Facing a Wave of Violence, India Is Rattled

Ajit Solanki/Associated Press

Bloody water ran early Sunday outside a hospital in Ahmedabad, India, where a blast on Saturday killed husband-and-wife doctors and two sanitation workers.

Over the past several years, terrorist attacks in India have become an everyday presence in everyday places. The targets seem to have nothing in common except that they are ordinary and brazenly easy to strike.

In eastern Varanasi, a deadly explosion interrupted Hindu devotees as they lighted oil lamps to Hanuman, the monkey god, one Tuesday at dusk. In southern Hyderabad, a homemade bomb planted inside a historic mosque killed worshipers on a Friday afternoon. In Mumbai, India’s largest city, nearly 200 commuters on packed city trains died in a series of blasts.

And, in the most recent attack, 17 back-to-back explosions struck shoppers and strollers on Saturday evening in Ahmedabad in western India, and then two blasts hit the very hospitals where the wounded and their relatives rushed for help, killing 49 people and wounding more than 200.

In a country long familiar with sharply focused violence — whether sectarian or fueled by insurgencies in Kashmir in the 1990s — the impersonal nature of the latest violence is new and deeply unsettling.

“This is different, because for the first time it’s everyday, it’s utterly anonymous, it’s excessive,” said Shiv Vishvanathan, a professor of anthropology in Ahmedabad. “The familiar becomes unfamiliar,” he said. “The apple seller you meet might be carrying a bomb. It creates suspicion. It’s a perfect way to destabilize society.”

Officials have said the attacks are attempts to provoke violence between Hindus and Muslims that have not succeeded so far. Virtually none of the attacks have resulted in convictions; a suspect in the Varanasi bombings was shot and killed by the police.

Reminders of the danger are everywhere. There are metal detectors at the gates of multiplex movie theaters and commuter trains, and even at the threshold of prominent temples and mosques. Yet they have had no bearing on the far greater number of easier, more densely crowded targets.

India’s congested cities offer rich opportunities. A small bundle of explosives, hidden as they have been in lunch boxes, pressure cookers and on the backs of bicycles, can cause grievous damage. It is also why the attackers have so successfully eluded punishment.

A report last year by the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington concluded that from January 2004 to March 2007, the death toll from terrorist attacks in India was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq during the same period.

Ahmedabad, home to 3.5 million people and Gujarat’s commercial center, is no stranger to violence. In 2002, a train fire that killed several dozen Hindus led to the killing of 1,000 Muslims over several days, one of the worst outbreaks of religious violence in India’s history.

An obscure group calling itself the Indian Mujahedeen warned Saturday that an attack was about to take place “in revenge of Gujarat,” plainly referring to the 2002 killings. The statement was sent in an e-mail message, written in English, to television stations just before the first blasts.

H. P. Singh, the city’s joint police commissioner, said Sunday that some of the explosives had been strapped to bicycles in crowded streets and markets. Later in the evening, a pair of car bombs went off in front of two city hospitals. At one of them, Civil Hospital, the dead included husband-and-wife doctors and two sanitation workers.

The police said two additional bombs had been found and defused, in Ahmedabad and nearby Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital. On Sunday afternoon, the police found two abandoned cars in Surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, one stuffed with bomb-making chemicals and detonators, the other with live bombs. The police said they were still tracing the cars’ ownership.

On Friday, there was a series of similar low-intensity blasts in southern Bangalore, one of which killed a woman standing at a bus stop. Two months ago in Jaipur, synchronized blasts on bicycles killed 56 people; the Indian Mujahedeen sent an e-mail message claiming credit for those attacks.

On Sunday, a police official, P. P. Pandey, said “a single mind” was suspected to be behind the three latest attacks. The police said they had detained people for questioning; The Associated Press reported 30 were in custody. Officials offered no further details about who was involved in the group or a possible motivation behind the bombings.

The morning after the Ahmedabad blasts, residents of this sprawling Indian capital pointed out that while it was virtually impossible to take precautions against terrorist attacks, they had grown increasingly vigilant of the strangers around them.

Hari Om Suri, 52, stood outside a popular seafood restaurant at the Defense Colony Market, scanning the parking lot for anything that looked suspicious.

Mohan and Helen Nanjundan ordered a chicken sizzler for lunch at Moet’s, a popular restaurant, and warily eyed the bicycles parked outside. Bicycles, a poor man’s transport here, are common. “Every few months, there is another one in another city,” said Mr. Nanjundan, 52. “Sometimes we tell ourselves to stay away from dangerous places, but it’s hard to say where that is.”

“I’ve never looked at a bicycle before,” said Ms. Nanjundan, 56.

Puneet Gupta, 23, said he was trying to avoid crowded markets, but his girlfriend, Jyotsna Malhotra, 21, said she was determined not to let it get in the way of her fun. “We are not sure what is going to happen tomorrow,” she said. “Better to live today, shop, get him to spend some money on me.”

Last August, after a pair of synchronized bombs tore through an amusement park and a fast-food restaurant in Hyderabad, killing at least 40 people, an Indian newspaper called the violence “a war on the way we live.”

by NYTimes

India's New Buddhists

Indian Buddhist devotees offer prayers at a Buddhist temple during the Buddha Purnima Festival in New Delhi

MANAN VATSYAYANA / AFP / Getty Images

Neha Mohan was 24 years old and living the new Indian dream, with a job at a New Delhi marketing firm that hitched her wagon to the country's chugging economy. And then she let it all go. "I wasn't satisfied," she says over a cappuccino in a shopping mall on the city's southern fringe. Mohan decided to ditch business and study French. With a widowed mother to support, Mohan says her family couldn't understand why she would turn her back on so much opportunity. "There was a lot of pressure," she says. But like many other urban, educated Indians, Mohan, now 29, has found strength and solace in Buddhism.

The faith that was started 2,500 years ago by a worldly, disaffected Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, is finding new adherents among the modern princes and princesses of the country's prosperous élite. They're facing some of the same tensions that have made Buddhist practice so popular in the U.S. and Europe. "As in America, there are all kinds of new pressures that are at work on people, all kinds of mental stress," says K.T.S. Sarao, a professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Delhi. The wealth created by India's technology boom has brought with it the realization that material comfort isn't the same thing as happiness. Caught in that tender trap, Sarao says, "People turn to meditation."

But while Buddhism in the West might carry with it a hint of the exotic, here the appeal has more to do with its simplicity and pragmatism. That's what has drawn so many New Delhi yuppies to Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist movement whose extensive land holdings and political influence have sometimes made it controversial in Japan, where it was founded. Soka Gakkai has had a tiny presence in India for decades. But the group has blossomed in the last eight years, growing from 5,000 to 35,000 members — 20,000 of them in New Delhi alone.

The core of the Soka Gakkai practice is the chanting of the phrase, nam ryo renge kyo — "I devote myself to the mystic law of the Lotus Sutra" — but it is otherwise stripped of mysticism or ascetic self-denial. It teaches a mix of personal affirmation, positive thinking, and the basic Buddhist principles of peace and non-violence. Saurabh Popli, a lanky, 34-year-old architect, says he found in Soka Gakkai "a philosophy that can help us navigate these incredibly complex lives that we're living." He adds, "It doesn't require me to live in the mountains. It's a pragmatic way to live my life." Sunita Mehta, 60, a non-profit executive who's been part of the group for 13 years, says she's noticed that the newer members aren't the typical spiritual seekers: many are scientists, doctors, or academics. Members chant privately, but meet regularly in each other's whitewashed apartment buildings and bougainvillea-shaded homes. They come, Mehta says, looking for a safe place to talk about their tough bosses and bad breakups. "These are not the things that you can take to the normal Hindu priest," she says.

Other established schools of Buddhist thought, like vipassana meditation and Tibetan Buddhism, are finding a newly receptive audience India as well. These new Buddhists don't convert officially; they simply take up some form of the practice, usually chanting or meditation, and often continue to observe the same holidays and family rituals they always did. That's another part of Buddhism's appeal in India, Sarao says. In a country where so much of social life revolves around religious festivals and ceremonies, Indians can enjoy the philosophical satisfactions of Buddhism without having to give up the faith they were born into. "They do not feel they're being disloyal to Hinduism in any way," he says.

Of course, that makes it difficult to know exactly how widespread Buddhist practice has become. About 1.7% of India's population, or 170 million people, were counted as Buddhist in the 2001 census, but the vast majority are the descendants of Dalits, who converted to Buddhism en masse in the 1950s as a reaction against their low status in the Hindu caste hierarchy. It was an inspiring political revolution, led by the great Dalit activist B.R. Ambedkar, but its success gave contemporary Buddhism in India the stigma of a lower-caste movement. That's changed with this recent move toward the faith among the élite. Sarao estimates that urban, affluent followers of Buddhism in India may number about 1 million.

With them, the story of Buddhism in India comes back to its beginnings. In his book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, author Pankaj Mishra describes the troubled times in which the Buddha appeared. Dissatisfied with lives regimented around work, he writes, people gathered to listen to a new breed of freethinking philosopher, "India's first cosmopolitan thinkers." Those disaffected seekers came together in groves and parks built near the cities of the sixth-century B.C. Gangetic Plain. But any 21st century Delhi-ite would surely recognize the tensions driving their search for spiritual clarity.

by TIME.

Korea, India, Vietnam Currency Interventions May Fail

South Korea, India and Vietnam will fail to halt declines in their currencies by using intervention because their economies are slowing and trade deficits widening, said Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest U.S. securities firm. Central banks in each of the countries have “repeatedly'' been buying and selling foreign-exchange this year as their currencies have weakened, Stewart Newnham, a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients. The won, rupee and dong have all fallen at least 5 percent in 2008, threatening to quicken inflation by increasing import costs. Korea, the world's sixth-biggest holder of foreign-exchange reserves, pledged today to take “stern action'' to stabilize the won.

“Their intervention will ultimately fail,'' Hong Kong- based Newnham wrote in the note, which he confirmed by telephone today. ``The best they can hope for, in our view, is to engineer an orderly decline through a `smoothing operation.' And maybe Vietnam cannot even achieve that.'' The won has fallen 10.2 percent this year to 1,042.85 per dollar according to Seoul Money Brokerage Services Ltd. It is the second biggest loser against the dollar in the period of the 10 most-traded Asian currencies outside Japan. India's rupee has weakened 8.7 percent to 43.165 and the dong has slipped 5 percent to 16,846.50. Minister Dismissed

Korea's currency snapped two days of losses today, gaining 0.7 percent, after the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Korea said they will use foreign-exchange reserves to stabilize the won and ``take strong necessary measures if the imbalance seems excessive.'' President Lee Myung Bak today dismissed Vice Finance Minister Choi Joong Kyung, who was in charge of currency policy, as part of a wider cabinet reshuffle. “By far, the strongest pressure is on the Vietnamese dong'' due to its limited foreign-exchange reserves, Newnham wrote. Morgan Stanley estimates Vietnam's reserves to be $27 billion, India's $302 billion, the world's fourth biggest, and South Korea's $258 billion. Vietnam will be forced to “realign'' the dong, Newnham said. Traders are pricing in an 18 percent decline in the coming year to 20,500 per dollar, according to offshore 12-month non- deliverable forwards. Accelerating inflation has pushed so-called “real rates,'' which are interest rates accounted for inflation, towards zero or negative levels because ``interest-rate stances are not sufficiently tight,'' Newnham wrote.

Korea's benchmark rate is at 5 percent and Vietnam's at 14 percent, compared with inflation of 5.5 percent and 26.8 percent respectively.

India's policy rate is at 8.5 percent, compared with its wholesale price index at 11.63 percent. “Their interest-rate and exchange-rate policies are not internally consistent for currency intervention to be regarded as credible,'' Newnham said in the note. Banks in the three countries are ``showing signs of discomfort and this could feed through into foreign-exchange weakness,'' Newnham wrote, citing high loan-to-deposit ratios, a shortage of dollars onshore and property loans.

India's governing Congress Party was on the verge of swapping allies on Friday in a last-ditch effort to push through a nuclear deal with the United States.

The Congress Party was on the brink of replacing its leftist allies, led by the Communist Party, with a coalition led by the Samajwadi, a North Indian socialist party. The Congress Party’s grip on India is weakening as inflation and fuel prices rise and the economy slows, and securing an ally is crucial to staying in power.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has been a staunch supporter of the nuclear agreement with the United States, has been rushing to firm up support for the deal in India ahead of the G8 summit meeting in Japan, which starts on Monday.

There, he is expected to meet with President Bush to discuss the arrangement, which would grant India access to American nuclear technology and atomic fuel in exchange for agreeing to international inspections of its reactors.

The proposal has dominated headlines and fueled heavy debate almost since it was put forward in 2005. Critics, including the Communist Party, say the deal ties India’s future foreign and energy policy too closely to the United States, but advocates say it could usher in a new era of nuclear power in India, freeing the country from heavy dependence on fossil fuels.

American companies have been lobbying heavily for the deal, hoping to sell nuclear power-related equipment to India.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, the founder and chief of the Samajwadi Party, told reporters early Friday that Mr. Singh’s explanation of the proposal was “satisfactory,” signaling that his party could support it. As of Friday evening, the Samajwadi Party had not officially agreed to support Congress or the nuclear deal, but its backing was widely expected.

If Mr. Singh’s Congress Party fails to secure Samajwadi’s support, it will probably be forced to call early elections, in which it is expected to lose many representatives in Parliament because of growing concerns over inflation and high oil prices. Samajwadi has 39 seats in Parliament, while the Congress Party’s former Communist allies have 59. Congress needs 44 seats to retain its majority.

Mr. Yadav, the Samajwadi leader, has pushed for the rights of farmers and the underclass and favors limiting the use of the English language in government. The party, based in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is made up mainly of Muslims and farmers.

Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, who arrived in New Delhi on Thursday, said he expected that Mr. Singh would arrive at the Group of 8 meeting with the deal in hand.

Mr. Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said in an interview that Indian officials had told him necessary approval of the agreement by the IAEA was “basically a done deal.”

Still, time is quickly running out for India’s divided political parties to come together, he said. The latest that the deal can be sealed is now, he said.

Asked if there is time to push the deal through the United States Congress before Mr. Bush leaves office, he said: “Possible? Yes. Probable? No.”

If the Indian government wins approval by international regulators by August, the United States Congress could vote on the deal soon thereafter, he said. The current Congress is lined up to vote favorably, he said, and he urged the Indian government to take advantage of the situation.

“I came here because we are hopeful,” he said, and the Indian government is “concerned.”

by NYTimes.