October 2, 2012

IN DELHI, MAMATA BANERJEE SHOWS NATIONAL AMBITIONS

["She is positioning herself as an important national leader," said C.P. Bhambhri, a political analyst. Much like other regional leaders, like Mulayam Singh Yadav of Uttar Pradesh and Narendra Modi of Gujarat, who are widely believed to harbor ambitions for national positions, including the prime minister's office, Ms. Banerjee too is projecting her party's relevance outside of West Bengal, said Mr. Bhambhri.]
Saurabh Das/Associated Press
Trinamool Congress party leader Mamata Banerjee speaking at a rally in 
New Delhi on Oct. 1, 2012.
Ratcheting up the pressure on the central government, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee organized a rally in Delhi on Monday as part of a series of protests to demand a rollback of the government's new economic policies.
"These policies will destroy the lives of the common man," Ms. Banerjee said to a crowd of a few thousand people gathered at Jantar Mantar. "They will punish the ordinary people of this country."
The rally, held in the political capital of the country rather than in West Bengal, home to Ms. Banerjee's traditional support base, marks a strategic step in the regional leader's attempts to make inroads into the country's national political scene, analysts say, after she left the governing United Progressive Alliance to protest the new measures.
"She is positioning herself as an important national leader," said C.P. Bhambhri, a political analyst. Much like other regional leaders, like Mulayam Singh Yadav of Uttar Pradesh and Narendra Modi of Gujarat, who are widely believed to harbor ambitions for national positions, including the prime minister's office, Ms. Banerjee too is projecting her party's relevance outside of West Bengal, said Mr. Bhambhri.
This strategy appeared to play out at the rally on Monday, where workers of the Trinamool Congress, Ms. Banerjee's party, chanted, "We have won Kolkata; now it is Delhi's turn." Ms. Banerjee announced a 48-hour dharna, or protest, in Delhi on Nov. 19 and 20 and an ambitious tour of other Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and states in southern India.
Clad in her trademark white-and-blue cotton sari and rubber slippers, Ms. Banerjee portrayed herself as a "clean" leader, untainted by allegations of corruption that have plagued senior Congress leaders and unafraid to take on the central government. "She is not only the tigress of Bengal, but of the whole country," said Sharad Yadav, a leader of the Janata Dal (United) Party, at the rally.
On Monday, she expressed solidarity with farmers, factory workers, vegetable vendors and other poor people in the country. "I am not in politics for any personal gain," she said, "but only to serve the people of this country."
Ms. Banerjee, whose party has a small but significant block of 19 parliamentary seats, has emerged as an influential leader. She won a landslide victory in West Bengal's elections in 2011, ousting the state's leftist parties that had governed for 34 years. Ms. Banerjee is now boosting her national profile, observers say, with an eye on the 2014 elections, in which neither the Congress nor the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is expected to win a majority.
While Ms. Banerjee is popular among the rural poor in West Bengal, she has, in recent years, earned a reputation for being an intolerant and mercurial leader.   Politically, she remains unpredictable, analysts say. "She is fickle minded. She is temperamental," said Mr. Bhambhri. "But she is also very, very clever."
In the run-up to Monday's rally, she led a scathing Facebook campaign against the government: "Reforms are meant to usher development for the people," a post said. "Now-a-days, the trend is, whenever any anti-people decision is taken, it is taken in the name of reforms."
Earlier this month, the embattled Indian government introduced several economic policies aimed at revitalizing India's stalled economy, including a controversial measure that would allow foreign investment in India's retail sector and pave the way for foreign retailers like Walmart to set up shop in India. This move was met with widespread protests by other politicians, led by the Trinamool Congress, who argued that small Indian shop owners and vendors would be squeezed out.
The government also announced a rise in the price of diesel and a cap on the number of subsidized gas cylinders, measures widely criticized as "anti-poor."
The Congress Party, however, has dismissed Ms. Banerjee's attacks. "After Mamata Banerjee came to power in West Bengal, there is no industrial development and no jobs were created," the union minister V. Narayanasamy said in a televised interview on Sunday.
The central government can't be like that, he said. "The center has to march forward for the purpose of fulfilling the wishes and aspirations of the people."
@ The New York Times

TURNING UP THE VOLUME ON GLOBAL POVERTY

[Global Citizen, the Web site and festival, grew out of the Global Poverty Project, which strives to end extreme poverty: the situation of more than 1.4 billion people trying to subsist on less than $1.25 a day. The Global Poverty Project works with nongovernmental organizations worldwide, spanning education, women’s rights, public health, including providing mosquito nets and malaria treatment as well as training midwives to help eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic. It was noted that Mr. Young is a polio survivor.]

By Jon Pareles

Cranked-up guitars and sobering statistics shared a Central Park audience of more than 60,000 people on Saturday at the Global Citizen Festival, a five-hour concert on the Great Lawn devoted to ending extreme poverty worldwide. The concert was also webcast internationally.
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
Global Citizen Festival Neil Young and Crazy Horse played in Central Park on Saturday as part of this event organized to combat poverty around the world. More Photos »
The headliner was Neil Young with Crazy Horse, the band that has perfected rock as a primordial stomp. Sharing the lineup were guitar-driven bands that have obviously listened closely to Mr. Young through the years: Foo Fighters, the Black Keys and Band of Horses. It was a narrow, old-school, all-male slice of rock, with a hint of internationalism for starters: the rapper and singer K’Naan, who was born in Somalia and now lives in Canada (and whose band included a female keyboardist). An unannounced guest, John Legend, sang John Lennon’s vision of global citizenship, “Imagine.”
Mr. Young’s set was molten and unkempt, yet it had his own kind of finesse. He and Crazy Horse, on their first tour since 2004, often huddled near the center of the stage, bobbing back and forth until their heads nearly touched, and their songs sometimes welled up out of a caldron of drone and distortion.
But Mr. Young’s voice was pure and precise, and his lead guitar could peal with straightforward melodies, or scrabble with frenetic intensity, or plunge to grapple with subterranean forces. The set included three songs from Mr. Young’s next album, “Psychedelic Pill,” due Oct. 30, and they were openly autobiographical.
“Walk Like a Giant” was also a pithy eulogy for 1960s idealism: “We were ready to save the world,” Mr. Young sang. “Then the weather changed and the white got stained and it fell apart/And it breaks my heart to think about how close we came.” It ended with blast after slow blast of the closing chord, dozens of times, turning into slabs of abstract noise.
Global Citizen, the Web site and festival, grew out of the Global Poverty Project, which strives to end extreme poverty: the situation of more than 1.4 billion people trying to subsist on less than $1.25 a day. The Global Poverty Project works with nongovernmental organizations worldwide, spanning education, women’s rights, public health, including providing mosquito nets and malaria treatment as well as training midwives to help eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic. It was noted that Mr. Young is a polio survivor.
Concertgoers received free tickets by enrolling an e-mail address with Global Citizen and then performing certain actions through the Web site, including watching videos, spreading information via social media and doing something for a partner organization.
During equipment changes there were video clips, activists and celebrities — among them Katie Couric, Selena Gomez, Olivia Wilde and Katharine McPhee, as well as the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs — detailing poverty-related death tolls and efforts to change them. The concert’s hosts called for actions like sending a poverty-related tweet to the presidential candidates.
Leaders of organizations from India, Haiti and Somalia got rock-star-size ovations. But the audience was there for the music; Foo Fighters fans started shouting for the band before the Unicef pitch ended.
Foo Fighters were playing their last scheduled show for some time, and they romped through it. “I wish we could play all night,” said Dave Grohl, the band’s songwriter and guitarist. “But I’d rather see Neil Young.”
Mr. Grohl was Nirvana’s drummer; with Foo Fighters he combines the brawny riffs and the explosive dynamics of grunge with arena-friendly melodies. The music cycled from Mr. Grohl playing guitar alone to full-band bashes and back; the lyrics seesawed between frustrated fury and a yearning for hope, climbing toward optimism at every opportunity.
The Black Keys are terse, savvy revivalists, basing their music on early-1970s blues-rock but also allowing themselves infusions of Hendrix, Stax-Volt soul, glam-rock, garage-rock and a touch of psychedelia. This two-man band — Patrick Carney on drums and Dan Auerbach on guitar and vocals — now has additional musicians onstage, but that doesn’t make it any less rigorous.
Mr. Auerbach moans, nearly all the time, about woman trouble, reaching back to blues vamps and shuffles; Mr. Carney propels him with elemental no-frills beats. The set dispensed their songs like a jukebox, keeping them short and stopping them as soon as they’d had their say. It also included two versions of “Little Black Submarines” — as a solo, fingerpicking quasi-blues, and then with the band, as a direct homage to Crazy Horse, socking away at the beat.
Band of Horses, with a front line of three guitars (or two guitars and a keyboard), has yet to escape the shadow of its obvious model, My Morning Jacket, from its high-tenor lead vocals to its triumphal, multiple-guitar choruses. But its songs — about salvaging love or hope from disaster — were well chosen for this concert.
K’Naan’s songs, which often included highly melodic rapping, revolve around his two worlds: the strife he left behind in Somalia and his ambition and success in the Americas, including his international hit, “Wavin’ Flag,” which sounds like both a children’s song and an anthem. His version on Saturday added New York City details — “We moved to Harlem/Until the I.N.S. gave us a problem” — before turning to the inspirational.
For the concert’s finale Mr. Auerbach and Mr. Grohl brought their guitars to join Mr. Young and Crazy Horse in “Rockin’ in the Free World”; Band of Horses and K’Naan became a backup vocal choir. The song isn’t a simple celebration. It’s a juxtaposition of dire conditions in the verses and ironic joy in the choruses. It’s Mr. Young’s take on the complacent “free world” versus real life, and perhaps a song for those who want tweets to suffice as international actions. It was a clamorous multiguitar blowout and, for those who know the song, a hint of the real work ahead before the world can be saved.
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