Nepal: Political turmoil looms over the peaks of the Himalayan Nation (Associated Press, 26 May 2011)

Courtesy: "Associated Press (AP)", 26 May 2011

Political turmoil looms over Nepal's peaks

By BINAJ GURUBACHARYA

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) -- Amongst Nepal's Himalayan peaks and glacier-fed rivers is a capital with only a few hours a week of running water. The country had no prime minister much of the past year, and risks having no government at all by the weekend.

Five years after the country's communist rebels gave up a bloody revolt to join a peace process - raising hopes of a new era of stability - the country is sinking deeper into political turmoil, leaving its dreams of becoming a modern Switzerland of the East unrealized.

Nepal went seven of the past 12 months without a prime minister because of a power struggle between the main political parties. They still haven't figured out what to do with the former insurgent fighters, many of whom are still confined to demobilization camps.

Ambassador Timothy Roemer says India Must Reform or Risks Slowdown (Wall Street Journal, 17 May 2011)

Courtesy: "Wall Street Journal (WSJ)", 17 May 2011
Roemer: India Must Reform or Risks Slowdown
By PAUL BECKETT

NEW DELHI—The U.S. ambassador to New Delhi said Tuesday that India needs to consider whether it is delivering on its side of the new close alliance with the U.S. and do more to tackle graft and encourage foreign investment or the nation's economic expansion risks losing steam.
"India needs to be asking itself: Is it delivering on the global partnership?" Timothy Roemer said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal as he prepares to leave the post next month and return to the U.S. "The international business community that was pouring money and investment potential into India last year and the year before is now pausing and saying: 'Where is India heading in terms of investment opportunities, the corruption challenge and inflation?'" If this perception doesn't change, he added, India could see downward revisions of as much as two percentage points to estimates for growth this year, considering the impact of higher oil prices and high inflation. Earlier this month, C. Rangarajan, chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory
Council, forecast Gross Domestic Product growth in the year ending March 31, 2012, of 8.5%, below the government's forecast of 9%, as a series of interest rate rises to combat high inflation crimps growth. A spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office had no immediate comment.
Foreign direct investment in India, after rising steadily for years, totaled $18.4 billion from April 2010 to February, down 25% from a year earlier, according to Indian government data, amid a series of corruption scandals that have paralyzed the government and a lack of progress on economic reforms that would make the market more attractive for foreign firms.
Mr. Roemer's warning comes after two years – his tenure in New Delhi -- in which the U.S. and India have, in many respects, dramatically expanded their cooperation and partnership on issues ranging from counter-terrorism to environmentally-friendly technology to coordination over regional policy in Afghanistan.
For decades since India's independence in 1947, the U.S. viewed India warily as the Indian government maintained strong ties with the former Soviet Union. But relations have warmed in the last decade, in part because the U.S. and India – the world's richest and largest democracies, respectively – see China as both a rising market and a rising threat. And the two nations have a mutual interest in combating violent Islamist extremism in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the U.S. and the 2008 terror attack on Mumbai.
Both countries have gone to some lengths to showcase the new alliance. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the guest for the first official state dinner of the Obama presidency in 2009. President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of the Indian parliament – and pledged support for India's efforts to gain a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council – during a visit here in November. "We've made tremendous progress in elevating this to a global partnership," Mr. Roemer said.
But several areas of friction remain. A high-profile deal on civilian nuclear technology that was years in the making was stymied by an Indian law that puts liability for nuclear accidents on equipment suppliers rather than channeling all liability to operators, which U.S. officials say is the international standard. The U.S. also has been pushing India to open its markets further in areas such as banking, insurance and retail – reforms that have long been discussed in New Delhi but never implemented.
"There's no doubt this needs to be a two-way street," Mr. Roemer said, adding it was "frustrating at times to be awaiting the next 'Finance Minister Singh move' to open up the markets as happened in 1991" – a reference to Mr. Singh's landmark reforms, when he served as finance minister two decades ago, to liberalize India's economy and ditch its centrally-planned socialist model.
"These steps would help America and American business truly help India and Indian consumers," Mr. Roemer said. "But India needs to step forward and do this not for American interests but for India and India's interests."
Among the biggest frustrations for the U.S. was India's recent decision not to shortlist two U.S.-made medium-range fighter jets in the global bid process for a contract estimated at about $10 billion. Instead, India's defense ministry selected two European-made jets as finalists. "We're going to continue to have a strategic defense relationship with India -- one deal won't make or break it – but to not have one of the U.S. companies make it to the final two or three is puzzling," Mr. Roemer said.
He added, however, that he expected an announcement in the next few weeks that the U.S., as reported, would win a roughly $4 billion contract for Boeing C-17 military transport aircraft, a deal that he said would support thousands of U.S. jobs. A spokesman for the Indian Air Force confirmed the deal is expected to happen soon.
Mr. Roemer, 54 years old, said he will leave the post early next month and expects his replacement to be named shortly. In his resignation statement, he said he was leaving for personal reasons. He also has been reported to be one of the candidates being considered to replace Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, who was chosen by Mr. Obama as the next ambassador to Beijing. Mr. Roemer declined to comment on that. He also noted that with two kids heading to college before long "the private sector certainly is an attractive potential path." Mr. Roemer was formerly a Congressman from Indiana.
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Indian Secularuism; Religion and the Public Sphere in India (Inter Press Service, 16 May 2011)

Courtesy: "Inter Press Service (IOS)", 16 May 2011
Religion and the Public Sphere in India
By Christophe Jaffrelot*
PARIS, May 16, 2011 (IPS) - In contrast to most South Asian countries, modern India has always been officially "secular", a word the country inscribed in its Constitution in 1976.
Secularism, here, is not synonymous with the French "laïcité", which demands strong separation of religion and the state. India's secularism does not require exclusion of religion from the public sphere. On the contrary, it implies recognition of all religions by the state.
This philosophy of inclusivity finds expression in one article of the Constitution by which all religious communities may set up schools that are eligible for state subsidies.
India's secularism, therefore, has more affinities with multiculturalism than with "laïcité". Its emphasis on pluralism parallels the robust parliamentary democracy and federalism that India has been cultivating for 64 years.

But today, secularism is in jeopardy in India. The main threat comes from the rise of Hindu militancy and its consequences not only for electoral politics, but also for the judiciary and society at large.
The rise of Hindu nationalism
The core belief of the Hindu nationalist movement, whose key organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was founded in 1925, is that the Indian identity is embodied in Hinduism, the oldest and largest religion of India. For decades the RSS has worked at the grassroots level, recruiting children who are taught to fight religions founded outside India (including Islam and Christianity), and forming new fronts (that include student, labour and peasant groups).
The RSS and its offshoots consistently criticised pro-minority policies. But it mostly remained a marginal player until the 1980s when the ruling Congress Party was again assailed by the old Hindu nationalists' critique of "pseudo-secularism".
The RSS-supported party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), mobilised on claims that the government and courts favoured Muslims, and also demanded the (re)building of a temple where the Babri Masjid mosque was constructed in 1528 at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
This campaign culminated in the demolition of the mosque by a Hindu mob in 1992. It was accompanied by widespread wave of communal riots aimed at polarising the voters along religious lines. It contributed to electoral gains for the BJP, and in 1998-2004 the party was in position to head a new national-ruling coalition.
Towards an ethno-democracy
The 1980s-90s were a turning point in the India's secularism. This period could have been a parenthesis, since the Congress Party regained power in 2004, but India has never returned to the balance of religious co-existence and compromise that prevailed in its first three decades of independence.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the communal clashes that accompanied the BJP's rise to power have never been addressed properly by the policy and judiciary. Muslims were massacred in numbers unprecedented since India's 1947 partition; about 1,000 were killed in Bhagalpur in Bihar State alone in 1989, and violence rose to the level of pogroms in Gujarat State in 2002 when about 2,000 Muslims were killed after 59 Hindus were burnt alive in train coaches in Godhra, Gujarat.
Inquiry commissions prepared reports that were either never made public or not followed by serious action. In most democracies, the kind of violence Gujarat experienced in 2002 would have resulted in at least a "Justice and Reconciliation" commission.
And minorities must cope with marginalisation. Christian Tribals are victims of violence, especially in Orissa and Gujarat, where they are requested to (re)convert to Hinduism. Muslims face discrimination in the job and housing markets, and Muslim ghettoisation is increasing in northern and western India.
On the political scene, Muslims are marginalised with less than six percent of MPs in the lower house of Parliament while representing 13.4 percent of the population. In 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh commissioned a report on the status of India's Muslims by a committee named after its president, Justice Rajinder Sachar.
But none of the Sachar Committee's key recommendations to improve Muslims' situation has been implemented, perhaps from political fears that the BJP will again denounce "pseudo-secularism".
India is gradually moving away from multiculturalism toward a type of democracy exemplified by Israel and Sri Lanka, known as "ethnic democracy", where minorities are treated as second-class citizens.
With this transformation, India may well lose one of the key pillars of its soft power, the quality of its multiculturalism - and more alarmingly, perhaps also its adherence to the rule of law.
*Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS.
This article is part of the series "Religion, Politics & the Public Space" in collaboration with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and its Global Experts project (www.theglobalexperts.org).
The views expressed in these articles are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nation Alliance of Civilizations or of the institutions to which the authors are affiliated. 

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West Bengal Defeat rocks India's elected communists (Aljazeera English)

Courtesy: "Aljazeera English", 13 May 2011

Defeat rocks India's elected communists

After 34 years, the world's longest-ruling elected communist government has been ousted from West Bengal state. By Subir Bhaumik

The color of India's eastern state of West Bengal turned from red to green on Friday, when the world's longest-ruling elected communist government was decisively voted out of power.
Supporters of the opposition alliance that defeated the communist-led Left coalition danced wildly to the tune of drums, exchanged sweets and colored each other with green phagu (dry color).
The celebrations reached a crescendo as the opposition leader, Mamata Banerji - a diminutive yet aggressive Bengali woman in her mid-50s - emerged from her small shanty home adjoined to Calcutta's Kalighat temple to announce the historic victory.
"Communism is history in Bengal, we have won a decisive victory. This is a day of liberation for our people," Banerji, leader of the Trinamul Congress Party and India's railways minister, told waiting journalists.
An Indian television channel quickly dubbed her as "India's Lech Walesa", in reference to Poland's famous anti-communist leader.

Crushing defeat
The communist-led Left coalition has ruled West Bengal for 34 years, that makes it the longest tenure for any elected communist government in the world.
But when they lost the elections on Friday for the 294-seat West Bengal state assembly, the defeat turned into a landslide when Banerji's Trinamul Congress - in alliance with India's ruling Congress party - won 73 per cent of the seats.
Only five years ago, the opposite had happened when the communists crushed the Trinamuls by winning 80 per cent of the seats.
"It is the most dramatic reversal of fortunes in Bengal's history," says political analyst Sabyasachi Basu Roy Choudhury of the Calcutta Research Group, a think-tank.
This time around, all but two of the top Communist ministers survived the landslide.
Those defeated included chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya, a pragmatic young communist leader whose drive to acquire land for a huge industrialisation project had alienated Bengal's traditionally militant peasantry and loosened the left's strongholds in rural Bengal.
"How could a communist government ask police to fire on peasants like they did in Nandigram to set up a chemical industry. That has eroded their support amongst the rural poor and Mamata Banerji has gained by leading campaigns against the acquisitions," said Bengal's leading political sociologist, Pradip Bose.
Political blunders
But many others say the urban Bengali gentry (called Bhadraloks) were also fed up with the communists for not joining the government in Delhi, even though they had at least two opportunities in the last 15 years.
"When left of centre parties formed a ruling coalition in 1996 and wanted the legendary Bengali communist leader Jyoti Basu to take over as prime minister, his party decided to stay out. Jyoti Basu described it as a historical blunder and that is what most Bengalis feel. So why should they vote for the communists?" said former communist lawmaker Saiffuddin Choudhury, whose breakaway party - PDS - is now in alliance with India's ruling Congress Party.
The communists built up a formidable political party and were popular with the rural poor and industrial workers during their three decades of continuous rule in West Bengal.
They also enjoyed the support of the influential Bengali intelligentsia - until Nandigram happened four years ago. After that, the cultural elite distanced themselves from the communists in protest of the police shootings that killed 14 farmers.
Seven Bengali film stars and theatre personalities won seats on a Trinamul ticket this time.
The anti-left vote in Bengal has never slipped below 40 per cent of the electorate, even at the peak of communist rule, but the anti-communists lacked a leader who could capitalise on that support until the fiercely combative Banerji arrived.
"The anti-left mass got a powerful leader in Mamata Banerji and she started to reach out to the floating voters, issue by issue. That explains why the tide has turned against the communists," says analyst Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury.
"The communists were functioning within the parameters of Indian democracy but they tried to create a party whereby they could control all segments of Bengali society. They are paying dearly for their obsession for control because the fiercely independent Bengali middle class would take it no more," alleged Indian economist Bibek Debroy, who hails from Bengal.
Women on the rise
Banerji's victory, marks the coming of age of Bengali regionalism.
"Within thirteen years of breaking away from the Congress and forming her own Trinamul party, she has marginalised the Congress in Bengal as much as the communists now. That's a major achievement," says political analyst Ranabir Sammadar.
Gender expert Paula Banerji described Banerji's stunning victory as a "demonstration of the political power of the Bengali women".
Across the border in neighbouring Bangladesh, where more than ninety per cent are Muslim, the present Awami League government is headed by prime minister Sheikh Hasina - five of the top positions in her cabinet are also held by women.
"Now Banerji has done 'a Hasina' in our state. Both the Bengals will now be ruled by women and in Bangladesh, even the main opposition leader is a women," Paula Banerji said. "The communists don't have a female leader of Banerji's stature and unless they find one, they cannot take her on."
Nearly half of West Bengal's population are women and they strongly identify with Banerji.
During the six-phase elections held in West Bengal, women showed up in large numbers and could be seen standing in queues at polling booths - sometimes waiting five or six hours to vote.
'Obsolete ideology'
The communists have also lost the southern state of Kerala, so they now hold only one Indian state - the tiny north eastern state of Tripura which has only two seats in the Indian Parliament.
"Their future in Indian politics is in jeopardy," says Indian editor Prabhu Chawla. "This is an obsolete ideology and will not work here anymore."
With the communist defeats in West Bengal and Kerala, the chances of a third front emerging in Indian politics are remote.
Though the Indian left never joined a non-Congress or non-Hindu nationalist BJP government in Delhi, they decisively supported the experiment in 1996.
"Now Indian politics at the federal level will be more bipolar - with the Congress leading one coalition and the Hindu nationalist BJP leading the other," said Tarun Vijay, editor of the Organiser Weekly that reflects the views of Hindu nationalists.
"Bengal's communism was unique in that it grew among the people not through armed revolution. This was a party that grew by consensus by carrying with them all sections of middle class, rural and urban poor - even the gentry. But somewhere down the line, the arrogance of power led them to adopt narrow, sectarian politics and that is their undoing now," says analyst Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhuri.
'Old Left values'
Their only hope now is if Banerji, whose performance as India's railway minister has not been overly impressive, fails in her position of governance.
"We are down, but not out. We will perform our role in opposition and win back the people's trust," said Bengal communist party leader Biman Bose.
Bose points to the state of Tripura, "where the communists messed up and people brought us back. That will happen in Bengal," Bose said. "They went out of power in 1988 and came back to power five years later...ruling it all the way until now."
But that is only likely if Banerji makes major mistakes.
On Friday, she outlined her priorities in a brief interview, even as her supporters continued their noisy celebrations outside her small shanty. She emphasised a return to true democracy that have been undermined by the communist politics of control.
Banerji also plans to promote inclusive development that benefits rural and urban poor by balancing allocations between agriculture and industry. She also wants to make governance more efficient - especially in terms of maintaining law and order in what has become a fairly violent state.
"I will continue to live like a commoner because I don't like luxury. The support of my people is more important," said Banerji, whose austere lifestyle appears closer to the old icons of the Bengal communist movement than their successors who had become corrupted by three decades of power.
"I am against the Left here but not against Leftism. I share the values of the old Left," said Banerji.

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India's state elections: Unlucky day (The Economist, 13 May 2011)

Courtesy: "The Economist", 13 May 2011
India's state elections: Unlucky day
Friday 13th May will surely count as an awkward day for Congress, India’s ruling party, despite some apparently cheering poll counts. As results from local elections were published it became clear that in four states and a union territory, which together account for nearly 230m people, voters showed little enthusiasm for the party of prime minister Manmohan Singh.

The headline defeat, and one long expected, was for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), thumped in a landslide in West Bengal. The Reds had ruled for 34 uninterrupted years, but voters proved sick of the poor economic performance of their state, and of a party that is desperately short of ideas for how to fix things. Mamata Banerjee, the national railways minister and an energetic opponent of the Communists, stormed to victory at the head of her Trinamul Congress: the coalition that she leads was expected, as counting approached an end, to scoop over 220 assembly seats to an estimated, and paltry, 65 for the Reds.

In theory that was good news for the party of Mr Singh too, since his Congress is the junior partner in Ms Banerjee’s coalition in West Bengal. In fact however, the scale of the victory is troubling. So emphatic is the Trinamul success that Ms Banerjee will have no need of her ally to rule in the state, which has a population larger than Germany’s. That leaves Congress’s state MPs with precious little leverage. And the coalition partners have not been getting on: a bitter scrap before polling got under way, over how many seats each party would contest, almost saw them march their separate ways.

To the south, in Kerala, matters were more surprising. The state, also under Communist rule for the past five years, had been expected to swing comfortably into the hands of the Congress party. As we reported in April the well-educated and crotchety voters of Kerala almost always kick out their governments, when given a chance. And the Communists had annoyed important constituencies, notably religious ones, by pushing for a cap on fees charged by colleges (many of which are run by the church, for example). Yet results on May 13th showed an extremely close split between the left and the Congress party. In the end Congress scraped it by a handful of seats. That less-than-emphatic win looks troubling, especially for the likeliest next prime ministerial candidate of Congress, Rahul Gandhi, who had taken a personal role in campaigning and picking candidates there.

Results were grimmer still next door in Tamil Nadu, where Congress is allied to the ruling DMK party, which suffered a huge battering by a rival coalition led by the similarly named AIADMK. Latest counting suggested that the DMK would gather a few dozen seats, to their rivals’ 200 or so. That matters because the DMK is part of the national government with Congress (courtesy of its separate clutch of MPs in the parliament in Delhi). There it is most closely associated with dreadful corruption at the telecoms ministry, long run by a DMK man, A. Raja. And in neighbouring, tiny, Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry), a union territory which was a French colony until 1956 (nine years after the rest of India got independence, from Britain) Congress was kicked from office.

The only really bright spot for Congress was its emphatic victory in Assam, a moderate-size state of 31m in the north-east, where counting suggested it would get about 80 out of 126 seats. Congress had been in power already, and voters were grateful for relative stability and cheered their state rulers for having lured local militants to lay down guns and hold talks instead.

All in all however, Congress did not have a good day, despite being on the winning side in West Bengal, Kerala and Assam. To a large extent voters responded to local matters. But a national trend is discernible too. As in other countries, Indians have taken advantage of mid-term state polls to send a warning to their national government over issues that frustrate them. The most obvious—especially in relation to the dreadful showing of Congress and its ally in Tamil Nadu—is public fury over corruption. Similarly there is anger that economic growth, still racing along at nearly 9% a year, is not translating into a better life for all, especially given rises in the costs of food, fuel and other goods. Coming on the heels of another big state election late in 2010 in Bihar, where Congress was also badly thumped, the country’s ruling party looks vulnerable.

Congress, however, can take heart from two factors. It has fared badly in state elections before, and then gone on to win comfortable victories in national, general polls. Before the 2009 general election many analysts had concluded on the basis of previous state results that Congress was in trouble, only for it to outstrip everyone’s expectations. Second, the party’s main rival, at the national level, is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has made much of the running in attacking the government over its poor corruption record. Though the BJP will find much to cheer in Congress’s troubles, the opposition party itself was almost nowhere to be seen in these five polls, emphasising that it struggles to spread its appeal beyond those parts of India where its Hindu-nationalist themes play well.

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Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus leaves microfinance bank (Guardian, 13 May 2011)

Courtesy: "Guardian, UK", 13 May 2011
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus leaves microfinance bank
Peace prize recipient leaves pioneering Grameen Bank following legal dispute with Bangladeshi government
By Fariha Karim
The Nobel laureate who founded a pioneering microfinance institution, the Grameen Bank, has quit as its head after a long dispute with Bangladesh's government.
The announcement by Muhammad Yunus that he is standing down as managing director is a watershed in the 28-year history of the bank, which is credited with lifting millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty. It also ends a protracted legal wrangle with the Bangladeshi government over control of the bank.
Yunus wanted to "ensure my colleagues and our 8 million members, and owners of the bank, are not subjected to any difficulty in discharging their responsibilities". He took the step "without prejudice" to outstanding legal issues.

His deputy, Nurjahan Begum, has been appointed as interim managing director.
Yunus was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2006 jointly with the bank. Literally meaning "village bank", the institution offers tiny loans to would-be entrepreneurs who would otherwise be refused conventional loans, and his microcredit scheme has been replicated across the world, and has been hailed as being the most effective way of defeating poverty.
The bank has nearly 9 million borrowers in Bangladesh; 97% of them are women. Control of the bank would be a considerable political asset, and a significant help in the battle for power in Bangladesh.However, its reputation came under attack in December by a Norwegian TV documentary which raised allegations of irregularities over the transfer of £40m million from the bank to another company.
Although Yunus was subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing in an investigation by the Norwegian government, his already fractious relationship with the Bangladeshi government reached breaking point, with claims that he had tarnished his country's reputation.
Earlier this year,the Bangladeshi Central Bank made a legal challenge against the 70-year-old, claiming he had violated retirement laws by failing to relinquish control at 60. Despite a series of legal battles that reached the supreme court, Yunus failed to overturn the judges' decision to oust him as managing director.
His supporters, such as the former Irish president Mary Robinson, and former president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn, claimed that the respected economist had been the target of a political vendetta.
An outspoken government critic, Yunus has had an acrimonious relationship with the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, who is reportedly angry over his attempt to form a political party in 2007.
In December, a war of words broke out as she accused Yunus of "sucking blood from the poor borrowers" through the bank's allegedly exorbitant interest rates, calling for the government to launch an inquiry into claims of misappropriation. He was subsequently cleared.
However, microcredit as an economic model has increasingly suffered from a lack of faith, with critics pointing to impossibly high interest rates.
In India, politicians have accused bankers of profiting from the poor, and in some cases have banned further lending or recovery of debts.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, aggressive selling and recovery of outstanding interest payments by scores of unregulated microfinance firms have pushed huge numbers of already desperately poor farmers deeply into debt.


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India: Delhi's Waste to Energy Project Not So Green (Inter Press Service)

Courtesy: "Inter Press Service", 11 May 2011
Waste to Energy Project Not So Green 
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 11, 2011 (IPS) - A waste-to-energy (WtE) project in the heart of the Indian capital and run by a powerful industrial family is testing the enforceability of the country’s environmental and zoning laws.
The WtE project, being promoted by Jindal Ecopolis—owned by the Jindal family that is close to the ruling Congress party—will, when fully operational, burn 4,000 tonnes a day of refuse derived fuel (RDF) made from municipal waste, to produce 20 megawatts of electricity.
Like many dirty industries rapidly coming up across the Indian landscape, Jindal’s WtE project may have gone unremarked, except that it is located in the Okhla area of South Delhi, reckoned as among the most affluent of India’s 604 districts and populated by people acutely aware of their rights.
Environmentalists say the plant has violated zoning regulations, the Delhi Master Plan, rulings by the Supreme Court and rules laid down by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) and the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), a statutory body.
Ravi Agarwal, director of Toxics Link, a leading environment group specialising in solid waste management, said because the Jindal WtE project is the first plant of its type in India, it will serve as a model for other Indian cities to follow.
"This has serious implications for the future of the urban waste sector in this country," he told IPS.
Even before Delhi State Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit laid the foundation stone for the plant in July 2010, residents of Okhla, which has a population of 1.5 million people, had filed public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court protesting several gross violations.
In published guidelines, titled "Management of Municipal Solid Waste," the CPCB has specifically cautioned local bodies "Not to adopt expensive technologies of power generation, fuel pelletisation, incineration etc. until they are proven under Indian conditions by the Government of India (GoI) or expert agencies nominated by the GoI."
After visiting the plant on Apr. 1, in response to mass rallies and protests by Okhla residents, MoEF minister Jairam Ramesh wrote to Dikshit pointing out two grave violations: the failure of the state government to hold adequate public consultations and Jindal Ecopolis’ failure to seek mandatory clearance from the CPCB.
Last week, however, Ramesh confessed to helplessness in enforcing green laws on major development projects.
"Regularisation of illegality is a peculiar Indian characteristic. First you make the law and then break the law," Ramesh said, venting frustration while addressing a management conference in the capital last week.
Ramesh, who has degrees in engineering and management from the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he is often forced to "regularise irregularity" because the offending project had already come up.
"I am guilty of condoning many environmental violations," Ramesh said with a candidness rare for an Indian minister.
In May, Ramesh’s ministry granted environmental clearances to such controversial projects as a 12-billion-dollar steel plant and port being built by the South Korean Pohang Steel Company in eastern Orissa state, and a nuclear power park in Jaitapur in western Maharashtra state under construction in a 15-billion-dollar deal with the French state-owned Areva.
Ramesh had earlier observed that Jindal’s WtE plant would be hard to stop or relocate because it was close to completion. But, under pressure from the Okhla community, he ordered a technical review by the CPCB and made the grant of an "operating license" conditional on the outcome.
To his credit, Ramesh allowed the residents to nominate two independent experts—Toxics Link’s Agarwal and another highly qualified technology consultant, Anant Trivedi—to participate in the technical review the CPCB conducted on Apr. 26.
Agarwal and Trivedi pointed out startling anomalies to the 23 expert participants of the review exercise, who included the chief of Jindal Ecopolis, Allard Nooyi, and Jurgen Porst from the German consultant Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) which collaborates with the Indian environment ministry and advises it.
A presentation made by Nooyi was so elementary that it resulted in the CPCB chairman S.P. Gautam calling for "technical details rather than project outlines." In a formal statement, the CPCB demanded that Jindal Ecopolis provide "realistic figures on quantities of residues and other waste streams generated and complete details of control facilities."
GIZ representatives said that the disposal of fly ash and other residue needed to be studied, besides the impact of transportation of waste on the environment. They were also concerned that Jindal Ecopolis did not have a disaster management plan.
Agarwal said, "We pointed out that there was no baseline data on the use of WtE technology in India and that the Supreme Court had ruled in 2007 that only pilot projects on research and development mode can be allowed."
"It became painfully clear that Jindal Ecopolis does not have technology clearance from CPCB, no valid environment impact assessment, and has never bothered to engage the community in public consultations as mandated by law," Trivedi told IPS.
"From the project costing it was clear that Jindal has no viable plans to remove toxic pollutants and plans to discharge effluents into the already polluted Yamuna River," he added. "The fact that the Asian Development Bank has dropped it from its Asia Pacific Carbon Fund speaks volumes for how green the project is."
Trivedi said that with so many blatant violations it was hard to see how the environment ministry could grant the WtE plant an operating license unless additional investments worth millions of dollars are made by July, when it is due to be inaugurated.
"We expect to know shortly whether Ramesh’s ministry and the CPCB have turned into rubber stamps for patently illegal projects being pushed by powerful industrial lobbies, Indian or international," Trivedi said.

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India court urges death penalty for honor killings (Associated Press, 10 May 2011)

Courtesy: "Associated Press", 10 May 2011 

India court urges death penalty for honor killings

By NIRMALA GEORGE

NEW DELHI (AP) -- India's top court recommended the death penalty for perpetrators of "honor killings," calling the practice barbaric and feudal in a ruling cheered Tuesday by activists who hope it will inspire opposition to a crime seen as anathema to a democratic nation.

Most victims were young adults who fell in love or married against their families' wishes. In some cases, village councils ordered couples killed who married inside their clan or outside their caste. While there are no official figures, an independent study found around 900 people were killed each year in India for defying their elders.

The Supreme Court on Monday affirmed a life sentence imposed for a man convicted of killing his daughter but added a warning: "People planning to perpetrate honor killings should know that the gallows await them."

The court said tough measures were needed to stamp out India's caste system and the violence and harassment young people faced as they tried to break out of the shackles of centuries-old social practices.

"It is time to stamp out these barbaric, feudal practices which are a slur on our nation," Justice Markandeya Katju said. "This is necessary as a deterrent for such outrageous, uncivilized behavior."

Kirti Singh, a women's rights lawyer in New Delhi, hailed the ruling as an important first step.

"The government should now speed up legislation to punish not just killings, but all forms of social and economic crimes ordered by village councils against young adults wanting to get married to a partner of their choice," she said.

In India the death penalty is only given in the "rarest of rare" cases. While it is not unprecedented for a lower court to give a death sentence in an honor killing case, the nation's top court had yet to weigh in on the issue.

Katju and Justice Gyan Sudha Misra wrote in their joint statement that honor killings fall within the "rarest of rare" category and deserve to be a capital crime.

The court's ruling rejected an appeal by Bhagwan Dass, who argued he was innocent of strangling his daughter, Seema, in 2006 after she walked out of a troubled marriage and had an affair with a cousin.

Honor killings have increased in recent years, especially in northern India. With young, educated and empowered Indians with fraying ties to caste or religious divisions demanding the right to choose their spouse, some village leaders and horrified relatives have fought back violently.

Often young couples who fall in love have to seek police protection to avoid the "wrath of kangaroo courts," said Katju.

Last month, the court directed police and district administrators across the country to offer protection to any couple marrying outside their caste or religion and to start criminal action against those who threaten or harass them.

A court in the state of Haryana handed down the first "honor killing" death sentence last year when it convicted five people in the gruesome murders of young newlyweds. The bride's family beat and strangled the groom, forced the bride to drink pesticide and dumped their bodies in a canal. The death sentence is being appealed and it was unclear how the Supreme Court recommendation would affect that case.

The Haryana murders led to national outrage, with lawmakers and civil rights activists demanding punishment for the local council that ordered the couple killed for "bringing dishonor to the village."

While women's rights groups welcomed the top court's ruling, they were skeptical about the government's ability to finally adopt legislation to tackle the practice.

"The Supreme Court's directive is a recognition of the gravity of such crimes," said Sudha Sundararaman, general secretary of the All India Democratic Women's Association. "But the judgment exposes the failure of the government to take appropriate action and bring the perpetrators of such crimes to justice."

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India’s Nuclear Conundrum (By Jaswant Singh)

Courtesy: "www.project-syndicate.org"

The New Power Game: India’s Nuclear Conundrum

By Jaswant Singh
NEW DELHI – Japan’s nuclear disaster has fueled fear and uncertainty among all of the world’s producers of nuclear power. For India, an energy-starved country, much is at stake.
That fear factor has two main causes. Although nuclear power ranks as a “clean” source of energy, it is accompanied by the terrible shadow of nuclear war, which emerged from Japan’s last reckoning with nuclear catastrophe, 65 years ago at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and which lends it an automatic association with mass destruction and death. Moreover, the secrecy that attends all things “nuclear” has left people not knowing enough to feel confident.

The fear inspired by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster will be reflected in soaring costs for nuclear power worldwide, largely owing to demands for improved safety and the need to pay more to insure the potential risks. Indeed, nuclear plants are prone to a form of “panic transference.” Should a reactor of one design go wrong, all reactors of that type will be shut down instantly around the world.
India’s dilemma is this: it has 20 nuclear plants in operation, with an additional 23 on order. With the country desperately short of power, and requiring energy to grow, concerned citizens are asking if nuclear is still the answer for India.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has cautiously announced that a “special safety review” of all plants will be undertaken. “Not enough,” say roughly 50 eminent Indians, who at the end of March demanded a “radical review” of the country’s entire nuclear-power policy for “appropriateness, safety, costs, and public acceptance.” The group also called for an “independent, transparent safety audit” of all nuclear facilities, to be undertaken with the “involvement of civil-society organizations and experts outside the Department of Atomic Energy.” Until then, there should be “a moratorium on all…nuclear activity” and “revocation of recent clearances.” This is as explicit as opposition can get.
How have other countries reacted? France, which is around 80% dependent on nuclear energy, and is a big exporter of nuclear-plant technology, initially avoided most of the global anti-nuclear concerns. But now it, too, is promising to draw the necessary lessons from the Japanese experience and upgrade its safety procedures, including a reassessment of the potential effects of natural disasters on nuclear-plant operations, conceding that the occurrence of more than one natural disaster simultaneously had not been considered previously.
China, which has 77 nuclear reactors at various stages of construction, planning, and discussion, has said that it will “review its program.” Though Russia has formally announced that it will go ahead with its program, former President Mikhail Gorbachev – on whose watch the Chernobyl meltdown occurred 25 years ago – is not so sanguine.
While the US is the principal exporter of reactors, it currently has just two under construction on its own territory. Denmark, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal are strongly anti-nuclear, and Switzerland has stopped all nuclear-power projects. 
All of this will lead to cost evaluation and escalation. According to a study conducted by the former Indian government minister Arun Shourie, the price of uranium could rise to $140 per pound, close to its record high.
A change of much greater consequence concerns the price of reactors. Pre-Fukushima, a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “The Future of Nuclear Power, 2003,” as well as a study by researchers at the University of Chicago, established that nuclear energy was 50-100% more expensive than energy from coal or gas. The report of the Working Group on Power of the Planning Commission of India puts the cost of energy from the country’s coal-based plants at about one-third lower than nuclear power, with gas 50% cheaper.
Energy security and public safety should be of equal importance in determining future policy on nuclear power. Indeed, experts like C. M. A. Nayar have said that the Fukushima accident “could have happened even if there was no tsunami.” Nayar suggests that it has long been known that the reactor’s design contained basic flaws, though only the Japanese authorities can verify this.
So, what is to be done? Clean energy at a time of global warming is obviously necessary.  But so is the safety and security of humans, animals, and plants. India has set itself on a path of virtually doubling its nuclear-power output. This is deeply troubling, for India’s supply of nuclear fuel, technology, and reactors is almost entirely dependent on imports from manufacturers who refuse liability for any malfunction.
There is, of course, no single correct response that would simultaneously and uniformly deal with resource scarcity, fossil-fuel depletion, climate change, and the risks of nuclear power. A choice will ultimately need to be made about how to meet India’s energy demands.
At a minimum, a thorough reexamination and full public debate must precede the construction of any new nuclear plant. But the current emphasis on nuclear power must be objectively reassessed, and dependence on it thereafter reduced. With nuclear safety suddenly becoming a global imperative, the costs are simply too high to do otherwise.

Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister, is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link:
http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/singh13.mp3

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U.S. Loses Bids to Supply Jets to India (New York Times, 29 April 2011)

Courtesy: "New York Times", 29 April 2011

U.S. Loses Bids to Supply Jets to India

By VIKAS BAJAJ
NEW DELHI — The United States lost a hard-fought competition to supply a new generation of fighter jets to India, which has listed two European manufacturers as the finalists for an order estimated to be worth $10 billion.
The decision was a blow for President Obama, who had pushed hard for this and other defense deals during his visit to India in November as part of his agenda to deepen and broaden the United States’ relationship with India. The American ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, who separately announced on Thursday that he would resign from his post for personal reasons, said the United States was “deeply disappointed by this news.”

While political and economic relations between India and the United States have been warming for years, American arms makers have struggled to win big contracts here. After decades of frosty relations during the cold war, which pushed India to rely extensively on the Soviet Union for military hardware, many in the Indian defense establishment are still wary of American intentions and United States military aid to Pakistan, India’s main adversary.
The American bid to build the fighters came from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Boeing had offered its F/A -18 jets, and Lockheed Martin pitched its F-16 planes. But India instead narrowed the list to the Rafale fighter from Dassault and the Eurofighter Typhoon jet made by a consortium of European companies. Russian and Swedish bids were also turned down.
The 126 planes are meant to replace aging Russian jets. A spokesman for the Indian Defense Ministry said the country hoped to make a final decision by the end of March 2012.
Both American companies are also looking to sell other military hardware to India, which unlike much of the Western world has been sharply increasing its defense spending. Some analysts say India could spend $50 billion to $80 billion on equipment in the next five years.
One Indian international affairs analyst, C. Raja Mohan, played down the significance of the American companies’ loss of this deal. He said that the Indian government was buying more from United States contractors than ever before.
“One deal doesn’t make everything,” said Mr. Mohan, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “There has been a lot of hype about this deal. We are doing things with the U.S. that we never did before.”
But another analyst, Nitin Pai, argued that India’s decision would hurt relations with the United States, at a time when the country needed stronger ties with America to advance its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the United Nations Security Council, on which India is seeking a permanent seat.
“This move will most certainly reduce India’s geopolitical leverage with the U.S. military-industrial complex, at a time when India needs it most,” Mr. Pai wrote on his blog, The Acorn. He added, “Is the United States more likely to be sympathetic to India’s interests after an $11 billion contract — which means much needed jobs for the U.S. economy — is awarded to someone else?”
Dinesh Keskar, president of Boeing’s Indian operation, said that while the company was “obviously disappointed” about not making the cut for the fighter jets, it was “quite excited about the opportunities in India.” He added that the company was seeking a meeting with Indian officials to find out why its planes were not selected.
Boeing said the company and the Indian Air Force were in the final stages of negotiating a contract for C-17 cargo planes that was announced by Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November. And it is hoping to win orders for attack and heavy-lift helicopters.
“We are quite engaged with and will continue our partnership with India,” Mr. Keskar said in a telephone interview.

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Narendra Modi ordered Police, "Let the Rioters Loose" - ’مودی نےفسادیوں کو چھوٹ دینے کاحکم دیا‘

 بی بی سی اردو ڈاٹ کام :Courtesy

’مودی نےفسادیوں کو چھوٹ دینے کاحکم دیا‘

بھارت کی ریاست گجرات کے ایک سینیئر پولیس افسر سنجیو بھٹ نے سپریم کورٹ میں داخل کیے گئے ایک بیان حلفی میں وزیر اعلیٰ نریندر مودی پر الزام لگایا ہے کہ انہوں نےگودھرا کی ٹرین میں کارسیوکوں کو جلائے جانے کے واقعے کے بعد اعلیٰ پولیس افسروں سے کہا تھا کہ وہ ہندوؤں کو اپنا غصہ نکالنے دیں۔

سنجیو بھٹ 2002 میں فسادات کے وقت انٹیلی جنس کے ڈپٹی کمشنر تھے۔

ان کا کہنا ہے کہ انہوں نےگودھرا کے واقعے کے بعد زبردست کشیدگی کے دوران ستائیس فروری کو احمدآباد میں اعلیٰ پولیس اہلکاروں کی ایک میٹنگ میں شرکت کی تھی جس میں بقول ان کے وزیر اعلی نریندر مودی نے پولیس سے کہا کہ وہ ’فسادیوں کو نہ روکیں اور مسلمانوں کی طرف سے مدد کی التجاؤں پر دھیان نہ دیں۔‘

عدالت عظمی میں داخل کی گئی اٹھارہ صفحات پر مشتمل اس بیان حلفی میں سنجیو بھٹ نےمیٹنگ کی تفصیلات دیتے ہوئے کہا کہ اس میں آٹھ اہلکار شریک تھے۔

’مسٹر مودی نے ان اہلکاروں سے کہا کہ ایک طویل عرصے سےگجرات پولیس مذہبی فسادات میں ہندؤوں اور مسلمانوں کے خلاف کارروائی کرنے میں توازن سے کام لیتی رہی ہے لیکن اس بار ایسی صورتحال ہے کہ مسلمانوں کو ایسا سبق سکھایا جائے کہ کبھی ایسا واقعہ (گودھراٹرین ) دوبارہ نہ ہونے پائے۔‘

انہوں نے مزید کہا ہے کہ وزیر اعلٰی نے کہا کہ ہندوؤں کے جذبات بہت زیادہ مشتعل ہیں اور ’یہ لازمی ہے کہ انہیں اپنا غصہ نکالنے دیا جائے۔‘

سنجیو بھٹ نے بیان حلفی میں کہا ہے کہ انہوں نے سپریم کورٹ کی مقرر کردہ خصوصی تفتیشی ٹیم یعنی ایس آئی ٹی کو بھی یہ باتیں بتائیں تھیں لیکن انہوں نے ان کے بیان کو سنجیدگی سے نہیں لیا۔

انہوں نے مزید کہا ہے کہ ایس آئی ٹی نے ان کی گواہی کے بیانات کو گجرات حکوت کو لیک کر دیا تھا اور اب وہ اپنی زندگی کے لیے خطرہ محسوس کر رہے ہیں۔ انہوں نے اپنے اور اپنی فیملی کے لیے پولیس کا تحفظ مانگا ہے۔

گزشتہ برس مسٹر مودی ایس آئی ٹی کے سامنے حاضر ہوئے تھے اور انہوں نےکہا تھاکہ مسٹر بھٹ اس میٹنگ میں شریک نہیں ہوئے تھے۔ ان پولیس افسروں نے بھی جنہوں نے مسٹر مودی کے مطابق اس میٹنگ میں شرکت کی تھی مسٹر مودی کے بیان کی تصدیق کی ہے۔

مسٹر بھٹ نے نامہ نگاروں سے بات کرتے ہوئے کہا ہے کہ اگر انہیں کسی پینل یا عدالت کے سامنے طلب کیا گیا تو وہ سارے ثبوت پیش کریں گے۔

سنجیو بھٹ اس وقٹ گجرات پولیس میں ٹریننگ محکمے کے انجارچ ہیں۔ ان کی بیان حلفی گجرات فسادات کے سلسلے میں انتہائی اہمیت کی حامل ہے۔

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India's Middle Class Hungers for Undemocratic Change (Wall Street Journal) - 21 April 2011

Courtesy: "Wall Street Journal", 21 April 2011

India's Middle Class Hungers for Undemocratic Change

Support for a dangerous piece of anticorruption legislation can skew political debate in the world's largest democracy.

By SALIL TRIPATHI

Annasaheb Hazare is an unlikely middle-class hero in India. He wasn't part of the Indian cricket team that won the World Cup earlier this month. He doesn't own one of the teams of the lucrative Indian Premier League cricket tournament currently underway. He isn't a Bollywood star either. He is a septuagenarian self-described Gandhian known for his development work in the western state of Maharashtra.

And yet he recently dominated the news cycle in India. He went on an indefinite fast to force the Indian government to appoint a committee that would examine and propose changes to draft legislation to establish the office of a national ombudsman to tackle corruption. He succeeded in five days' time: On April 9, the government caved in.
Last Saturday, a committee met to begin drafting a bill. This week, the composition of the committee is becoming controversial. Some have assailed the personal integrity of a few of its members who belong to civil society groups, and even questioned why they belong on this committee.
Judging by the way Mr. Hazare's fast drew support from industrialists, Bollywood stars, social reformers, activists and many students and professionals, this was quite a moment for the Indian middle class. For the first time the current generation of 20- or 30-something working Indians—only dimly aware of Mohandas Gandhi through the symbols and landmarks to his memory across the country—had encountered a real activist who, like Gandhi, was willing to sacrifice his life for a larger national cause.
The cause in question, a war against corruption, has resonated in the past year. Thousands of Indians have marched in demonstrations, enraged at various acts of corruption. Two high-profile cases are key: the way contracts were awarded to stage the Commonwealth Games held last October, and the way licenses were issued for the next generation of cellular telephony in 2008.
While these cases of grand corruption are important, Indians face millions of instances of daily, petty corruption. The municipal officer demands a bribe from a hawker; the bureaucrat refuses to register a land title or a marriage; the traffic cop beats the rickshaw-driver who can't afford to pay his weekly installment, known as hafta. These inconveniences at best and affronts to dignity at worst make corruption a rallying cry.

Such corruption also proves corrosive for business. The World Bank ranks India at 134th out of 183 countries for the ease of doing business and Transparency International puts it at 87th among 178 in its corruption perception index. Economists have noted that the way forward to reduce corruption has to be to decrease the discretionary power in the hands of these bureaucrats and politicians, while streamlining and clarifying the laws that empower them.
The irony here is that Mr. Hazare's struggle might hurt the fight against corruption. He wants an anti-corruption ombudsman with sweeping powers to investigate cases, demand prosecutions, and in some cases, deliver verdicts. That works in Hong Kong, through the Independent Commission Against Corruption, but that's because its economy is not micromanaged, and laws are applied fairly by a very competent civil service. In India, which still hasn't fully recovered from its dirigiste past, a new set of rules begets another one, and bureaucracy easily expands.
This expanding bureaucracy and body of rules is anyway hard for the citizenry to keep accountable; this ombudsman will add to these woes. Many constitutionalists and lawyers have expressed concern that the office of the ombudsman—from what we know now, in the preliminary stages of drafting the legislation—would be able to prosecute any public servant, including perhaps members of the independent judiciary, but would neither be elected popularly nor appointed by a popularly elected official. Rather, one proposal is that he would be anointed by a committee that would include Indian Nobel Prize and Magsasay Award winners, as if those Oslo, Stockholm and Manila anoint are worthier than other Indians. All this bypasses democratic norms of checks and balances.
Such details don't deter Mr. Hazare's supporters, some of whom have said that they want the corrupt to be "executed." This is moral enthusiasm from parts of the middle class, thousands of whom have signed Internet petitions and held candlelight vigils in protest. The highly competitive and breathless electronic media in the country have stoked the fire, likening downtown Delhi to Egypt's Tahrir Square.
For one thing, this comparison insults the brave men and women of Egypt. More importantly, the middle-class revolutionaries miss the fundamental point of the revolutions rocking the Arab world: they are against unrepresentative, unelected dictatorships. With all its flaws, India is a democracy that regularly holds elections. The real danger is that this accountability, however limited it might be, might be replaced by the tyranny of an unelected ombudsman. That's curiously welcome to Mr. Hazare's followers who yearn for a perfect messiah and don't trust the democratic process to deliver such an outcome.
To an extent, such disdain is symptomatic of India's middle class who, judging by the voter turnout in the middle-class strongholds of south Delhi and south Mumbai in the past decade, hardly participate in the electoral process. The apathy is partly due to cynicism, that Parliament is irrelevant to their lives, and the laws the state passes are to be ignored, and partly due to snobbery—of not wanting to wait in a long queue to vote, particularly if the queue includes lower-income people the elite don't like to mix with. But the middle class also perceives that its vote simply doesn't matter in an electoral system where voters continue to vote for party candidates with, say, a criminal record—who end up defeating competent, independent ones with a clean record. The recent corruption woes have only heightened this disgust.
This is not to suggest that demonstrations by the middle class are wrong. Democracies are meaningless without them. But when such protests are led by unelected members of society whose only claim to legitimacy is a claim of moral superiority, and when that is combined with essentially blackmail—accept my demands or I will end my life—it changes the nature of democratic debate.

Mr. Tripathi is a writer in London.

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It's Time to Re-Align India (Wall Street Journal) - 21 April 2011

Courtesy: "Wall Street Journal", 21 April 2011 

It's Time to Re-Align India

The country can no longer afford to stand aloof from the world's superpower.

By SADANAND DHUME

Like a monster in a B-grade horror film, India's love affair with non-alignment refuses to die. During the Cold War, socialist India purported to stand aloof of the U.S.-USSR divide, while in fact tilting toward the Soviet Union and against the West. The end of the Cold War should have ended this approach to foreign policy. Unfortunately, it hasn't.
Last month, with Colonel Moammar Gadhafi's trigger-happy troops besieging rebel strongholds, India joined
China, Russia, Brazil and Germany in abstaining from the Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians. Two weeks later, New Delhi went along with unanimous sanctions against rogue Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo, but not before its ambassador to the United Nations griped about "the tendency to hurry the process of adopting resolutions." And last week in Hainan, China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh joined other leaders of the so-called BRICS—Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa—in a call for a new global monetary order that would diminish the role of the U.S. dollar.
These positions together signal a pattern that raises a tricky question for India as it reaches for a place at the high table of global affairs. Last year Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy separately endorsed India's long-standing bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council. But can the once pro-Soviet nation maintain this relatively new closeness to the West, while retaining a foreign policy stance essentially mistrustful of Western power?
Thus far, a mix of clever diplomacy, smooth public relations and dumb luck has prevented this question from coming to the fore. But emerging India faces a new level of international scrutiny. Mr. Singh's government can stay true to India's non-aligned past and undercut the argument it put forth while lobbying Washington for the 2008 civilian nuclear deal—that the rise of a large, pluralistic, English-speaking democracy in Asia is fundamentally in the West's interest. Or it can discard a shopworn habit of equating independence with reflexive opposition to Washington and London and lay itself open to charges of selling out its Cold War-era nonalignment.
These choices spring from two very different conceptions of India's national interest and America's place in the world. For India's unreconstructed Cold Warriors, the nation's proper role is as permanent high priest in the temple of Third Worldism.

In this view, Julian Assange is a modern saint fighting the good fight against the evil Yankee. China's intentions are benign; never mind that little business about disputed borders. Getting Pakistan's generals to end their love affair with jihad is largely a question of mustering enough peace-loving folks with candles at the border. Japan, South Korea and Singapore are to be pitied as Western lackeys. And American gift horses—whether the nuclear deal or intelligence sharing on radical Islamist plots—exist only to be looked in the mouth.
The contrasting view, no longer marginal but less dominant than Indian pundits on the international conference circuit like to suggest, sees Indian interests in more sober terms. By this reckoning, America underpins the stable and open international order that India needs to fulfill its economic potential and carve out a greater role for itself in the world.
China may not be an enemy, but India can hardly afford to be sanguine about the rise on its borders of a powerful one-party ethno-state with a history of trying to resolve disputes by force. Islamist terrorism radiating outward from Pakistan has deep roots and threatens India's quest to remain an open, pluralistic society.
Japan, South Korea and Singapore evoke admiration as sophisticated societies that immeasurably bettered the lives of their own citizens in part by maintaining close ties with the world's foremost power. The English language, close educational links, and successful immigrant populations in the United States and the United Kingdom give India a special affinity toward the Anglosphere.
Until now, India has not really had to choose between these contrasting worldviews, except on a few occasions, like the fraught debate that erupted at home over the U.S.-India nuclear deal. But with power comes both responsibility and scrutiny. Odds are that Libya was only the first of many tough choices India will be called upon to make between now and the expiration of its current term on the Security Council at the end of next year.
Will New Delhi back tougher sanctions, and possible military action, against Iran should the Islamic republic refuse to abandon its rogue nuclear program? Will it publicly stand by Israel, a stalwart friend and close defense partner? Will it prop up the ridiculous BRICS grouping, or see it for what it is, the figment of a Goldman Sachs analyst's imagination that serves as a vehicle for China's anti-American drive for power? Are India's core interests—the eradication of poverty and the maintenance of a multireligious democracy and open society—best pursued in opposition to the West or, despite occasional differences, under the rubric of a liberal international order underwritten by American power?
In the real world, these choices may not always present themselves starkly, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Whether America and the West will remain committed to India's rise, or begin to view it in more lukewarm terms, will depend in large part on what choice New Delhi makes.

Mr. Dhume is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, and a columnist for WSJ.com. Follow him on Twitter @dhume01

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Note: The viewpoint expressed in this article is solely that of the writer. "FATA Awareness Initiative" Team may not agree with the opinion presented.

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