March 1, 2013

COULD HINDU FESTIVAL ‘POP-UP MEGACITY’ BE AN ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL FOR INDIA?

[Apart from a Feb. 10 stampede at the nearby Allahabad railway station in which 36 people were killed, the Kumbh Mela itself has so far gone smoothly. Fresh water comes out of the taps. Toilets are disinfected. Trained police carefully shepherd the crowds to the bathing ghats. The lights come on at night.]
By Victor Mallet
ALLAHABAD, India — Onno Ruhl, head of the World Bank in India, calls it “an incredible logistical operation.” Harvard researchers describe it as “a pop-up megacity”.

On the sandbanks of the Ganges River at Allahabad, bureaucrats and workers from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its poorest, took less than three months to build a tent city for 2 million people — complete with hard roads, toilets, running water, electricity, food shops, garbage collection and well-manned police stations.

Organizers do much the same every three years – although on a particularly large scale every 12 years, as in 2013 – for the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival celebrated in turn at four different locations on the Ganges.
This year’s event, a combination of religious worship and medieval funfair, has attracted millions of pilgrims from across India who come to wash away their sins in the Ganges at its confluence with the Yamuna. During its two months to mid-March, the mela will have attracted 80 million to 100 million faithful. Up to 30 million attempted to bathe on Feb. 10 alone, officials say.

Precise numbers are hard to estimate, but devotees and foreign visitors are generally full of praise for the organizers of what is arguably the largest gathering of humans on earth.

Apart from a Feb. 10 stampede at the nearby Allahabad railway station in which 36 people were killed, the Kumbh Mela itself has so far gone smoothly. Fresh water comes out of the taps. Toilets are disinfected. Trained police carefully shepherd the crowds to the bathing ghats. The lights come on at night.

In the minds of both Indians and foreigners, this raises important questions: How? Why? Or, if the authorities can build infrastructure so efficiently for this short but very large festival and its instant city, why can they not do the same for permanent villages and towns?

The World Bank’s Ruhl, who was moved to bathe in the Ganges himself when he visited the Kumbh Mela this year, says the city on the sandbanks, soon to be dismantled before the river floods, “has water, sanitation, power, solid waste management, everything, actually, that many Indian cities lack”.

“To somebody who does projects, it’s like a mega-refugee camp that came up overnight and gets sustained and managed for two months with people filtering [in and out] at a rate of millions a day. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. . . . It’s managed by the UP [Uttar Pradesh] government. . . . If somehow we could translate that capacity to day-to-day business, you could transform UP. It’s a really powerful thought.”
Uttar Pradesh is often seen as the epitome of all that is wrong with India. With a population of more than 200 million – larger than Brazil’s – the state is notoriously corrupt and inefficient.

Take sanitation. In the decade to 2011, the UP government reported steadily rising construction of latrines in rural areas with the help of $600 million in public funds. But the 2011 census showed that almost no toilets had actually been built. Most of the money was stolen, leaving tens of thousands of children to die each year as a result of diarrhea spread by what one aid worker called “appalling” sanitation.

There are few such problems at the Kumbh Mela, however. Devesh Chaturvedi, a senior official who is divisional commissioner of Allahabad, is proud of the “huge task” that he and perhaps 100,000 workers have completed in organizing this year’s festival.

He mentions 100 miles of roads made by placing steel plates on the sand, 18 pontoon bridges, 347 miles of water supply lines, 400 miles of electricity lines, 22,500 street lights and 200,000 electricity connections, as well as 275 food shops for essential supplies such as flour, rice, milk and cooking gas.

Chaturvedi agrees there is a contrast between the successful provision of these services and the way life continues in the rest of the state, and has two explanations. First, the authorities ensure that all those working on the project are accountable for their actions and the money they spend. Second, those involved are highly motivated.

“They feel it’s a real service to all these pilgrims who have come here, the sadhus [holy men] and the seers, so it’s a sort of mission which motivates them to work extra, despite difficult working conditions.”

Good organization and efficient infrastructure, in short, are no more impossible in India than anywhere else. “The lesson is, it can be done,” says Bhagawati Saraswati, a Californian-born Hindu devotee camped on the river bank with other members of an ashram based on the upper Ganges.

She notes the “phenomenal” number of man-hours and employees devoted to the Kumbh Mela, but says the event still shows that India can organize itself.

“It’s an amazing lesson,” she says. “What it means is: India can do it. All of the villages, all of the cities can have electricity, they can have running water, they can have roads. That attention, that focus, that clarity, that commitment, just has to be there.

@ The Washington Post


DEATH TOLL FROM BANGLADESH UNREST REACHES 44

[The protests for and against Jamaat have convulsed Bangladeshi politics, demonstrating that the country has still not healed from the bloody 1971 conflict, in which an estimated three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped. Before the war, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of that country by a wide expanse of India. The war pitted Bangladeshi separatists against Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators, who were known then as the Razakar Bahini.]
By Julfikar Ali Manik and Jim Yardley
Reuters
The police used a baton on a protester in Dhaka on Thursday.
DHAKA, Bangladesh — The death toll from violent clashes between protesters and security forces in Bangladesh reached at least 44 on Friday, one day after a special war crimes tribunal handed down a death sentence to an Islamic leader for crimes against humanity committed 42 years ago, during the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
The verdict against Islamic leader, Delawar Hossain Sayedee, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party, resonated across the country. It was celebrated by the hundreds of thousands of young protesters who have taken to the streets in recent weeks to condemn Jamaat and demand justice in the war crimes cases against other party leaders, insisting that those who were convicted be hanged.
“This verdict is a victory for the people,” declared Imran H. Sarkar, a blogger and an organizer of the protests, during a rally on Thursday afternoon.
But followers of Jamaat reacted with fury, saying the case brought against Mr. Sayedee and others was politically motivated and tainted by judicial irregularities. The police and witnesses said that of the 44 people killed in the unrest, six were policemen.
Jamaat leaders had called a nationwide strike on Thursday to protest the verdict, and by afternoon bloodshed had erupted across the country, as party workers fought with the police in the streets.
The protests for and against Jamaat have convulsed Bangladeshi politics, demonstrating that the country has still not healed from the bloody 1971 conflict, in which an estimated three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped. Before the war, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of that country by a wide expanse of India. The war pitted Bangladeshi separatists against Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators, who were known then as the Razakar Bahini.
“As judges of this tribunal, we firmly hold and believe in the doctrine that ‘justice in the future cannot be achieved unless injustice of the past is addressed,’ ” Justice A. T. M. Fazle Kabir commented in a written summary of the judgment.
The war crimes tribunal has convicted three Jamaat leaders in connection with the war, and other cases are under way, including some against defendants not affiliated with the party.
Mr. Sayedee, 73, is a well-known religious speaker with a bright red beard who became a member of the Bangladeshi Parliament after the war. Prosecutors accused him of involvement in looting and burning villages, raping women and forcing members of religious minorities to convert to Islam during the war.
His defense lawyer, Abdur Razzaq, scoffed at the court’s verdict and accused the authorities of deliberately prejudicing the trial and preventing an important witness from testifying.
“This is unfortunate, and this is unexpected,” Mr. Razzaq said of the verdict and sentence in a telephone interview. “This is a perverse judgment. It is inconceivable that a court of law awarded him a conviction. This prosecution was for a political purpose.”
Jamaat leaders and other opposition politicians have said for months that the government was manipulating the war crimes process to go after political rivals, accusations that the authorities deny. The proceedings have already created dissent and some international criticism. The chief presiding judge resigned after reports, based on hacked Skype conversations, that the judge had improper contacts with a legal expert linked to prosecutors and the government.
But to many Bangladeshis, the real injustice has been that war criminals have remained free for decades. On Feb. 5, the tribunal convicted another Jamaat leader, Abdul Quader Mollah, and sentenced him to life in prison. Furious that the tribunal had not sentenced Mr. Mollah to death, protesters gathered in growing numbers, surpassing 200,000 on some days.
The protests have become known as the Shahbagh movement, named for a large intersection in central Dhaka where the main demonstrations have taken place. Many political analysts say the Shahbagh protests are the most significant spontaneous political movement in Bangladesh in decades. Though the movement may be suffused with idealism and proud nationalism, it also bears a hard edge, with demands for the execution of convicted war criminals.
Sultana Kamal, a prominent human rights leader in Dhaka, said that she disagreed with the calls for the death penalty, but that they reflected the cynicism of Bangladeshis who have seen war criminals evade punishment for decades. Many people were infuriated when Mr. Mollah flashed a victory sign after receiving his life sentence.
“We have a problem in accepting that they are demanding the death penalty,” Ms. Kamal said in a telephone interview. “But we understand that it was from a nervousness among the people here that unless they are given the highest penalty in the land, these people will come back out.”
Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi.