Advani, Bachchan, Dilip Kumar get Padma Vibhushan

BJP patriarch L.K. Advani, Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and actors Amitabh Bachchan and Dilip Kumar are among the nine Padma Vibhushan awardees, the second highest civilian award of the country.

Senior advocate K.K. Venugopal, nuclear scientist M.R. Srinivasan, philanthropist Veerendra Heggade and Sanskrit scholar Rambhadracharya and Karim Al Hussiani Aga Khan are the other awardees of the Padma Vibhushan.

Among the 20 names to be awarded the Padma Bhushan are senior advocate Harish Salve, journalists Swapan Dasgupta, Rajat Sharma, former Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswami, constitutional expert Subhash Kashyap and Carnatic vocalist Sudha Raghunathan.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates, and Fields Medal winner Manjul Bhargava have also been named for the Padma Bhushan.

Economist Bibek Debroy, now a member of the Niti Ayog, and lyricist Prasoon Joshi, who worked on the advertisement campaign for the BJP’s Lok Sabha campaign, are among the 75 people to be conferred with the Padma Shri award. IT honcho Mohandas Pai, badminton player P.V. Sindhu, woman cricketer Mithali Raj, filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Arunima Sinha, the first woman amputee to climb the Mount Everest, are the other prominent names on the list.

Source - The Hindu

ON DAY ONE, THE NUCLEAR DEAL IS DONE

A hotline that will now connect Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Obama, a declaration of friendship, a renewed 10-year defence partnership, and the much-anticipated nuclear breakthrough marked the second summit between the two leaders, taking relations to what Mr. Modi called “a whole new level” and Mr. Obama referred to as “powerful symbolism backed by substance.” Announcing an end to the nuclear logjam, Mr. Obama said they had reached a “breakthrough understanding” that would allow nuclear contracts to be signed between U.S. firms and India. The agreement, including the completion of administrative arrangements, was a key highlight of the India-U.S. bilateral negotiations that marked the first day of Mr. Obama’s visit as chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations. “The civil nuclear agreement was the centrepiece of our transformed relationship,” said Mr. Modi referring to his previous meeting with Mr. Obama in September 2014. “I am pleased that six years after we signed our bilateral agreement, we are moving towards commercial cooperation, consistent with our law, our international legal obligations, and technical and commercial viability.” While the two sides did not disclose how U.S. concerns over the Indian supplier liability law were addressed, officials said “the deal is done,” as far as the government’s work was concerned. The two sides signed a renewed Defence Strategic Framework, which covers all aspects of defence cooperation, including the Defence Trade Technological Initiative under which they could co-produce four “pathfinder projects” and study cooperation on aircraft carriers and jet-engine technology and are committed to upgrading joint military and naval exercises.

On economic issues, the two sides did not announce any agreements.

Source - The Hindu

[Ed] Critical transition in Saudi Arabia

The death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, at the age of 90, beckoned a cautiously orchestrated transition of power to his successor Salman in the Al Saud dynasty that holds power in the nation. King Salman has pledged that the succession would be managed smoothly, with continuity in policies and stability in internal as well as foreign relations. Given the rising violence and political instability in the region, and the glut in oil supply and consequent fall in prices, this transition of power is a critical moment. Salman, who has been crown prince since 2012, is now 79 years old and not in the best of health. Clearing any sort of uncertainty, Prince Muqrin, followed by Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, 55, have been declared the crown princes to succeed King Salman. Although the monarchic succession plan seems to be clearly mapped out, the House of Saud is said to be riven by factions and internal feuds. Whether order will prevail within the royal family is hard to speculate, given the secretive nature of its internal affairs.

The transition of power is happening at a time when politics in the region is beset with uncertainty. Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shia-dominated Iran, with their decades of rivalry, are closely following the turmoil in Yemen since the resignation of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. The Shiite rebel group Houthi, suspected to have affiliations with Iran, has often accused Saudi Arabia of meddling in the country’s internal affairs. Riyadh has been praised for its effective counter-terrorism activities, especially with the Islamic State-dominated Iraq on its northern borders. Saudi Arabia continues to have favourable strategic partnerships with the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. Even with the global glut in supply, King Salman is likely to continue pumping crude, keeping prices low, with no apparent intention to alter policies anytime soon. India maintains significant economic ties with Saudi Arabia, which is its biggest supplier of oil, accounting for 20.18 per cent of the imports in 2013-14. India accounts for 11 per cent of Saudi Arabia’s exports and 7.2 per cent of its imports. Remittances from Indians in Saudi Arabia amount to a substantial sum. From a socio-economic perspective, India has a lot at stake in the stability of the country. Given the centrality of Saudi Arabia to western economic interests, the West has often treated the country as an exception when it comes to human rights issues. The fact is that Saudi Arabia has an incredibly poor record in the matter of ensuring civil and political rights. Public flogging, beheading, and a general climate of intolerance are hallmarks of its criminal justice system. Women still do not have even the fundamental rights of speech, movement and assembly.

Source - The Hindu

[Ed] Criticism over Ebola response prompts WHO to mull reforms

The World Health Organization (WHO) is debating how to reform itself after botching the response to the Ebola outbreak, a sluggish performance that experts say cost thousands of lives.

WHO’s executive board has planned to discuss proposals that could radically transform the United Nations health agency in response to sharp criticism over its handling of the West Africa epidemic.

“The Ebola outbreak points to the need for urgent change,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general. She acknowledged that WHO was too slow to grasp the significance of the Ebola outbreak, which is estimated to have killed more than 8,600 people, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Critics say the kinds of reform being debated are long overdue.

Not at the helm

“The groundswell of dissatisfaction and lack of trust in WHO over Ebola has reached such a crescendo that unless there is fundamental reform, I think we might lose confidence in WHO for a generation,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights at Georgetown University.

“Ebola revealed all of WHO’s inherent weaknesses and the international community saw painfully what it was like to see WHO not being able to lead. That resulted in thousands of deaths that were completely avoidable,” he said. “If that doesn’t light a fire for reform, I don’t know what will.”

In reports issued to its 34-member board earlier this month, WHO identified major holes in its ability to stop outbreaks and “a culture that resists embracing operations, an essential element of emergency response.”

A year before Ebola broke out in West Africa, WHO’s outbreak department slashed its staff to save $6 million. In proposals discussed, WHO appears to be backtracking on that decision, saying it must develop operational expertise beyond its “skeleton complement” of logistics experts. The agency also conceded that, despite public expectations that it can respond quickly to health emergencies, it simply is not designed to do that.

WHO declared Ebola to be a global emergency in August. But it wasn’t until January 12 that Dr. Chan officially assigned Bruce Aylward, the agency’s lead official on Ebola, to work full time on the outbreak, according to an internal memo sent to WHO staff. Some experts expressed scepticism that the broad reforms being discussed by WHO would significantly change anything. “If we try to reform everything, then nothing will be done,” said Dr. Jean Clement Cabrol, a director of operations at Doctors Without Borders. He described certain parts of WHO specifically its Africa office, which was blamed by Geneva officials for blundering the early response as “dreadful.”

Dr. Gostin said no other agency has a mandate to protect public health that could easily replace WHO.

“If we didn’t have a WHO, we would need to create one,” he said. “But we need to make them politically accountable for their failures and force them to be leaders.”

Source - The Hindu

[Ed] Reasons for remembering King Abdullah

His state visit to India as chief guest on Republic Day in 2006 paved the way for improved bilateral relations
“Has he looked after you well? I suspect he is a bit deficient in this matter,” the host enquired in deliberative baritone Arabic from the guest, a hint of humour being discernible. The guest assured him that he had been taken care of well. The 1994 conversation at royal palace in Riyadh would have qualified as easy banter, but for the participants being Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and visiting Indian Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. Under discussion was the hospitality acumen of Dr Abdulaziz al-Zamil, Saudi Minister of Industry and Co-Chair of the bilateral Joint Commission.

King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, 90, who passed away on January 23, was indeed a thoughtful leader, also capable of surprises. The conventional wisdom of the Saudi watchers put him among the “conservative faction” of the House of Al-Saud, the royal family. His mother, who was from the Al-Rashid clan (long-standing rivals of Al-Saud), made him stand out. He was taciturn, closer to the country’s Bedouins, and a long-standing personal friend of Arab nationalist leaders, in contrast to the mainstream liberal faction, which is headed by the “Sudairi Seven.”

Stability and security

History is, however, likely to judge his two decades at the Kingdom’s helm (1995 to 2005 as regent and 2005-2015 as the King) in a more balanced and benign manner. There were many markers that stood out. King Abdullah steered the ship of Saudi Arabia with a consummate hand through various storms such as the 9/11 tragedy, which was perpetrated by 19 terrorists, 15 of them Saudis. For the next five years, as the world held its breath, the al-Qaeda led by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden waged a no-holds terror campaign aimed at overthrowing the establishment in Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter and host of Islam’s two holiest shrines.

However, under King Abdullah’s watch, the Kingdom’s response to this existential challenge was firm, efficient and nuanced. The threat was overcome without disproportionate collateral damage or a schism between the enduring alliance among Al-Saud and the Wahhabi clergy. Later, when the “Arab Spring” contagion posed a different genre of threat, King Abdullah’s sagacious package of financial concessions and socio-political liberalisation avoided a catastrophe.

Wide-ranging reforms

King Abdullah would also be remembered for initiating some of the most far-reaching reforms in the country. These included curbing the excesses of the feared religious police, prioritising education, appointing women ministers and legislators, and planning to hold first direct elections for the local bodies. He became the first Saudi monarch to visit the Vatican and sponsor an international interfaith dialogue. These measures often did not go far enough, but were significant as the first steps towards modernising a deeply conservative Saudi society.

The 9/11 attacks precipitated the U.S.-led “global war against terror” and the “Arab Spring” — both causing widespread mayhem and ideological confusion. It can be argued that with the al-Qaeda and its derivatives, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban, all jostling for Arab-Islamic centre-stage, Riyadh under King Abdullah managed to remain an influential player in maintaining stability and equilibrium.

The sharp swings in oil prices in 2008-09 and 2014-15 epitomise both Saudi’s role as OPEC’s largest exporter and its determination to protect its market share. During the past two decades under King Abdullah, the Saudi economy, nevertheless, came some way from its reliance on oil exports through diversifying measures such as incremental indigenisation through skilling of the labour force, establishing new industrial cities, deepening the share market, promulgating investment laws and joining the WTO.

In 2002, King Abdullah personally pushed for a plan to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict based on realism and mutual concessions. He also became the first Saudi leader to exchange state visits with China and Russia. Given Saudi diplomacy’s penchant for caution and discretion, these were tectonic shifts. Even as King Abdullah’s foreign policy evolved under various impetuses, a pro-West tilt and suspicion towards Iran persisted.

As per the Al-Saud tradition, Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, 79, was proclaimed the successor to the late King Abdullah. He in turn appointed Prince Mukrin as the new Crown Prince and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef as the Deputy Crown Prince. In his inaugural address, King Salman stressed continuity and indicated that many of the important functionaries are likely to be retained. With King Salman and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the “Sudairi Seven” appears to be back and the inevitable reordering of political echelons over the time would bear watching. Moreover, with regional turbulence and the oil prices on a roller coaster, the new team needs to hit the ground running.

Bilateral relations

In the bilateral context, King Abdullah’s State visit to India as chief guest on our Republic Day in 2006 was a defining event. It paved the way for former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Saudi Arabia in February 2010. These two summits catapulted the ties from “correct and cordial” to “substantive and strategic” with Riyadh abandoning its hyphenation with Pakistan. The bilateral trade for the year ending on November 30, 2014 was over 46 billion dollars, making Saudi Arabia one of India’s top five trading partners and the largest source of its oil imports. Indian expatriates in Saudi Arabia number three million, the largest foreign community in that country. The Saudi embassy in India issued 1.2 million visas to Indians in 2014 — a record for a Saudi mission anywhere. These figures illustrate the surge in people-to-people ties. Mutual investments and business-to-business ties have also been picking up from a relatively smaller base. Discreet cooperation in security and anti-terror domains have been intensified.

India has reasons to be grateful to King Abdullah for ensuring that bilateral ties have realised much of their potential on the basis of shared interests and perceptions. King Salman, who visited India in 2010 and 2014, is expected to carry forward this momentum.

(Mahesh Sachdev is a retired Indian ambassador and an Arabist. He served in Saudi Arabia and was Director (Gulf).)

Source - The Hindu

[Ed] The love for sons and appropriate attire

Although urban Indians are slowly showing more openness in their attitudes towards women’s attire, this is not the case when it comes to the issue of son preference
As one of the world’s most socially heterogeneous societies, building solidarity across social groups has been a singular challenge in India. Social bias in India is pervasive across a range of key cleavages — whether caste or class, region or religion.

In this piece we discuss a different social bias, not between different castes and religions but within all castes and religions, namely gender. Last week, while launching the “beti bachao, beti padhao” initiative, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called female foeticide a “mental illness” ailing the whole country. “We cannot call ourselves citizens of 21st century by practising such a crime,” he said. His comments describe the distressing persistence of female foeticide in contemporary India and underscore the broader scourge of gender bias in Indian society.

One might have expected that the major societal changes that have occurred over the past three decades — improvements in literacy and levels of education, rapid economic growth, and urbanisation — would have led to a decline in gender bias. While there is undoubtedly some improvement in the gender gap, the growing sex ratio problem and continued gender-based violence reveal just how far India still has to travel to bring dignity to half its population.

We focus on two different issues related to gender bias — son preference and norms on appropriate attire for women, which can be a form of social control. Between 2001 and 2011, the infant (0-6 years) sex ratio in India dropped from 927 females per 1,000 males to 914. In an attempt to understand the underlying attitudes which are behind India’s falling sex ratio, we asked Lok Survey respondents about their preference for the gender of their child. Respondents were asked the following question: For your family, is having more boys than girls preferred?

Overall, 34 per cent of respondents readily admitted that their family preferred having more boys. Given the sensitive nature of this question, this number is a lower bound since some people will undoubtedly give socially desirable responses. In order to estimate the true levels of son preference, we ran a “list experiment” which protects the anonymity of the survey responses. The respondents were randomly divided into two groups, given a list of statements, and then asked the number of statements with which they agreed. Only half of respondents were given a statement about son preference, and therefore, we were able to estimate the share of respondents who agreed to the sensitive statement by comparing the means of the two respondent groups. Using this technique, we found that once granted the cloak of anonymity, 48 per cent of respondents have a preference for sons in their family.

Son preference is widespread across Indian society with little variance across income classes, education levels, and rural/ urban areas.

Inter-State variation
Rather, what matters most is region. Inter-State variation on this issue exceeds variation on any other social cleavage in Indian society. The North-Western States do poorly, as expected, with Haryana (78 per cent) and Delhi (65 per cent) topping the list. Haryana and Delhi also had the largest gap between how people responded directly and how they responded in the experimental question, demonstrating that despite the high levels of son preference in those places, there is a social taboo in openly admitting it. Madhya Pradesh (59 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (58 per cent), and Punjab (55 per cent) also reported high levels of son preference in the experimental question and Kerala (15 per cent) reported the lowest. There was a strong correlation between the State-wise son preference as revealed in the experiment and the actual sex ratios of the States, suggesting that these attitudes are manifesting in sex-selective behaviours.

While son preference is manifest evidence of gender bias in the early years of childhood, there are many additional forms of bias and social control that women face throughout their lives, such as ‘suitable’ occupations or ‘suitable’ marriage partners. These are life-altering choices. But one dimension that is pervasive in the daily lives of young women is social control on what women wear. The survey explored this aspect by asking: Would you consider (the following clothing choices) inappropriate for young women in your neighbourhood when they go out with friends?

The part of the question in brackets was replaced by a type of clothing like “pants and shirt” or “shorts.” Although we first considered asking about young women “in your household” instead of “in your neighbourhood” in the pilot, we found that the question provoked conflicts in respondent households, which led us to rephrase the question. Clearly the question was fraught — because young women are trying to make their own choices instead of pliantly accepting what they are told is “appropriate.”

Seventy seven per cent of respondents felt that pants and shirt were inappropriate for young women and 92 per cent felt that shorts were inappropriate. However, there was a large difference between rural and urban respondents on this question, with 85 per cent of rural respondents disapproving of pants and shirt compared to 60 per cent of urban respondents. We attempted to understand which household attributes might drive respondents to report less restrictive attitudes on women’s clothing using multivariate regression analysis. Contrary to our finding on son preference, attitudes on women’s dress were driven by income, urbanisation and education. Ascriptive identities like caste and religion played a less significant role in how people evaluated the appropriateness of women’s clothing. In urban areas the income level of the household was the single most important factor impacting how respondents evaluated the appropriateness of clothing. For city dwellers, 65 per cent of the poorest families did not think that pants were appropriate for young women compared to 50 per cent of those with the highest incomes in our sample.

Conservative views on female attire are less prevalent amongst the more urban, wealthy, and educated members of Indian society, which may come as no surprise. The acceptance of different types of women’s attire is not just about patriarchy, it is also related to social status. Clothing is a marker of consumption, and adopting Western modes of attire is often used to signal status in urban areas.

As with son preference, there is significant regional variation in how families perceive the appropriateness of pants and shirt for young women. Goa (23 per cent disapproved) and Odisha (61 per cent) were the most open to women wearing pants. Although the smaller sample size for Goa data may have affected the results, the numbers for Goa are not too different than those for Mumbai. Haryana (88 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (88 per cent) and Bihar (86 per cent) were the least open. There were large differences in how respondents in major metro areas responded to the question. In Mumbai only 28 per cent of people thought that pants and shirt were inappropriate for young women compared to the 61 per cent in Delhi and 54 per cent in Kolkata.

Shameful reality
Gender discrimination in India is undoubtedly one of the county’s most shameful social realities. It is not just that it is inequitable and unfair; quite simply, any society where half the population suffers from social bias has already hobbled itself and its future. Although urban Indians are gradually showing more openness in their attitudes on women’s attire, this is not the case on the critical issue of son preference, an attitude that remains deeply rooted in India’s family ideals and social structure across a wide cross-section of society.

Clearly economic growth does not appear to be sufficient to remove the social incentives for having fewer daughters. Without frontally addressing some norms and structures, and fundamentally delegitimising gender bias in wider social discourse, there is little reason to believe that India will see a reversal in male child preferences in the foreseeable future.

(Megan Reed is the Research Coordinator at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. Devesh Kapur is Director of CASI.)

Source - The Hindu

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