By Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Sep 2 (IPS) – The ordeal of a Sri Lankan domestic worker whose Saudi Arabian employer allegedly drove nails and metal wires into her body has sent alarm bells ringing among government officials and activists, but how such abuses can be stopped remain far from clear.

“This is a bit of a problem. Maybe we need to look at
some new protective measures,” said Mangala Randeniya,
deputy general manager at the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau
of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), which looks after the
overseas deployment of this South Asian island nation’s
workers.

The widely reported case of 50-year-old L P D Ariyawathi,
who returned to Sri Lanka on Aug. 21 with 20 nails and metal
wires in her body, has triggered protests outside the Saudi
Arabian embassy here.

After President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered a full
investigation into the Ariyawathi case, SLBFE officials flew
to Riyadh on Aug. 30 to persuade Saudi authorities to take
action against the employer and discuss issues facing
migrant workers.

This latest case may be the most bizarre thus far, but it
is not the first and will not be last, given that this South
Asian island nation has 1.5 million overseas workers, of
whom 1.2 million work in Saudi Arabia. Majority of them are
women working in private homes as domestic workers.

But Lakshan Dias, a lawyer who is chairman of the Colombo-
based South Asian Network for Refugees, IDPs and Migrant
Workers, says Ariyawathi’s plight provides a opportunity for
the Sri Lankan government to step up pressure on labour-
receiving countries to fulfill international conventions
against torture and others respecting the rights of migrant
workers.

Saudi Arabia has signed the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) Convention against Torture but with some
reservations, he says.

“Putting pressure on governments won’t necessarily mean
we will lose markets,” he said, arguing that recently the
SLBFE banned the deployment of Sri Lankan domestic workers
in Jordan because agents there were paying less than the
prescribed minimum wage of 200 U.S. dollars per month.

But while Sri Lanka has bilateral agreements on migrant
labour with Kuwait and Jordan, it does not have one with
Saudi Arabia.

Likewise, Sri Lanka, like many other labour-exporting
countries, has signed the 1990 International Convention on
the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and
Their Families. But many labour-receiving nations, like
Saudi Arabia, have not signed it.

With little certainty over how justice can be obtained in
Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka’s bureau of foreign employment has
taken the responsibility of compensating Ariyawathi with a
house and cash. It says it plans to fly her to Saudi Arabia
in case her presence is required for an investigation there.

Nimalka Fernando, a women’s rights activist and
spokeswoman for the Colombo-based Women’s Alliance for Peace
and Democracy, says the government drags its feet over the
protection of domestic workers, which the country has been
exporting for three decades.

“Sri Lankan domestic workers are getting harassed almost
daily in some part of the world but our officials are slow
in responding,” she said. “It was horrifying that the
Foreign Minister G L Peiris met the Saudi ambassador in
Colombo to register a complaint in the Ariyawathi case only
on Tuesday (Aug. 31), almost 10 days after the victim
returned and the storywas splashed all over the newspapers.”

She said rights groups plan to file a complaint with the
U.N. Expert Group on Migrant Workers in Geneva on the
torture of Ariyawathi. “We are also canvassing for all
labour- receiving countries where Sri Lankans work to ratify
the ILO Convention Against Torture and enforce it,” she
added.

But Dias says that what happens to efforts to seek legal
address in Saudi Arabia, where this is first case of abuse
of this kind for Sri Lanka, is up in the air. If the courts
move and issue a ruling in favour of the migrant worker, it
could be precedent case for the future.

He adds that judicial intervention – getting a ruling and
policy from the courts – might be more effective than
working through existing laws.

For instance, Dias has filed a fundamental rights
petition in Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court on behalf of a Sri
Lankan worker who was duped into signing a second contract
with a job agent, one where the job designation was changed
from the original contract and the salary reduced. This
worker returned to Sri Lanka a few months after arriving in
Qatar, where he had been forced to work as a labourer
although he was a skilled plumber, and then fell ill.

The victim is demanding not only compensation but a
ruling from the court that the government should have a
compensation formula for all workers in distress.

Ariyawathi’s case has drawn as much attention as much as
what happened to Rizana Nafeek, the underage domestic worker
who was trafficked into Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death
on Jun. 16, 2007 for the alleged murder of an infant in her
care. In jail since May 2005, Nafeek’s sentence has been
suspended in view of an appeal.

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By Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug 30 (IPS) – A breakdown in Pakistan’s justice system, a sign of a society desensitised to violence, an example of mob brutality.

Whatever one calls the sight filmed on video by at least
two television stations – of two teenage brothers being
clubbed to death by a group of men in the eastern city of
Sialkot in Punjab province – it brings out into the open
many difficult questions that Pakistanis are asking about
their society.

Shock over the Aug. 15 lynching – which the crowds did
nothing to stop – spread after the footage was shown last
week on all local televisions channels, and carried in
international media reports. The video provoked calls for
the government to step in to put a stop to vigilante
justice.

“The Sialkot outrage sums up the degeneration of
Pakistani society and the state institutions,” I A Rehman,
secretary-general of the independent Human Rights Commission
of Pakistan (HRCP), told IPS.

The grainy footage showed the two brothers, 19-year-old
Mughees Butt and 15-year-old Muneeb, being beaten with
sticks and wires by the men before being hung, alive, from
metal poles.

The reason for the killing remains under inquiry, and
reports said the men who beat up the youngsters were
students from a ‘madrasah’ or Islamic religious school.

A local journalist interviewed by IPS said the lynching
was related to a woman and not one of crime or theft. But
other media reports said that when Interior Minister Rehman
Malik met the brothers’ family on Aug. 22, he referred to
their having tried to rob a house but saying that even if
guilty, “they (the public) cannot act as the investigator,
prosecutor, judge and executioner”.

“The fact that the criminals resorted to such extreme
violence was disturbing enough,” says psychologist Asha
Bedar, but found even more appalling the fact that so many
people stood and “watched and not one of them was shocked,
horrified or sickened enough to intervene”. Seventeen of the
18 suspects in the lynching have been arrested.

This desensitisation to violence is combined with what
peace activist Q Isa Daudpota says is the breakdown of the
judicial process, which makes some think they can take
justice into their own hands.

This is reinforced by incidents of “fake police
encounters”, adds Farooq Tariq, spokesman of the Labour
Party Pakistan. ‘Police encounters’ is a euphemism used in
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to describe extrajudicial
killings in which police shoot down alleged suspects before
they can go through trial.

Yet mainstream media and the public gave glorified cases
where police have killed suspected criminals in fake
encounters, Tariq says. He cites the example of Zulfiqar
Ahmed Cheema, deputy inspector general in Gujranwala, a town
neighbouring Sialkot, who was conferred the ‘Tamgha-e-
Imtiaz’ or medal of excellence, the fourth-highest
government honour given to members of the military and
civilians. “He paraded them (killed suspects) in the city
and got showered by rose petals by the citizens,” he
recalls.

“As a matter of policy, police kill suspects in the so-
called encounters and they see no reason to stop citizens
from following suit,” Rehman says, recalling that a police
officer once appeared on television to announce awards to be
given to citizens who killed criminals.

Rehman traces the brutalisation of Pakistani society to
the 11 years (1977-1988) of martial law under dictator
Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. This was also the result of
Islamisation starting with Zia’s Hudood laws, or Islamic
decrees introduced in 1979 by General Zia that cover a range
of crimes and apply to non-Muslims, adds senior journalist
Ghazi Salahuddin.

In short, Pakistan is paying “for the militancy of
bigots”, Rehman points out. Tariq adds that often, mob
justice is also strengthened by religious teachings that
uphold stoning to death and cutting off the hands of
thieves. This can become difficult to control in places like
the Punjab that have “a history of religious militancy”,
independent researcher Mansoor Raza says.

“All major militant outfits have their head offices
there. The recruits and headcount of ‘martyrs’ (a euphemism
used to refer to suicide bombers) are also from these seven
districts,” says Raza, referring to Lahore, Faisalabad,
Kasur, Sheikhupura, Gujranwala, Toba Tek Singh and Sialkot.
The number of ‘madrasah’ has grown in the Punjab, resulting
in more intolerance, and “they are immune to logic and in
adversity are quick to resort to muscle power,” he says.

Rehman adds that very few protests have been heard when
extremists carry out abuses, including toward religious
minorities and those suspected of having done immoral acts.

All these come together in a “herd mentality”, explains
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a peace activist who teaches physics at
Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University. In the mid-August
lynching, he says, “Gustave Le Bon, the famous French
sociologist, would surely have used this example to bolster
his theory of social contagion which hypothesises that
crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members.”

“Mobs behave like this when there is a total breakdown in
social order and when the moral and intellectual foundations
of a society begin to crumble,” adds Salahuddin.

Bedar warns of more episodes like the Sialkot lynching,
which was “neither the first nor the last of its kind.”
Added Bedar: “Unlearning the deeply ingrained and powerful
attitudes that instigate, support and allow such incidents
is what will ultimately make a difference. And that is the
real challenge.”

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NEW DELHI: After a long drawn -out consultation process, the Union government has finally pronounced its verdict against Vedanta Alumina’s $1.7-billion plan to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa. Local tribals have been agitating against the project as the site is considered sacred by them.

“There has been a very serious violation of the Environment Protection Act, the Forest Conservation Act and the Forest Rights Act,” said Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh.

He blamed Vedanta, the Orissa Mining Corporation, and State officials for the violations. “The clearance stands rejected.”

Read Full report : http://www.hindu.com/2010/08/25/stories/2010082559410100.htm

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By Prabhat Shunglu

New Delhi: The claims of British doctors and scientists can always be re-doubted whether the New Delhi bug
actually originated from the capital of the country it has been named after before long it was
claimed to have travelled to Europe and other continents but corruption is one adamant superbug
that refuses to leave the power corridors of New Delhi. This time the bug bit a somebody who has
been a familiar name in the country’s sports administration, credited, along with several like-minded
politicians and social bigwigs running sports bodies, with pushing the country’s sports on the brink
of sustained disaster leave aside a few sports. And they did this largely by draining the coffers of
the sports bodies they headed for private luxury. Those who were incapable of such an enterprise
showed their prowess by investing their energies into more physical and fleshy aspect of sports,
never mind the public shame that invariably accompanied the exposure of their escapades. Only
the Board of Cricket Control of India can be excluded from this category because they have single-
handedly fashioned cricket’s fall from grace by plying the boys with stinking money only to see Team
India set records after records in setting lowest scores ever in test and one day history and going
down to rivals with margins that cannot be measured in yards but in miles.

But why should the country make a song and dance about Kalmadi and his hand-picked coterie.
How will his resignation help set things right when the Commonwealth Games are round the corner.
In fact, there cannot be a more opportune time to tether Kalmadi to his acts of commissions and
omissions. Now is the time to believe in him for all what he is claiming. Now is the time to repose
one hundred per cent faith in his leadership and enterprise. If the Games are pulled off without
stadium lights going out just when the rivals in the boxing ring are taking rapid jabs at each other,
without a tile out of place, without the players getting stuck in the traffic jams from the games
village to the stadium, without rains playing havoc with Kalmadi, his men and Delhi government’s
cheeky efforts to give a leak-proof stadium all the punches and jabs being thrown at Team Kalmadi
may actually boomerang. Public memory is time-tested and is clearly short. Post October 14 when
the curtains fall down on the Commonwealth Games you can be rest assured the former fighter pilot
would have ejected to safety.

But that would be one lovely wishful thinking for Mr Kalmadi. For in the deep recess of his mind
he must be scheming ways to get out of the sordid mess because he knew he was sprinting close
to that mess every time a stone was laid at expanding the stadium, every time a tile was imported
for the rest rooms and the lobbies, when state-of-the-art turf was being laid out and every time a
certain plan was changed and re-drawn to measure up to the most modern sporting facilities that
lived up to the international standards. It is hard to digest Kalmadi’s ignorance about tenders and
deals floating around him most of which he was personally privy to and he personally partook. The
fabricated letter from the Indian High Commission recommending a certain firm for a contract was a
clear give away of Team Kalmadi’s shenanigans. As Kalmadi himself had a big foot into his mouth on
news channels across the country.

Precisely why even the party he has served over three decades has distanced itself from him over
the CWG controversies. But it is a case of too little too late. It is true that as elected president of
the Indian Olympic Association and man in charge of CWG preparations Kalmadi is answerable
only to Commonwealth Games Federation in this case and not to Sonia Gandhi or Prime Minister

Manmohan Singh. Yet it shall be travesty of reason and logic to completely take away the blame
from the Congress party or the government for having allowed the mess to prosper at the cost of the
nation’s pride and honour.

Whose credibility is at stake in this CWG anyway. Whose games are these. Kalmadi may just be
Games CEO for all we know but at the end of the day it is India’s honour and credibility at stake. Can
one man be allowed to play with country’s confidence, pride and self-esteem. Can the government
of the day wash its hands off the controversies and those that may dog the Games in the immediate
future or post the conclusion of the Games. What, if the standards at the Games venues and stadia
were found suspect. What if the rains bring down the concrete slab over the excited and restive
spectators. It shall also crush the country’s credibility and self-esteem beyond repair. And burdened
with this heavy weight guilt we shall loose the moral right to bid for hosting the 2020 Olympics.
Anyway, with tons of water-tight evidences the Olympics Committee shall be on a high moral ground
to reject India’s bid.

You can question the chicaneries of a Kalmadi but the pragmatism of the Manmohan Singh
government ably remote-controlled by 10 Janpath, the repository of political power in the country
today, who also plays parent and guardian to several Congress MPs including Mr Suresh Kalmadi,
also becomes suspect. For much part of his tenure after he was put in charge of the sports ministry
Mr M S Gill seemed fumbling for a role for himself when he should have been asserting his authority
as a Minister. The grand-old-nanny of Delhi’s politics chief minister Sheila Dixit appeared too clever
by half as it gradually dawned upon her that after all she will have to meet project deadlines well
before the onset of the Games. While the Gills, the Dixits and the Kalmadis were busy playing
seven stones with the Games not a leaf stirred at either the South Block, 7 Race Course Road or 10
Janpath.

Enter Mike Fennel and the country wakes up to a disaster in waiting. The government agencies
engaged in Games’ work were caught off-guard. As Fennel hopped and stepped over games
preparations he nearly jumped with anger at the tardy progress. That was a year ago. Kalmadi cut a
sorry figure but put up a brave face and made incredulous assertions misleading public but gathering
headlines nevertheless. That was the time the Manmohan government should have appropriated
the opportunity to take the Games command under its wings without giving the impression that
Kalmadi’s wings have been clipped. It could have also saved Mani Aiyar the embarrassment of
having to literally curse, in a fit of frustration and anger, a la sage Parashuram that the games shall
be an utter disaster. Finally it dawned upon him that he was no longer the minister of sports and
having lost the elections and now nominated to the Rajya Sabha shall never become one again and
will have to cool his heels in the Upper House for long.

But who knows Mani’s unprecedented, off-the-cuff but pungent outburst may have just catapulted
him into the big league of doomsday alarmists. Maybe he is the indigenous answer to the ‘occult
powers’ Germany’s Octopus Paul possessed. Who will have the last laugh – Mani Shankar or the
Games mascot Shera. Shera, the tiger, is battered and bruised by the gang of classical poachers in all
likelihood might just be counting on his last breath.

If the Games pull off well it shall be a triumph of corruption once again and India shall celebrate
it on the streets of New Delhi. Corruption is one superbug Indians can claim to have lab-tested
indigenously. The only difference being while the NDM-1 feeds on human lives the corruption

superbug gnaws at the soul. This superbug and not the superbug British scientists are tom-toming
having originated here should be the one named after the capital of the country of its origin.
- 13-08-2010

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By Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug 20 (IPS) – Inundated by appeals through text messages, email and Twitter, as well as in print and broadcast media, that call for donations of dried rations, hygiene kits, buckets, tubs and cooking pots, and straw mats, Ambreen Siddiqui feels lost in trying to help her fellow Pakistanis in the midst of the country’s worst floods in decades.

”I don’t know where and how to begin helping these people who have lost just about everything û their home, land, livestock and some even their families,” says Siddiqui, a 35-year-old mother of two.

While the calls for assistance say how to and who to give donations to, she is unsure whom she can trust. But she is sure that her donation will not be going into the relief fund set up by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani.

This is a common refrain heard here every day, reflecting the deep mistrust of and anger against the government. For many, this sentiment has been exacerbated by President Asif Ali Zardari’s sojourn to France and Britain earlier in August, when the destruction caused by record floods was at its peak.

”I haven’t heard in the media even once how much donations the ruling elite have given to this fund, how can the government expect me to put my money in it?” 75-year-old Salma Ahmad says angrily.

”This government is not honest, that’s what we hear on the media daily. There are no refutations from them, which means it’s all true. The message we get is they don’t care. Only last night I heard our foreign minister talking to the Pakistani expatriate community in the U.S. telling them to donate generously,” says Azra Ahsan, a Karachi-based obstetrician. ”He said if they didn’t trust the government, they can give to groups they do, but donate they must. It was laughable for a government to admit this.”

”The response of the civilian government was slow in the first week; it took its time to put its act together,” Hassan Askari Rizvi, an analyst in the northern city of Lahore, explains. In contrast, the army has received kudos for its operations. ”They have the organisational capacity, training to deal with difficult situations and technical skills for rescue and relief operations, building bridges and restoring communication,” explained Rizvi. ”This helps to build its image as against the increased governance problems of the civilian government.”

The massive deluge has killed some 1,600 people and left almost 20 million people affected. A fifth of the country has been submerged.

Some have started their own collection drives for goods and cash. Salim Tabani, 49, a factory owner in Karachi, took four truckloads of rations that he and his friends donated to Khairpur and Kashmore districts in Sindh province .”Now I know better what is needed and will go again next week with more goods,” he said.

In Karachi, abuzz with a bevy of fund collectors, a group of young women collects clothes for flood victims. Textile design students are collecting old, faded T-shirts, which are made into blankets, mattresses and hammocks. An art gallery held a ”silent auction” of paintings collected from 88 artists and raised 1.26 million Pakistani rupees (140,000 U.S. dollars). Meantime, another group of women collects plastic water and soda bottles and fills them with clean water.

In Peshawar in north-west Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, 32-year-old Najiullah Khattak has collected over 2.2 million rupees (250,000 dollars) since he started a group on the social networking site Facebook on Aug. 2. ”To be honest, I and a few friends decided to collect some funds and give it to an organisation, thinking that’s where our responsibility would end,” Khattak told IPS by telephone from Peshawar. ”All I did was tell people on Facebook what we were doing, and people just came in with their donations.”

At the international level, the United Nations has seen a marked improvement in donations. It launched an appeal for 460 million dollars, and has received 227.8 million so far.

But the disaster’s scale is so massive that no government, corrupt or otherwise, can address it alone, observes Khattak. Indeed, the charity arms of organisations linked with extremism have also been busy giving out hot meals, and receiving contributions.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik, worried by the inroads these groups could make, has said that ”banned organisations” cannot visit flood-hit areas. ”There is a possibility that the negative forces would exploit the situation,” Zardari said at a press conference with visiting U.S. Sen. John Kerry this week.

Among the charities helping flood victims is the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation, the charitable wing of Jammat-du-Dawa blamed for carrying out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India. Its chairman, Hafiz Abdul Rauf told IPS that its 43 camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and southern Punjab ”serve two hot meals a day to some 45,000 people in all three provinces.”

Faisal Edhi of Edhi Foundation, South Asia’s biggest and most trusted charitable organisation, says: ”I see no reason why these groups cannot work alongside in this hour of need.”

There should be no problems ”as long as humanitarian assistance is provided in a way which is neutral, impartial, and independent, it conforms to humanitarian principles,” adds Maurizio Giuliano of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

At the same time, many of the relief initiatives lack organisation. ”Everyone is doing their own thing. Nobody trusts anyone, not the government or the NGOs. I’m just worried the passion with which people have gone on this charitable drive, may just fizzle out,” Siddiqui points out. ”This month is also the holy month of Ramadan when people are generally feeling more generous, but we must think of long-term strategy for supporting these people.”

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A sister in New Delhi ties ‘Rakhi’ to his brother. PHOTO: Rajeev Sharma

Melbourne, New Delhi: ‘Rakhi’ (Sister’s Day) was celebrated all over India and by Indian people all over the world yesterday. Sister’s tied ‘Rakhi’ to their brothers and brothers pledged to love and look after their sisters for ever. The ancient festival is popular and sweets are exchanged by brothers and sisters on the day.

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Melbourne: Australian Labor Party (ALP) candidate Lisa Singh from Tasmania has become the first person of South Asian decent in Australia to enter the Australian Federal Parliament. Lisa Singh, 38, a former Minister in the ALP government in Tasmania has been elected to the Senate. She got 39, 359 votes after preferences and the Liberal candidate secured 37, 795 votes after preferences.

At the March 2010 Tasmanian state election Lisa was not returned to office. Since that time Lisa has been active establishing a support organisation for asbestos sufferers in Tasmania. She is the current CEO of Asbestos Free Tasmania Foundation. Her grandfather Ram Singh was a member of the Fiji Parliament in the 1970s.

Lisa is the mother of two teenage boys and lives in Hobart in the Denison electorate.

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The magic number of 76 seems impossible with counting on for three seats. Independents and the lone Green are likely to play a decisive role in the formation of the new government which could take a few more days.

Earlier, people across Australia yesterday voted for a new Parliament. About 1.8 million early votes had been cast by Wednesday, according to the Australian Electoral Commission — 12.5 per cent of all voters, increasing the chances of a delayed outcome if the election goes down to the wire. Of those, 811,190 were pre-poll votes, up almost 230,000 on the 2007 election, and 951,829 were postal votes, up 145,000.

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By Megan Iacobini de Fazio and Matthew Berger*

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 (IPS) – The U.N. General Assembly met Thursday to express the world
community’s solidarity with the people of Pakistan and to urge
member states to step up their aid commitment to the flood
stricken country.

Envoys called for ”filling the gap” in the initial appeal of
460 million dollars launched last week. So far, only half of
that has been pledged.

”Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami,” said Secretary-
General Ban Ki-moon, who visited Pakistan last weekend.
”This is a disaster, a global challenge. It is one of the
greatest tests of global solidarity of our times.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Quereshi drew
attention to the severe impact the floods have had on the
mainly agrarian economy and the dangers of food shortages in
the sixth most populous country in the world.

He also stressed that Pakistan is still committed to the
fight against terrorism, but added that if the upheaval and
economic losses caused by the flood are not dealt with
effectively, the hard won gains made by the government in
tackling extremism and terrorism may be undermined.

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton announced that the
U.S., already the biggest donor, will give an extra 60
million dollars in addition to the 90 million already
pledged. She also said that part of the 7.5 billion dollars
that the U.S. will give to Pakistan over the next five years
for non-military assistance will be devoted to rebuilding
the country’s infrastructure in the mid- to long-term
future.

The European Union was represented in the assembly meeting
by Belgian Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere. European Union
Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton was unable to attend
the meeting because as representative of the EU, which is
not formally a member of the assembly, she has ”no speaking
rights”.

However, Ashton said that the EU will increase its
assistance to Pakistan by 30 million euros, to reach a total
of 105 million euros (135 million dollars).

The list of over 60 speakers included countries such as
Georgia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Italy. However,
only about half of those countries took the floor as the
meeting was adjourned early.

Quereshi claimed that the new pledges were an encouraging
sign of solidarity and that he would be returning to
Pakistan reassured that the initial 460-million-dollar
initial appeal would be reached.

Earlier in the day, several dignitaries made a high-profile
appeal for aid before a morning crowd at the Asia Society.
The speakers also touched on the ways in which their
organisations are helping.

Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for
International Development, pointed to the successes of U.S.
help in response to the 2005 earthquake centred in Pakistan
administrated Kashmir. There, the goal was to ”build back
better”, he said.

Shah hoped the response to this disaster will follow a
similar model, using new technology and new strategies to
rebuild the infrastructure and communities more resilient
than before. ”The recovery will take a long time,” said
Shah, ”but it also affords an opportunity to build back in a
better way.”

For now, the focus is simply on helping the people on the
ground who are continuing to suffer. Shah said that aid is
currently meeting the needs of 700,000 to 1.2 million
people, but that this is clearly not enough. About 20
million people have been affected by the floods, as well as
1.7 million acres of productive, planted farmland and the
livestock there, he said.

But some are willing to look deeper than the immediate
emergency. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros noted the
donor fatigue ”in responding to these disasters because
there are too many of themàThey are connected. There is
climate change and it has a human cause.” Soros said
governments must act to help Pakistan but ”must also do
something about the root causes,” including reducing fossil
fuel emissions.

Foreign Minister Qureshi echoed those climate concerns. He
pointed to the combination of high rainfall in the north,
increased glacier melt in the Himalayas and unseasonable
monsoons as leading to the devastating floods.

As for the U.S. response, U.S. special envoy Richard
Holbrooke says it is ”focused solely on helping. We’re not
doing it because of Pakistan’s neighbours, we’re doing it
because Pakistan matters.”

”We want to be the first with the most assistance, and we
have been,” Holbrooke said, though he noted the response
will require an international and continued effort.

*Matthew Berger reported from Washington.

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Analysis by Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 18 (IPS) – Strident voices are rising against the Indian coalition government’s move to
identify people by their caste background in the ongoing census.

India has not included caste as a category in census enumerations since
1931. This form of social hierarchy, based on descent and traditional
occupation, has continued to be a feature of social and political life on the
subcontinent. Caste originates in Hinduism, but Christians and Muslims are
not immune to it.

The vast majority of marriages continue to be caste-endogamous, with
matrimonial columns in newspapers subdivided according to caste. Violation
of the caste code by young couples invites social ostracism or, at worst,
honour killing.

Caste groups form readymade vote banks, and are carefully nurtured by
politicians. Several regional parties are closely identified with a particular
caste, such as the Samajwadi Party (SP) in the northern Uttar Pradesh state
and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in eastern Bihar.

SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and the RJD’s Lalu Prasad Yadav openly
promote the largely peasant but upwardly mobile Yadav caste. Both the
‘Yadav chieftains’ as they are often referred to in the Indian media, have
served as state chief ministers and central government ministers.

The SP and RJD, the main drivers in parliament behind the move to include
caste in the census questionnaire, provide issue-based support to the ruling
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).

In the face of SP and RJD charges in Parliament that the government is
dragging its feet, defence minister Pranab Mukherjee, who heads a group of
ministers charged with formulating policy on the issue, announced that what
is under consideration is ”how and when this should be done.”

Supporters of the move say that without accurate statistics on caste numbers,
development programmes will be difficult to implement fairly.

At issue particularly is the exact size of a group officially classified as other
backward classes (OBCs) which have been variously estimated to form
between 40 and 60 percent of India’s population and into which large caste
groups such as the Yadavs fall.

”We need a scientific count of the OBCs if they are to be given the benefits of
reservation policies,” says Sitaram Yechuri, a member of Parliament who
represents the opposition Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).

”Enumeration of the OBC groups will quickly settle disputes about their actual
numbers and yield vital information on their socio-educational and economic
conditions,” says Prof. Yogendra Yadav, senior fellow at the New Delhi-based
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and a respected demographer.

According to Prof. Yadav, the government has no choice but to do a head
count of the social groups that it has already recognised through laws and
policies. He says it must also heed court directions to settle the issue of
numbers so that affirmative action can be implemented. ”OBC enumeration
should have been carried out at the last census in 2001 when the policy of
reservations for this group was already in place,” he says.

Meanwhile, Sabal Bharat (Strong India), a grouping of eminent public figures,
is devising a strategy to head off caste enumeration until it can be examined
by an all-party parliamentary committee that takes into account the opinion
of jurists, statesmen, demographers, academics, and of the state assemblies.

Sabal Bharat founder Ved Prasad Vaidik told IPS the issue is too important to
be ”dealt with summarily by only a small group of ministers or the political
leaders of the present Parliament, because it will impact future generations.

”The fact is that major political parties do not want to take responsibility for
the initiation of this dangerous move, but they are anxious to preserve their
vote banks,” said Vaidik.

Both the Congress party and its main rival, the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) have, over the last two decades, been marginalised in Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar, states which together are home to 273 million people.

Hindu society was originally divided into priests (Brahmins) at the top of the
hierarchy, followed by warriors (Kshatriyas), traders (Vaishya) and the serving
classes (Sudras), but this fourfold order became divided and subdivided over
the centuries into thousands of closed, hereditary groups. Most OBC groups
are today identified with the classical Sudra caste.

Caste-based discrimination was outlawed by India’s 1950 constitution but
prejudices persist, especially in rural areas where 70 percent of India’s 1.2
billion people live.

The Dalits who fall outside the caste system face extreme prejudice. The
government has set quotas for them in Parliament and other legislatures, and
in government jobs and educational institutions.

A government decision to extend affirmative action for ‘other backward
classes’ (OBCs) who fall between upper caste Hindus and Dalits has led to
protests from the ‘higher’ castes and also groups like Sabal Bharat working for
the eradication of caste.

”Caste is a social evil that must be stamped out rather than endorsed through
the census,” said Vaidik. ”I am a Brahmin but have a Dalit son-in-law, and I
never cared to ask him what caste he belongs to.”

The government introduced a bill in the current monsoon session of
Parliament to deal with a spate of sensational ‘honour killings’ in recent
months over inter-caste marriages. The debate on caste has informed the bill
to deal with honour killings.

Separately, the Supreme Court demanded in June that state governments
report to it on steps to deter honour killings. Across parts of northern India
caste violence is often at least tacitly blessed by village councils that
disregard the rule of law.

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