Violence against Indians was central to British rule, and the courts served as its instruments.

Racist violence

A.G. NOORANI
Frontline May 2011

DURING the Quit India Movement, the Chief Justice of the Federal Court, Sir Maurice Gwyer, consistently ruled in favour of the citizen, to the dismay of the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. But this is only one truth. There are two others which complete the picture. Not all the judges in colonial India were fair and impartial, as Tilak's trials for sedition and Bhagat Singh's trial for murder revealed. The Privy Council acted as a form of colonial control and systematically reversed Gwyer's rulings.

Lower down came the crimes against Indians committed by British planters, paupers, soldiers and sailors. The offenders were tried by white judges and white juries after white policemen had cooked up the case in their favour. It is this aspect of the British record on justice in India that Prof. Elizabeth Kolsky of Villanova University exposes in her work with meticulous documentation and cogent analyses. It is a product of 10 years of research and writing.

There was the celebrated trial of indigo planter William Orby Hunter in the late 19th century. He had tortured three of his female servants, who were discovered with their noses, ears, and hair cut off, their genitals mutilated, and their feet fettered in iron chains. He was sentenced to pay a nominal fine and immediately set free. Racial violence was a constant and constituent element of British dominance in India. “This book examines how quotidian acts of violence simultaneously menaced and maintained British power in India from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. Physical violence was an intrinsic feature of imperial rule. This fact is widely acknowledged but narrowly explored, particularly in the Indian historiography. Although the archive is replete with incidents of Britons murdering, maiming, and assaulting Indians – and getting away with it – white violence remains one of the empire's most closely guarded secrets.”

The book ferrets out those secrets. Indians do not bother to recall those crimes. The absence of rancour among Indians towards the British is but right, but we tend to let some historians get away with their glosses on Britain's revolting record. The noted writer Akilesh Mittal, for one, never ceases to remind us of the prosperity in India before the British arrived. They exploited India into poverty.

“By focussing on crimes committed by a mostly forgotten cast of European characters – planters, paupers, soldiers, and seamen – this study demonstrates that violence was an endemic rather than ephemeral part of British colonial rule in India.” Violence against Indians was central to British rule, and the courts served as its instruments. Tilak remarked, “The goddess of British Justice, though blind, is able to distinguish unmistakably black from white.”

There was continuous tension between the rule of law, which did exist, and its breaches, which were not uncommon. The book is based on a detailed examination of cases that illustrate the contradiction and what the author rightly calls “the persistent significance of race in British India”. Worse than the officials were the non-official European community, a pillar of the Raj. “While British tea, indigo, and coffee planters in India provided critical financial returns to the colonial government, their drunk, disorderly, and murderous conduct both presented a serious law-and-order problem and also was an embarrassment to the ‘right sorts' of official Britons.” The author highlights their misbehaviour and its condonation by the British rulers.

“What outraged Indian journalists and nationalists in the late nineteenth century was not simply the fact of white violence but its handling in the criminal courts. Race had a clear, obvious, and ongoing influence over legal decision-making as Britons accused of assaulting and murdering Indians were booked on lesser (if any) criminal charges, which resulted in little to no punishment. Contrary to David Cannadine's controversial claim that rank and status were more important in the empire than race, British police, judges, and juries in India routinely collaborated across the hierarchies of class to buttress the racial basis of colonial dominance.” Racially abusive language accompanied the violence. Violence was not an exceptional “but an ordinary part of British rule in the subcontinent”. The abuse in India was typical of British colonial rule everywhere.

In general, British democracy has been better than others at concealing the brutal way its state functions.

A short history of British torture
Submitted by WorldRevolution
December 5, 2005


When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails and where Cheney has been labelled the ‘Vice President for Torture’. In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques.
Interrogation in Northern Ireland

Between 1971 and ‘75 more than 2000 people were interned without trial by the state in Northern Ireland. Picked up without having any charges laid, or knowing when they were going to be released, detainees were subject to all sorts of treatments, some coming under the heading of ‘interrogation in depth’. Apart from prolonged sessions of oppressive questioning, serious threats, wrist bending, choking and beatings, there were instances of internees being forced to run naked over broken glass and being thrown, tied and hooded, out of helicopters a few feet above the ground. The ‘five techniques’ at the centre of the interrogators’ work were: sensory deprivation through being hooded (often while naked); being forced to stand against walls (sometimes for over 20 hours and even for more than 40); being subjected to continuous noise (from machinery such as generators or compressors for periods of up to 6 or 7 days); deprivation of food and water; sleep deprivation for periods of up to week. Relays of interrogation teams were used against the victims.

The British state tried to discredit reports of torture. Stories were fed to the media about injuries being self-inflicted - “one hard-line Provisional was given large whiskies and a box of king-size cigarettes for punching himself in both eyes” (Daily Telegraph, 31/10/77). There were indeed instances of self-harm, but these were either suicide attempts or done with the hope of being transferred to hospital accommodation.

Then the press said that any measures were justified if they helped to ‘prevent violence’. They contrasted “ripping out fingernails, beating people with steel rods and applying electric shocks to their genitalia” (Daily Telegraph 3/9/76), examples of “outright brutality”, with the measures used in Northern Ireland.

In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights said that the techniques Britain had used caused “intense physical and mental suffering and … acute psychiatric disturbance”, but that while this was “inhuman and degrading treatment” it didn’t amount to torture. This was a victory for the British state because it was keen to use means that would cause the maximum distress to the victim with the minimum external evidence. They had been previously referred to the European Court over torture in Cyprus, but in fact British interrogators had been using various combinations of the ‘five techniques’ for a long time. When the army and RUC approached Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, for formal approval “They told him that the ‘in-depth’ techniques they planned to use were those the army had used … many times before when Britain was faced with insurgencies in her colonies, including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, the British Cameroons, Brunei, British Guyana, Aden, Borneo, Malaysia and the Persian Gulf” (Provos The IRA and Sinn Fein Peter Taylor).

By any means deemed necessary

British intervention in the Malayan ‘emergency’ in the 1950s has been held up as a model of suppression and ‘counter-insurgency’. Apart from the camps established, the murder squads, use of rigid food controls, burning down villages and the imposition of emergency regulations, the use of torture was an integral part of British operations. With 650,000 people uprooted and ‘resettled’ in New Villages, or put in concentration camps, there was also a programme of ‘re-education’.

British action in Kenya in the 1950s also showed what British civilisation was prepared to do. At various times over 90,000 ‘suspects’ were imprisoned, in either detention camps or ‘protected villages’. At one point Nairobi (population 110,000) was emptied, with 16,500 then detained and 2,500 expelled to reserves. Assaults and violence, often to the point of death, were extensive. As in Malaya, ‘rehabilitation’ was one of the goals of the operation. More than 1000 people were hanged, using a mobile gallows that was taken round the country. Overall, maybe 100-150,000 died through exhaustion, disease, starvation and systematic brutality.

Recent revelations in The Guardian (12/11/5) concerned a secret torture centre, the “London Cage”, that operated between July 1940 and September 1948. Three houses in Kensington were used to interrogate some 3500 German officers, soldiers and civilians. Still in use for three years after the end of the war, interrogation included beatings, being forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours, threats of execution or unnecessary surgery, starvation, sleep deprivation, dousings with cold water etc. “In one complaint lodged at the National Archives, a 27-year-old German journalist being held at this camp said he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. And not once, he said, did they treat him as badly as the British.”

No exceptions

There is a continuity in the British state’s actions. The Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the ‘London Cage’ received an OBE for his interrogation work in the First World War. In the 1950s there were reports of Britain experimenting with drugs, surgery and torture with a view to designing techniques that would be effective but look harmless. In the 1970s thousands of army officers and senior civil servants were trained to use psychological techniques for security purposes. Inevitably, the truth about current activities is not in the public domain.

In general, British democracy has been better than others at concealing the brutal way its state functions. Anything that is exposed is denied or dismissed as being an isolated excess. In France the extensive use of torture in the war in Algeria was publicised as part of a battle between different factions of the ruling class. Victims had hoses inserted in their mouths and their stomachs filled with water, electrodes were put on genitals, heads were immersed in water. During the Battle of Algiers 3-4000 people ‘disappeared’: fatal victims of French torture techniques.

Although France, and more recently the US in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, have been less successful than Britain in keeping their actions under wraps, all these democracies use the most brutal methods of interrogation and detention. They also learn from each other’s activities, most notably in Vietnam, where the US drew on British experience in Malaya as much as earlier French experience in Indo-China. Any government can talk about ‘human rights’, but every capitalist state will use any means at its disposal in war or to enforce its social order.

Dr. Denise Horn: Foreign Funding as a Strategy for Manipulation

Sujata Tuladhar
TUFTS Fletcher
Date: March 10, 2008

“Powerful states do engage in exploitation of NGO networks and are very specific about it,” stated Dr. Denise Horn, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Northeastern University.

At a talk entitled “NGO Funding and the Manipulation of Civil Society within Transitional States” organized by the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at The Fletcher School on February 19th, Dr. Horn discussed the development of a new international trend in which hegemonic states use funding for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a tool to control social agenda. The event was co-sponsored by Global Women, a student group at The Fletcher School that invites speakers and sponsors a mentoring program.

Using case studies from Moldova and Estonia, Dr. Horn established three main findings. First, she described how foreign countries help establish the rules for civil society. They can delineate the boundaries of the issues they identify as being important. An outstanding example is that of the United States, which through NGO funding, has significantly contributed to the emergence of a particular notion of democracy and the process of democratization. Only aspects of democracy valuable to US foreign policy have been funded. “Because the US has a lot of power and a lot of money to invest in democracy programs and policy, they get to determine what democracy looks like and what policies are democratic.”

Her second finding is that “foreign donors frame the debate within civil society and domestic politics by focusing on particular issues and funding local NGOs willing to support those targeted issues.” For instance, US-funded programs focus on free and fair elections, promote multi-party participation, encourage women in political parties and free market reforms as part of the process of democratization. NGOs who do not subscribe to these means of democratization are not funded, thus reducing their voice in political discourse.

Through analysis of the ‘requests for proposals’ published by donors and the proposals written in response to them, Dr. Horn also found that “because foreign funding can shape the language of the projects that develop, it shapes the way individuals perceive themselves vis-à-vis civil society and the state through the programs and social campaigns that are implemented by local NGOs.”

For instance, Moldova received heavy funding for programs dealing with human trafficking. The US approaches trafficking as an economic problem alone and thus fails to address the social and economic underpinning of the issue. Therefore, resulting programs focused on providing women with economic skills without understanding why women participate in trafficking in the first place. Similarly, in Estonia, US funding concentrated on domestic violence. As a result, people claiming to be victims or perpetrators of domestic abuse rose significantly.

Dr. Horn went on to elaborate that the decision of donor states such as the US to engage in funding NGOs is, in fact, a strategy to fulfill their respective national interests. Through funding NGOs, they shape what kind of civil society networks emerge, which will in turn serve their foreign policies. For instance, the US encourages countries to democratize because it believes that states that believe in the American notion of democracy are more responsive to US foreign policy. Most often, civil society is leveraged for such interventions because it serves as a less threatening approach.

How far this strategy has reached and whether or not other big states are also following similar strategies is a question yet to be answered. However, with a growing number of research studies like the one Dr. Horn pursues, there is bound to be a growing pool of knowledge on this issue soon.

Understanding Arundhati Roy on Kashmir

By P. Chacko Joseph

October 26th, 2010
Frontier India

When I was a kid, my father had annual leave to go to wherever he wishes. Normally, he would choose to go to his home in Kerala. For me it was the dreaded month of the year. Take a train to Kerala where there was hardly any electricity, mosquito and other insect bites, trying to talk in Malayalam and worse to eat Kerala Fat Rice. I admit there were joys too. The Kerala Porrota and egg pattice were my favorite things. I have / had a cousin too. We have had many arguments together. The first ever was when he told me that sun revolves around Kerala. I asked him how? He then traced out with his finger pointing up in the sky on how sun rose and how it set down. I told him it rises similar way in the place my father was posted. And it has been same in the places I had been with him. He explained that, what I saw was sun from far rising and setting in Kerala. I had another doubt. I asked him if it goes the other way, then there must be another place behind Kerala. He told me that the place was empty.

I held the belief, until I got to study solar system. I was devastated. I challenged my cousin during my next annual leave. He told me that this is what I get via capitalistic system of education. Unfortunately for him, he too had the similar geography book on his table. He reasoned that if he does not write the same things in the book, the capitalistic system wouldn’t let him pass. This was the second time heard the word “Capitalistic.” So, I asked him what it was. He explained that an imperialistic country America dictated what we studied. True, those days American hand and profits were bad words.

Next trip, he told me was how Indian ministers were bought by imperialistic America. Especially Morarji Desai and Indra Gandhi. He said the only way to save India was via communism. He spoke passionately about his Chairman Mao. Here, I differed. I said its an enemy country. He said I was foolish. He gave me 3 scenarios. China should capture US; Communist should take over India; or India should be divided into small countries. This is the only way forward he said.

Next time, he said that “You know, kerala politics directly effects US politics!” I was laughing uncontrollably.

Slowly, as we both matured, I used to give him solid arguments back. For example, “I will buy you a ticket to your fatherland China.”

Once he showed me some chocolates his UNGLE (uncle) brought from Gulf. I told him that Mars and M&M were from imperialistic US. He should not eat it and I can make a sacrifice by eating it for him. He said that, since his UNGLE brought it from Gulf, its ok, he can eat it.

But, as I grew up, and came in contact with other Keralites, I realised that I was up against some kind of romanticism. Also, they say that every Kerala child is born with a red (communist) flag in the hand. I stopped arguing. Besides, me and my cousin got busy with our own lives. He was practicing Law as I last heard.

Similarly, on yahoo chat (late 1990), I went into a mallu chat room. I introduced myself as from Dubai. The mallu crowd was on me with words like paradesi and other unmentionable words. The funny part was, I told them that I can get people visas to Dubai and every one changed the tune. I was a chat room hero.

People like Arundhati Roy have grown in this kind of environment. They live in their own fantasy land that mix with communist ideas. Just that this one is famous, got some money from imperialist publisher (like my cousins UNGLES chocolates) and a mike to talk into. Arundhati just mouthed off what could be an “average Kerala talk.” The kind when they discuss politics.

This talk is no different from CPI (M) support for china or Baglihar Dam. You can understand why Prakash Karat and Arundhati Roy are so famous in Srinagar. These people have been picked up by the powers that be for their idiocracy.

Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room

by Vamsee Juluri

Author and Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
Posted: January 8, 2010 03:29 PM

The Huffington Post



All prejudices are unpleasantly alike on some level, but the prejudice that India and Indians face on a global scale has proven to be exceptionally resistant to change.

In a week that saw innocent Indians being murdered and imaginary Indians being maligned on opposite ends of the Western world, Foreign Policy published an article that labels India a "global villain." It is time for a serious reality-check, and an even more serious attitude-check.

Let me start with the Foreign Policy article in question. Barbara Crossette, who authored the piece, formally worked at the New York Times, a publication, which has devoted entire editorials to its briskly exasperating civilizing mission vis-a-vid India. Now, Crossette writes about how annoying it is to deal with India on important global issues, such as trade and nuclear non-proliferation.

She begins with a pithy demolition of India's supposed good press in recent times (to which, one must note, a witty commentator has responded by asking the obvious: What good press?) only to go on to denounce India as a sanctimonious rogue among nations. The words that are used to describe India include "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it," all of which a student of postcolonial cultural studies would recognize as obnoxious cliches that have come to characterize Western discourse about the colonies for decades now. What else could be flashing in a writer's mind when the word "petulant" or "intransigent" is used but the belief that a a whole nation is infantile? What colonial image of a gaping-mouthed ragged supplicant must have inspired the use of a word like "craving" to describe India's goals?

The bold labeling of a sovereign, democratic nation as a "global evil" marks, I believe, a new low in what must be recognized as nothing less than Indophobia. If we have not heard that frequently enough before, it is not because it doesn't exist. Just like how the most effective propaganda is never called propaganda, but rather it is accepted as truth, the most insidious of prejudices seldom even get named as such (perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase "elephant in the room," which means exactly that, is centered around the animal most closely identified with India). There are perhaps as many anecdotes about Indophobia at a personal level as there are Indians in foreign countries, but it is at a deeper cultural level that we need to face it first. The first sign of Indophobia many of us encounter is really its own ideological defenses; phrases which are used to preempt any discussion about it, like "Indian chauvinism," "Indian supremacism," "Indian exceptionalism," "Indian victimism," or just allegations of childish over-sensitiveness coupled with some sort of vague Eastern cultural fetishism pertaining to notions of honor (I have heard all of these sentiments informally or otherwise in my academic career from grad school until now). If we can get past these, perhaps we can see things more clearly.

India's role in the Western imagination has been a long and important one. Despite some reverential accounts of Indian civilization in the earliest days of the encounter between Europe and India, the image that has prevailed has not been a nice one, or even a truthful one. The present Indophobia has its origins in colonial Hinduphobia. Fuelled by the crazy stories of missionaries determined to rid the world of heathen Hindus and steeped in the ideologies of the colonizers' civilizing mission, Indophobia infiltrated popular, journalistic, political and academic thought. In the cold war period, some things improved, but in the great conversation of powers that Washington thought it was having, Pakistan would appear to it as a reliable favorite; tough, dependable, monotheistic, and anti-communist. India, on the other hand, was seen as too weak, too Hindu, too vegetarian, precariously past its Must Break Up By Date. At best, or worst, India was seen as "pious," with its Gandhian austerities and Nehruvian Non-Alignment dreams.

But it is the present, the post cold war, post 9/11, post outsourcing nature of Indophobia that we must return to, history in tow. The examples are many. Why is it that some Australians reacted to the beating and killing of Indian students with the odd retort that "this happens in Mumbai"? Why did NPR cheerily lend its audience to one man's claim that he saw an Indian get the Nigerian airline bomber on board? Why does Foreign Policy get to call India "evil" without a drop of concern for how it feels to Indian readers or how dangerous words like this were in the past for the colonized nations? Why does New York Times choose to show agonizing restraint when Pakistani terrorists massacre civilians in Mumbai and run screaming headlines naming the arrest of an "Indian" after Madrid? Why does Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most exhilarating movies of our time, depict the majority of Indian characters in it as irredeemably cruel and barbaric (not the nice Indian hero with the British accent though, of course not)? Why did the fictional slur "slumdog" and the image of poverty reportedly figure so often in the Australian attacks? Finally, why does Glenn Beck find the name of a life-giving sacred river similar to the name of a disease? I must admit though that the last case is less depressing because it is Glenn Beck after all and the problem must naturally lie not in the word 'Ganges' but really in his ears or what's (not) between them.

After a brief decade or so of somewhat unexpected "India Rising" stories, India-bashing is once again becoming fashionable. As a media studies teacher, I always wonder what it means when a particular way of looking at things suddenly becomes prevalent in history. What does it tell us about our times and who we are? In the past Indophobia was part of a colonial and then cold war mindset. Thinking of India as the very embodiment of wretchedness and poverty fit in with the western self-perception of the time. In recent times, things have improved at some levels. Racism is no longer legal and in many places no longer cool. With globalization and the economic success of India and Indians abroad, it is no longer possible to deny to India its talent, labor, and its contribution to the world. All should have been well, at least now. But Indophobia has found new reasons to resurface--and some of these reasons have less to do with India and more to do with where the United States sees itself in the world right now. The world's most powerful nation has been only minimally successful in its wars against its most formidable adversary. It is beset by doubts about the mortality of empires and such. It has swung from gung-ho bombs-away leadership to a low-bow bombs-away leadership. It has perhaps even painfully sensed the barb in the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies?" when it comes to the whole question of its cold war-era role in the creation of Frankenjihadis in South Asia. All of these have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on its present story on India.

The present wave of Indophobia, starting with the hate-call campaigns against Indian call centers a few years ago and culminating in the execrably immoral devaluing of Indian lives in recent times, may be at least in some parts the result of an overcompensation for a sense of imperial loss. The pinnacle of western power and prestige is no longer the only high rise in town (and I don't mean the Burj Dubai). Globalization has done to the world what it has done in India too--the days of single nation world dominance, like single party dominance in Indian politics, are over. Accepting this won't be easy for some because the culture has not found the will to change; at least not as far as India goes. The culture can grudgingly accept China as a rival. It can deem the whole of Islam as a civilizational rival. India's rise, though, is harder to accept. America is used to dealing with things on the grounds of toughness, force, power. Doing so on the grounds of smartness is new to it.

So the whole old repertoire of Indophobia returns; images of poverty and disease, allegations of corruption and piousness, insinuations about culture and religion. This time around though, there is less of the sort of restraint that existed in the past. Just as how some people think it is okay to be racist now because we have a black president, the new Indophobia deems it okay to spew nastiness because India has arrived too. But of course, post Mumbai and Slumdog the arrival story is also questioned. This is an old tired story too; of the romantic westerner eagerly turning to India despite their friends' counsel only to be tremendously disappointed that they didn't find nirvana, or even a nice airport terminal. That sort of backlash tends to get extra nasty, leaping into large scale generalizations. That is the pattern that seems to be playing out in the present India story. "You think you know India? You think India has got better/richer/nirvana?" The pitch inevitably starts (In Crossette's article this part runs with "internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers and gurus"). "Nope," the anointed Western (and sometimes South Asian) expert gravely retorts. "Here's the real India and here are the real Indians. They are evil." At least Foreign Policy had the honesty to put that word up in lights.

As someone with an emotional stake in both India and the United States, I wonder whose loss will be greater in the end. The nastiness of Indophobia is of course bad for India in the first instance. It is young Indians who have been bearing the brunt, whether of American hate-callers or worse, of Australian murderers. But India is a survivor country; it has survived conquest, colonialism, and it survives its own chaotic self every day. America though is inexperienced on this count. It has just about started realizing, after much needless suffering of its own from blowback and backbite, that surviving the whirlwind of globalization takes smarts rather than brute force. I fear that the return of Indophobia may once again distract America from the right direction. When experts like Barbara Crossette heap sarcasm on "India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness" they fail to see that the more we ignore this supposed "loquaciousness" the more we are signaling that the only language we recognize is that of brute force. There is no dearth of precedent on that. There is no dearth of possibilities that the future may be exactly that too, if old prejudices run unchecked.

But I cannot make myself leave on a pessimistic note. Indophobia can be fought, and I believe there is enough goodness in all communities to do so. First, I think the Indian community, in India and abroad, must get its own stories right. There has been a tendency to shy away from naming Indophobia as such because we think it affects our image of India Rising, which has been hard fought, no doubt. But there is a need to name bad stuff for what it is. To be fair, as always, we must continue our introspection into our own prejudices and shortcomings; after all, as Ramachandra Guha once wrote, 95% of blame for India's problems today lies with us and not the British. India needs a better India story too (Guha and Khilnani are the best place to start) and it won't be easy because of how diverse, divided, and indeed complicated we are. But that is our task, and indeed for those of us who have the privilege of living and writing in the Western world, indeed an important one. For our Western friends, especially those in positions of authority in the media, the task is more daunting. Your responsibility may not be towards Indian feelings, not at all. But you do have a responsibility in your profession towards Truth. As long as your Indophobia is acting up, you will remain clueless about it.

Somini Sengupta has discovered child malnutrition

Somini Sengupta has discovered child malnutrition in India.

From the New York Times March 12: "As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists"

“Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge” she writes, “even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.”

Apparently this is not a paradox in America, the worlds richest and most powerful country.

She compares India to China “China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent.”

She laments that “There are no simple explanations.” Then goes on to make the incredulous claims that “Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor.” And that “Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here.”

She acknowledges that India runs the largest child feeding program in the world but then eviserarates it by saying that “experts agree it is inadequately designed”.

She makes a trip to a slum in Delhi to make these journalistic observations:

“A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.

Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood. “

First of all khichdi – a traditional Indian dish all over the north is not “all strarch” as every Indian knows – the lentils are added to provide protein and it provides a nutritious meal if vegetables are thrown in for the vitamins.

So she deliberately misleads – its not porridge nor is it all starch.

She then provides more anecdotal evidence of how, horror or horrors, some the left over food is given to women.

Somini Sengupta then provides more recycled and some questionable statistics collected from the internet.

She observes there are beggars in Delhi: “A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.”

She also seems amazed that there are rats in slums, there are open drains and malaria. I guess if you move about the five star hotel circuit this could come as a shock.

Here she makes an observation that a more astute journalist would have followed through on: “Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.”

Yes, thanks to globalization, multinationals like Coke and Pepsi, and Indian companies too sell non-nutritious snacks and sugary water drinks. These are consumed by poor under-nourished slum dwellers as a luxury thanks to the constant advertising barrage. This further erodes their finances, which could be better used to buy fresh vegetables or meat.

But instead she moves blithely on ….
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Many of the observations she makes are not new for example here is quote from a World Bank report on the subject:

The South Asian Enigma: Why is undernutrition in South Asia so much higher than in Sub Saharan Africa?

In 1997, Ramalingaswami et al. wrote, “In the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is Sub-Saharan Africa…but … the worst affected region is not Africa but South Asia”. These statements were met with incredulity. However, undernutrition rates in South Asia, including and especially in India, are nearly double those in Sub-Saharan Africa today. This is not an artifact of different measurement standards or differing growth potential among ethnic groups: several studies have repeatedly shown that given similar opportunities, children across most ethnic groups, including Indian children, can grow to the same levels, and that the same internationally recognized growth references can be used across countries to assess the prevalence of malnutrition. This phenomenon, referred to as the “South Asian Enigma”, is real.

The “South Asian Enigma” can be explained by three key differences between South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa:
- Low birth weight is the single largest predictor of undernutrition; and over 30% Indian babies are born with low birth weights, compared to approximately 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Women in South Asia tend to have lower status and less decision-making power than women in Sub-Saharan Africa. This limits women’s ability to access the resources needed for their own and their children’s health and nutrition, and has been shown to be strongly associated with low birth weight, as well as poor child feeding behaviors in the first twelve months of life
- Hygiene and sanitation standards in South Asia are well below those in Africa, and have a major role to play in causing the infections that lead to undernutrition in the first two years of life/


Ramalingaswami V, U. Jonson and J. Rohde. 1997 “The Asian Enigma”. In, The
Progress of Nations. New York: UNICEF.

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Here are some interesting comments to the NYT Article:

Comment 1 one of my favorites reporduced in full below
Comment 2
Comment 3
Comment 4
Comment 5
Comment 6
Comment 7

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240. March 13, 2009 3:22 pm

I will try to write this in the kindest least offensive manner. I worked five years in India (99-2004) managing Unicef's supply operation. Unicef is the UN childrens fund and has been working in India over 60 years; it was the first UN agency to startup in the then newly independent country. It has worked with governments, community groups, large ngo's, religious leaderships, universities, foriegn experts, you name it, anyone and everyone who wants to help nourish India's future, her beautiful children.

We (unicef) had some of the best nutrition and child development experts on our staff and advising us. Amartya Sen, nobel winner from his work on famine in Bangladesh; arguably the world leader in these issues regularly offered assistance. I am not a nutrition or development expert, I managed the spending of money, we spent about $130 million yearly, most of that went for vaccines, most of that for polio eradication. In nutrition unicef mostly offered training and meetings called 'advocacy' a nice way of saying, trying to convince people to nourish their children better. So my naive gleanings and reactions to comments here I've just read.

1. India has plenty of food, in fact large surpluses that are a financial/market stability problem; food is not lacking; its in the wrong spots at the wrong time. Teen girls & their babies need good food now.

2. India knows more about child feeding than most; they have received the world's most dedicated specialists in this area for many years.

3. 'Corruption' in government is not nearly the issue westerners blurt out whenever they use the word India. I worked with senior, middle and lower level officials, in tendering, ajudication and contracting of all sorts of local and international contracts for five years. I worked with government donor agencies, World Bank and well intended groups with money. I'm a typical middle class American male business fellow, with years in the US drug industry before Unicef. I've worked in Europe, Africa, Latin America, former Soviet, most south and east asian govt's managing contracts that spent your hard earned donations. India is no worse, and on balance better than some in the realm of corrupted contracting. They have corruption, but so do we (America)--it seems to be part of life. But, resistance to changing how things are always done is a bigger than the usual small time grifters trying to get over. India has active anti fraud teams, and a more agressive press than we do now in America.

4. 'Government' is not the problem. All comments seem to blame govt, but India's govt is a large complex group criticized from so many sides I wonder how they carry on. India is over six hundred districts, equivalent to US counties, only these have power. Nothing affects people through govt without the district. There are 600,000 towns & villages, each with elected vested interests--sound familiar? There are 26 states, each remarkably different; each zealous in its authorities. There are at least 10 powerful 'learned societies' of nutrition and child development in India, who field real experts in all subjects of child nutrition. They gather as often as someone will pay for their visit to Delhi or Mumbai and present learned papers. In my experience they disagree more over every aspect of nutrition than I thought was possible. In hindsight I found the gov't people trying to manage this 'nutrition' process to be powerless peons caught in the middle of angry partisans.

5. 'Caste', I love how westerners write about caste. In five years of very concentrated effort in all sorts of health programs with the smartest people I ever worked with, the word & concept of caste never entered the discussions. The only people who say things like 'untouchables' are westerners. Caste is a nice conception from watching films like Gandhi--who was high caste, but not part of the educated governance culture of the country. There is caste, it is illegal, there are exceptions who make it to the top, but caste is not causing this alone, and it is taboo to discuss--no one admits they have it.

6. Religion; to my surprise none of the comments I saw mentioned what is a measurable; muslim children and mothers in India suffer, and they are the largest 'minority' group. They are also the largest muslim population within a nation excepting Indonesia, over 100 million Indians are Muslim; most of them are poor hungry and fed up--call it a security risk, these teenage moms and babies need vitamins minerals and real food now.

'India's problem' in my view? It's similar to ours in America; selfishness. When we (the well off in America), and the same 'we' in India feel the pain of our poor, we will move forward. Thank you NYT for these opportunities, John Gilmartin

— John Gilmartin, Rhode Island, USA

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Somini Sengupta - another zinger

“Jornalist” Somini Sengupta has another “scoop” in the NY Tines. Ms. Sengupta has apparently just discovered that there are disparities in Indian society that extend, to the rapidly privatizing,health delivery system.

She starts with this bizarre statement: “To get the best care,” Robin Steeles said gamely, “you gotta pay for it.”

If Mr. Steele is willing to pay for it, why then is he in India? One would think Ms. Sengupta is making the argument that people come to India because, even though health care there is more expensive than their own countries, it is so much better that they are willing to pay extra for it. Not so. In the very next sentence she states that the reason Mr. Steel is in India is to get a Mitral valve repaired “at a price he could pay.”

As she nears the end of her short piece the quality improves, but not much. She recognizes somewhat obliquely that the American health system has disparities too and that “the American health care system could no more care for Mr. Steele’s than the Indian system could for Mr. Amin” (a poor laborer in India).

Ms. “Gunga Din” Sengupta is following in a long line of Indian sycophants who will speak to power with deference and admiration. To do that, however they must first internalize their values and despise themselves. If you find in hear article a curious similarity to those in the US press about health disparity in America its because, she follows in a footsteps many of India Journalists who recycle news ideas from the west into Indian versions for local consumption.

Although to be fair she has come a long way from her “four men facing their monkey god” days only a couple of years ago.
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An interesting discussion on her can be read here.
A blog post here.