India Insight

Sometimes the government does what it promises. India raised diesel prices by 5 rupees per litre on Thursday in a move guaranteed to alienate the common man, but please foreign investors, oil marketing companies and ratings agencies.

Opposition parties and key government ally Mamata Banerjee expressed their expected disappointment with the decision. The BJP called it a “cruel joke” and “mortal blow,” while West Bengal Chief Minister Banerjee planned a street rally on Saturday and said she was “shocked“.

So… on with the protests and demands to lower the prices. But let’s think for a minute about why that might be the wrong thing to ask for.

Diesel accounts for more than 40 percent of India’s refined fuel consumption, and there is no doubt that this move will hurt farmers, commuters, businesses, inflation and the common man in the near term. But sometimes, governments must make hard decisions that threaten the popularity of its ruling politicians.

The economy is slowing, the fiscal deficit is ballooning and no country wants its debt downgraded. If raising the price of diesel tells the world that India is serious about fixing its economy, rolling back the price would tell everyone that it’s not.

The Delhi government’s ban on plastic bags and gutka — the cheap mix of chewing tobacco and betel nut that you take for a quick high — is a welcome step, but it may be too soon to imagine city corners free of gutka “graffiti” and plastic-choked sewers.

Plastic bags lie strewn in city alleys, clogging drainage pipes, harming cows that eat them along with the garbage that they nibble on, and offer a prime breeding ground for harmful bacteria and disease.

Gutka, meanwhile, has an estimated 65 million users in India and causes tens of thousands of oral cancer cases every year.

They call it the garden city, though more lately it’s trash town, thanks to the recent shutdown of three landfills that take garbage from the city of more than 8 million people.

Bangalore’s residents in August and early September dealt with stench and garbage as tonnes of rotten food, flowers, paper and plastic bags leaking noisome muck spilled into the streets and roads.

People were forced to walk on roads clogged with cars, trucks and mopeds as filth caked the sidewalks, and wild dogs and stray cows gorged. Schools declared holidays to prevent students from falling ill, and the rain isn’t helping.

Images of a bespectacled, bearded and tousle-haired young man, waving his arms in defiance as police tried to shove him into a car, have taken Indian media by storm.

The arrest of Aseem Trivedi on charges of sedition for having drawn satirical cartoons, including one that depicts the parliament building as a lavatory buzzing with flies, is being seen as an attempt to stifle the freedom of speech and expression, a fundamental right under the Indian constitution.

The episode has catapulted the hitherto unknown 25-year-old to the position of a national hero, with his cartoons echoing popular resentment against a scandal-plagued government. Social media is abuzz with his pictures and twitterati have made #AseemTrivedi one of the most searched items on the micro-blogging website.

If you are an Indian sports buff, but were stuck in the office during the Euro Cup or the India-Sri Lanka cricket series, chances are the live streaming of the matches you caught on your computer or smartphone was from iStream.com.

A video streaming site that started off as a regional partner for YouTube and Dailymotion, iStream bagged the exclusive Internet streaming rights for two of the most-watched sports events in the country.

But regional content is the site’s forte — news, television shows and movies mainly in southern Indian languages Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, but also in Hindi and English. It has some 60-65 Indian television channels as content partners, and is in talks with U.S.- based production houses such as FremantleMedia Ltd, which owns “American Idol”, and UK-based “Big Brother” maker Endemol and ITV for content rights.

By Shashank Chouhan

It took more than 10 days for the chief of India’s ruling party to react to the ‘Coalgate’ episode that has tainted Manmohan Singh’s government and blocked parliamentary proceedings in the monsoon session that limped to its close on Friday.

But what was the reaction of Sonia Gandhi to alleged irregularities in coal block allocations that might have cost the treasury billions of dollars? Here’s what Gandhi told her party’s lawmakers at a meeting: “Let us stand up and fight, fight with a sense of purpose and fight aggressively.”

Instead of reprimanding her lawmakers over corruption allegations, she goaded them to take the fight to the enemy camp — the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Media reports about her speech said she made it clear that the Congress party must respond to the “negative politics” of the BJP in upcoming state assembly elections.

Is it a compliment when the government of one of the largest countries in the world demands that you apologise for something you wrote? Ask Simon Denyer, India bureau chief of The Washington Post and a former Reuters editor based in Washington D.C. and India. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; }

Denyer in a Post article called India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh a “dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government”. Denyer also said that the 79-year-old Singh has fallen from grace, and that he no longer fits the image of being a “scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat”.

Denyer didn’t leave much out: Singh is an object of ridicule, has ignored his cabinet’s corruption, has let the rupee’s value collapse, has let his reputation be tarnished, has given away coal mining concessions and cost the treasury billions, and lost the confidence of his party long ago. The implication is that his main value is to be quiet and do what he’s told.

Almost four years since Sri Lanka's war ended, rage over the lack of rehabilitation for thousands of survivors of the bloody 25-year-long civil conflict has surfaced - not on the war-torn Indian Ocean island itself, but in neighbouring India.

India's Tamil Nadu state -- where the majority Tamil ethnic group have a close association with Tamils living across the Palk Straits in Sri Lanka - have long felt their brothers have been discriminated against by the Sinhalese-ruled government.

The war, pitting separatist Tamil Tigers against President Mahinda Rajapaksa's Sri Lankan Armed Forces, saw tens of thousands of mainly Tamil civilians in the north and east of the island killed or injured, and hundreds of thousands were displaced.

Passions are running high in parliament and the stakes are huge. The contentious issue of reservation is back to haunt Indian politics and it may well decide who runs the next government in the world’s largest democracy. Sparks were seen flying in the upper house on Wednesday when two MPs from rival parties came to blows during the tabling of a bill to amend the Constitution, providing for reservations in promotions at work for backward castes.

The issue, however, is nothing new. Reservation is a recurring theme in India’s democracy. And Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s embattled government seems to be returning to identity politics at a time when it is badly cornered, thanks to a string of corruption scandals, a ballooning fiscal deficit and low investor sentiment.

The move comes after the Supreme Court in April struck down former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati’s policy of a promotion quota in government service.

With the Congress-led coalition government more than halfway through its five-year term, the political temperature is heating up in the world’s largest democracy. The question on everyone’s minds is — who’s going to be the next prime minister?

A recent Nielsen survey had showed Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was the top choice for the post, ahead of Congress party scion Rahul Gandhi and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.

But last week’s conviction of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker in the Gujarat riots is a blow to Modi, and the political fallout from the case may have dented his hopes of sitting in the prime minister’s chair.