When India’s ruling Congress party asked ministers and bureaucrats to cut down on needless expenses at a time of recession and deepening drought, many in the country had one question on their lips: will the austerity drive work?

Rahul Gandhi tried to set an example by travelling by train as an ordinary passenger. His mother, Sonia, abandoned her private army plane and flew economy class on a commercial flight for a party rally in Mumbai.

But there is still a great deal of scepticism among people. Some of the doubting was fuelled after the train Rahul was travelling in was pelted with stones. Experts said Rahul’s train trip was a security risk, which could cramp the austerity drive.

But it’s not just the security concerns alone. The austerity drive also drew ridicule following a controversy over two senior government ministers staying in luxury hotel suites priced at $1,000 and $1,500 a night until their official residences were ready.

Both ministers said they’d paid for their suites themselves, but stung by criticism amid the government’s austerity drive, they moved to more modest temporary homes.

However, it was too late to change the mind of ordinary Indians who over years of Nehruvian socialism had begun to associate Congress politicians as leaders in simple hand-spun cotton, or khadi, clothes who drove around in old-fashioned Ambassador cars.

Now, the question many are asking is: will the austerity drive last with election campaigns for Maharashtra and Haryana about to begin?

True, with the economy in trouble, the government is making an effort with the finance ministry appealing for fewer overseas trips and smaller entourages as well as a ban on conferences in luxury hotels.

But it isn’t easy: one minister protested he was “too tall” to fly economy while another said their positions demand they entertain in style.

So, will the government’s austerity drive last? The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) doesn’t think so. A BJP spokesman said it was just an “election gimmick” and they would go back to their usual ways once the state elections were over.

Will they?

September 11, 2001 — I was at university attending a freshers’ welcome bash in New Delhi.

That was a time before cell phones had become affordable and news travelled slowly.

There were murmurs of an attack, something about the U.S. and a trade center but I didn’t pay much attention.

“Is Osama coming?” someone sniggered, about a senior who shares his name with the infamous al Qaeda chief.

“Osama is sleeping in the hostel. Why are you bothering him?”

Back at the hostel, my roommate asked me if I had heard the news.

“Go look, it’s on TV. They ploughed planes into a building.”

I went to the common room, thinking randomly of Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh.

All the TV news channels were showing footage from the attacks — over and over again.

I had just read the book ‘The Inscrutable Americans’ and as I saw the towers go down, I remembered these were the first buildings the novel’s protagonist had seen in New York.

I was glued to the television screen, unable to tear myself away.

Scenes from assorted Hollywood movies played through my head as I tried and failed to make sense of it.

The spectacle of thousands dying beggared my imagination.

As I turned in for the night, I couldn’t shake of the thought that if this could happen to the most powerful country in the world, then what about us in India?

The distraught foreign national and her wheelchair-bound mother on TV is a compelling argument against the Jet Airways pilots’ strike which has dragged on for four days.

The stand-off between the pilots and the airline management over the sacking of four pilots has forced the airline to cancel hundreds of flights, affecting at least 14,000 passengers since Tuesday.

The public inconvenience caused by such strikes is so pressing that the cause of the strike almost always seems petty.

But striking employees are not always to blame over fragile labour relations.

There have been years when man-days lost due to lockouts have surpassed those caused by employee strikes.

In the current strike, the management as well as the pilots’ union have been pointing fingers.

On Wednesday, the High Court had issued a contempt notice to the pilots for going on ‘mass leave’.

A day later, the chief labour commissioner said that it was illegal to dismiss the pilots while conciliation proceedings were still on.

So who is responsible for this chain of events?

In response to recent reports that two Chinese helicopters intruded into Indian territory in Leh in Jammu and Kashmir, Army Chief Deepak Kapoor said he did get reports of Chinese intrusion but “this is not a new thing.”

“I want to tell you that the press sometimes hypes this but the numbers of intrusions which have taken place this year are on the same level as last year,” Kapoor said.

Soon after that the Indian media reported that Chinese soldiers had crossed the border in Ladakh last week and painted some rocks red.

Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna said, “Let me go on record to say that border with China has been one of the most peaceful boundaries that we have had as compared to other boundary lines with other countries.”

Former Air Force Chief Fali Homi Major and Navy Chief Sureesh Mehta have repeatedly warned that China is a danger to India, and the hawks in the Indian security establishment fear that the Chinese had a strategic plan of encircling India.

Around the time India and China were holding the 13th round of their border talks in August, an article had appeared in China titled “If China takes a little action, the so-called Great Indian Federation can be broken up”.

The article primarily focussed on how China can split India and break it up into 20-30 states like the European Union.

Given this context, many seem to think Indian officials and ministers could be playing down any potential threat from China.

So what do you think is India’s policy towards China? What does India seek to achieve by playing down these intrusions?

Brahma Chellaney, former adviser to India’s National Security Advisory Board, said, “The atmosphere has deteriorated in the recent months, plus there’s been escalation of tensions along the Himalayan border.”

What should be India’s stand on these constant intrusions in the name of a differently perceived Line of Actual Control?

In a Wall Street Journal report, India’s former national security advisor Brajesh Mishra said, “The Chinese must know that if they create something on border there would be an instant reaction far beyond what happened in 1962.”

Many analysts on the other hand believe that India is uncertain about how to handle these intrusions and deal with Beijing’s ‘Rising China’ strategy.

“India is clueless on how to deal with China’s growing belligerence, so it attempts to play down an admitted pattern of growing Chinese incursions.” said Chellaney.

Should India fall back on the U.S. to checkmate any future designs of China to break up India? Or should India focus on trying to find a solution to the long standing border dispute with China so that it can concentrate on consolidating its strategic interests in the region and beyond?

Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee rolls on with a bagful of bounty for one and all in West Bengal, even as the state’s corporate big wheels close ranks with her.

Her eyes all set on the 2011 assembly elections, Banerjee shed the image of an anti-industry politician, using to the hilt the resources the world’s largest employer (Indian Railways) could offer.

The industry-basher epithet stuck thick on Mamata after Tata Motors made an angry exit from Singur last year, bowing before a wave of protests over 400 acres of farmland acquired forcibly by the communist state government for the Nano plant.

Just when a section of people and political pundits had written her off, Mamata’s gamble with the land movement and the state’s poor human rights record paid off.

Now in a hurry to catch the 2011 train, Mamata (referred to in local media as chief minister-in-waiting) has impressed industrialists with her impatience to fast-track projects in West Bengal.

She is now offering land to set up factories, emphasizing on setting up Public Private Partnership (PPP) models to develop the infrastructure of railway and industry.

“Mamata means business” wrote The Telegraph after her August 21 meeting with industrialists. The largest circulated English daily from eastern India had less than a year ago written against the Trinamool Congress chief for driving out the Tatas from Singur.

Mamata’s meeting was a durbar of sorts as she addressed members of the country’s three leading chambers of commerce and urged industrialists to set up shop on available railway land.

“I urge you all to take the opportunity and use the land available to set up industry,” she told industrialists, chanting her slogan of Ma, Mati and Manush (Mother, Soil and People).

Mamata said the railways had already prepared a land bank and about 112,000 acres are available.

With her popular railway budget and various initiatives, the ghosts of Singur seemed to have been exorcised. Mamata said land disputes can be avoided with proper planning and human approach.

The meeting, which has been organised by the Railways, cleared any doubts about her anti-industry posturing in the past.

For now it is brand Mamata that rules Bengal as excitement builds up in the run-up to her big show in 2011.

Despite the Force India team taking second place at the podium at the Belgian Grand Prix there is no rethinking in the sports ministry on its view that Formula One is not enough of a sport.

Sports minister M.S. Gill congratulated Vijay Mallya on his team’s win but labelled Formula One as ‘expensive entertainment’.

The sports ministry has refused approval to the promoters of Formula 1 in India, JPSK Sports, to pay 1.7 billion rupees to the Formula One Administration for the proposed Indian Grand Prix of 2011.

The ministry has reasoned that the Formula One race “does not satisfy conditions which focus on human endeavour for excelling in competition with others, keeping in view the whole sports movement from Olympic downwards.”

It wrote to the promoters that Formula One is not purely sports, it is entertainment and the venture by JPSK Sports was a commercial initiative.

The sports ministry’s argument stands on two legs. Formula One is expensive entertainment and the outcome is determined by technology hence it is not ‘pure sports’.

Is sport supposed to be boring — that’s a question which can be posed at least rhetorically?

Sports like golf and tennis aren’t exactly cheap sports I can play in my backyard, assuming I had one.

As for human endeavour in Formula One, former world champion Michael Schumacher couldn’t return to the sport because of fitness concerns. Surely there is more to Formula One than just zippy cars and technology.

Technology and better training determine the outcome in all sports. Use of polyurethane swimsuits has been debated in swimming.

Commercialisation of sports has for long been debated. Cricket is probably one of the most commercialised sports in India.

Should we go back to some pristine version of the game when it was played on the village greens?

Cricket is heavily tilted in favour of batsmen because the gentry used to bat and the commoners used to bowl when the game was evolving, according to a school text book I chanced upon once.

Can any sport be divorced from its social context? Are there any sports in the country which can be called ‘purely sports’?

Commercialisation and flow of money in sports has surely helped sportsmen get by better.

Periodicals have carried stories of old sports warhorses living the last days of their lives in penury.

Sports certainly became respectable in the middle-class society I grew up in after they linked up with money.

Otherwise sports was for the academic losers and failures, seen as the cause as well as the effect.

India’s absence in most sporting arenas didn’t help either.

My six-storey school building did not even have a playground. It was built over for the science labs.

The Olympics, mentioned by the sports ministry, have allowed professional athletes to compete in certain sports like tennis since 1988.

Is the ministry’s view justified?

India can boast of taking a major stride in Formula One after Italian driver Giancarlo Fisichella drove from pole to second on the podium at the Belgium Grand Prix on Sunday.

The first points for the team owned by India’s liquor and airlines baron Vijay Mallya was a pleasant surprise, the team having failed to make an impact since it was launched ahead of the 2008 season.

The Indian media lapped up the news, indicating that F1’s popularity in India will only grow more rapidly as Indian fans gradually embrace the team as theirs.

Although home fans would have hoped an Indian driver had produced the achievement, India would still celebrate Fisichella’s success.

Indian F1 hopes were given a huge boost when Narain Karthikeyan was signed up by Jordan in 2005. However, an uncompetitive car and his lack of experience at the highest level meant India’s first F1 driver stayed very briefly in the limelight.

Karthikeyan’s subsequent role as a tester for Williams pushed him behind the scenes and he has now moved to the A1 Grand Prix, the world cup of motor racing, with his Formula One hopes all but over.

The Force India podium could not have come at a better time, as India gear up to stage an inaugural Grand Prix in 2011.

It comes after local media revealed this week that the sports ministry had refused a request to remit $36.5 million by JPSK Sports, the private company building the race track near New Delhi,  to the Bernie Ecclestone’s British-based Formula One Administration.

The sports ministry felt Formula One was more entertainment and less sport and rejected the company’s request, but Mallya believes the decision, due to India’s exchange control regulations, is unlikely to prevent the 2011 Grand Prix.

Force India’s success will definitely lift the mood in Mallya’s camp as he was facing questions about the future of the team due to issues in his businesses.

However, Mallya can take credit for shuffling the management and taking direct charge of affairs earlier in the season, having refused to bow to sentiment while choosing the drivers.

He picked Fisichella to use his experience, alongwith German Adrian Sutil, ignoring Karthikeyan as well as the promising Karun Chandok.

Last week, a college in Mangalore in India banned a student wearing a burqa from attending class. The principal told local media the college had a policy of not allowing symbols of religion.

The media did not say if there were students on campus with a ‘bindi’ (dot) on their foreheads or crucifixes around their necks or turbans on their heads, other symbols of religion one commonly sees in India, besides the ubiquitous “Om” scarves and t-shirts.

Mangalore, a cosmopolitan city, is no stranger to controversy; it was recently in the news for attacks on bars and women by a fundamentalist Hindu outfit that declared they were against Indian culture.

Nor is the controversy over headscarves and burqas limited to India. UK’s Jack Straw sparked a heated debate when he asked Muslim women in his constituency to remove their veils to promote better relations between people.

Turkey last year lifted a ban on women wearing headscarves at universities, ruling it violated the country’s secular constitution.

More recently, French president Sarkozy said burqas have no place in the country because they are a symbol of the subjugation of women. The issue has divided France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority, over how to reconcile secular values with religious freedom.

A 2004 French law bans students from wearing “conspicuous” signs of their religion in state schools, prompting Sikhs to launch a protest to allow them to keep their turbans on.

Sikhs have also fought in some countries for the right to carry the “kirpan”, a dagger mandated by their religion and have called on the U.S. Army to end a ban on men with turbans.

How about India, a secular country which allows its citizens the right to follow any religion of their choosing? Can a college or a workplace impose its own rules about religious symbols? And who gets to determine what’s conspicuous or not?

India and Pakistan, with their competitive strategic interest in Afghanistan, are keenly watching the war-battered nation’s election this week, the second since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001.

The front-runner of that vote is incumbent President Hamid Karzai who is facing a stiff challenge from his former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani. There are more than two dozen other candidates.

While a successful vote could mean a step toward achieving basic political and military stability in Afghanistan, its outcome holds crucial geopolitical significance for India and Pakistan.

Conventional wisdom is that a victory for Karzai will help India. Karzai has lived and studied in India, cultivated a strong relationship with New Delhi and spoken out angrily against Pakistan, especially during the years it was ruled by Pervez Musharraf.

Abdullah and Ghani too have India connections — while the former lived there, Ghani was once posted in New Delhi with the World Bank.

So in that sense, Pakistan should have no serious good option, and the various candidates who offer any potential to project its influence in Afghanistan, Islamabad should be more or less a supporter of them, says Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Markey says Pakistan may tend to prefer Karzai simply because he is “known quantity” and his relations with the civilian government in Islamabad are better than before.

But former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar argues Pakistani intelligence disfavours Karzai’s victory as it has scores to settle with almost all the warlords who rally behind Karzai — Mohammed Fahim, Karim Khalili, Mohammed Mohaqiq, Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan — and they happen to be in the rogues’ gallery in the Western world, too.

But a Hamid Karzai victory may not be without complications for India.

New Delhi, which is seeding Afghanistan with projects spanning sanitation to roads and power, is worried at Karzai’s election promise to intensify peace talks with the Taliban and other insurgent groups such as Hezb-i-Islami.

Last month Karzai’s government announced it had reached a truce with local Taliban fighters in Badghis, a province in the north. Some Taliban leaders later denied there was such a truce.

Karzai’s government has enlisted the help of former Taliban officials in recent months to act as go-betweens in an effort to reach out to fighters. Saudi Arabia has also indicated its
willingness to help in mediation efforts.

Such moves have worried Indian officials who say they fear a U.S.-British-Saudi-Pakistani plan to co-opt the Taliban into the Afghan power structure as part of the NATO’s Afghan exit plan.

If that happens, Indians suspect, wouldn’t it then just be a matter of time before the Taliban start going after their enemies?

It may not, however, be as simplistic but India does seem to have a job of dissuading Karzai from pushing for a rapprochement with the Taliban.

- Saritha Rai writes for the GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. -

Not long ago, passengers of India’s airlines were spoiled with choices. One promised to treat them like a maharajah. Its passengers were greeted curbside by friendly staff who eagerly took their bags. Once aboard, glamorous female flight attendants waited on the passengers.

Another offered meal choices from a list so long that it ran off the page, even on flights that lasted less than two hours. A third had fares so low that thousands of train passengers found it cheaper and faster to fly.

“I always felt like royalty when I traveled, it was all so unreal and fantastic,” said Janaki Murali, a frequent flyer who works with one of India’s largest outsourcing firms based in Bangalore.

Alas, it was also too good to last.

Last week, a grouping of 10 private carriers –  including popular upstarts Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways –  threatened to stop operations for a day on Aug. 18 to draw attention to their sorry financial plight. A strike, they reasoned, would be a dramatic way to get the attention of the government.

And with reason. Private airlines have been a key part of India’s economic boom: they ferry more than half of the country’s passengers.

But the carriers are hurting, due to a combination of slower economic growth and government policies. State taxes make jet fuel 60 percent more expensive, one of the highest tax structures in the world. (The government uses the funds to subsidize the cost of others fuels such as kerosene and diesel for poorer Indians.)

Private carriers have long lobbied the government to reduce these aviation fuel taxes, as well as high airport charges, so far to no avail.

Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant owner of Kingfisher Airlines — which is named after Mallya’s beer brand — said India’s airlines were being “taxed to death.”

For now, the crisis has been averted. A public outcry and a tough-talking government forced the private airlines to back off from their strike plan. The Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) said that the boycott was canceled “in view of the agitated public sentiment” and the government’s call for a dialogue.

But some of the private airlines’ woes have been their own doing. During the aviation boom of the last few years, private airlines have proliferated.

Many airlines, including Kingfisher and Jet Airways, have built up excess capacities, even as cut-throat competition and falling demand for air travel have eaten away their profits. The FIA said India’s airlines lost $2 billion during the last financial year.

But even as private airlines demanded the government ease some of their financial burden, Delhi is considering handing a $3 billion bailout package to the national carrier, Air India.

The bloated state-owned airline is a loss-maker crumpling under its own debt. Air India has 147 aircraft but about 47,000 employees - making it the most profligate employee to aircraft ratio in the world.

Meanwhile, private airlines are also pushing the government to ease the current rules that ban foreign carriers from buying a stake in domestic airlines.

For many, foreign investment appears the only hope for raising funds, a challenge at a time when the biggest global airlines are themselves cash-strapped.

Clearly, the days of big orders for planes, new routes and lavish marketing budgets are over. Right now, India’s airlines are just fighting for survival.

For passengers like Janaki Murali, who had quickly gotten used to the premium service and an abundance of flight choices, that is a hard landing indeed.

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