Shashi Tharoor: Feeding Young Minds

NEW DELHI – Of the many sad news stories emerging recently from India, the saddest in a long time concerns the deaths of 23 schoolchildren in July in Chhapra, the main town in the impoverished rural Saran district of the state of Bihar. The children were poisoned by their midday meals – a vital part of a government-run nutrition program in schools – which apparently were cooked in oil that had been carelessly stored in used pesticide containers. The sheer horror – parents seeing their kids safely off to school, only to have them be killed there by something intended to benefit them – is unbearable.

The reaction has been predictable breast-beating about the inefficiency of India’s government services (particularly in rural areas), the country’s woeful standards of hygiene, and inattentive implementation of even flagship national schemes by the country’s 28 state governments. The midday meal scheme itself has been trashed in India and abroad as wasteful and counter-productive. “Free school meals kill Indian children,” one headline screamed. Another commentator even went so far as to claim that there is “little evidence to suggest that schoolchildren are actually getting any nutritional value from it at all.”

Critics of the scheme view it as symptomatic of big government run amok and ask why it is necessary for any government to feed schoolchildren. The answer, in India, is that no one else could. While various small school-lunch programs existed, the idea of a massive government-backed scheme originated three decades ago in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

When Tamil Nadu’s chief minister at the time, the film star M.G. Ramachandran, introduced free school meals statewide, the measure was widely criticized as populist and fiscally irresponsible. Children, his detractors argued, go to school to learn, not to eat. But if children do not get enough to eat, they cannot learn: empty stomachs make it difficult to fill minds.

Tamil Nadu’s voters, who supported the scheme at election time, silenced the critics. So did the scheme’s results – improved literacy rates and nutrition levels. Soon, other states were imitating the program, and in 1995, India’s central government followed suit, supplementing state governments’ budgets so that children throughout the country could enjoy the same benefit. Today, 87% of government schools implement the scheme.

The midday meal scheme – which costs India’s government about $2 billion a year, with additional funding coming from state governments – feeds 120 million schoolchildren in more than a million primary schools across the country. By providing free and balanced nutrition to schoolchildren, it has provided a powerful incentive to poor families to send their kids to school and, equally important, to keep them there throughout the day.

Indeed, thanks to the scheme, school-attendance rates have improved, sometimes by as much as 10%, and dropout rates have declined. And obliging children of different castes to eat the same meal at the same time in the same place has broken down social barriers in a highly stratified society.

Children whose families could not afford to feed them properly have benefited significantly. In drought-affected areas, the midday meal scheme has allowed children who otherwise would have starved to overcome malnourishment. Allegations that the scheme lacks nutritional value have been disproved. One scholar, Farzana Afridi, reported in the Journal of Development Economics that the program “improved nutritional intakes by reducing the daily protein deficiency of a primary school student by 100%, the calorie deficiency by almost 30%, and the daily iron deficiency by nearly 10%.”

But, while the midday meal scheme’s benefits have ensured its popularity, the quality of its implementation has varied across states. The national government provides funds for cooks and helpers, and has devised guidelines for the program’s implementation, but schools are under the jurisdiction of state governments, some of which are more capable than others of maintaining the standards required to provide a reliable service. Many northern states, such as Bihar, have lagged in providing kitchens, storage facilities, and utensils. The rule requiring at least two adults to taste meals before they are served to children has often been ignored, as it was in the Chhapra tragedy.

Attempts to enforce the rule have met unexpected resistance from teachers, who are obliged to rotate tasting duty: they object that they are at school to teach students, not to taste food. Some teachers’ unions have refused to perform the task.

Sadder still has been the reaction of some parents in Bihar, who have withdrawn their children from school rather than risk their being poisoned. Such concerns are understandable but manifestly exaggerated. The Chhapra tragedy has at least focused attention on a scheme that public opinion has largely taken for granted. But it would be a great pity if, in examining what went wrong, deficiencies in the program’s implementation were to obscure its accomplishments.

The midday meal scheme has transformed lives and helped educate a generation of poor schoolchildren. It should be emulated by other developing countries, not shunned because of a preventable disaster. Indeed, the Chhapra tragedy would be compounded were it to end up derailing a program that is benefiting millions of children and their families every day.

Shashi Tharoor is India’s Minister of State for Human Resource Development. His most recent book is Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.

Shashi Tharoor: An India-Pakistan Thaw?

NEW DELHI – India and Pakistan are enjoying one of the better periods in their turbulent relationship. Recent months have witnessed no terrorist incidents, no escalating rhetoric, and no diplomatic flashpoints. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari just made a successful, if brief, personal visit to India (mainly to visit a famous shrine, but with a lunch with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thrown in). Sixteen years after India granted Pakistan most-favored-nation (MFN) trading status, Pakistan is on the verge of reciprocating. The peace process is resuming, and the two sides are talking to each other cordially at all levels.

And yet it is important to understand that the problems that have long beset the bilateral relationship will not be resolved overnight. Even if, by some miracle, the Pakistani civilian and military establishment suddenly saw the light, concluded that terrorism was bad for them, and decided to make common cause with India in eradicating it, the task would not be accomplished with a snap of the fingers. Extremism is not a tap that can be turned off at will. ­­­The proliferation of extremist ideologies, militant organizations, and training camps has acquired a momentum of its own. As Satyabrata Pal, a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, put it:

“These jihadi groups recruit from the millions of young Pakistanis who emerge from vernacular schools and madrassas, imbued with a hatred for the modern world, in which they do not have the skills to work. So while young Indians go to Silicon Valley and make a bomb for themselves, young Pakistanis go to the Swat Valley and make a bomb of themselves, the meanness of their lives justifying the end. Pakistan has betrayed its youth, which is its tragedy.”

This is not a counsel of despair. It is, instead, an argument to offer a helping hand. A neighboring country full of desperate young men without hope or prospects, led by a malicious and self-aggrandizing military, is a permanent threat to India. If India can help Pakistan transcend these circumstances and develop a stake in mutually beneficial progress, it will be helping itself as well. Therein lies the slender hope of persuading Pakistan that India’s success can benefit it, too – that, rather than trying to undercut India and thwart its growth, Pakistan should recognize the advantages that might accrue to it in partnership with an increasingly prosperous India.

Such an India can build on the generosity that it has often shown – for example, with its unilateral assignment of MFN status to Pakistan – by offering a market for Pakistani traders and industrialists, a creative umbrella for its artists and singers, and a home away from home for those seeking refuge from the realities of Pakistani life. Creating more points of contact – back-channel diplomacy conducted by special envoys (a formula used effectively by Singh and former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf), direct contact between the two militaries (of which there is little), and extensive people-to-people contact – is indispensable to the peace effort.

Unfortunately, India responded to the November 2008 Mumbai attacks and other Pakistani provocations by tightening its visa restrictions and restricting other possibilities for cultural and social contact. This might be an area in which risks are worth taking, since the advantages of enhancing opportunities for Pakistanis in India outweigh the dangers; after all, the Mumbai terrorists did not apply for Indian visas before sneaking ashore with their guns and bombs.

I strongly favor a liberal visa regime, which would require India to remove its current restrictions on which points of entry and exit Pakistani visa-holders can use, the number of places that may be visited, and onerous police reporting requirements. For starters, prominent Pakistanis in business, entertainment, and media could be made eligible for more rapid processing and multiple-entry visas.

Some would argue that Pakistan will not reciprocate such one-sided generosity. That might be true, but India should not care. Parity with Pakistan would lower India’s standards. India should show a generosity of spirit that might persuade Pakistanis to rethink their attitude towards Indians.

Concessions might also be made on issues that do not involve vital national interests. Specific problems like trade, the military standoff on the Siachen glacier, the territorial boundary at Sir Creek, the dispute over water flows through the Wullar Barrage, and many other disagreements are amenable to resolution through dialogue. It seems silly that public passions in Pakistan are being stirred by false claims that India is diverting water from the Indus River; candid and open talk to the Pakistani public by Indian officials would help dispel such suspicions.

More immediately, India should seize upon Pakistan’s newfound willingness to reciprocate India’s grant of MFN trade status by taking concrete steps to reduce non-tariff barriers, such as security inspections and clearances, that have limited Pakistani exports to India. India’s financial-services industry and its software professionals could offer their skills to Pakistani clients. They would gain a next-door market, while providing services that Pakistan could use to develop its own economy. These are all “easy wins” waiting to be pursued.

The big questions – the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan’s use of terrorism as an instrument of policy – will require much more groundwork and step-by-step action for progress to be achieved. By adopting a position of accommodation, sensitivity, and pragmatic generosity, India might be able to shift the bilateral narrative away from its 65-year-old logic of intractable hostility.

Shashi Tharoor, a member of India’s parliament, was Indian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 2009-2010, and served as United Nations Under-Secretary-General from 2001-2007. In addition to his expertise in Indian foreign policy and global affairs, he is an author of literary fiction, whose novels, including Riot, The Great Indian Novel, and Show Business, explore the intricacies of Indian society and the hidden underpinnings of its everyday life.

Shashi Tharoor: Peace in Kashmir?

 LAHORE/NEW DELHI – A subtle shift may be occurring in one of the world’s longest-standing and most intractable conflicts – the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Increasingly, it seems, Pakistanis are questioning what the Kashmir dispute has done to their own state and society.

When Pakistan was carved out of India by the departing British in the 1947 Partition, the 562 “princely states” (regions nominally ruled by assorted potentates, but owing allegiance to the British Raj) were required to accede to either of the two new countries. The Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir – a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu ruler – dithered over which of the two to join, and flirted with the idea of remaining independent.

But rumors that the Maharaja was leaning towards India triggered an invasion from Muslim revolutionaries and Pakistani tribesmen. The Maharaja, fearing that his state would fall to the marauders, acceded to India, which promptly sent troops to stop the aggressors (by that point augmented by the Pakistan Army). The First Kashmir War lasted until 1948, at which point India took the issue to the United Nations Security Council, which resulted in a cease-fire that left India in possession of roughly two-thirds of the state.

In order to determine the Kashmiris’ preference, the UN mandated a plebiscite, to be conducted after Pakistani troops had withdrawn from the territory. India had insisted on a popular vote. Kashmir's National Conference Party, led by the fiery and hugely popular Sheikh Abdullah, was a democratic, pluralist movement that was closer to the Indian National Congress, the party of Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, than it was to the Muslim League, which had advocated the creation of Pakistan.

Nehru had no doubt that India would win a plebiscite. Pakistan, well aware of Abdullah’s popularity and worried that Nehru was right about the outcome, ignored the UN mandate and refused to withdraw. The plebiscite was never held, and the dispute has festered ever since.

Four wars (in 1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999) have been fought across the cease-fire line, now called the Line of Control (LOC), without materially altering the situation. Beginning in the late 1980's, a Kashmiri Muslim insurrection erupted, backed by Pakistan both financially and with armed militants who crossed the LOC into India.

Both the uprising and the Indian security forces’ response have caused widespread casualties and destruction of property, all but wrecking Kashmir’s economy, which depends largely on tourism and handicrafts. In the process, both countries have suffered enormously. Thousands of India’s citizens have been killed, and the country has had to deploy more than a half-million troops to keep the peace.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s strategy of “bleeding India to death” through insurgency and terrorism has accomplished little other than to make its military enormously powerful and disproportionately wealthy. (Largely thanks to Kashmir, the Pakistani Army controls a larger share of its country’s national budget than any other army in the world.)

The Pakistani military may have once thought that fomenting militancy and terrorism in India was an effective strategy for hurting the enemy at little cost. But now Pakistan’s government increasingly recognizes that it may have become the main victim of its Kashmir policy, which has left the country with a distorted polity and a military that has carried out four coups and calls the shots from behind the scenes.

Moreover, Pakistan’s economy is collapsing, with inflation raging and a large number of unemployed and under-educated young men radicalized by years of Islamist propaganda against the Indian infidel. The result is a combustible mixture of extremism and hopelessness that threatens to consume the Pakistani state, as government-sponsored terrorists now turn on their erstwhile patrons.

Leading members of the Pakistani establishment are beginning to see this. On a recent visit to Islamabad and Lahore, I sensed in private conversations a widespread desire to put the Kashmir dispute on the back burner and explore avenues of mutually beneficial cooperation with India.

Pakistanis are saying it publicly, too. In a recent interview, the politician and religious leader Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman spoke frankly about Kashmir: “Obviously, we are in favor of a political solution….Things have changed so much. Now the concept of winning Kashmir has taken a back seat to the urgency of saving Pakistan.”

Younger Pakistanis are going even further. The columnist Yaqoob Khan Bangash, for example, openly derides the hallowed Pakistani argument that, as Muslims, Indian Kashmiris would want to join Pakistan: “Despite being practically a war zone since 1989, Indian Kashmir has managed higher literacy, economic growth, and per capita income rates than most of Pakistan,” he wrote recently. “Why would the Kashmiris want to join Pakistan now? What do we have to offer them?”

Beyond that, many argue, the costs of the prolonged obsession with Kashmir have become unsustainable for a Pakistan mired in internal problems. Kashmiris, wrote Bangash, “should certainly not come at the cost of our own survival, and not when all that we will be able to offer them is a failed state.”

This is still a heretical position in Pakistan, but it is a view that is gaining ground. When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who consistently advocates peace with his nuclear-armed neighbor, suggested last summer that Pakistan should “leave the Kashmir issue alone” and focus on its domestic challenges, the comment did not elicit the customary howls of outrage in the Pakistan media. Instead, it was met with a grudging acknowledgement that this time India’s leader might be right.

If such episodes reflect an incipient new national mood in Pakistan, it could well be time for India to seize the moment to build a lasting peace.

Shashi Tharoor, a former Indian minister of state for foreign affairs and United Nations under-secretary-general, is a member of India’s parliament and the author of many books, including India from Midnight to the Millennium and Nehru: the Invention of India.

Shashi Tharoor:India’s Anti-Corruption Contest

NEW DELHI – India ended 2011 amid political chaos, as the much-awaited “Lokpal Bill,” aimed at creating a strong, independent anti-corruption agency, collapsed amid a welter of recrimination in the parliament’s upper house, after having passed the lower house two days earlier. The episode, which leaves the bill in suspended animation until its possible revival at the next session, raises fundamental issues for Indian politics which will need to be addressed in the New Year.

The need for the bill – Lokpal loosely translates as “ombudsman” – was first mooted in 1968, but eight subsequent attempts to create one had never reached a parliamentary vote. The credit for imparting urgency to an issue that had become a hardy perennial of Indian politics goes to the mass campaign that coalesced around a Gandhian leader, Anna Hazare, who insisted that a “Jan Lokpal Bill” (“People’s Ombudsman”) drafted by his followers had to be enacted in toto.

Two well-publicized fasts by Hazare, attended by hundreds of thousands and breathlessly covered by India’s news channels, pushed the government to expedite preparation and consideration of a bill. The draft differed in many respects from Hazare’s, but it retained what most people sought – an independent agency with its own investigative resources and prosecutorial powers.

After parliamentarians were summoned back to work after Christmas in an unprecedented extended winter session, the bill passed the Lok Sabha (the lower house), where the ruling coalition commands a narrow majority. But the government’s attempts to entrench the law in a constitutional amendment, thereby elevating the authority of the office, failed to command the necessary two-thirds support. Still, the bill’s passage after 43 years of stalemate was little short of historic.

The action then shifted to the Rajya Sabha (the upper house), where the government lacks a majority. After a session lasting until midnight, punctuated by the introduction of 187 amendments (most by the opposition but some by coalition allies of the ruling Congress Party), the government pleaded incapable of processing all the amendments in time. Agitated members shouted their dissatisfaction (one rather melodramatically tearing up the draft bill), and the Rajya Sabha’s chairman, Indian Vice-President Hamid Ansari, halted the proceedings without a vote.

All sides have flung accusations at each other. Some allege that the government’s bill, by requiring a similar ombudsman in each of India’s states, was an assault on Indian federalism. Others claim that the government colluded in the disruptions in the Rajya Sabha, because it knew that it could not win the vote; some, preposterously, suggest that the government did not want the bill to pass; still others claim that it would have created such a “weak” Lokpal that it was not worth passing. The government has grimly suggested that it would go back to the drawing board with a view to reviving the bill during the parliament’s budget session, due in March.

Whatever happens, the need to tackle corruption is undeniable. In a recent survey by the anti-corruption watchdog group Transparency International, 54% of Indian respondents said that they had paid bribes in the last two years, in interactions with police, bureaucrats, and even educational institutions.

While the media have tended to focus on big-ticket corruption, such as that revealed by ongoing scandals concerning on the allocation of spectrum to telecom companies or the organization of the Commonwealth Games, petty corruption has often affected people more directly. The mass outpouring of support for the quirky Hazare reflected the genuine frustration that most Indians feel over the corruption that assails their daily lives, rather than a clear understanding of Hazare’s proposals to combat it.

Every time a poor pregnant woman must bribe an orderly to get a hospital bed (to which she is entitled), or else deliver her baby on the floor; every time a widow cannot get the pension that should be hers by right, without bribing a clerk to process the papers; and every time a son cannot obtain his father’s death certificate without greasing the palm of a petty municipal official, Indians know that the system has failed them. They are right to vent their anger at endemic graft.

Indeed, corruption in India is far broader and deeper than the headlines suggest. The Lokpal will not be a panacea. It is one instrument among many that are needed, along with reforms to increase transparency, protect whistleblowers, prevent tax evasion, clean up campaign financing, and reduce officials’ discretionary power, which allows them to profit from the power to permit.

Inspectors and prosecutors can catch only some criminals; India needs to change the system so that fewer crimes are committed. Corruption isn’t only high-level governmental malfeasance; overcoming it requires nothing short of a change in Indians’ mindset. For every Indian bribe-taker, there is a bribe-giver looking for a shortcut or an undue advantage. To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, we need to be the change that we wish to see in India. Corruption will not end until Indians stop giving bribes as well as stop taking them.

As an elected politician, I am well aware that Hazare’s campaign has sparked the imagination and enthusiasm of many young people in my country. India’s parliament must continue to debate all the options available. It is important that we do not betray public expectations; but nor can we act irresponsibly. We must do the right thing, but we must also do the thing right.

Shashi Tharoor, a former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and UN Under-Secretary General, is a member of India’s parliament and the author of a dozen books, including India from Midnight to the Millennium and Nehru: the Invention of India.