A group of Burmese ethnic rebels currently held in an Indian jail will next week enter into a plea bargain in what could be a momentous final stretch in a marathon 12-year fight for justice.
The group, composed of 10 fighters from the Karen National Union (KNU) and 24 from the now-defunct National Unity Party of Arakan (NUPA), were lured in 1998 to the Indian Andaman Islands by an Indian intelligence officer named Colonel Grewal, who offered them a safe haven. He has since disappeared, and evidence suggests he may have been a double agent working for the Burmese military.
On arriving on Indian soil the group were accused of weapons smuggling; six of the men were murdered by Indian security forces and the rest placed in detention, in what has come to be known as Operation Leech.
Their trial lawyer, Akshay Sharma, speaking exclusively to DVB in Delhi yesterday, said that use of the plea bargain – a predominantly western legal concept – was exceptionally rare in India, but was beneficial to all parties.
Moreover, human rights lawyer and chief advocate on the case, Nandita Haksar, said that “the Indian intelligence community are on trial here”. Indeed an intelligence officer, speaking under condition of anonymity, was quoted in the Indian press several months after the incident as saying that defense authorities were “deliberately adopting dilatory tactics”.
The implications of guilt for the Indian security services appeared in court after a 10-year wait for a single charge sheet to be produced, with evidence that Sharma said was “full of discrepancies”.
Key evidence such as the serial numbers of the supposedly smuggled weapons did not match, whilst “security reasons” stopped the Indian security services from bringing the explosives that the accused were charged with possessing to the Kolkata trial.
Lawyers have therefore suggested that the 12-year wait for a verdict and the “grey areas” have likely induced both prosecution and defence to for the plea bargain. One of the most telling of these “grey areas” was the failure by India’s own Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to produce key witnesses, such Colonel Grewal, the initial contact person for the freedom fighters. This was despite requests by the Indian state’s primary investigative bodies to produce this witness.
While the acquittal of the weapons smuggling charges has been “beneficial”, Haksar claimed that they conceal an ugly truth; a “hypocrisy” at the heart of Indian democracy. For whilst the 34 may soon walk free, it is now corroborated that the Indian security services have the blood of at least six Burmese rebels on their hands, while two more who were under custody “disappeared” during the course of the trial.
Their disappearance appears to be a misnomer when one considers the severity of the initial charges the Burmese were accused of. The charge of ‘waging war against the Indian state’ – a similar indictment to one brought on the Mumbai bombers – carries the maximum penalty of death, but they still managed to disappear, and no-one seems able to divulge their whereabouts, or indeed whether they are still alive. Moreoever, one of the early trial lawyers, T. Vasnatha, was murdered in what Sharma believes was an act of the Indian intelligence services.
KABUL, Afghanistan — A Pakistani-based militant group identified with attacks on Indian targets has expanded its operations in Afghanistan, inflicting casualties on Afghans and Indians alike, setting up training camps, and adding new volatility to relations between India and Pakistan.
The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is believed to have planned or executed three major attacks against Indian government employees and private workers in Afghanistan in recent months, according to Afghan and international intelligence officers and diplomats here. It continues to track Indian development workers and others for possible attack, they said.
Lashkar was behind the synchronized attacks on several civilian targets in Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed. Its inroads in Afghanistan provide a fresh indication of its growing ambitions to confront India even beyond the disputed territory of Kashmir, for which Pakistan’s military and intelligence services created the group as a proxy force decades ago.
Officially, Pakistan says it no longer supports or finances the group. But Lashkar’s expanded activities in Afghanistan, particularly against Indian targets, prompt suspicions that it has become one of Pakistan’s proxies to counteract India’s influence in the country.
They provide yet another indicator of the extent to which Pakistani militants are working to shape the outcome of the Afghan war as the July 2011 deadline approaches to begin withdrawing American troops.
Some intelligence officials say it is also possible that factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means “army of the pure,” have broken from their onetime handlers and are working more independently, though Indian and Afghan authorities say the focus on Indian targets is being interpreted as a direct challenge from Pakistan.
“Our concern is that there are still players involved that are trying to use Afghanistan’s ground as a place for a proxy war,” said Shaida Abdali, Afghanistan’s deputy national security adviser. “It is being carried out by certain state actors to fight their opponents.”
A number of experts now say Lashkar presents more of a threat in Afghanistan than even Al Qaeda does, because its operatives are from the region, less readily identified and less resented than the Arabs who make up Al Qaeda’s ranks. There were a few Lashkar cells in Afghanistan three or four years ago, but they were not focused on Indian targets and, until recently, their presence seemed to be diminishing.
A recent Pentagon report to Congress on Afghanistan listed Lashkar as one of the major extremist threats here. In Congressional testimony in March by Pakistan experts, the group was described as having ambitions well beyond India.
“They are active now in six or eight provinces” in Afghanistan, said a senior NATO intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak publicly on the subject.
“They are currently most interested in Indian targets here, but they can readily trade attacks on international targets for money or influence or an alliance with other groups,” he said.
Lashkar’s capabilities, terrorism experts say, have grown in recent years, since the group relocated many of its operations to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it trades intelligence, training and expertise with other militant groups, including Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the insurgent network run by Siraj Haqqani, also a longtime asset of Pakistan.
“A lot of hard-liners have broken away from LeT and gone to North and South Waziristan,” said a Pakistani intelligence official, using an acronym for Lashkar-e-Taiba. “There are a number of splinter groups that are much more radical. The problem is not LeT per se, it’s the elements of LeT that have broken away and found their place in Waziristan.”
In that lawless expanse on the Afghan border, security officials said, Lashkar could help other militant groups plan complex attacks against Afghan and international targets, possibly in exchange for reconnaissance on Indian targets from its militant allies who have operatives in Afghanistan.
The Indian targets are easy enough to find. Since the overthrow of the Taliban government by American and international forces in 2001, India has poured about a billion dollars’ worth of development aid into Afghanistan, including the construction of the new Afghan Parliament and several major electricity and road projects.
It has also revitalized consulates in four of Afghanistan’s major cities — Herat, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar — fueling Pakistani fears of encirclement by hostile neighbors and suspicions that India is using Afghanistan as a listening post for intelligence gathering.
“What does an Indian consulate do in Afghanistan when there is no Indian population?” asked a Pakistani intelligence official, who also alleged that the Indians were providing funds, ammunition and explosives to the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas, smuggling it through Afghanistan. The Indians dismiss the allegations.
“It’s a matter of faith, that’s fixed in Pakistan’s thinking, that India will take every opportunity to put Pakistan at a disadvantage,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a senior analyst at the Middle East Institute, who testified before Congress in March about the mounting danger posed by Lashkar.
India supported an alliance of fighters in northern Afghanistan against the Taliban when the Taliban — a Pakistan ally — governed Afghanistan, and it maintains close relations with the alliance’s former commanders, Mr. Weinbaum and others noted. The relationship adds to Pakistani fears that India will turn to proxies of its own in Afghanistan once the United States leaves.
Pakistan, meanwhile, has continued to allow Afghan Taliban leaders and other fighters battling NATO forces to base themselves in Pakistan. The intent seems to be to retain ties to those who might one day return to power in Afghanistan or exercise influence there.
One indication of Lashkar’s presence in Afghanistan came on April 8, when a joint American-Afghan Special Operations force killed nine militants and captured one after a firefight in Nangarhar Province, in eastern Afghanistan. All of them were Pakistani and “a concentration of them were LeT,” according to a senior American military official.
Lashkar is believed to have orchestrated the Feb. 26 car bombing and suicide attack on two guesthouses in the heart of Kabul frequented by Indians. An attack on a shopping center and bank in downtown Kabul in January also suggested Lashkar’s influence.
Both attacks bore some resemblance to those in Mumbai. They involved meticulous planning and multiple targets, and in the case of the guesthouses, Indian targets. Also, multiple attackers were coordinated by people outside the country on cellphones during the attacks.
Witnesses told investigators that the attackers at one guesthouse came in shouting, “Where is the head Indian doctor?”
Hanif Atmar, the interior minister who resigned this month, lost three police on the day of that attack. He said at least two of the attackers had been speaking Urdu, a language found in Pakistan and parts of India. “They were not Afghans,” he said.
“What we know for sure is that it was planned, financed, organized, and that people trained for it, outside Afghanistan,” he said. “Over the past six months more than four attacks in Kabul had suicide bombers with telephones that we recovered with active numbers that were from Pakistan.”
Several intelligence experts here said they doubted that Lashkar could have done the guesthouse attack alone. Lashkar operatives would have needed help to get into Afghanistan, a place to stay, weapons, explosive materials, vehicles and an opportunity to carry out reconnaissance on their targets, they noted.
The most likely partner, they said, would have been the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan, has links to Al Qaeda, and is believed to have carried out a number of attacks of its own in Kabul.
Lashkar, in conjunction with Afghan extremist groups, was also believed to be involved in the Oct. 8, 2009, attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, which killed 17 people, and the Dec. 15 attack in front of the Heetal Hotel, which killed 8. At the time of the hotel attack, nearly two dozen Indian engineers were staying either in the hotel or in a building next door.
Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.
By Karin Brulliard Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, May 28, 2010; A14
LAHORE, PAKISTAN -- The latest standoff between India and Pakistan features familiar elements: perceived Indian injustices, calls to arms by Pakistani extremists. But this dispute centers on something different: water.
Militant organizations traditionally focused on liberating Indian-held Kashmir have adopted water as a rallying cry, accusing India of strangling upstream rivers to desiccate downstream farms in Pakistan's dry agricultural heartland. This spring, a religious leader suspected of links to the 2008 Mumbai attacks led a protest here of thousands of farmers driving tractors and carrying signs warning: "Water Flows or Blood." The cleric, Hafiz Sayeed, recently told worshipers that India was guilty of "water terrorism."
India and Pakistan have pledged to improve relations. But Sayeed's water rhetoric, echoed in shrill headlines on both sides of the border, encapsulates two issues that threaten those fragile peace efforts -- an Indian dam project on the shared Indus River and Pakistan's reluctance to crack down on Sayeed.
It also signals the expanding ambitions of Punjab-based militant groups such as the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba, founded by Sayeed, through an issue that touches millions who live off Pakistan's increasingly arid land.
Pakistan's water supply is dwindling because of climate change, outdated farming techniques and an exploding population. Now Pakistan says India is exacerbating its woes by violating the treaty that for 50 years has governed use of water originating in Kashmir.
India denies the charge, and its ambassador to Pakistan recently called the water theft allegations "preposterous." International water experts say that there is little evidence India is diverting water from Pakistan but that Pakistan is right to feel vulnerable because its water is downstream of India's.
Washington has pressured the two nations to settle their differences. India and Pakistan have fought three major wars, and the conflict has kept much of Pakistan's army focused eastward, not on Islamist insurgents. India wants Pakistan to target India-focused militants, and it is outraged that Sayeed -- whose sermons often call for jihad against India -- remains free. India blamed the Mumbai attacks on Lashkar-i-Taiba.
Yet even as the nations' civilian leaders were building bridges, Pakistan's military underscored the perceived Indian threat last month with large-scale military exercises near the border. With the Kashmir liberation struggle waning in Pakistan's public consciousness, some analysts say Sayeed's use of the water issue demonstrates his long-standing links to Pakistan's powerful security establishment, elements of which do not favor peacemaking.
"Hafiz Sayeed is trying to echo the establishment's line," said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of security studies at Qaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. "The government is trying to shift the focus of Kashmir as part of a jihadist thing . . . to an existential issue."
Hydroelectric projects
Politics aside, experts say, Pakistan's water situation is reaching crisis proportions. As the population has grown over six decades, per-capita water availability has dropped by more than two-thirds. About 90 percent of the water is used for agriculture, making it an economic lifeline but leaving little for human consumption.
Inefficient irrigation and drainage techniques have degraded soil and worsened shortages, forcing many small farmers to pump for groundwater. A severe electricity crisis means most rely on diesel-powered pumps, but fuel prices are rising, said M. Ibrahim Mughal, head of Agri Forum, a farmers' advocacy group.
"You can't do agriculture without water," he said. "What will happen? Hunger."
The Indus Waters Treaty, which India and Pakistan signed in 1960, gave each country unfettered access to three rivers and limited rights to the other nation's rivers. A joint commission oversees the treaty, which water experts say has worked fairly well.
Cooperation has frayed as water has grown scarcer and India has stepped up new hydroelectric projects in Kashmir. Those plans have raised alarm in Pakistan, where newspapers and politicians regularly accuse India of secret designs to weaken its enemy by diverting water. Pakistan's Indus Water Commissioner, Jamaat Ali Shah, said his country believes that one proposed Indian dam on the Kishanganga, an Indus tributary, violates the treaty by making Pakistan's own plans for a hydroelectric project downstream unworkable.
"Candidness and transparency should be there. It is not," Shah said.
In a speech last month, India's ambassador to Pakistan, Sharat Sabharwal, said Pakistan has not detailed its complaints. Pakistan's water problems are attributable to factors including climatic conditions, he said, and blaming India was meant to "inflame public passions."
'Water declaration'
That is exactly what Sayeed is trying to do, according to Yahya Mujahid, a spokesman for the radical cleric's Islamic charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The charity, which the United States and India call a front for Lashkar-i-Taiba, recently sponsored the farmer protest and released a "water declaration" alleging that India had "virtually declared war on Pakistan by unlawfully constructing dams and diverting Pakistani rivers."
Lashkar-i-Taiba has taken its fight against India beyond the disputed terrain of Kashmir to stage attacks in Afghanistan and work with militant organizations in Pakistan's northwest. But Sayeed has typically sought to uphold the group's Kashmir-focused reputation, making water a bit of a departure. Mujahid said Sayeed is helping desperate farmers pressure the government to solve their problems, not inciting jihad. But peace talks are unlikely to help, he said.
The dispute has hard-liners in both countries predicting war, alarming observers who say what should be a technical issue has veered into dangerous terrain.
John Briscoe, a Harvard professor and former World Bank water specialist in Pakistan and India, said allegations of India's "water robbery" are unfounded. But because India could influence river flows into Pakistan, he said, the wisest solution would be for India to initiate talks and perhaps call for a permanent neutral party to implement the treaty.
"On the Indian side, the last thing I would want to come into India-Pakistan relations is an issue as visceral as water," Briscoe said. But, he added, "it's all about politics and political will."
Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.
Can a battle of the bands help end a brutal insurgency in India?
By Jeremy Kahn
Image credit: Sanjit Das
The young man warming his hands over a bucket of coals looks nervous. He opens his mouth wide, like a python swallowing a deer, then snaps it shut. “I’m trying to relax my jaw,” Lui Tzudir says. Tzudir is the 26-year-old front man for an alternative-rockband called Original Fire Factor, or OFF. Huddled nearby, the band’s two guitarists—one with dreadlocks, the other with headbanger-long hair—tune and retune their instruments while the drummer beats out a rhythm on the back of a chair. In little clusters around the cold, concrete room, other bands perform similar preshow rituals. The air smells of adrenaline, like a locker room before a high-school track meet.
The members of OFF look like the sort of Asian cool kids you might find jamming in a garage in Palo Alto or Seoul—but those places are worlds away. I am backstage at the Hornbill National Rock Contest, a battle of the bands held each December in Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, a forgotten corner of northeast India near the border with Burma. The contest seeks to crown India’s best unsigned rock act. For OFF and the other bands, winning means $10,000 and a chance at national recognition—perhaps even a record deal. But the stakes are higher for the state government, which set up the competition. It is betting that rock and roll might help end one of the longest-running insurgencies in Asia.
The rock contest is a modern addition to the larger Hornbill cultural festival, a kind of anthropological fair designed to showcase the folkways of the Nagas, the 30 or so related tribes that inhabit this region of mist-and-jungle-clad hills. The Nagas once had a fearsome reputation as warriors and headhunters. (At the festival, men of the Konyak tribe wear distinctive family heirlooms called yanra—necklaces strung with little human heads made of brass, one for every enemy decapitated in battle.) They resisted British rule until 1880, when they reached an uneasy accommodation with the colonial administration. As the British prepared to leave after World War II, the Nagas sought to establish their own country, and when neither London nor the newly independent India consented, they started an armed insurrection that has lasted 55 years, claiming thousands of lives. Today, convoys of the Assam Rifles—the Indian paramilitary force whose heavy-handed tactics have turned its motto, “Friends of the Hill People,” into an Orwellian joke—patrol Kohima with their faces hidden by black scarves, assault rifles at the ready.
Ending the insurgency is a priority for New Delhi. Naga tribes have become involved in rebellions in other northeastern states, and their example has encouraged other ethnic groups in the region to take up arms. India’s strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, have at times helped to arm and train the Naga rebels, using them as proxy fighters.
But a lasting peace settlement has proved elusive, and with the conflict deadlocked, the rebels have resorted to drug-running, kidnapping, extortion, and fratricidal killings among splinter groups. The violence has scared off desperately needed outside investment. The state’s only heavy industry, a paper mill, shut down in 1992, and nothing has taken its place. (Signs lining the route to the festival promote gathering honey from the forest as “sustainable development.”) With a population of just 2 million, Nagaland has 40,000 unemployed secondary-school graduates—offering the rebels a pool of angry young men without other prospects. In rural villages, the insurgents simply draft farmers’ sons into their ranks.
The members of OFF claim to care little about the separatist movement or its dream of an independent Greater Nagaland. “We are meant to believe certain things,” Tzudir says. “But the younger generation are not interested.”
Nagaland’s popular chief minister, Neiphiu Rio, wants to give these young Nagas alternatives. He has quixotic dreams of turning Kohima into India’s answer to Nashville or Motown. The rock contest is part of that plan. It is designed to connect Nagaland’s musicians to the outside world and, just maybe, to help reconcile feuding Naga tribes. “Any festival brings people together,” Rio tells me. “And when they start working together, moving together, doing things together, that brings people closer and brings understanding and unity.”
Tzudir and his band mates remain cynical. (“It’s nonsense,” Akum Aier, OFF’s long-haired bassist, says when I ask him about a new peace overture from the Indian government.) And yet, in one respect, Rio’s plan is already working. The guys in OFF don’t feel compelled to join an underground faction, and they are beginning to see rock and roll as a ticket out of Nagaland.
The question is: Where to go? Young Nagas feel alienated from “mainland India,” as they call the rest of the country. Most Nagas look East Asian, not South Asian, and those who travel to other Indian cities for education or work sometimes face discrimination or assault. Nagas speak English or Nagamese, not Hindi. They prefer Korean pop or American death metal to Bollywood or Bhangra. In a nation of Hindus, Jains, and Muslims, most Nagas are Baptist, thanks to American missionaries who ventured here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Every morning, I get up wishing I had been born somewhere else,” a 31-year-old engineer confesses to me during a party one night in Kohima.
OFF opens its first set at the festival with “Free Me,” a song that captures this longing for escape and the impossibility of realizing it: “Take me to some place where I can never be / Where I’ll become who I was meant to be,” Tzudir sings, his face aglow in multicolored stage lights. “Politics and sermons, you can’t move me.”
It is sometimes said that the Nagas have lived “10,000 years in a lifetime.” And on the competition’s last night, all 10,000 years seem to go by in a glance: girls in skinny jeans furiously thumb text messages while rubbing shoulders with guys in loincloths and headdresses who carry machetes and wicker baskets decorated with monkey skulls. Thousands of teenagers pack the outdoor amphitheater. The crowd is raucous, fueled by copious local rice beer. A wave of delighted screams washes over OFF, among the hometown favorites, as they take the stage. Throughout their set, fans in the front leap up and down like the colored balls in a toy corn popper.
When the machine-generated fog of rock war finally lifts, OFF emerges as the winner. “We still can’t believe it,” Tzudir texts me from backstage. The next morning I ask him what the band plans to do with the prize money. “Most will go to paying off the loans on our instruments,” Tzudir says, his voice still hoarse. “Then to make a recording of our songs and maybe upload it to the Net, or something like that.”
For a moment, it is easy to believe in the transformative power of rock and roll. The leaders of the largest Naga rebel faction recently met with top Indian officials, and both sides say they are serious about reaching a settlement. But they remain far apart on the details—and in Nagaland, gunfire has a way of drowning out a rocking bass line.
NEW DELHI — India’s campaign against the country’s Maoist insurgency suffered a major setback on Tuesday when rebel fighters ambushed a paramilitary unit on patrol in an isolated forest region, killing at least 73 officers.
The authorities described a carefully executed surprise attack in which the Maoists opened fire as the patrol entered an area seeded with booby-trap bombs. When officers fell to the ground to take cover from gunfire, they detonated the explosives.
“Something has gone very wrong,” said Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, according to the news agency Press Trust of India. “I am deeply shocked.”
He said the attack by the Maoist fighters showed the “brutality and the savagery they are capable of.”
The attack comes as the government is mobilizing security forces against the Maoists in a multistate campaign known as Operation Green Hunt. The Maoists, also known as Naxalites, have existed in India for four decades and claim to represent the interests of the rural dispossessed who have not shared in India’s economic progress. Once lightly regarded by the government, the Maoists have expanded across a large rural corridor and now exercise outright control over some isolated, mountain regions. Maoist propaganda calls for overthrowing the Indian state.
The goal of the government operation is to push the Maoists out of more populated rural areas and isolate them in certain remote mountain regions. Maoist sympathizers have accused the government of brutalizing and killing innocent villagers as security forces sweep through rural areas to root out rebel fighters.
Officials say the Maoists are the ones who brutalize, having disrupted schools and hospitals and destroyed roads in many areas; the security campaign calls for clearing areas of rebels so that government services can be restored.
By some unofficial estimates, roughly 200 security officers have been killed by Maoists during the past 12 months. The operation involves multiple federal and state security agencies, and some analysts have questioned whether poor coordination and training is exposing officers to danger. On Sunday, Maoists detonated a land mine in the state of Orissa, killing 10 officers and wounding 16 others. Last month, the Maoists blew up a railroad track, forcing the minor derailment of a passenger train. And in February, about 100 Maoists on motorcycles stormed a police outpost in the state of West Bengal, killing 24 security officers.
The attack on Tuesday occurred in the Dantewada region in the state of Chhattisgarh, in an area known as Chintalnar, considered a major Maoist stronghold. The officers were members of the Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary unit, who entered the forest on Sunday night for a two-day mission related to the government operation.
T. J. Longkumar, the Chhattisgarh police inspector general for the larger region, said the officers were returning to camp after an early morning patrol when the Maoists struck around 6:30 a.m. Officer Longkumar said he did not know how many fighters had attacked, but Indian news outlets reported that as many as 1,000 Maoists were involved.
“They were blasted,” Officer Longkumar said. “Most of the casualties were from the explosives.”
He said the attack was probably a response to security forces pressing deeper into isolated areas once completely controlled by the Maoists. “They have regrouped,” he said. “They feel we are entering their core area.”
Asia forms the crossroads of success or failure for Barack Obama's grandest foreign policy designs. This impression has crystallized over a year in which the president has shown himself indifferent to Europe, sentimental and somewhat conflicted about Africa, perplexed by the Middle East and largely oblivious to Latin America.
Obama's choices about China, India, Japan and Pakistan loom at least as large as the urgent challenges of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president has outlined the need for the United States to shed burdens abroad to help repair the badly damaged American economy. That means that Obama must settle discarded U.S. burdens -- and power -- across a range of international organizations in which Asian nations are becoming increasingly influential.
The president consigned the Group of Eight industrial countries to leadership oblivion in his recent State of the Union message, omitting any mention of it while singling out the G-20 forum of developed and developed nations. This was no oversight: His administration hopes to shift climate change negotiations out of the unmanageable U.N. format that doomed the Copenhagen summit in December and place these talks in the G-20 process, according to U.S. officials.
Asia's giants, India and China, present differing and opposed models of international cooperation. A G-20 world needs at its center a dynamic U.S.-Indian relationship to help bridge that organization's divides between haves and have-nots and their different political systems. But here in New Delhi, Indian officials increasingly fear that the Obama team does not see it that way.
Indians are flattered that the only state dinner Obama hosted last year was given for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose remarkable intelligence and gracious manner would make him a welcome guest anywhere. But they also detect an air of ambivalence blowing their way from Washington -- and are reacting by hedging against a quick U.S. pullout from Afghanistan that would bring greater U.S. reliance on China and Pakistan, at India's expense.
Romanced by the Bush administration to balance China's inexorable rise in military and economic power, India finds itself out of sync with the Obama administration on some key issues. There is no open conflict. But neither is there the air of excitement and innovation about the U.S. relationship that I found on my last trip here 18 months ago.
Since then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has explicitly rejected balance-of-power politics as a relic of the past. Yet India, Japan and other Asian states fear that without a supportive U.S. hand on the scales, they will be swamped by China's growing military capabilities and its increasingly aggressive, and effective, diplomacy.
The somewhat fanciful notion of a G-2 directorate in which the United States and China collude to determine global economic and political direction is increasingly colliding with reality. Tensions over Taiwan, trade and Tibet make the G-2 unworkable, as recent events have again shown. But the specter lingers for Asians as well as Europeans that Obama will be tempted to try -- even though a failed G-2 would be the worst possible outcome for everyone.
"The G-2 carries the implication that the United States would leave Asia to China to run," says B.J. Panda, a rising young political star here. Adds another Indian strategist: "We have to balance the Chinese, irrespective of what the U.S. and others do."
Obama's emphasis on setting an initial date for withdrawal from Afghanistan in his Dec. 1 policy speech, even as he sent additional U.S. troops, stirred doubt here about U.S. strategic patience. So have the frequent U.S. military visits to and overblown praise for Pakistan's army leadership, despite credible evidence of high-level Pakistani involvement in cross-border terrorism directed at India.
The dominant impression from three days of informal conversations organized here by the Aspen Strategy Group with Indian officials and analysts is that Pakistan has become a second-tier problem for India, even as it increasingly preoccupies Washington. What one Indian analyst described as "Obama's nuclear alarmism" also gives Pakistan increased leverage over Washington.
India has recently moved troops away from the Pakistan frontier while increasing deployments into border areas that China is claiming in pugnacious and offensive rhetoric. In a break with its past opposition to foreign bases in the region, India has secured military transit and stationing rights at an airbase in Tajikistan. And Singh's government lavishly welcomed Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, on a recent three-day visit that included publicity about plans for joint military maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.
These are clear signs of Indian hedging: seeking allies for worst-case scenarios while accommodating China on economic matters. The Obama administration's failure to reaffirm clearly that India's rise is in U.S. strategic interests has contributed to this hedging. That is a mistake the president should quickly correct, in the interests of his own vision of a new world order centered on the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Think for a moment about which countries cause the most global consternation. Afghanistan. Iran. Venezuela. North Korea. Pakistan. Perhaps rising China. But India? Surely not. In the popular imagination, the world's largest democracy evokes Gandhi, Bollywood, and chicken tikka. In reality, however, it's India that often gives global governance the biggest headache.
Of course, India gets marvelous press. Feature stories from there typically bring to life Internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers, and gurus keeping spiritual traditions alive while lovingly bridging Eastern and Western cultures.
But something is left out of the cheery picture. For all its business acumen and the extraordinary creativity unleashed in the service of growth, today's India is an international adolescent, a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence. India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness, so enchanting on a personal level, turns out to be anything but when it comes to the country's international relations. On crucial matters of global concern, from climate change to multilateral trade, India all too often just says no.
India, first and foremost, believes that the world's rules don't apply to it. Bucking an international trend since the Cold War, successive Indian governments have refused to sign nuclear testing and nonproliferation agreements -- accelerating a nuclear arms race in South Asia. (India's second nuclear tests in 1998 led to Pakistan's decision to detonate its own nuclear weapons.)
Once the pious proponent of a nuclear-free world, New Delhi today maintains an attitude of "not now, not ever" when it comes to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As defense analyst Matthew Hoey recently wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "India's behavior has been comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia."
Not only does India reject existing treaties, but it also deep-sixes international efforts to develop new ones. In 2008, India single-handedly foiled the last Doha round of global trade talks, an effort to nail together a global deal that almost nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most. "I reject everything," declared Kamal Nath, then the Indian commerce and industry minister, after grueling days and sleepless nights of negotiations in Geneva in the summer of 2008.
On climate change, India has been no less intransigent. In July, India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, pre-emptively told U.S. Secretary of StateHillary Clinton five months before the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen that India, a fast-growing producer of greenhouse gases, would flat-out not accept binding carbon emissions targets.
India happily attacks individuals, as well as institutions and treaty talks. As ex-World Bank staffers have revealed in interviews with Indian media, India worked behind the scenes to help push Paul Wolfowitz out of the World Bank presidency, not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds.
By the time a broad investigation had ended -- and Robert Zoellick had become the new World Bank president -- a whopping $600 million had been diverted, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from projects that would have served the Indian poor through malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and drug-quality improvement programs. Calling the level of fraud "unacceptable," Zoellick later sent a flock of officials to New Delhi to work with the Indian government in investigating the accounts. In a 2009 interview with the weekly India Abroad, former bank employee Steve Berkman said the level of corruption among Indian officials was "no different than what I've seen in Africa and other places."
India certainly affords its citizens more freedoms than China, but it is hardly a liberal democratic paradise. India limits outside assistance to nongovernmental organizations and most educational institutions. It restricts the work of foreign scholars (and sometimes journalists) and bans books. Last fall, India refused to allow Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan journalists to attend a workshop on environmental journalism.
India also regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates. In 2003, India denied a visa to the head of Amnesty International, Irene Khan. Although no official reason was given, it was likely a punishment for Amnesty's critical stance on the government's handling of Hindu attacks that killed as many as 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat the previous year. Most recently, a delegation from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a congressionally mandated body, was denied Indian visas. In the past, the commission had called attention to attacks on both Muslims and Christians in India.
Nor does New Delhi stand up for freedom abroad. In the U.N. General Assembly and the U.N. Human Rights Council, India votes regularly with human rights offenders, international scofflaws, and enemies of democracy. Just last year, after Sri Lanka had pounded civilians held hostage by the Tamil Tigers and then rounded up survivors of the carnage and put them in holding camps that have drawn universal opprobrium, India joined China and Russia in subverting a human rights resolution suggesting a war crimes investigation and instead backed a move that seemed to congratulate the Sri Lankans.
David Malone, Canada's high commissioner in New Delhi from 2006 to 2008 and author of a forthcoming book, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, says that, when it comes to global negotiations, "There's a certain style of Indian diplomacy that alienates debating partners, allies, and opponents." And looking forward? India craves a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, seeking greater authority in shaping the global agenda. But not a small number of other countries wonder what India would do with that power. Its petulant track record is the elephant in the room.
A new generation of Kashmiris is weary of five decades of tensions over the future of this Himalayan region, which has been a flash point for India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers that claim Kashmir as their own.
But Kashmiris have been caught in the diplomatic dilemma facing the Obama administration as it tries to persuade Pakistan to take on a stronger role fighting Islamist extremists and simultaneously seeks to improve relations with India, Pakistan's arch foe.
Many Kashmiris celebrated when President Obama took office nearly a year ago, because he seemed to favor a more robust approach to bring stability to Kashmir, where human rights groups estimate that as many as 100,000 people have died in violence and dozens of Pakistan-backed militant groups have sprung up. At one point, the Obama administration contemplated appointing former president Bill Clinton as a special envoy to the region.
But now residents say they are disappointed, complaining that Obama has not engaged on Kashmir other that to say recently that the region's fate is in the hands of India and Pakistan alone.
"When Obama came, there was so much hope to reclaim those happy times in Kashmir. But when it comes to human rights, we feel really let down. It's been nothing more than election rhetoric," said Pervez Imroz, a Kashmiri lawyer and head of a coalition of civil society groups.
Low-key approach
But analysts say Obama is working behind the scenes, treading a careful diplomatic path.
The Obama administration is supporting the Indian government's talks, or what it calls "quiet diplomacy," with Kashmiri separatists groups to discuss options such as greater autonomy and demilitarization of the region. The talks are seen in India's capital and in Kashmir as a key development, with dialogue about the future of the region continuing even though attacks in Mumbai last year have derailed talks between India and Pakistan.
"Washington fears that any overt American interference in Kashmir could backfire and set back warming relations between India and the U.S.," said Howard B. Schaffer, a retired Foreign Service official who is an expert on South Asia and author of "The Limits of Influence: America's Role in Kashmir." Any mention of appointing a special envoy for Kashmir, he said, is "viewed as toxic waste in India."
The Obama administration's apparent low-key approach to Kashmir belies the region's importance to the U.S. campaign against terrorism. The population here -- 10 million, as of the 2001 census -- is predominantly Muslim, and Islamist militants have tried to recruit followers in the region. But in recent years, most Kashmiris have said they just want a return to peace.
Even more important for U.S. interests, though, is calming the ongoing tension between India and Pakistan over the region so that the Pakistani military can turn more of its attention to helping root out al-Qaeda members and other militants who have used isolated regions of Pakistan as a base for operations against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Easing tensions would also allow Pakistan to move more forcefully against Lashkar-i-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group implicated in the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, India's financial capital, which killed 165 people. India says the group is also smuggling fighters into Kashmir.
But some Kashmiris want more from Washington. 'U.S. has to engage'
"The Obama administration and India can't hide behind Mumbai. The U.S. has to engage with both India and Pakistan," said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference, a separatist coalition. "If this opportunity is missed, all the ingredients are there for the cycle of violence to start again."
Human rights groups accuse India's government of killing civilians in its crackdown on militants.
"We want Washington to speak out against these tragedies," Imroz, the lawyer, said. "There has only been silence."
In recent years, violence between militants and the Indian army has largely decreased. A new generation of Kashmiris has said it is committed to a nonviolent freedom movement.
But Kashmiris still grow angry at perceived wrongs. Protesters filled the streets this month after India's top investigating agency ruled that two young village women thought to have been raped and killed in the summer had drowned in a mountain stream.
Many here view the findings as a cover-up to protect the Kashmiri officers working for Indian security forces. Others say the initial investigation was fabricated to frame security forces.
Such incidents highlight the fragility of Kashmir's peace and scare off potential investors in projects such as Ansari's call center that could provide a sense of normalcy for many.
He and others here worry that without a political solution soon, the region's youths will grow restless and turn once again to militancy.
"We need to divert young minds from this conflict," Ansari said, sitting in a cafe where rock music mixed with the hiss of a cappuccino machine. "But our problem in Kashmir is that conflict keeps Kashmir Valley from turning into a Silicon Valley. Our talent pool is great. People are scared to invest here. We want them to come to Kashmir with an open heart."
By William Wan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 25, 2009; A01
As the choir launched into the Christmas song, Betty Leach sat in her pew and stared at the words on the page, trying to make sense of them. "Puttenesudu nedu," the Indian parishioners all around her sang.
At 79, she has passed more than four decades' worth of Christmases at this Silver Spring church. She brought her children here and her children's children. But now as the congregation broke into song, Leach couldn't begin to pronounce the words or translate their meaning: Jesus is born today. Instead, the bespectacled grandmother resigned herself to humming along.
After years of holiday tradition -- the "O Holy Nights," the turkey and gravy galore -- Christmas has undergone a dramatic makeover for Leach and two dozen other longtime parishioners. Now they celebrate with plates of goat curry with rice, folk songs from halfway around the world, and a people and culture they are only starting to understand.
This is what happens when you take two congregations -- a predominantly white church in desperate need of new members and a booming Indian church desperate for space -- and blend them together. The result at the now merged Memorial First India United Methodist Church is a study in frustration, joy, struggle and, above all, grace. And Christmas has become a chance for everyone involved to live out the season's themes of unity and peace amid what has turned out to be an unusual and sometimes complicated relationship.
* * *
Although many churches share their space with other congregations, full church mergers remain rare. Some experts estimate that 1 percent of Protestant churches merge each year. Two congregations so ethnically distinct agreeing to merge was a first for the denomination in this region.
Since the two churches -- First India and Memorial United -- joined together three years ago, the combined Sunday services, conducted mostly in English, have become a balancing act between the two worlds. And the man doing most of the juggling is the Rev. Samuel Honnappa, the church's diplomatic, soft-spoken pastor.
"Every Sunday is a big challenge," said Honnappa, 60, who is careful to choose someone from the Indian congregation and the original church to do the scripture readings each week. He also makes sure representatives from both groups serve on all the planning committees.
Even the church's decor reflects the delicate position in which it now operates. On one side of the simply adorned altar is the American flag; on the other, the Indian flag.
Two choirs perform during services: a small English choir and a larger choir that sings strictly in Telugu, the language in Andhra Pradesh, from where most of the Indians come.
Three Indians have joined the English choir to try to bridge the gap, but it's been harder to get the English-only members of the congregation to join the Telugu choir.
"We started printing the Telugu hymns out phonetically, so people can at least sing along on Sundays," Honnappa said. "A lot of them really do try to make the same sounds, but I know it's hard for them."
For Leach, adjusting to the food has been even more challenging. At the new church's first holiday dinner, Leach recalls getting a spoonful of an exotically fragrant green bean dish.
"Try this one," they told her, "it's not too spicy."
She took one bite and went running for a cup of water. "They told me later I was eating the little black pebbles they use to spice the food. 'Betty, you're not supposed to eat that!' they said. All I knew was it was hot!"
There have been adjustments on the Indian side as well.
"We have something called Indian time," Honnappa said. "If an Indian says 5 p.m., what they really mean is 6 p.m. I've had to remind some in the Indian congregation that to an American, 5 p.m. means 5 p.m."
An arranged marriage
For the aging Memorial congregation, the merger was a last-ditch effort to keep the building on Colesville Road where it had worshiped for more than half a century.
When the church was built in 1958, its modern architecture caused a stir with its sharp angles, bright colors and long windows of clear-paned glass. The spacious sanctuary was built with the future in mind, able to fit more than 400 people. But instead of growing, the congregation of more than 200 kept shrinking until only about 25 remained, depending on the week and the weather.
Some members moved or passed away. Others quietly left to join other churches -- a group that eventually included Leach's daughter and granddaughter.
The church tried canvassing for new members, baking raisin nut loaves for visitors, even direct-mail marketing. None of it made a dent.
"On some Sundays, you could fit the entire congregation into the first two rows," said John Roth, 68, a church trustee.
In 2006, the area's denominational leaders told Memorial United that it needed to find new blood or risk losing its church altogether.
That's when Roth and others were told about the Indian group renting a small chapel in Takoma Park. The congregation of more than 120 -- mostly young, professional families -- was practically bursting at the seams. Sunday school classes were being conducted in the hallway.
That first Sunday after the merger, the sanctuary was filled for the first time in years. The old Memorial congregation found itself sitting amid a sea of Indians in colorful saris and suits.
The Indians tried not to seem too excited, afraid of offending the longtime members. But their kids couldn't contain themselves, running through the halls, exploring every new nook and cranny.
Leach smiled at their enthusiasm. "It was odd, yes, but there was something electric in the air," she recalled. "It felt like the church was alive again."
Even with all the changes, Leach said, it still feels like her spiritual home. "This church has been my life. I'll stay here until the day I die."
It is a sentiment shared by Edith Mountjoy, 88, who was baptized in the church, married there, had her children baptized there and her father buried there. With her husband now deceased and her daughter in another state, the church is in many ways her family. "All my friends are there, and the Indian folk, we're all starting to get acquainted, too," she said.
This month, after one of her sons died of cancer, she arrived on Sunday morning and was greeted by the pastor's wife with a long, lingering hug. "Oh, my heart just feels for you," Rachel Samuel told her. Many of the Indian parishioners, people whose names Mountjoy couldn't always remember, told her that they were praying for her and embraced her. It has made this year's tough Christmas, she said, a little easier to bear. "I really needed all those hugs."
Grace and unity
Celebrating Christmas has been a unifying force for Memorial First India.
This year, members of both choirs joined for the first time to present a special holiday recital. Even the food at this week's Christmas dinner has been worked out to the satisfaction of all, with one table for fried chicken and lasagna and several others for slow-cooked lamb dishes, flatbreads and curries.
"It actually has gotten to the point where we have to keep our children from eating up all their American food," said Sukumar Christopher, 69, a founding member of the Indian congregation. "They get tired of the curry at home. All they want is to eat from the American table."
And almost everyone plans to attend the Christmas play, which the snow postponed until this weekend.
Together, they will look on as the children of the church reenact the Nativity scene, with Mary and Joseph wandering from inn to inn looking for someone to welcome them. It is a story that especially resonates among the Indian parishioners, who also searched hard for a place of their own. Now, they say, they've finally found it, alongside their new friends at Memorial United.
American universities are enrolling a new wave of Chinese undergraduates, according to the annual Open Doors report.
While India was, for the eighth consecutive year, the leading country of origin for international students — sending 103,260 students, a 9 percent increase over the previous year — China is rapidly catching up, sending 98,510 last year, a 21 percent increase.
“I think we’re going to be seeing 100,000 students from each for years to come, with an increasing share of them being undergraduates,” said Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the Institute of International Education, which publishes the report with support from the State Department.
Over all, the number of international students at colleges and universities in the United States increased by 8 percent to an all-time high of 671,616 in the 2008-9 academic year — the largest percentage increase in more than 25 years, according to the report.
With the current recession, the influx of international students has been especially important to the American economy, according to Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute.
“International education is domestic economic development,” Mr. Goodman said. “International students shop at the local Wal-Mart, rent rooms and buy food. Foreign students bring $17.8 billion to this country. A lot of campuses this year are increasing their international recruitment, trying to keep their programs whole by recruiting international students to fill their spaces.”
The number of international students exceeded the past peak enrollment year, 2002-3, by 14.5 percent. In 2008-9, undergraduate enrollment rose 11 percent, compared with only a 2 percent increase in graduate enrollment.
In China, that shift has been quite sharp. Last year, China sent 26,275 undergraduates and 57,451 graduate students to the United States — compared with 8,034 undergraduates and 50,976 graduate students five years earlier.
Ms. Blumenthal said the growing share of undergraduates would change the face of the Chinese students’ presence in the United States.
“It used to be that they were all in the graduate science departments, but now, with the one-child policy, more and more Chinese parents are taking their considerable wealth and investing it in that one child getting an American college education,” she said. “There’s a book getting huge play in China right now explaining liberal arts education.”
The book, “A True Liberal Arts Education,” by three Chinese undergraduates from Bowdoin College, Franklin & Marshall College and Bucknell University, describes the education available at small liberal arts colleges, and the concept of liberal arts, both relatively unknown in China.
Meanwhile, many large public universities are devoting new resources to building up their share of international undergraduates. The State University of New York, for example, recently made Mitch Leventhal the vice chancellor for global affairs. Mr. Leventhal, who at the University of Cincinnati helped build a network of ties abroad, expects to increase undergraduate recruiting, especially in India and China.
“There’s growing disposable income in China, and not enough good universities to meet the demand,” he said. “And in China, especially, studying in the United States is a great differentiator, because when students get home, they speak English.”
Although the report tracks only the 2008-9 numbers, a smaller survey by the institute last month found that over all, the increase in international students seems to be continuing, with China remaining strong. Of the institutions surveyed this fall, 60 percent reported an increase in Chinese students, and only 11 percent a decline. In contrast, the number of institutions reporting increases in their enrollment of Indian students equaled the number reporting declines.
The survey also found continuing growth this year in the number of students from the Middle East, and continuing declines in the numbers from Japan.
NEW DELHI: A majority 96% of women feel unsafe to venture out alone in the national capital, reveals a survey conducted by an organisation committed to the cause of women.
"If we as the citizens of India feel unsafe in Delhi, how can we make thousands of those coming from other nations during the 2010 Commonwealth Games feel safe and secure?" Co-founder of CEQUIN (Centre for Equity and Inclusion) Sara Pilot said.
"With the 'Make Delhi Safe' campaign, an initiative of our organisation along with the Delhi government, we aim at creating awareness and better preparedness towards making our city safe for us and our visitors," she added.
This city-centric campaign has the IPL team Delhi Dare Devils as its goodwill ambassador.
Virendra Sehwag, the goodwill ambassador for CEQUIN too shared his experiences of being witness to many gender based incidents in Delhi buses, which 82 per cent of the women regard as the most unsafe mode of transport in the city.
"I have travelled a lot in buses as a kid. So I know what all a woman goes through. It is every person's responsibility to make a woman feel safe, not just as a celebrity but as a proud citizen I stand up for this campaign," he said.
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