The Outsider With Tim Sebastian on Bloomberg TV India

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India Is More Unequal Than Ever

India’s Constitution guarantees equality, but in a country with a caste system and a fast growing wealth gap, what is the reality?


EQUAL RIGHTS AND THE LAW

The Indian Constitution guarantees equality. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth and Article 16 provides equality of opportunity in matters of public employment. Article 17 abolishes or forbids the practice of "untouchability".

A number of laws are also in place to guarantee equality.

The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which was enacted in 1989, was aimed at preventing the commission of crimes and atrocities against members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, to provide for Special Courts for the trial of such offences and for the relief and rehabilitation of the victims of such offences.

The Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955 was adopted to prescribe punishment for the practice of "Untouchability". The Act says no-one can be refused entry to public places of worship, shops, restaurants, hotels etc.. on the grounds of "Untouchability". It also is aimed at preventing other forms of discrimination on the grounds of "Untouchability".


CASTE

There is a policy of reservation (or quotas) for members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in education and the public service, including quotas for seats in parliament and local village administrations.

A team at the University of Northern British Columbia in Canada carried out a study of the workforce in India. They profiled board members of the top 1,000 Indian firms, both private and state-owned and found that 93 percent belonged to the forward castes. People from a collection of lower castes accounted for 3.8 percent of the directors. After six decades of affirmative action, Scheduled Castes and Tribes accounted for only 3.5 percent of the directors.


RELIGION

In 2005, the government commissioned a report on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in the country. The Sachar report found:

The literacy rate among Muslims in 2001 was 59.1%, below the national average (64.8%). Participation of Muslim salaried workers in both the public and private sectors is quite low. The overall participation of Muslims in Central Government departments and agencies is abysmally low at all levels. Employment of Muslims is also very low in the Universities, Banks, and central PSUs. Muslims face fairly high levels of poverty. Their conditions on the whole are only slightly better than those of Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes, though slightly worse in urban areas.

In 2011, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said "We have not only drawn up schemes and plans based on Sachar recommendations, these initiatives have begun to impact the status of minorities."

He said:

• The recruitment of minorities had increased in government jobs, security forces and the banking sector.
• Priority sector lending for minorities had gone up form 9 to 15 percent.
• Four million scholarships had been awarded to minority students, and minority-specific development programmes implemented in as many as 90 minority-concentration districts.

However, according to a Gallop poll in November 2011, one-third (32 percent) of the country's Muslims said they are suffering. Hindus (23 percent) and members of India's various other religious sects (15 percent) are less likely to be suffering. More than three in 10 Indians rated their lives poorly enough to be considered "suffering" in the first quarter of 2012, up from 24 percent in 2011.


WEALTH GAP

The gap between the wealthy and poor is growing. According to the OECD (Regions at a Glance 2011), the top 10 percent of wage earners now make 12 times more than the bottom 10 percent (compared to 6 times 20 years ago). According to the Forbes report - The World's Billionaires (March 2012) - 48 of the world's billionaires are Indian. They have a combined net worth of 194.6 billion US dollars.

According to a report by Bain and Company, nearly 40 percent of the nation's wealth is controlled by the top 5 percent of India's households. Breaking that down even more, the wealthiest 1 percent controls about 16 percent of the national wealth.

India's poor:

Estimates of the number of people living below the poverty line range from 30 to 53 percent of the population. The numbers vary according to the way in which poverty is calculated. According to official statistics, poverty has been on the decline. According to official government of India estimates, poverty declined from 37.2 percent in 2004-05 to 29.8 percent in 2009-10.

India's Planning Commission in 2012 said 29.8 percent of population live below the poverty line. Labourers (farm workers in villages, casual workers in cities), tribespeople, Dalits (formerly called low caste untouchables) and Muslims remain the poorest Indians. Almost 60% of the poor continue to reside in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Significantly, 85% of India's tribespeople and Dalits live in these states.

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Free speech is under serious threat in India

International monitors have expressed concern that press freedom is weaker than it was and should be in the world’s largest democracy - is free speech under serious threat in India?

Constitution:

Under the Indian Constitution, citizens have the protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech:

(1) All citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression.

However, free speech should not affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State from making any law in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

The Constitution justifies restrictions on freedom of speech in the interest of communal harmony and public order. A Supreme Court ruling in 2007 said that freedom of speech could not be used as an excuse to criticise other faiths.

World ranking:

India was ranked 122 on the Press Freedom Index 2010, below Qatar, Nepal, Indonesia, Tajikistan, Condo, Chat, Niger, Uganda, East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Angola, amongst others. It dropped to 131 on the Press Freedom Index 2011-2012.

India is one of the largest markets for newspapers in the world. The country has more than 70,000 newspapers and over 500 satellite channels in several languages. More than 100 million newspapers are sold each day.

Restrictions and violence:

In August 2012, a mass exodus of people from Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai which was caused by SMS messages warning people of retaliation for sectarian violence that began in Assam late in July.

The government banned SMS messages directed to more than five recipients. It also ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to block a number of websites held guilty of hosting inflammatory content on the events in Assam.

The New York Times reported that the government’s actions put it at odds with Internet companies. Officials in New Delhi, who have had disagreements with the companies over restrictions on free speech, say the sites are not responding quickly enough to their requests to delete and trace the origins of doctored photos and incendiary posts aimed at people from northeastern India. In late 2011, an Indian minister tried to get social media sites to prescreen content created by their users before it was posted. The companies refused and the attempt failed under withering public criticism.

While just 100 million of India’s 1.2 billion people use the Internet regularly, the numbers are growing fast among people younger than 25, who make up about half the country’s population. For instance, there were an estimated 46 million active Indian users on Facebook at the end of 2011, up 132 percent from a year earlier.

The Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore analyses the number of blocked sites. In a post on 22 August 2012, the Society posted an analysis on a leaked list of websites blocked from the 18th to 21st of August 2012. It said there were 309 specific items (those being URLs, Twitter accounts, img tags, blog posts, blogs, and a handful of websites) that had been blocked.

It said this number was meaningless at one level, given that it doesn't differentiate between the blocking of an entire website (with dozens or hundreds of web pages) from the blocking of a single webpage. However, given that very few websites have been blocked at the domain-level, that number was still reasonably useful. The information only relates to what telecom companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were asked to block till August 21, 2012. It does not include information on what individual web services have been asked to remove.

Sedition and other arrests

There has been heated debate about the use of the sedition law. Under Indian Penal Code Section 124 A, sedition is defined as, "Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine."

In the most recent case, cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was arrested in September 2012 on sedition charges for cartoons which allegedly mocked India’s Constitution and national emblem. He was released from prison on bail. He has said his “battle against sedition and oppressive behaviour by the government will continue.”

In April 2011, in an interview with the BBC, human rights activist Binayak Sen accused the government of misusing the country's sedition laws "to silence voices of dissent". The interview followed his release from jail after being sentenced to life in prison for helping Maoist rebels.

Concerns have also been raised that the laws are being used to silence critics. In April, a professor in Calcutta was arrested for allegedly posting cartoons on the internet which ridiculed West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The police said Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra was arrested for “spreading derogatory messages against respectable people”. His fellow professors and intellectuals condemned his arrest, calling it an attack on free speech.

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India Has No Confidence In Its Leading Politicians

With concerns increasing over the economy and growth, widespread corruption, internal strife and terrorist threats how do Indians regard their leading politicians - with confidence or not?

In September 2012, the Indian government introduced economic reforms including the opening of the retail sector to global supermarket chains. The move cost it a key ally, the Trinamool Congress Party, which withdrew from the government in protest of the reforms. The Economist reported that the reforms were supposed to cheer investors in need of encouragement and tackle a dangerous budget deficit, which in 2012 will easily breach the official target of 5.1 percent of GDP.

In September 2012, the Economist was saying Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had rediscovered his vim. It wrote that ‘after years of drift and sleaze, the Congress-led government of Mr. Singh has found some pizzazz. The initiatives that the prime minister announced on September 13th and 14th are nothing compared with the "big bang" reforms of 1991 that set India growing and for which Mr. Singh, then finance minister, was chiefly responsible. They do not even match the incremental reforms of Mr. Singh’s first term as prime minister from 2004-09. Still, from an ageing man whose second-term performance has been feeble, they mark a welcome change. Businesspeople are suddenly less despondent.’

Just a few months earlier, in July, Time Magazine called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an "under achiever." The magazine article said that 'with the rupee hitting record lows, a yawning fiscal deficit and a lack of economic direction from the government's brass, investors at home and abroad are developing cold feet, as rising inflation and a litany of scandals chip away at the government's credibility'.

Chief Ministers:

The political map has changed in India in recent years with the Congress Party losing its dominance over the central government and over a majority of state governments.

Regionalist parties, groups and leaders have emerged, bringing with them their own areas of influence. Chief Ministers are more willing to confront the federal government to protect their states’ interests. Earlier in 2012, they rebelled against a federal government attempt to set up a new counter-terrorism centre.

Opinion polls:

In May 2012, a CNN-IBN opinion poll found that 66 percent of the country's urban population think Manmohan Singh-led UPA government has lost credibility to govern. 59 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the current government.

In August 2012, a Mood of the Nation opinion poll conducted by Nielsen for the weekly magazine India Today put the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance ahead of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, if Lok Sabha elections were held immediately. 54 percent of the respondents replied 'No' to the question: Has Manmohan Singh lived up to his expectations of 2009? 46 percent said the PM fared 'poorly' in controlling inflation.

On the question who will make the best Prime Minister for the country, as many as 21 percent opted for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, 17 percent still think Atal Bihar Vajpayee, who is away from public life for the past 8 years due to ill health, as the best candidate. Only 10 percent opted for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, while six percent each opted for Dr. Singh and Sonia Gandhi. L.K. Advani garnered 8 percent support. Nitish Kumar could hardly gather 2 percent support.

The most talked about BJP leader in the country is Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, who is often tipped as a contender to the party leadership at the next election.

Corruption:

India has been hit by a string of huge corruption scandals in recent years. India ranked 95th place out of 182 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in 2011, down from 87th place in 2010. The index refers to perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts. The World Bank has identiï¬Âed corruption as among the greatest obstacles to economic and social development.

Economy:

Reuters reported on September 1 that India's economic growth languished near its slowest in three years in the quarter that ended in June but was slightly better than expected. Quarterly GDP grew 5.5 percent, driven by a rebound in construction and financial services, provisional government data showed, just above the 5.3 percent posted in the three months ended in March and slightly higher than economists had forecast in a Reuters poll.

Weak demand in the West has hit Indian exports, but the heaviest toll on the economy is from government overspending and a lack of reforms, a point made by both the central bank and ratings agencies Fitch and Standard & Poor's, who threatened to downgrade India's sovereign ratings to junk.

Wealth gap

The gap between the wealthy and poor is growing. According to the OECD (Regions at a Glance 2011), the top 10 percent of wage earners now make 12 times more than the bottom 10 percent (compared to 6 times 20 years ago). According to a report by Bain and Company, nearly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth is controlled by the top 5 percent of India’s households. Breaking that down even more, the wealthiest 1 percent controls about 16 percent of the national wealth.

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India Should Be Ashamed Of Its Record In Kashmir

Kashmir remains one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints. Conflict and instability in the state have left tens of thousands of people dead. But has India done enough to minimalise the casualties and address the concerns of the people?

Background:

Kashmir has one of the most deeply disputed borders in the world, with Indian and Pakistani troops posted at the Line of Control. The Line of Control (LoC) has been a flashpoint for the two nations since its foundation.

A truce in 2003 led to peace talks and improved ties. Since the truce, Pakistan has taken steps to wind down the Kashmir insurgency. The BBC reported that in 2006 Pakistan stopped all funding for militant operations in Indian-administered Kashmir and in 2012 it cut by half the administrative funds it issues to insurgent groups that maintain offices in Pakistani-administered Kashmir and offered a cash rehabilitation package to former fighters to get married and set up businesses.

India has fenced the entire LoC, which has reduced infiltration by militants. Since 2000, the number of armed militants has steadily decreased in Kashmir.

In recent years, tourists have started returning to the Kashmir valley in larger numbers. In 2011, the government approved a 220 million dollar employment plan for Jammu and Kashmir, which at the time had half a million unemployed.

Human rights

In 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said his government was committed to 'zero tolerance' against rights violations and effective action would be taken in such cases.

In August 2011, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Chief Minister Omar Abdullah reiterated his resolve of zero tolerance to human rights violations and said those involved in such practices would be punished.

A police investigation in 2011 by the J&K State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) found more than 2,000 bodies dumped into unmarked graves at 38 sites in north Kashmir. More than 500 were identified as the bodies of local Kashmiris.

A report by the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN published in December 2011 found that in Kashmir, justice evades well-known cases of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearance.

Amnesty International has accused security forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir of exploiting a law - the Public Safety Act - that enables them to hold tens of thousands of prisoners without trial. Amnesty reported that hundreds of new prisoners are being arrested and detained each year under the law.

The United Nations has asked India to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, saying it had no role to play in a democracy. The Act empowers the governor or the Central government to declare any part of the state as a 'disturbed area' if in its opinion special powers are required to prevent

(a) terrorist acts aimed at overthrowing the government, striking terror in the people, or affecting the harmony of different sections of the people, or

(b) activities which disrupt the sovereignty of India, or cause insult to the national flag, anthem or India's Constitution.

According to the BBC, the authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir have launched more than 400 cases of alleged human rights abuses against security forces personnel in the past three years. Nearly 300 cases have been seen in local courts, according to the government.

Interlocutors:

A group of three “interlocutors” was appointed in the fall of 2010 by the Indian central government after an outbreak of violence that left more than 100 people dead in J&K. They produced a 176 page report after speaking to more than 700 delegations throughout J&K. They found that more than two decades of conflict have left a large number of gross human rights violations by a variety of groups, including murder, torture and missing persons.

Some of the recommendations made by the group include:

• Ensure speedy punishment of those accused of human rights violations.
• Security forces must be given special training to respect the dignity of citizens.
• Peaceful protests must be allowed.
• To end the intimidation and harassment of citizens by the police, the para-military and the army.
• To release the stone-pelters and political detainees not charged with serious offences.
• To speed up the trial of militants languishing in jail for many years by setting up fast-track courts.
• To curb the indiscriminate use of the PSA.
• To bring to book those responsible for human rights violations;
• To re-deploy the army to the borders and place severe limits on the use of special powers vested in them.
• To stop the discrimination of family members who happen to be related to militants.

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India - Pakistan Relations

CURRENT RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

An International Crisis Group report in May 2012 summarised current relations as:

• In March 2011, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led government resumed the composite dialogue with India, with the rapid pace of its economic liberalisation program demonstrating political will to normalise bilateral relations.
• Departing from Pakistan’s traditional position, the democratic government no longer insists on linking normalisation of relations with resolution of the Kashmir dispute.
• India no longer insists on making such normalisation conditional on demonstrable Pakistani efforts to rein in India-oriented jihadi groups, particularly the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and hence suspension of the composite dialogue.

KASHMIR

In October 2012, Pakistan and India engaged in a verbal duel over Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly.

Pakistani President Zardari told the UN that his country would continue to support the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to peacefully choose their destiny in accordance with the UN Security Council's resolutions on the matter. India’s Foreign Minister responded by saying: ”We wish to make it abundantly clear that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India.”

Kashmir has been a flashpoint between the two countries for more than 60 years and has sparked two wars between the neighbouring countries. India and Pakistan fought in 1947-48 and in 1965.

In 1999 they also fought after Pakistani-backed forces infiltrated Kargil - an Indian-controlled area. In the fighting which lasted two months, more than 1,000 people were killed. General Musharraf was the head of the Pakistan army at the time.

A truce in 2003 led to peace talks and improved ties. Since the truce, Pakistan has taken steps to wind down the Kashmir insurgency. India has fenced the entire Line of Control, which has reduced infiltration by militants. Since 2000, the number of armed militants has steadily decreased in Kashmir.

In recent years, violence has decreased and tourists have started returning to the Kashmir valley in larger numbers.

Since 2010, India and Pakistan have established a series of confidence building measures and held regular peace talks.

KANDAHAR

In December 1999, an Indian Airlines jet was hijacked en route to Delhi from Kathmandu. It was flown to Kandahar in Afghanistan where the hijackers demanded the Indian government release militant fighters in Kashmir.

One hostage was killed during the early stages of the hijack and 27 others, mainly women and children, were released during a stopover.

The government released three jailed Kashmiri militants in exchange for the remaining 160 passengers who had been held hostage for a week.

NUCLEAR

Both India and Pakistan declared themselves nuclear powers with a number of tests in 1998.