Archive for September, 2008

Hindu mobs hit Christians

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Mass conversions spark violence in India, but rival tribes’ quest for state funds also at play
September 22, 2008
SONYA FATAH

The Toronto Star

KANDHAMAL, India–Rabindranath Pradhan grabbed his wife and son and took shelter amid the lentil stalks of a nearby field.
Cowering in fear, Pradhan, 45, who had left his paralyzed brother inside the house, watched as 200 right-wing Hindu youngsters entered his brother’s bedroom, poured gasoline over his body, and burned him alive.
“I could hear him screaming for me to save him, but I was unable to move,” said Pradhan, recounting the horror of his brother’s suffering on Aug. 24. Unarmed and outnumbered, Pradhan and his neighbours could only watch as his brother’s shrieks faded and their homes and church were burnt to the ground.
Afterwards, the area’s 37 Christian families took refuge in the nearby hills. While torching their homes, the crowd had chanted “Jai Bajrang Dal!” revealing themselves as members of the youth brigade of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing group that aims to cleanse the Hindu soul of mother India and end the slaughter of cows and conversions to Islam and Christianity across the country.
Increasing conversions to Christianity in Kandhamal, one of India’s most “backward” regions, have triggered a reaction among India’s right-wing Hindu organizations.
Foreign and local missionary groups of varying denominations have been proselytizing in the area for decades, but now they’re facing a staunch Hindu right that’s determined to counter Christian missionary zeal with a bit of their own.
What’s happening in Kandhamal, however, is also a struggle between two dominant tribal groups over acceptance into India’s complex affirmative action system, which gives communities defined as “backward” better access to education and jobs.
The targeting of Christians, their homes and places of worship began after the murder of VHP leader Swami Laxmiananada Saraswati on Aug. 23. Although the government blamed Maoists, VHP leaders and the Bajrang Dal blamed militant Christians and set about taking revenge. Since Aug. 24, at least 20 people have been killed, countless houses burnt and at latest count 20,000 people had taken shelter in relief camps under the protection of regular police deployments, paramilitary squads and riot police.
Kandhamal, in India’s eastern state of Orissa, is an unlikely place for a religious confrontation. Lush green valleys dotted with small fields of rice paddies and lentil plantations are flanked by forested hills. On the face of it, its villages demonstrate religious harmony; their short commercial stretches boasting both churches and temples. Beneath the surface, however, tension has been building.
Many in Orissa’s political establishment trace the problem to Christian missionary work.
“So much money comes into the state for missionary efforts,” said MP Tathagata Sathpathy, a member of the ruling Biju Janata Dal party. “These guys offered Dalits better chances by offering them jobs, free education and other benefits … That’s one reason why there have been mass conversions to Christianity.”
Kandhamal’s people rely mostly on subsistence farming to survive. Some 650,000 people live in the area, according to the 2001 census. Members of the Kandha tribe are predominantly Hindu. The Panos, who were Dalits, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, have over the years embraced Christianity.
Orissa is 95 per cent Hindu. Christians only make up 2.5 per cent of the population. But in Kandhamal district, Christians make up roughly 25 per cent of the population.
Since Saraswati’s death, they’ve been hounded, killed and made to retreat from the areas that have been their homes for centuries.
“It’s not simply a religious issue,” said a district official in Kandhamal. “Religion is being used for this purpose, but essentially the Kandhas and the Panos are fighting for access to (job) reservations.”


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No Canadians killed, diplomats say

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

Sonya Fatah
The Toronto Star

NEW DELHI, INDIA – Authorities at Canada’s High Commission in Islamabad say no Canadians were killed by the massive suicide bomb set outside one of the gates of the four-star Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital city.

The Marriott caters to international travelers and the Pakistani elite and, as the bomb exploded, many people had gathered at the hotel to break their daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. A Pakistani diplomat suggested the attack was “Pakistan’s 9/11,” BBC News reported.

“All our staff at the mission are accounted for, and as far as we know there are no Canadian casualties,” said a source within the Canadian High Commission.

The source, who often liaises with security officers at Islamabad’s two main prestigious hotels, the Serena and the Marriott, said an entire team of security officers deployed at the Marriott by the government of Pakistan accounted for seven of those who have died in the bombing. The officers are generally employed to ensure the security of VIP visitors and foreign delegations, including Canadian ones. The security staff was likely in the lobby at the time of the bombing.

At the time of filing, there were at least 40 dead and many injured but with people still trapped inside the hotel, the numbers were expected to rise. Islamabad’s police chief told the Guardian that the number of dead would be much higher because “dozens more dead” were inside.

The Marriott is a popular destination for international journalists, travelers and businessmen. In addition, many restaurants, in particular Jason’s Steakhouse, the Japanese restaurant, Sakura, and its Thai restaurant, the Royal Elephant, are also frequented by the city’s wealthier residents.

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Bhutto widower poised to take over presidential reins

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: The international airport here has been renamed the Benazir Bhutto International Airport. The country’s women crisis centres now go by the name Shaheed (Martyred) Benazir Bhutto Women Centres. A major district in Sindh province has also been given a new name: Shaheed Benazir Bhutto. Posters, billboards and banners bearing enlarged photographs of the late former prime minister still hang in key locations in Islamabad and the country’s other major urban centres. But it is Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who is quietly stealing the limelight. Today, as Pakistan prepares for a poll that will determine who will be its next president, Zardari appears poised for victory.
Turnarounds are not uncommon in Pakistani politics where horse-trading and under the table deals mean politicians are forever seeking fresh opportunities under new administrations. Still, Zardari, 53, has pulled off the most successful turnaround of them all. Until December 27, 2007, he was quiet, living away from Pakistan and staying out of matters relating to his wife Benazir Bhutto’s political rebirth. As Bhutto moved from city to city campaigning for her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, she was surrounded an entourage of future power-sharers but Zardari was conspicuously absent. Since her death, however, he has gradually moved into centre space, taking charge not only of internal party matters, but carefully securing for himself the role of the president.
There is good news, however, in Zardari’s ascendancy. Today’s election is constitutional and legal, a considerable departure from the previous presidential elections that saw a military chief grant the presidency to himself and decorate the position with additional power.
“There is certainly a cause for optimism in [Zardari’s] election,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, of Human Rights Watch. “It is markedly different from the election of his predecessor in that it is legal, that there is an electoral college, and that he will be elected through constitutional means.”
Over 700 members of Pakistan’s electoral college, consisting of federal and provincial members of parliament, will convene on Saturday. Zardari needs 351 votes to push him into office but the PPP hopes to get at least 60 percent of the vote. What happens after he takes office, however, is keeping a tired Pakistani nation anxious about its tenuous political future.
After all, Zardari, despite the legal and democratic triumph that his election may prove to be, he is not the most popular of men in Pakistan today. He has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of his late wife, the country’s twice-elected former prime minister, who was assassinated during a rally last year. The irony of Zardari’s sudden rise has been discussed over and over again in cafes and tea stalls, in the homes of the elite and the homes of the country’s vast poor.
Born in Karachi in July 1955 – a month after the birth of his future wife in the same city – to a Sindhi landlord, Hakim Ali Zardari and his wife, Asif Ali Zardari, was schooled at St. Patrick’s High School for boys, a Catholic institution that educated many of the city’s well-to-do, including Zardari’s predecessor, General (Retd) Pervez Musharraf.
Zardari hailed from a feudal background but his family lost much of their wealth when he was a young men. His friends recall that as a teenager in Karachi Zardari grew smart off the streets by selling movie tickets on the black outside his father’s cinema, Bambino.
Over the years stories about Zardari have become the stuff of legend with many ordinary Pakistanis telling unique stories of fearful encounters.
But those stories came to light only after Zardari married Benazir Bhutto, the then 32 year-old heir of her father’s political dynasty. The two had met only a few times before their marriage, and Bhutto said she had agreed to marry in an arranged marriage sort of way, because she knew that in Pakistan being single would go against her.
“In a Moslem society, it’s not done for women and men to meet each other, so it’s very difficult to get to know each other, and, my being the leader of the largest opposition party in Pakistan, it would have been a lot of rumor to the grist and bad for the image if I had chosen another course,” she was quoted as saying in a New York Times article announcing her marriage in the summer of 1987.
Indeed, Bhutto decided to marry largely because her election as the Muslim world’s first woman prime minister, was imminent. The following year the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq would collapse after his sudden and mysterious death in a plane crash, Bhutto, at the age of 33, would be elected prime minister.
For Zardari, the powerful world of high politics was enthralling. Very soon, he had earned a reputation for being an extremely charming person who was willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted. Among this pleasures was the popular Pakistani sport of polo and when his wife was in the prime minister’s spot for the second time, he frustrated the nation by building air-conditioned stables in the prime ministers house to keep his horses cool under the sweltering South Asian sun. It was a move that didn’t endear him to the millions living in sun-baked poverty.
But much more serious stuff was in the offering. When in 1996 Bhutto’s brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto was assassinated in a drive-by shooting, many alleged that Zardari, with whom Murtaza had acrimonious ties, had arranged for his murder. There was no evidence to back up this allegation but it stuck like wallpaper to Zardari and Bhutto’s reputation.
When Bhutto’s first government collapsed in 1990, Zardari was accused of blackmail and corruption and thrown into jail. But that term ended in 1993 when Bhutto returned to power.
Over the years he continued to accumulate charges that ranged from corruption to murder. A plethora of cases stacked up against him but were used against him when his wife was out of office. He was jailed between 1997 and 2004 but his cases never went to trial stage, and no evidence was ever shown to back up the charges.
When interviewed in London in July 2007, Bhutto insisted that the charges against her husband and herself — mostly for corruption — were falsified and were politically motivated by opposition governments and those who did not want her in power.
No doubt Zardari’s fortunes suffered a massive blow when the Nawaz Sharif government came to power and put him behind bars. Two weeks ago, the Financial Times published a story revealing that Zardari’s psychiatrists believed that he was mentally unstable, potentially suicidal and deeply affected by his time in prison, as a result of possible torture during his 11 years in Pakistan’s prisons.
The PPP says that Zardari has fully recovered. It has succumbed to his leadership in son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s absence, and accepted his presidential nomination even if Bhutto, anxious to redress the stigmas of her past, failed governments, had cast him aside.
While the corruption charges for which Zardari was put behind bars were never proven because the case went to trial, Bhutto’s widower earned himself the distinguishable title of ‘Mr. Ten Percent.’
The allegation corruptions haunted Bhutto’s governments and seemed likely more than a smear campaign that was politically motivated. Cases propped up in Swiss courts too, with Swiss authorities accusing Zardari of money laundering. At the end of last month Swiss courts stopped all proceedings against Zardari and unfroze the $60m that were in his Swiss accounts.
“Zardari is everything a good friend would want,” said a friend who did not want to be quoted. “He’s deeply loyal, and you see that his good friends are all around him. But he can also be downright ruthless. Absolutely ruthless.”
Today, the man who has lived in the shadow of his wife and in the shadow of scandal is to become the country’s much-awaited constitutionally appointed president.
But some analysts say that the man with the most scarred of Pakistani political pasts may not be the worst of Pakistani leaders.
He will be inheriting the position just as Pakistani enters another difficult phase of international cooperation in the war on terror. With two US strikes on Pakistani ground that have incensed the public, and with a new American president soon in office, it is Zardari who will have to handle both internal and external matters of security.
To do this, Zardari will have to watch out for his own skeletons.
“His presence as president of Pakistan means that he will be the target for anything that goes wrong,” cautioned Lt. Gen. (Retd) Talal Masood, who is a political and defense commentator, who believes that Zardari’s downfall may be control-seeking temperament.
“He is trying to over-centralize power because he is insecure and if he becomes president he will not need any indemnity,”
For now, Zardari has promised that he will do away with a sticky resolution that gave enormous powers to the president, and that he will redistribute the power equilibrium between his position and that of the prime ministers.
“The PPP has repeatedly said that it will restore the balance between the prime minister and the President and return Pakistan to a parliamentary democracy,” said Hasan.
Zardari has first to prove this. Then he must juggle with the counter-terrorism portfolio, and attempt to change the way in which counter terror operations were handled under General Musharraf. In addition to the challenge of growing terrorism, Zardari will have to build good relations with the military and save the country from a potentially worsening economic decline.
With his own experience in maneuvering through tricky situations, he may, oddly, be the right man in Pakistan’s troubled political cauldron, to take over power.
For the people of Pakistan, however, Zardari’s fifth gearing into power is a puzzling reality, merely another indication that politics here remains elusive to the common man, and an elite domain.
“Only Allah knows what happens in politics in Pakistan,” said Mohammad Farooq, an electrician, who said he was appalled at the news. “How did this man move from becoming the curse of our country to the president? Even Mohtarma Benazir had pushed him aside.”

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India toasts vintage industry

Monday, September 1st, 2008

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A view of the vineyards at Sula Vineyards, one of India’s largest wine producers, with 1,800 acres under cultivation with 10 varietals.

Wine made its debut in the 1980s but country’s economic boom has seen vineyards mushroom

September 01, 2008
SONYA FATAH
The Toronto Star

NASIK, India–Rows of grape vines wrapped around steel frames are set in long, neat lines that stretch across the expanse on this side of the horizon.

The varietals are common: Chenin Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Red Zinfandel, Merlot to name a few. But this is not old wine country. Set against the rolling green plains around Nasik, a sort of Napa Valley in western India, this is Sula Vineyards, one of India’s largest wine producers with 1,800 acres under cultivation and 10 varieties of whites, reds, roses and dessert wines to offer the Indian consumer.

Wine is not new to India. Its oldest vineyards – Château Indage and Grover Vineyards – have been around since the 1980s. But the wine industry has only mushroomed after Sula’s entry, a change that is partially attributed to its founder, Rajeev Samant, a 41-year-old Stanford-university educated engineer turned winemaker, who set his sight on the potential a boom in wine consumption. But it’s also partially attributable to a growing economic boom in the country.

Indeed, as India has rolled into the 21st century with consumers ready to spend their rising disposable income on fine dining and wining, the business of wine making has become quite the in-thing. In the state of Maharashtra alone a handful of wineries have found more than two-dozen new neighbours.

“The future for Indian wine is very bright,” said David Banford, who heads the Wine Society of India, an organization that promotes wine education through information sessions, courses and wine tastings. Banford and his partners first started such a concept in the United States — the Wine Society of America — when the U.S. still had an unfriendly attitude toward wine. Today, the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of wine. India, too, is headed in that direction, Banford said.

“Wine culture is here to stay. People here see wine as part of a civilized, western-oriented lifestyle.”

Of course, consumption in India is still quite marginal, making up 1 per cent of total alcohol sales by volume. About 1.2 million cases of wine are consumed annually, but the national alcohol diet is heavily skewed in favour of beer and liquor. By comparison, more than 70 million cases of beer and 70 million cases of spirits are consumed annually. Simply said, there are about 5 million wine consumers compared with 300 million liquor consumers.

If those numbers don’t impress, the rate at which the wine industry is rapidly growing surely will.

Since Samant harvested and fermented grapes for his introductory round of bottled wines, his business has increased by many multiples. That year — in 2000 — some 5,000 cases of wine were consumed across India. Today, Sula Wines contributes 250,000 to India’s one million plus consumption total.

Add to this a change in tired, old laws disallowing wine licenses and a 2005 move to delink wine and liquor in some states, have made inroads in changing perceptions about wine.

In some Indian states big supermarkets can now carry wines extending the influence of sellers to India’s large middle and upper-middle class.

Of course, the savvy Samant is also a keen marketer of his wines. At Sula Vineyards he has a tasting room with an outdoor patio overlooking the vineyard. He’s also started an annual harvest festival at the vineyard’s amphitheatre, which he designed. By October a trattoria restaurant will have opened serving vegetarian Italian food, Nasik’s first Italian restaurant. Recently he also started renting out Beyond, a three-bed bungalow where visitors can enjoy the green pastures of India’s wine country.

Samant’s success aside, developing a wine culture in India has been a slow process. Most men here drink beer and spirits and women form a minuscule portion of the country’s drinking population. For wine lovers and businessmen, the negative publicity around alcoholism and drinking hard liquor may do wonders for the image of wine in India.

Wine makers are trying hard to present it as a healthy alternative, one that can be savoured by men and women. Anecdotal examples of their success can be seen among the young men and women who drive out to Sula’s vineyards to taste its wines or who are becoming regulars at specialty wine stores that have propped up in some of the country’s metros. Samant himself is a partner in Saunte, a chain of wine stores in Mumbai and Pune that sell domestic and imported wines.

Château Indage, too, has a wine bistro, Ivy, in Mumbai and a series of specialist wine stores.

The newness and the range are allowing India’s upwardly mobile youth to experiment with changing tastes.

At the outdoor patio bar at Sula, three young men, all recent medical school graduates, ordered three different wines and sat discussing the differences in bouquets among their chosen drinks; a glass each of shiraz, red zinfandel and rose.

“We used to think that roses were a girl’s drink,” said Nikhil Pawar, 22, who hails from neighbouring Nasik, and who, on his third visit to Sula Vineyards, had dragged along two other friends. “But we’re experimenting with all sorts of wines now. We want to know what is the difference between dry and semidry, and whites and reds.”

For his friend, Saurabh Shivishkar, a 22-year-old medical resident in Mumbai, an afternoon at the vineyards brought out the romantic in him.

“I can just imagine myself travelling between Bordeaux and Marseille and stopping here in between. It feels like heaven. It’s such beautiful country. The clouds, the countryside, the wine.”

Young men like Pawar, Shivishkar and their friend are recent converts to wine. By Indian standards, Nasik with a population of just over one million according to the 2001 Indian national census, is a second-tier city after the more cosmopolitan urban Indian centres like Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. But ever since Samant and Sula Wines set their footprint in this area, Nasik has quickly become India’s fastest growing area for wine consumption.

The mini wine revolution isn’t restricted to elite urban consumers. Farmers on contract to sell wine grapes to vineyards like Sula and Château Indage, also in Maharashtra state, and are beginning to sample and enjoy the product of their labour.

“Many of the farmers around here drink wine now instead of liquor,” Samant said after presiding over a 10-year annual meeting with his contract farmers who previously plied the much less successful business of table grapes.

That means new drinkers are beginning to opt for wine over hard liquor. In Nasik, women, too are beginning to swirl goblets of wines grown virtually in their backyard.

“My mother never used to drink,” said Pawar. “She’d occasioning have a small rum with my father. But now she’ll have wine with her friends. Last year, she came to Sula Vineyards with 14 of her friends and they were all drinking wine.”

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