By Rama Lakshmi

GANDHINAGAR, India — On the campaign trail, the renowned classical dancer Mallika Sarabhai walks past a foul-smelling trash heap and a gate adorned with coconuts to enter the maze-like slum where ragpickers in this western Indian city live.

Little girls welcome her with rice grains mixed in auspicious vermilion paste and garland her with hand-spun cotton threads. She squats on the floor and breaks into a folk song, and women in floral saris and colorful glass bangles clap and sing along.

“Other candidates wave at you and go away. Our democracy has room only for leaders, not for people like you and me,” said Sarabhai, 56, a slim, short-haired woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and a red-glitter bindi, the decorative dot worn on the forehead by many Hindu women. “But I have come here as one of you, as your sister.”
Sarabhai, a first-time independent candidate, is running for a lower house seat in Parliament in national elections this month from one of India’s most high-profile constituencies, a state capital that has been polarized along Hindu-Muslim lines since riots in 2002. As a dancer, she has used performing arts for years to challenge social taboos that limit women’s aspirations. In her new political role, she calls herself a “people’s candidate” who is fighting to reclaim the idea of an inclusive and secular India.

Sarabhai eschews grand speeches, microphones, banners and slogans. Instead, she takes notes as people talk about illegally brewed alcohol, bribe-taking policemen, the lack of bathing water and the shortage of women’s toilets in the slums.

Sarabhai, one of a handful of professional people running as independents in the upcoming elections, rejects the standard Indian political appeals to caste, religion and linguistic ethnicity, and speaks of empowering voters to unseat corrupt and ineffective politicians. Her campaign, she said, seeks to reclaim the shrinking space left for ordinary people’s voices in a democracy dominated by political parties that too often rely on mudslinging, muscle-flexing and money power.
Sarabhai’s constituency, Gandhinagar, in the western state of Gujarat, has suffered six bloody bouts of Hindu-Muslim rioting in four decades. The latest was in 2002, when Hindu mobs mounted reprisal attacks against Muslims that left more than 1,000 people dead in the state. Many groups have blamed the state’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government for abetting the violence. Later that year, Sarabhai filed a public interest lawsuit against the government in the country’s Supreme Court, earning the wrath of the BJP’s supporters, who have since lampooned her.

“The silence of the city’s middle class toward the violence has been stunning. She is trying to extrude that silence by providing a credible alternative,” said Shiv Viswanathan, a social scientist at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar. “Her fight has a lot of symbolism in this city fractured by violence.”

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DRUG BUST
Alan Cassels

SURELY OUR economic calamity couldn’t have any positive health effects, could it?

As people lose their jobs and watch their assets, retirement savings and homes diminish in value, one might assume that it inevitably means a big negative on the balance sheets of our lives.

Not so fast, I say. Among the pharmaceutical-popping public, recessionary times may indeed have a silver lining. In fact, this recession may be good for both our health and our pocketbooks, especially if it forces us to reassess our frequently thoughtless, overzealous and often un-economical, legal drug habit.

You have to admit that we have been somewhat conditioned by the media to believe that spending less on healthcare means rationing, longer waits and less access to health services. But can throwing less money at the pharmaceutical industry translate into better access and shorter wait times for things that actually count? It could, but I admit such heretical thoughts are based on my perspective that pharmaceuticals really do reside in a special place inside the healthcare world.

For each drug on the market that is truly lifesaving, providing profound benefits and extending the quality and length of our lives, dozens more either don’t deliver the goods or worse, provide the opposite – more harm than benefit. And the money we’re spending on those treatments could be buying less health.

Suffice to say, one of the side effects of these belt-tightening times could be that we spend more energy figuring out what is really essential for people who are truly sick and then making sure the system doesn’t reward prescribing what is unnecessary or harmful. After all, what better time to eliminate fat than when we are collectively facing lean times?

One clue that there is perhaps too much excess in the world of prescription drugs might be found in the way society pays for pharmaceuticals. In Canada, drug coverage operates by the rule of thirds: about a third of our collective pharmaceutical tab is covered by the public purse (in our case, BC Pharmacare). A third is paid for by your private and typically employer-sponsored health benefit program. And finally, a third is paid for out of your own pocket.

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(Submitted by a reader)

By John Pilger

The BBC’s American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.

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By Sonia Shah

Last weekend, the mosquitoes emerged from the narrow stream that trickles by our house outside Baltimore, flitting around the ankles of my 9-year-old son, skipping stones with his pants rolled up to his knees.

These days, it’s just a benign sign of warmer months to come, but it wasn’t always so. Not too long ago, the local Anopheles mosquitoes-like dozens of mosquito species around the world today-were just as likely to slip in a few Plasmodium parasites with their itchy bites, roiling their victims with the chills and fever named after the Italian for bad air, mal’aria. The stories of how malaria and yellow fever impeded European colonization of Africa and the building of the Panama Canal (surveyed by the Spanish in 1534, unsuccessfully attempted by the Scots in the seventeenth century and the French in the late nineteenth) are familiar. Less known is how malaria’s tide sculpted our own landscape, too.

English settlers from the malarious low-lying counties around the Thames brought vivax malaria to the Chesapeake Bay colonies in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth, European colonists in the Americas had introduced the killer falciparum malaria too, carried in the bodies of enslaved Africans. Malaria-plagued families of 18th-century South Carolina endured the deaths of a third of their children before their fifth birthdays, most during the August-November malaria season. Those who could fled to the highlands during the late summer and fall; medical authorities warned them not to return until after the first killing frost.

During the Civil War, Union troops suffered 1.3 million cases of malaria, and as the infected troops returned home, they spread the scourge northwards. Madison Square, Washington Square, and Tompkins Squares in Manhattan became “dangerous hot-beds of disease and death” as the New York Times put it in 1877. Every man, woman, and child in the neighbourhoods of Dutch Kills and Ravenswood in Long Island, it seemed to a New York Times reporter that year, had been “poisoned” with malaria. “There has been so much malarial fever that it amounts almost to an epidemic,” the Times reported. The schools were emptied of students and half the police force was “unfit for duty.” Residents fled the island en masse, “to let” signs fluttering on their abandoned homes. [i]

In Bound Brook, New Jersey, not a single family escaped malarial infection. “I have resided here 33 years,” a lumber merchant explained to a newspaper reporter, “and was never compelled to take a dose of [anti-malarial remedy] quinine, or use it in my family, until 1878. Now we all take it in pretty large quantities, and have had touches of the malaria in some form.” His neighbor took massive doses of antimalarial meds every day, just “in order to keep well.” [ii] Across New England, the story was the same, chills and fevers reported in epidemic form all the way up to the foot of the Berkshire hills. [iii]

Pioneers brought malaria from the coasts into the interior of the country after the civil war, creating a disease barrier so fierce many felt the west would never be settled. The 19th-century American physician Daniel Drake called malaria “the great cause of mortality or infirmity of constitution” in the Mississippi valley. Malaria took 80 percent of settlers in Pike County, Illinois in the 1820s, and 80 of 600 Norwegian settlers in Wisconsin in 1841. It destroyed an 1830s effort to build a canal between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river. Cruising down the Mississippi river, Northern passengers ogled the “sallow faced…pitiable looking objects” that emerged from mud huts, sod houses and dugouts along the river’s banks. Their malaria-bloated spleens expanded their bellies by nearly a foot. It was the “swamp devil,” one boat captain explained. “I’m feared you will see plenty of it if you stay long in these parts,” he said to a passenger. “It will take the roses out of the cheeks of those plump little ones of yours mighty quick.” Popular ditties warned outsiders of Michigan’s malaria. “Don’t go to Michigan, that land of ills,” one song advised, “the word means ague, fever and chills.” Commentators considered anti-malarial quinine pills as crucial to survival as food. “Had our bread failed, our wells and the river dried up, we could have endured it,” wrote one typical 19th century enthusiast from Michigan. “But to be without cathartic pills and quinine…was worse than a bread and water famine.”[iv]

“It is to be suspected” of the Mississippi valley, bemoaned Pennsylvania congressman John McCulloch in 1829, “that no changes and no cultivation will ever bring it into a state of salubrity.”

The last case of indigenous malaria in this country occurred over fifty years ago, the disease quietly decimated by decades of drainage, road-building, and the agricultural and economic transformation that ensconced us inside houses with screened doors. My son runs home from the streambed, pleasantly muddy, shins speckled with bites. His cheeks are flushed, but I do not worry. I shut the door upon the insects’ thrum. Over the course of humankind’s long history with malaria-malariologists estimate that half of all deaths since the Stone Age have been due to malaria-not many mothers could do the same.

Sonia Shah’s third book, a political history of malaria, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She hosts the website ResurgentMalaria
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[i] “Malarial sickness: the fever in Long Island City,” New York Times, October 1, 1877
[ii] “A fever-stricken Jersey town,” New York Times, July 10, 1880
[iii] “Malaria’s baleful work,” New York Times, August 22, 1881
[iv] Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley 1760-1900 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 107

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Islamic ‘Adl In Orakzai The Nizam-e-Adl [Justice] Regulation was signed on April 15, formally enforcing what some call sharia laws in Swat. The same day came the news of the Sikh community living in Orakzai Agency being asked to pay jizia by the Taliban…

By C. M. Naim
The Daily Times, Lahore, of April 15 carried the following as reported by Abdul Saboor Khan:
Sikh families leave Orakzai after Taliban demand jizia

HANGU: Sikh families living in Orakzai Agency have left the agency after the Taliban demanded Rs 50 million as jizia (tax) from them, official sources and locals said on Tuesday.

“Residents of Ferozekhel area in Lower Orakzai Agency told Daily Times on Tuesday that around 10 Sikh families left the agency after the demand by the Taliban, who said they were a minority and liable to pay the tax for living in the area in accordance with sharia.
“Locals said the Taliban had notified the Sikh families about the ‘tax’ around a week ago. They said of the 15 Sikh families in Ferozekhel, 10 had shifted while the remaining were preparing to do so.
“The locals said the families were impoverished and had left the area to avoid any Taliban action.”

The following day, April 16, appeared another report by the same correspondent:
“Sikhs in Orakzai pay Rs 20 million jizia to Taliban

HANGU: The Sikh community living in Orakzai Agency on Wednesday conceded to Taliban demand to pay them jizia – tax levied on non-Muslims living under Islamic rule – and paid Rs 20 million to Taliban in return for ‘protection’.

“Officials told Daily Times that the Taliban also released Sikh leader Sardar Saiwang Singh and vacated the community’s houses after the Sikhs accepted the Taliban demand.
“The officials said the Taliban announced that the Sikhs were now free to live anywhere in the agency.
“They also announced protection for the Sikh community, saying that no one would harm them after they paid jizia. Sikhs who had left the agency would now return to their houses and resume their business in the agency, the officials said.”

A week has passed, but I have not seen any comment on the above in the three Urdu newspapers from Pakistan that I fairly regularly check: Jang, Nawa-i-Waqt, and Daily Express. And if the Daily Times or Dawn carried an editorial on the plight of the smallest and most powerless group of Pakistani citizens, I must have missed it. Here I must note that while Jang failed to carry the news about the Pakistani Sikhs, it twice reported on the special arrangements made for security and hospitality for the Sikh pilgrims from India.

The Pakistani lawyers who took to the streets to bring back an independent judiciary might not have read the news, busy as they must be with important matters, for none issued even a statement of regret or sympathy. As for the newly established ‘independent judiciary,’ personified by the Supreme Court of Pakistan and its Chief Justice—it took notice, suo motu, of the case of the whipping of a married woman and then only the other day declared that the penalty for ‘blasphemy’ should be death in the Islamic nation—it too preferred to ignore the Sikhs. The nation’s President and Prime Minister, of course, saw nothing wrong in what the Taliban had done—the two now co-share authority—and made not the slightest noise. Of course the guardians of Islam’s honour in Pakistan, the muftis and maulanas, made not the slightest protest. Most likely they saw in the incident just one more triumph of their vision of Islam’s glory in Pakistan. If anything, they showed remarkable restraint when they didn’t make a public celebration of it, as they had done when President Zardari’s father-in-law had the Ahmadis declared non-Muslim.

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By Yuval Goren, Amos Harel and Tomer Zarchin, Haaretz Correspondents

The police arrested for questioning seven Israelis suspected of violating the law by inciting in favor of evading the draft. The seven are suspected of operating the Web sites New Profile and Target 21, in which texts are published calling on youths not to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces and provide those interested with advice on how to convince psychologists working for the army to disqualify them from service.

“The main part of the investigation has focused on locating those persons who are operating the two web sites where violations to article 109 of the criminal law, incitement for draft evasion, are being carried out,” said Superintendent Nimrod Daniel, chief of investigations in the Yarkon District Police.

“It may be that these persons have explanations, but according to the law this is a criminal violation that is punishable by five years imprisonment,” he added.

Several days ago, investigators identified the names and addresses of a number of Israelis suspected of operating the Web sites, and Sunday morning they were arrested in their homes. Among those investigated was a 70-year old female artist.

In searches carried out in their homes, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramat Hasharon, Netanya and Be’er Sheva, materials were found that are suspected to be used in inciting youths to evade the draft. Police officers confiscated a number of computers and documents during the raid.

During questioning some of the suspects denied any involvement in incitement to evade the draft, but others acknowledged links to the texts being published on the Web sites.

At the end of questioning they were released under restriction.

The New Profile movement, which members describe as a feminist organization, protested the questioning of their members Sunday.

“What happened yesterday confirms what we have been saying for years about the militarization of Israeli society that undermines the sacred principles of democracy and freedom of expression. This is about framing normal citizens, including a 70-year old grandmother, whose only crime is activity for human rights,” said Ofra Leit, spokesperson for the group.

Two other women will appear before the police this morning for questioning: a retired nurse from northern Israel and a 20-year old woman from Jerusalem, both suspected of involvement in running the sites.

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The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has denounced the recent increment of sentence of the Moroccan journalist and blogger Hassan Barhoun by the Appeals Court.

The court in the Moroccan city of Tetuan, increased the sentence on journalist last week Monday to ten months in prison instead of six, after he had accused the public prosecutor of collusion in a corruption case.

The Court of Appeal had Mr Barhoun’s sentence increased to ten months without allowing his lawyers to submit a plea during the trial’s proceedings.

Mr Barhoun was arrested on 26 February and was sentenced on 6 March to six-months in jail. He was charged with circulating false news, after publishing a petition signed by more than 60 people, including activists, journalists and officials accusing the King’s deputy in Tetuan, the Public Prosecutor of collision in a corruption case.

“Instead of being interrogated about the article, Mr Barhoun was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison. At the Court of Appeal, the sentenced was increased to ten months,” the Network statement said.

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Zardari learns how not to deal with jihadists while the US weighs how to play the bully

By the Editorial Board of the Christian Science Monitor
As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama criticized George W. Bush for giving billions in aid to Pakistan even as that country made “peace treaties with the Taliban.”

Now in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama has learned how easy it is for Pakistan, a democratic but Muslim country, to ignore US pleas and take its money – while it simply keeps coddling Islamic militants.
Last week, the US was helping line up $5.3 billion in new development aid from foreign donors for Pakistan. This week, Richard Holbrooke, special US envoy to the region, was trying to persuade Congress to increase US development aid to Pakistan. But at the same time, President Asif Ali Zardari was hailing a deal that allowed the Taliban to impose harsh Islamic law – including public floggings – in the country’s Swat Valley.

In essence, Pakistan gave up territory to Muslim militants.
The deal reveals a strange unwillingness by Pakistan’s 500,000-strong Army to confront the violent jihadists that pose an existential threat to this country’s democracy, just as Al Qaeda’s headquarters in Pakistan still pose a threat to the West.

Hawkish leaders in the Army remain too focused on a perceived threat from India and not on the jihadists along the western border with Afghanistan. This misplaced nationalism comes at the expense of Pakistan’s democracy.

The government’s appeasement of the Taliban also reflects an ambivalence about suppressing a group that the Army helped create in Afghanistan during the 1990s as a strategic tool. Pakistan may still want to retain ties to the Taliban in its jockeying with India and the US.

In sealing the deal last week, President Zardari likely took a cue from the Obama administration in its eagerness for Afghanistan to talk with factions of the Taliban in that country. But alas, Zardari soon discovered that Islamic fanatics don’t make good partners.
Instead of laying down their arms as promised, the Taliban used the stand down of Pakistani forces in Swat to take over ever-larger areas. The 6,000 to 8,000 fighters even came within 60 miles of the nation’s capital this week.

Rightly so, this close call with an Islamic takeover of a nuclear-armed state of 170 million Muslims set off alarm bells in Washington. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Pakistan was “basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists” while Obama dispatched the Pentagon’s top military chief to Islamabad.

Pakistan then responded weakly by sending some forces back into the area, while the Taliban, having made its point about its potency, appeared to make a strategic retreat.

Pakistanis prefer democracy, but many also decry the country’s widespread lapse in the rule of law. Justice is hard to come by for common folk and many, especially along the border with Afghanistan, welcome the strict social controls that Islamic fanatics offer.

A country cannot have two types of rule – theocracy vs. democratic rights and freedoms – let alone rival governments. The two are radically different concepts about the role of the individual and how to organize society.

Pakistanis must make a choice. They need only look to Iran to see how Islamic authoritarianism has made a sham of democratic ideals.
And the US, too, needs to decide how much pressure to place on Pakistan to make that choice. Attaching strings to aid could backfire by playing to Pakistani nationalism. Obama must be careful not to act like a bully while at the same time quietly nudging Pakistani leaders to reform their courts, police, and politics.

In the past three years, Islamic militants have stepped up their vicious attacks on civilians within Pakistan. Now that the Swat deal has revealed the Taliban’s duplicity and its rough sense of justice, the choice for Pakistan is even clearer.

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(Submitted by a reader)