India Insight

After initial signs that India’s government might move to censure controversial remarks by novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, it appears New Delhi has sidestepped a potential political minefield with U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to the country only a week away.

On Sunday, Roy told a conference in New Delhi that Kashmir has “never been an integral part of India”, sparking a strong backlash.

Opposition politicians called for “the strongest possible action” against her “seditious” remarks and Law Minister Veerappa Moily declared the comments “most unfortunate”.

Responding to the charges against her, Roy countered: “Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.”

With its recent election to the United Nations Security Council with a view to making it permanent and Obama’s arrival next Saturday, India appears to have concluded — as influential Indian newspaper The Hindu wrote on Tuesday — that the media furore over Roy’s remarks is “essentially much ado about nothing”.

When Barack Obama heads for India next month, he'll be carrying a heavy policy agenda -- questions over the handling of nuclear material, the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and India's status as a growing economic power, along with regional relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Peace laureate who heads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hopes the U.S. president has time to focus on clean energy too.

Even as Pachauri and the U.N. panel evolve -- and as Pachauri himself weathers pressure from some quarters to resign -- he urged Obama to work on U.S.-India projects that he said would enhance global energy security.

Given India's red-hot economic growth rate -- 8 or 9 percent a year, Pachauri told reporters during a telephone briefing -- he said it makes sense for the United States to work with India to head off an expected soaring demand for fossil fuels.

They call economics the dismal science, but Larry Summers, one of its pre-eminent public practitioners, is anything but dull. That penchant for intellectual controversy means he hasn’t always won popularity contests, but he is unfailingly stimulating, as he proved in a speech in India last week, when he hit on one of the biggest issues in the world economy today, and coined a snappy catch-phrase to describe it: the “Mumbai Consensus”.

The Mumbai Consensus, Summers said, is “people-centric.” He contrasted it both with the Washington Consensus, the U.S.-led, free-markets-and-democracy formula that seemed to have conquered the world after 1989, and with the Beijing Consensus, China’s state capitalist approach that today is winning fans in emerging markets and in some developed ones.

Summers thinks the real model to watch is India’s, the world’s largest democracy. Partly because of its political system, India’s economic rise has been powered as much by the voracity of its domestic consumers as it has by the country’s push into foreign markets. That’s a sharp contrast with China, where the focus has been on working for the rest of the world, while the Chinese people, who are poorer on average than those of Albania or Jamaica, nonetheless save more than half of their GDP.

Ask any travel agent, globe-trotter or gap-year student: The Golden Temple in Amritsar, north India, is both a site of pilgrimage for Sikhs and a must-see on any tourists’ Indian itinerary.

But India’s most famous foreign tourist, U.S. President Barack Obama, who will tour the country next month, may have to forego his visit.

It was supposed to be Obama’s only religious appointment on the 4-day trip to India, but a politically-sensitive row over the required headwear for the temple threatens to derail his plans.

In getting out to debutant Peter George of Australia in the second cricket test at Bangalore, India's Sachin Tendulkar has established another test record.

Of the 251 times he has gotten out in a test match, the little master has been the debut wicket of at least ten bowlers - Hansie Cronje, Mark Ealham, Neil Johnson, Ruwan Kalpage, Jacob Oram, Monty Panesar, Ujesh Ranchod, Peter Siddle, Cameron White and Peter George.

While getting Tendulkar’s scalp might seem like a dream start to a young cricketer’s career, which of these players have gone on to become greats of the game?

India is globalising, but not the way much of the world wants.

That rather contradictory thought nagged at me one morning during the chaotic Commonwealth Games here in New Delhi.

On the road to the media venue’s gate, I trudged past a squatter’s family living in a tarpaulin. The mother was helping her son pee on my left. Rubbish, the smelly, sickly kind, lay to my right. My shoes sunk in mud from an unfinished pavement.

Hardly the stuff of a showcase international event meant to rival China. But after four years in India, the scene appeared normal. So was news during the Games that stocks had hit a near three-year high and that the Economist had predicted India’s economy would soon outpace China.

India took its deserved place at the world’s most powerful table on Tuesday, winning a two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council with the resounding support of 187 of the assembly’s 192 countries.

Immediately, the country’s U.N. Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri began talking of his intent to use the tenure to push for reform, with an eye on a permanent berth for the Asian giant.

But the perennial issue of sanctions against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran and its nuclear ambitions are a more pressing — and complex — issue for India in its new role.

By Adveith Nair and Krishna N. Das

Having dominated international cricket for over 21 years, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar sets a world record practically every time he steps out on a cricket pitch.

The second India-Australia test that begins on Saturday will be no different. Fans will be counting down the 27 runs the little master needs to become the first ever player to chalk up 14,000 test runs. Given his recent prolific form, it is more than likely the little master will reach that milestone in the southern Indian city of Bangalore with ease.

But in a cricket-mad nation of over a billion people, the expectations don’t end there.

In India, a thin line separates bravado from infamy. In a country that swears by its Bollywood potboilers, it does not take long to turn a one-time hero into a villain.

And the perfect example is Lalit Modi — once head of India’s $4 billion cricket premier league, he was first removed from his post after a tax scandal and later booted out of the cash-rich Indian cricket board.

Media reports on Thursday say the Enforcement Directorate (ED) issued a ‘blue alert’ against Modi, after he failed to make himself available for interrogation in the corruption allegations.

After offering special Eid prayers to mark the end of Ramadan, I got myself ready to cover the large Eid prayer congregation at Eid Gah in downtown Srinagar where senior separatist leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was scheduled to address thousands of Muslims.

Soon after the end of Eid prayers, Farooq called for a protest march to Lal Chowk, the heart of Srinagar. Continually shooting pictures I followed the tens of thousands of demonstrators shouting "we want freedom". When they reached Lal Chowk, the shouts turned to violence and I saw protesters damaging the clock tower. Again Farooq addressed the people calling for anti-India protests. I ran to the office nearby to file the pictures.

As I finished filing I received a call from Sheikh Mushtaq, Reuters Kashmir correspondent, he told me protesters had set fire to police and government buildings. I rushed out to take more pictures. By the time I finished transmitting them I had worked 14 hours straight and, having fasted all day, was extremely hungry.