkeepers than factory workers in Kerala, and since three religions permeate the state, where does party get its votes? “We welcome the votes of whoever supports our goals.” How then does his party differ from European Social Democrats? “Our party has an international Marxist ideology,” he frowned, adding that it was less dependent on a single leader (at least in Kerala). And evidently it is also an ecumenical party. The Chairman announced: “I’m a Hindu; my number two is a Muslim.”
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Islam’s Seductive Weapon?
This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Kozhikode (Calicut)—A specter is haunting India’s state of Kerala, a supposedly new and secret Islamic weapon known as “love jihad.” Namely, the idea that young Muslim men court impressionable Hindu and Christian women to capture their souls as well as their bodies. In the Malabar region, where the majority of Kerala’s most venerable Muslim community lives, it is whispered that as many as 4,000 women have already succumbed. Can it be? Will seduction threaten the communal peace in this tolerant multicultural state?
By chance, we arrived in Kozikode on the day riot police dispersed hundreds of demonstrators belonging to the activist group Hindu Aika Vedi (HAV) as they marched within a hundred meters of an Islamic social center. It was actually a “conversion center,” the protestors insisted. In reponse, a large crowd led by the Sunni Students Federation (SKSSF) gathered to protect the threatened social center.
In the end, it all ended peacefully, if not amicably. City authorities invoked a law banning provocative assemblies, a riot was averted, and the crowd dispersed. A newspaper account was careful to state that during the agitation, Hindu leaders of HAV escorted a pregnant Muslim woman in a jeep to the local women’s hospital.
It also happened that we were that day meeting two highly respected Muslim leaders: a Congress Party veteran, T. Sadarikkoya, who as a youngster took part in Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign in 1943; and Prof. M. N. Karassery of Calicut University, a leading authority on Kerala’s Malayalam language and a widely read columnist.
Both agreed that yes, there were communal problems. Fundamentalists have been proselytizing, and its effects are evident in the prevalence of hijabs worn by a growing minority of Muslim women. But Malabar had its distinct civil culture. Whereas Muslims in India’s northern provinces arrived as conquerors, their brothers arrived in Malabar some 450 years ago as traders. With rare exceptions, they have lived in peace alongside Hindus and Christians. Another unifying factor, Professor Karassery stressed, is that while a common language, Urdu, unites northern Indian and Pakistani Muslims, the Malabar Muslims share the same language, Malayalam, with Hindus and Christians. Thus during the bloody exchange of populations that occurred when India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 there were no riots in Kerala, and few Muslims migrated northward.
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Kerala: Between the ‘Icon’ and the ‘Supremo’
This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on C
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: A Glimpse of Reality in Kerala
This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Trivandrum—Our first interview in Trivandrum, capital of Kerala, yielded a disconcerting assertion: “The Kerala model is collapsing,” declared C. K. Vishwanath, a youthful, intense authority on communal strife. We pressed for details, having flown halfway around the world to visit what experts said was an outstanding example of democratic social progress.
Our visitor elaborated: Yes, the south Indian state had achieved a first-world quality of life on meager average incomes, but it is a victim of its own success. “Kerala doesn’t produce anything, so it can’t provide job for its better-educated job seekers.” Moreover, its health care system is being overstretched by an aging population as life expectancy has reached Western standards.
All true, but based on first impressions, not the whole story. Our tour began with a glimpse of reality. We wheeled through much of Trivandrum, but did not encounter the omnipresent beggars, nor were we grabbed by roving gangs of children pleading for rupees that we found in central Mumbai. Instead, an air of animated cheerfulness permeated the streets, accented by a rainbow of faultless saris on the matrons and the now trendy salwar kameez of the twenty-somethings (a fashion which has now migrated south from the Punjab).
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Report on Mumbai
This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Mumbai—We arrived on Wednesday, Nov. 11, in Mumbai, formerly Bombay and India’s financial capital, on the Asian leg of Project Patchwork, our year-long quest for examples of multicultural societies where people of different creeds seemingly live together peacefully. Why Mumbai? One may well ask: a year ago, ten young Pakistani gunmen glided unseen into this great port and in a three-day rampage slaughtered at least 170 Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, purportedly in the name of Islam. And we arrived on the eve of the first anniversary of the November 26-29 bloodbath.
Yet we quickly learned that there is little new Hindu-Muslim tension. “Most people see the killings as an act of foreign aggression,” we were told by Naresh Fernandes, editor-in-chief of Time Out Mumbai and editorial board member of World Policy Journal. “Things have been calm locally during the last four or five years, and the real dispute nowadays is about linguistic nativism.” He was referring to a bizarre controversy over the politically and legally correct language to be used by an elected lawmaker in taking his or her oath of office.
Most native-born Mumbaikars speak Marathi, and a calculated storm arose in the city’s legislative assembly when an incoming opposition lawmaker from neighboring Uttar Pradesh took his oath in Hindi, India’s most widely spoken language. [Watch a video on the controversy here.] For this offense, he was roughed up by Marathi-only militants linked to a fundamentalist Hindu party, the MNS (Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) led by Raj Thackeray, who regards migrant workers from other Indian states as hostile aliens. The subtext for language is jobs. The MNS first targeted polyglot Tamils, then Muslims, and currently northern newcomers. As the furor mounted, Thackeray tellingly upped the ante by demanding that in Mumbai all job seekers at the State Bank of India (SBI) had to be fluent in Marathi. And this just as the SBI says it needs 20,000 new clerical employees.
Mira Kamdar: Outsourcing India: For Obama and Singh, Democracy Means Business
This article was originally published in The Huffington Post.
While the administration rolled out the red carpet to welcome Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington this week, the real action wasn’t around the elegantly set tables at the Obama’s first state dinner. It was across the street at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That’s right: the same folks who are spending millions to fight any government action to prevent climate change are about to be put in charge of the relationship between two of the countries most essential to finding solutions for that and other pressing global challenges.
As Robert Blake, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia put it at an “India Day” celebration at defense and communications giant Honeywell: “The most important part of our relationship is that increasingly governments matter less and less and it’s more about empowering the private sector and our businesses, our scientists, educators so that they can all work together to achieve great things.” Honeywell’s CEO David Cote is the head of the newly expanded India-U.S. CEO Forum, which met during the Indian prime minister’s visit.
The India side is headed by Ratan Tata, one of seven Indian CEOs who accompanied the prime minister. On Monday, Nov. 23, Prime Minister Singh addressed the U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC); part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the biggest lobbyist for the U.S.-India nuclear deal, which saw final approval in the last weeks of the George W. Bush administration. In fact, to clear one of the last remaining hurdles of the deal, the Indian cabinet just green-lighted a provision to make immune from liability U.S. nuclear plant builders in the event of an accident. This is no small feat in a country that still hasn’t gotten over the Union Carbide poisonous gas leak in Bhopal, the worst industrial accident in history. The bill must still pass India’s parliament.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has identified five pillars of the U.S.-India relationship: strategy, agriculture, health care, science and technology, and education. In all cases, the Obama administration is putting the private sector in the driver’s seat. As Robert Blake put it at meeting in Washington last Wednesday, Nov. 18: “[T]he Obama administration would really like to do much more to try to engage the private sector, both in private-public partnerships, but also in advising and working with both governments, to see how we can make the private sector portion bring the private sector to the fore in all of these dialogues.”
Ed Hancox: Obama’s Missed Uyghur Moment
It could have been a powerful image—America’s first multicultural president promoting the benefits of an ethnically diverse society to the Chinese—but during his trip to China this week, Barack Obama chose to steer clear of comments that could be perceived as lecturing the Chinese on their (poor) human rights record, and that included any reference to their treatment of their Tibetan and Uyghur ethnic minorities.
Lecturing another country on their shortcomings during a state visit is usually a diplomatic no-no. Unfortunately, for the past year the Obama Administration has generally taken the position that silence is golden when it comes to China and the issue of human rights, including not meeting with the Dalai Lama when he visited the United States last month. For the Chinese, the Dalai Lama is an international irritant, a highly visible spokesman reminding the world of China’s ongoing attempts to eradicate the indigenous Tibetan culture and replace it with an ethnic Han Chinese one.
Due north of Tibet, China is engaging in a much lower-profile, but just as tenacious, cultural eradication campaign against the Uyghur community in Xinjiang, China’s northwestern-most province. The Uyghurs, a Turkic people practicing the Muslim faith, have lived in the region for well over a millennia; their empire once stretched over a broad swath of Central Asia. Today the Uyghurs find themselves a minority within what’s officially called the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” of China.
It is the result of a process that started more than 60 years ago when the Uyghurs’ briefly-independent nation of “East Turkestan” was gobbled up by Beijing and the People’s Liberation Army in 1949, a mere five years after its founding. In 1949, just 7 percent of Xinjiang’s population was Han Chinese, but today that figure is over 40 percent—the result, the Uyghurs say, of an aggressive Han resettlement policy orchestrated by Beijing. The Chinese government meanwhile has opposed the teaching of the Uyghur language, closed mosques, arrested Uyghur religious and cultural leaders, and, the Uyghurs claim, kept them from getting jobs in their homeland, prompting a large migration of Uyghurs from Xinjiang. (Uyghurs now make up just 45 percent of the population in their “Autonomous Region.”)
