Month: October 2009

Man is by nature a political animal, according to Aristotle. Now it appears that political contests can biologically affect the nature of males–namely their testosterone levels

By Charles Q. Choi

On election night last year, testosterone levels dropped rapidly among male voters of losing parties.

After the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was declared, neuroscientists at Duke University found that although male voters for Barack Obama, the winner, had stable levels of testosterone, the hormone’s levels rapidly dropped in males who cast ballots for John McCain or Robert Barr, the losers. In a questionnaire, the McCain and Barr voters reported feeling significantly more controlled, submissive, unhappy and unpleasant after the loss than the Obama backers.

The researchers monitored testosterone levels from the saliva of 163 college-age volunteers in North Carolina and Michigan by asking them to chew sugar-free gum and then spit before and after the results were announced. The male participants would normally have shown a slight nighttime drop in testosterone levels anyway, because the body doesn’t need it during sleep, but on election night, they departed dramatically from this routine: Obama voters’ levels did not fall as they should have, whereas those of McCain and Barr backers dropped more than would have been expected.

No significant effects were seen in the 106 female volunteers. Women have testosterone, but in much lesser amounts, making them less likely to experience rapid testosterone changes following victory or defeat.

Past research had shown that personally winning and losing in sports matches and other competitions raised and lowered testosterone levels in men. These new findings, appearing online October 21 in PLoS ONE, reveal that politics can influence testosterone in men “just as if they directly engaged head-to-head in a contest for dominance,” says researcher Kevin LaBar of the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an Obama baby bump nine months after the election.”

Anthropologist Coren Apicella at Harvard University, who did not participate in this study, noted she and her colleagues discovered similar results with a smaller group, findings that will appear next year in a book. “It’s an exciting time for people that study political behavior, where biological factors have largely been ignored,” she notes. “Political scientists are starting to recognize the role of biology and more and more research is showing there may be some reciprocal interactions between how elections make one feel, and how feelings can affect political behavior.”

Testosterone is linked to aggression, risk-taking and responses to threats. Bumps and drops in testosterone levels in response to competition in a variety of species can help both winners and losers, explains researcher Steven Stanton of the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience—victors may get motivated to pursue further gains, whereas also-rans are encouraged to back down so as not to press onward and potentially get injured. Apicella noted she and her colleagues found when voters were given $5 that they could donate in toto or in part to political parties or keep for themselves, after the 2008 election, voters for losing candidates whose testosterone levels dropped donated less, “showing this withdrawal behavior.”

SA

Coach Juan Marcos Troia and with the boys at his International Sports Academy Trust

By Muzamil Jaleel, Indian Express

ON a drizzly afternoon, as the sun plays hide and seek, a man sporting an elegant goatee and a loose track suit watches keenly from the empty spectator stands. Groups of boys in yellow jerseys dribble white footballs, shuffle to fake a circular move as they hit a pass, then attempt to rest a flying ball on the chest before it drops down perfectly on the toe. It has been three years since coach Juan Marcos Troia arrived in Kashmir, during which he helped a ragtag team of school boys fall in love with their traps, dribbles and kicks. That’s unusual for a region whose stadiums, when they reverberate, do so with fiery slogans and political speeches. But when Marcos left his home in Argentina and arrived in Kashmir with wife Priscila Barros Pedroso and their three little daughters Brisa, Dafne and Amanee, he instinctively knew football would keep him back.

As Marcos speaks, a tall teenager attempts a bicycle kick, his body moving in a dazzling summersault. “This is the boy,” Marcos whispers. “Our captain, Basharat. He is 18 and an exceptional player and a natural leader.” But the coach is pained. His star player was among the three from his academy who were selected for a special professional training by clubs in Spain and Brazil. But Basharat can’t make the trip—he was denied a passport because his father was a militant.

Three years in Kashmir and Marcos is slowly beginning to realise that he can’t insulate himself from the larger story of Kashmir, however hard he tried. “I know my boys are here to play football and not pelt stones or take up guns. Their sole aim is to become professional players. They are working hard but sadly, that’s not enough. How can one change his family’s past?”

Ever since he arrived in Kashmir, the 33-year-old Marcos has immersed himself in training the boys at his football academy, the International Sports Academy Trust, singularly focusing on the rigorous training that he puts the boys through. The Academy, registered with the J&K Football Association, has 360 students from all over Kashmir, like Ganderbal and Bandipore.

A month after Marcos arrived in Srinagar in 2006, he was beaten up by soldiers outside the Central Telegraph Office, a five-minute walk from the playfield. “They took me for a local Kashmiri and suspected I was pretending to be a foreigner. They apologised later and the matter ended there. I did feel scared but then I also realised that I have to accept these incidents if I want to live and work in Kashmir.” So Marcos stayed put even when frequent curfews, protests and strikes shut the Valley last summer, spending all his time with his players.

“They are my only family in Kashmir. They are like my own children,” he says.

(Submitted by Harsh Kapoor)

A “railroad” of sorts helps Iraqi women escape servitude, abuse and even death

By Anna Badkhen

On a bullet-scarred side street in Baghdad’s downtown, where U.S. Marines famously helped tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein in April of 2003, an inconspicuous entryway tucked between a steel-shuttered shop and a rickety candy stall leads to a flight of steep concrete stairs. The second-floor landing bottlenecks into a dark, empty hallway. Women in black abayas hurry across the buckled floor tiles in silence and quickly disappear through an unmarked plywood door on the right.

The decrepit two-bedroom apartment behind this unassuming portal is an essential junction of what activists in Iraq and their U.S. supporters call the Underground Railroad. This Railroad is a small, clandestine network of several shelters, located mostly in Baghdad, for the countless but commonly overlooked victims of the war in Iraq: women who have been raped, battered or forced into prostitution, or women who, accused of bringing dishonor to their families by having been abused, have been rejected or even threatened with death by their relatives.

In a country ravaged by war and fractured along sectarian lines, these shelters serve women who have nowhere else to turn for help. Operated despite recurring threats and lack of government support by a team of 35 Iraqi activists who call themselves the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), the shelters offer a glint of hope for civil society.

The Underground Railroad was founded in 2004 by Baghdad-born architect-turned-feminist-organizer Yanar Mohammed, head of OWFI, along with MADRE, an international women’s rights group based in New York. It provides the only sanctuaries for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence outside the quasi-autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, where the local government and NGOs operate several similar shelters. In addition to providing temporary asylum, it helps women resettle in places where their abusers cannot find them easily.

The cheap apartment is all the organization can afford; it costs about $60,000 a year to operate a shelter this size. With the squalor comes anonymity, and the inherent promise that, at last, the women are safe. Shelter workers believe that the shelter’s inconspicuous nature protects them from religious militias, which, Amnesty International reports, routinely target women’s rights advocates. The Railroad’s shelter locations are kept secret from angry husbands and male extended family members.

Samira (not her real name), a Sunni widow from the restive eastern province of Diyala, will stay at the shelter for several months, until it’s safe for her to move on. She spends most of her evenings cleaning the shelter: her safe haven, and her chance for a future without abuse.
“If it weren’t for this shelter I would have become a prostitute,” Samira said. “Now I feel I have a family around me.”

MsM

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger draws on George Orwell’s inspiration to describe the Call of Obama: “attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills”.

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations… nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.

JP

Herald front-page, Editorial, 18 October 2009

Terrorism has no religion. It must be put down with an iron hand. The blast in Margao, as well as the one averted in Sancoale, have brought to the fore the ugly face of terrorism in Goa. Fortunately, the bomb exploded before it could be planted, killing Malgonda Patil and critically injuring Yogesh Naik, the terrorists who planned to massacre dozens of innocent people. The bomb in Sancoale was detected by an alert youth. Had it exploded where it was planted – in a truck carrying 40 youth and a Narkasur for a competition – it would have taken a large number of lives. Those who made and planted it are yet to be brought to justice.

This dastardly terrorist attack was, first, intended to target the Diwali Narkasur festival, which is unique to Goa and Goans, but which the Hindu fundamentalist Sanatan Sanstha denounces as a glorification of evil. The second objective, far more sinister, was to instigate religious riots in Margao, which has a history of communal tension. This cowardly attempt to hurt Goan traditions and destroy the State’s communal harmony must be put down swiftly and decisively.

This is the second terrorist act linked to the Sanatan Sanstha, which is active mainly in Maharashtra and Goa, and has its national headquarters at Ramnathi. It is not linked, as police said yesterday, to the Malegaon bomb blasts, but to a crude bomb made from gelatine sticks that went off in the parking lot of Gadkari Rangaytan, a drama auditorium in Thane, Maharashtra, on the evening of June 4, 2008, just before the Marathi play ‘Aamhi Paachpute’ was about to begin, in which seven persons were injured.

The Sanatan Sanstha alleged that the play ridiculed Hindu Gods and the Hindu religion, and demanded that it should be stopped. The producers of the play refused to oblige. That is why it was targeted. Four days earlier, a similar unexploded explosive was found and defused in the Vishnudas Bhave Auditorium at Vashi, Navi Mumbai, where the play was
also to be performed. This was just a day ahead of the IPL-2008 finals at the D Y Patil Stadium in nearby Nerul. A third bomb exploded outside a cinema theatre in Panvel that was showing the Bollywood film ‘Jodhaa-Akbar’, which the Sanatan Sanstha had denounced as denigrating the Hindu religion. Fortunately, no one was hurt in that blast.

Ramesh Gadkari, Mangesh Nikam, Vikram Bhave, Santosh Angre, Haribhau Divekar and Hemant Chalke, all Sanatan Sanstha activists, were arrested for making and planting these bombs, and are presently on trial for criminal conspiracy, attempt to murder and under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Explosive Substances Act and the Arms Act. The Sanstha claimed it had nothing to do with the bombs and bombers, just as it has done this time.

When these blasts took place last year, through these very columns, we urged the government and the police that they should thoroughly investigate the Sanstha, which has its national headquarters in Ramnathi, Goa, lest something similar happens here. Our plea was completely ignored by the powers-that- be. That could be because the wife of a powerful minister in the Goa Cabinet is a strong sympathizer of the Sanatan Sanstha. Or it might be because of complacency and plain sloth.

But this time, the cause of action is in Goa itself. The objective of the bombs was to kill, maim and injure Goans. It was to try and shut down a unique Goan tradition – the Narkasur – which the Sanatan Sanstha hates. It was to take advantage of existing communal tensions and trigger riots in a State that prides itself on communal harmony
and tolerance. It was to destroy the Goan way of life for some twisted fundamentalist religious beliefs. The government and the police must disregard interference from ministers and MLAs. They must investigate this case thoroughly, book all those suspected under the most stringent laws possible, and ensure that terrorism is never allowed to raise its ugly head in Goa.

(Submitted by Harsh Kapoor)
OH

C.P. CHANDRASEKHAR

The dollar lacks the legitimacy to serve as the world’s reserve, but there is no national currency that can displace it as yet.

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG

John Lipsky (left), First Deputy Managing Director, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director, of the IMF in Istanbul on October 2. Lipsky has suggested that the SDR can be used as the foundation to build a new currency that would “be delinked from other currencies and issued by an international organisation with equivalent authority to a central bank in order to become liquid enough to be used as a reserve”.

IF time lag matters, news of the dollar’s demise as the world’s principal reserve currency is grossly exaggerated. That prediction has been heard periodically at least since the early 1970s when the United States brought to an end the Bretton Woods arrangement by breaking the link between the dollar and gold. As is obvious, whatever else may be said of the U.S.’ role in the world system, this expectation of the dollar’s displacement as the currency that is as good as gold has not materialised.

This, however, is not to say that the dollar fulfils its role adequately or even satisfactorily. Not surprisingly, with the strength of the U.S. economy once again in question, the dollar has begun to slide. The euro, between its low of 1.2932 to the dollar on April 21, 2009, and its value at the end of September 2009, has appreciated by 13 per cent vis-a-vis the dollar. This (and other similar tendencies) has triggered predictions of the demise of the dollar as the lead currency. Should and will a new currency replace the dollar as the paper that is treated as good as gold?

A noteworthy feature of the debate on the dollar’s worthiness as a reserve currency is that most people who say it is time for the dollar to go, do not base their argument on the greater strength of an alternative currency (such as the euro, the yen or the Chinese renminbi) that should take the dollar’s place. Rather, their alternative is the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Right (SDR), which is more a unit of account than a currency and which derives its value from a weighted basket of four major currencies.

There are three implications here. First, even when the weakness of the U.S. and the dollar is accepted, the case is not that the dollar should be completely displaced; even in the basket that constitutes the SDR the dollar commands an influential role. Second, there is no other country or currency that is capable of taking the place of the U.S. and its dollar at least in the near future. And third, the search is not for a currency that can be used with confidence as a medium of international exchange but for a derivative asset that investors can hold without fear of a substantial fall in its value when exchange rates fluctuate, because its value is defined in terms of, and is stable relative to, a basket of currencies.

EURO CHALLENGE

FL

By Jad Mouawad and Andrew C. Revkin

Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.

The oil-rich kingdom has pushed this position for years in earlier climate-treaty negotiations. While it has not succeeded, its efforts have sometimes delayed or disrupted discussions. The kingdom is once again gearing up to take a hard line on the issue at international negotiations scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

The chief Saudi negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, described the position as a “make or break” provision for the Saudis, as nations stake out their stance before the global climate summit scheduled for the end of the year.

“Assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification is very crucial for us through foreign direct investments, technology transfer, insurance and funding,” Mr. Sabban said in an e-mail message.

This Saudi position has emerged periodically as a source of dispute since the earliest global climate talks, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is surfacing again as Saudi Arabia tries to build a coalition of producers to extract concessions in Copenhagen.

Petroleum exporters have long used delaying tactics during climate talks. They view any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by developed countries as a menace to their economies.

The original treaty meant to combat global warming, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, contains provisions that in Saudi Arabia’s view require such compensation.

Mr. Sabban outlined his stance at climate talks in Bangkok this month.
Environmental advocates denounced the idea, saying the Saudi stance hampered progress to assist poor nations that are already suffering from the effect of climate change, and that genuinely need financial assistance.

“It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The worst of this racket is that they have held up progress on supporting adaptation funding for the most vulnerable for years because of this demand.”

Saudi Arabia is highly dependent on oil exports, which account for most of the government’s budget. Last year, when prices peaked, the kingdom’s oil revenue swelled by 37 percent, to $281 billion, according to Jadwa Investment, a Saudi bank. That was more than four times the 2002 level. At one point in 2008, the average gasoline price in the United States surpassed $4 a gallon.

Saudi exports are expected to drop to $115 billion this year, after oil prices fell. American gasoline prices are hovering around $2.50 a gallon.

NYT

(Submitted by reader with the following comment: “Enjoy – the cheeky comment by Asad Abu Khalil (the Angry Arab) says it all.”

“Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.” And then the Saudi oil (and vinegar) minister suggested another idea: for every drop in the price of oil, a Western government would sponsor a Saudi Prince and spend lavishly on his upkeep (and pay his hotel, gambling, and brothels’ bills).
As’ad AbuKhalil
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/

by Peter Kenyon

In Egypt, the senior cleric at one of the Muslim world’s pre-eminent centers of Sunni Islamic teaching has banned female students and teachers from wearing the niqab — the full-face veil — in classrooms and dormitories.

The Grand Sheik of Al-Azhar, Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, says the niqab has nothing to do with Islam and is a sign of radicalism. Other Egyptian universities have taken similar positions, prompting civil rights activists to complain that the ban violates students’ rights.

Many Islamic scholars believe that full-face coverings are not a religious requirement, but the modern expression of tribal customs and traditions that predate Islam. Such coverings are common in conservative states such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen, though not in Egypt.

But the sheik’s pronouncement is seen as a reminder of the country’s difficult position as it tries to push back against the growth of conservative Islam across the region.

Student Hela Omar, 19, is petite, slender, dark-eyed and otherwise indescribable because of her loose robes and the cloth covering her face from the bridge of her nose down below her jaw. She understands that the niqab is not an Egyptian tradition, but she doesn’t understand why Tantawi and some government ministers seem to see it as a sign of allegiance to radical Islam.

“Anything that covers the body is something that people should respect. I’ve lived in other countries like Yemen, and the niqab is normal there. So I don’t understand why people here think it’s extremist, or think it’s too Islamist to wear. I just think it’s a matter of modesty,” Omar says.

Tantawi’s announcement of the ban was clouded by reports that he spoke harshly to a young niqab-wearing student, embarrassing her in front of her middle-school class.

He denied speaking abusively to the girl and later clarified that he doesn’t object to the niqab in public settings where men and women mix. He said the ban applies only to Al-Azhar’s classrooms and dorms, which are already segregated.

NPR

(Submitted by reader)

Oct 15th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

An argument that never ends

IN EGYPT’S 100-year-long debate over female head-coverings, the veil has been put off and on as fast as hemlines in Paris have gone up and down. Feminists in the 1920s threw it off; by the 1970s so had most Egyptian women. But it has crept back, as a wave of religiosity has prompted many to embrace a more distinctively Muslim look. Most Egyptian women are again under cover, but adopt a range of styles, from the black niqab, often worn with gloves, leaving just a slit for the eyes, to the shoulder-enveloping khimar, to lighter novelties such as a colourful Spanish-style scarf wrapped around hair tied in a bun, leaving a jaunty fringe dangling to the neck.

Despite the argument’s longevity, the passions it stirs remain strong. In July this year proponents of the veil gained a boost by proclaiming their first martyr. Marwa Sherbini, an Egyptian immigrant, was stabbed to death in a German courtroom by the man she had brought to trial for insulting her as a terrorist, because she wore a headscarf.

But this month the veil’s opponents claimed a victory, won by no less a personage than Sayed Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Cairo’s 1,000-year-old Islamic university. While touring one of hundreds of girls’ schools that al-Azhar also runs, he happened to spot an 11-year-old student wearing the niqab—and lost his famously short temper. Not only did he order her to remove it on the spot. His university issued a blanket rule banning the niqab in all its girls’ schools, on the ground that the full face-covering is an innovation that represents too extreme an interpretation of Islamic modesty.

This was not the first attack on the niqab, a fashion widely seen as an expression of Salafism, a rigidly orthodox interpretation of Islam promoted by Saudi-owned satellite-television channels. In recent years Egyptian universities and government offices have sporadically banned niqab-wearers, citing security. But the abruptness of Sheikh Tantawi’s order, and the fact that it came from Egypt’s highest seat of Islamic teaching, stirred an outcry both from conservatives and from campaigners for civil liberties.

That storm has quieted. The sheikh now says he is not against the niqab but just sees it as unnecessary in all-female institutions. Egypt’s religious-affairs ministry says it is printing 100,000 copies of a leaflet called “Niqab: Custom Not Worship” to assure Muslims that exposure of a woman’s hands and face is not shameful.

EM
(submitted by reader)

By Rahimullah Yusufzai

“I fear there will be a bloody revolution in India,” a retired Indian military officer remarked to this writer and other guests during a recent visit to New Delhi. It was shocking to hear the comment from a soldier, in a country that supposedly had given a voice to its huge population and was believed to be all-inclusive.

It is obvious that India’s much-praised democracy hasn’t brought any real change in the lives of millions of Indians. That some of the poorest men and women are now up in arms in parts of India is evidence enough that democratically elected governments must do more to provide rights and justice to the rural poor and ensure even-handed development in different parts of the country.

The Naxalite violence in India has caused pain to most thinking Indians. For them it is a matter of anguish that a growing number of Indians are disillusioned with their country’s democracy and see no hope of benefiting from India’s steady economic progress. They have picked up the gun to fight for their rights.

The Maoist-linked violence is spreading and engulfing new places. The vast region affected by the insurgency include the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal and runs south through Orissa, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. It is usually called the “Red Corridor” because the leadership for the rebels is provided by communist cadres labelled as Maoists. The Communist Party of India (Marxists-Leninists), despite suffering splits, is still the standard-bearer of the rebels.

According to reports in the Indian media, more than 220 districts in 20 or so states are now affected by Maoist-linked violence. Indian intelligence agencies believe the movement has at its disposal 20,000 armed cadres and over 50,000 regular members. Apart from the rural poor, indigenous tribes such as the Girijans in Andhra Pradesh and Santhals in West Bengal have been flocking to the Naxalite movement. The movement has appeal for the dispossessed and the under-privileged. In the words of its present leader, Mupalla Laxman Rao, in hiding somewhere in eastern India and better known as Ganapathi, his party’s influence has grown stronger and it was now the only genuine alternative before the people of India.

The Naxalite movement began as a peasants’ uprising in May 1969 in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal. It was initially led by 49-year-old Charu Mazumdar and its aim was to seize power through an agrarian revolution by overthrowing the feudal order. Mazumdar died in police custody 12 days after his arrest in Calcutta in 1972 and became a hero to Maoist cadres that have increased in number and strength over the years despite splits in the movement. The Naxalite insurgency has sprouted after every defeat and is now stronger than ever.

India’s share of the world’s poorest people has increased to 39 percent from 25 percent in 1980. In comparison, the Below Poverty Line population worldwide has decreased from 1,470 million to 970 million. There are reportedly 301 million Indians below the poverty line, just 19 million less than in 1983. The Human Development Report by the UN has been ranking India among the lowest 60 or 65 countries in the list of 193 nations that are part of the annual study. India’s poor performance on this score was in spite of the around nine percent growth rate in its GDP. There are reports in the media about farmers committing suicide or selling their wives to pay mounting debts. Though the recorded figures of such cases aren’t high in a big country such as India with 1.17 billion people, it still indicates the desperate state of certain communities.

The News