by Daniel Korski | Apr 16, 2009 | South Asia
From today until May 13 the world’s largest democracy will be heading to the polls. India’s voters will be electing 543 members of parliament in the country’s fifteenth election. The figures alone are awesome: 800,000 polling booths run by six million election staff will cater to the 714 million eligible voters. Some of the booths will be perched on mountain tops in Kashmir, others placed near the beaches of Goa. The results, to be announced on May 16, will shape the Indian subcontinent for the next few years.
Opinion polls have the left-leaning Congress party of incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) neck and neck, with neither party likely to govern alone. So the stage is set the scene for horse-trading with a “Third Front” alliance and an array of regional and other smaller parties. One potential kingmaker is Kumari Mayawati, who is bidding to become the nation’s first Dalit – or bottom-rung caste – prime minister
Though issues such as poverty and how best to develop the countryside have been debated, in the wake of the last year’s Islamic militant attacks on Mumbai this year has seen national security become a major theme.
Security analysts fear the electoral consequences of another Mumbai-style terrorist attack. If that were to happen – and links back to Pakistani established — the current government would be hard-pressed to act against Pakistan in some. BJP would certainly be braying for tough action.
Even if the elections take place relatively quietly (with 714 million people voting, allow for some violence) India’s relationship with Pakistan is likely to remain fraught. Relations between the two countries have never been warm, but the five-year peace dialogue has now most definitely ended. Barring another terrorist atrocity, a direct confrontation between the two powers may be unlikely, but both governments will continue their proxy conflicts. This is bad news for Afghanistan, which plays host to the conflict. Neither the Congress Party nor the BJP seems to be willing to think through how to revert the Indian-Pakistani cycle of conflict.
The other national security issue both parties have been ducking is how to deal with Obama’s goals of reviving the nonproliferation system. Indian policy-makers of all stripes want to implement the US-India nuclear accord, and worry that the new US nonproliferation agenda will undercut this. But the Indian establishment does not appear to have thought through how New Delhi might participate in an inclusive nonproliferation regime.
Whoever ultimately wins this week’s election — BJP or Congress — will have to tackle India-Pakistan relations and the US nonproliferation agenda — the Obama administration is unlikely to give them much choice.
by David Steven | Apr 15, 2009 | North America
In the US, hundreds of millions of right wing ‘tea baggers’ (yes – really) are protesting against “illegitimate President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package.” (Illegitimate here refers not to Obama’s parenthood, but to the fantasy he’s not a citizen.)
Protestors had collected a million tea bags to dump in Washington, but they didn’t have their paperwork in order:
“We have a million tea bags here, and we don’t have a place to put them because it’s not on our permit,” said Rebecca Wales, lead organizer of D.C. Tea Party.
The tea bags were, instead, dropped off at a local conservative think tank. I bet Obama’s grassroots organisers are quaking in their boots.
by Alex Evans | Apr 15, 2009 | North America
Mohammed al Qurani, a young Chadian inmate of Guantanamo who’s been detained there for the last seven years, got permission to call a relative earlier this week – but used the chance instead to call Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who spent six years in Guantanamo before his release last year. It’s the first known interview with a current Guantanamo inmate. In his own words:
There has been no change in the administration of Guantanamo. The people managing the detainees there haven’t changed yet. These are the same people who were there during the Bush years and so they use the same methods.
From Al Jazeera’s coverage:
[Al Qurani said that] the alleged ill-treatment “started about 20 days” before Barack Obama became US president and “since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day”.
[snip]
Describing a specific incident, which took place after change in the US administration, al-Qurani said he had refused to leave his cell because they were “not granting me my rights”, such as being able to walk around, interact with other inmates and have “normal food”. A group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets entered his cell, accompanied by one soldier carrying a camera and one with tear gas, he said. “They had a thick rubber or plastic baton they beat me with. They emptied out about two canisters of tear gas on me,” he told Al Jazeera. “After I stopped talking, and tears were flowing from my eyes, I could hardly see or breathe.
“They then beat me again to the ground, one of them held my head and beat it against the ground. I started screaming to his senior ‘see what he’s doing, see what he’s doing’ [but] his senior started laughing and said ‘he’s doing his job’. He broke one of my front teeth. Of course they didn’t film the blood, they filmed my back so it doesn’t show.”
Obama has got to sort this out. Announcing plans for closure on his second day in office is great, and it’s widely understood that it’ll take time to figure out where the detainees will go after its closure – but in the meantime, according to Reprieve, conditions in the camp are getting worse, with an increase in the number of reported incidents in Camp Five (one of the isolation camps).
by Jules Evans | Apr 15, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Just did an interesting interview with Neil Eckert, the CEO of Climate Exchange PLC.
They’re the private company that owns the European Climate Exchange, which does 95% of the trading in EU carbon permits and CERs, and the Chicago Climate Exchange, which does all the existing carbon trading in the US. It also owns the only carbon exchange in China, and has pilot projects in India and Australia.
So in other words, they completely dominate a global market that is about to boom. Smart fellows.
One thing he mentioned that interested me is that the company is currently doing a pilot scheme to introduce a cap and trade market at the Great Lakes for water.
Eckert said: ‘Trading water is not that difficult. You cap extraction rights for a source, such as the Great Lakes, and then allow the main extractors to trade quotas among themselves.”
He expects an international water trading market to grow up: ‘If water becomes more and more scarce, people are going to be pumping it over long distances, like oil. The Middle East, in particular, could be a big buyer of water rights.’
As it happens, the Economist suggested using cap and trade for water in its latest issue. Synchronicity or what.
by Mark Weston | Apr 15, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
Further to Alex’s recent posts (here, here and here) on wealthy countries’ purchases of arable land in the developing world, here’s a map from Le Monde showing the main buyers of land, their primary targets, and the amount of land in hectares they are buying up. The map includes both done deals and deals that are still being negotiated. Note the massive sell-offs by the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Laos to China, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates. Excuse the French.
