Memo From India

Report Shows Muslims Near Bottom of Social Ladder

Prashanth Vishwanathan/Reuters

India has one of the world’s largest Muslim populations. Muslims in Mumbai prayed last month after Ramadan.

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: November 29, 2006

Correction Appended

NEW DELHI, Nov. 24 — Even those who caution against “illusions of grandeur and power,” as the head of India’s governing coalition, Sonia Gandhi, did last week, cannot hide their sense of pride at the idea of India as a nation that extends the concessions of secular democracy to its many castes, creeds and faiths.

Yet that notion has come under some strain in recent days, with an official panel having concluded that Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, are “lagging behind” on most things that matter.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s office, which is reviewing the report, summarized the panel’s biting conclusion this way: “The community is relatively poor, more illiterate, has lower access to education, lower representation in public- and private-sector jobs and lower availability of bank credit for self-employment. In urban areas, the community mostly lives in slums characterized by poor municipal infrastructure.”

Muslims make up roughly 13 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, and their numbers are nearly equal to the entire population of Pakistan, which was carved out of British India nearly 60 years ago as the homeland of the subcontinent’s Muslims. Soul-searching about Muslim rights and well-being in this country, which has witnessed periodic outbreaks of religious violence, has been a recurrent leitmotif ever since.

The latest findings have prompted fresh debate. In an editorial in The Indian Express, an English-language daily, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the president of the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, suggested that the government’s panel had revealed “the hollowness of our concept of republican citizenship.”

“What is at stake,” Mr. Mehta said, “is not just uplifting this or that group, but the very idea of India itself: whether it has the capacity for transcending the cant, indifference and identity traps that have brought us to this pass.”

The report is expected to be made public soon, but leaks in the last several weeks have already turned its contents into political fodder. Trial balloons have been floated about extending affirmative action benefits originally devised to uplift low-caste Hindus and others considered “backward,” by offering additional set-asides in education and employment for Muslims.

The mark of “backwardness” is a boon in this country, where a government job can lift a family’s fortunes forever, just as it is a vital part of political arithmetic: Secure jobs for a group, the reasoning goes, and you secure its loyalty at the polls.

A number of Muslim religious and political leaders have already begun to advocate quotas for Muslims. But the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has pointed out that Indian law prohibits faith-based quotas.

The secretary of the panel that issued the report, Abusaleh Shariff, said in an interview this week that in some states, education and poverty indicators showed that Muslims had fallen behind even low-caste Hindus. Mr. Shariff said the panel recommended, among other things, free and compulsory education up to age 14, as well as financial support to promote industries in which Muslims are concentrated, like textiles.

The findings of the panel, headed by a retired high court judge, Rajinder Sachar, are expected to add to sparring over the Muslim vote, particularly in the elections to be held next year in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims are a vital chunk of the electorate. The report will become public when Mr. Singh submits it to Parliament, possibly during its current session.

Among the panel’s most damning statistics, as reported by The Indian Express, are that in many states Muslims are significantly overrepresented in prison. In the western state of Maharashtra, for instance, Muslims make up 10.6 percent of the population but 32.4 percent of those convicted or facing trial. In the famed national bureaucracy, the Indian Administrative Service, Muslims made up only 2 percent of officers in 2006. Among district judges in 15 states surveyed, 2.7 percent were Muslim.

Educational disparities were among the most striking. Among Muslims, Mr. Shariff said, the literacy rate is about 59 percent, compared with more than 65 percent among Indians as a whole. On average, a Muslim child attends school for three years and four months, compared with a national average of four years.

Less than 4 percent of Muslims graduate from school, compared with 6 percent of the total population. Less than 2 percent of the students at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology are Muslim. Equally revealing, only 4 percent of Muslim children attend madrasas, Mr. Shariff said.

The gaps in employment are likely to be among the most politically explosive. Muslims appear to be overrepresented in the informal sector of day laborers and street vendors and underrepresented in the public sector. Muslims secured about 15 percent of all government jobs, considerably less than the share filled by “backward” castes and Dalits, those who were considered “untouchables” in the Hindu caste system.

Whatever action the government decides to take, it will have to contend with a peculiar dimension of Muslim identity here. Since they are mostly converts from Hinduism or descendants of converts, Muslims in India are riven by caste. In other words, there are Muslim Dalits, as well as Muslims who are considered “backward.”

To ignore those divides and entitle all Muslims to the same affirmative action benefits, Imtiaz Ahmad, a retired professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University argued, would be to reward only those at the upper reaches of the Muslim social ladder.

Many well-to-do Muslims, he said, particularly those with access to education, have benefited from the Indian economic advance in recent years. The Muslim community, he and other scholars point out, is made up of a small elite, vast numbers of poor people and very few people in between.

Whether India can deliver the fruits of economic progress to the many Muslims at the bottom of the ladder remains a crucial question.

At least, Mr. Ahmad argued, India has managed to address Muslim concerns without what he called the “coercive apparatus” that some European countries have adopted. He compared India’s approach with that of the Netherlands, which recently banned the wearing of the Muslim burqa, or face-covering veil, in public places.

“There are many things we can say about Indian democracy,” Mr. Ahmad said. “But it has given assurances, to minorities included, that things are negotiable.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Correction: Nov. 30, 2006

The Memo From India article yesterday, about the social and economic disadvantages faced by India’s Muslim minority, referred incorrectly to a step taken by the Netherlands government aimed at integrating that country’s Muslim minority. The government has proposed banning the wearing of the Muslim burqa, or face-covering veil, in public places; it has not banned it.

Sweden Is Top Democracy; Italy Is `Flawed,' Economist Says

By Alex Morales

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Sweden is the world's most democratic nation while Italy, a member of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, ranks as a ``flawed'' democracy and fails to make the top category of countries, the Economist said.

Countries are split into four regime types determined by their democratic credentials, according to a list e-mailed late yesterday by the magazine. The classifications are: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The U.S. at 17th, and U.K., 23rd, ranked in the bottom half of the full democracies.

``A decline in civil liberties and malfunctioning of government accounts for the U.S. position,'' the Economist said. ``In the U.K., a shocking decline in political participation, alongside some erosion of civil liberties, is the main reason for the comparatively modest ranking.''

The Economist Intelligence Unit awarded 167 countries and territories marks from 1 to 10 for 60 indicators across five broad categories: electoral process, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

The top level, full democracies, comprises 28 countries and is dominated by members of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Sweden beats Iceland and the Netherlands into first place, while France is ranked lower than the U.K., at 24th, and Italy, 34th, doesn't make the top level, falling among the ``flawed democracies.''

``The rating for France is also comparatively low as a result of modest scores for the functioning of government, political participation and political culture,'' the Economist said. ``Italy performs even worse, and falls in the flawed democracies category -- as a result of problems in functioning of government and the electoral process, as well as weaknesses in the political culture.''

Iraq Score

Two Latin American nations, Costa Rica and Uruguay, made the top category, as did the Indian Ocean island nation Mauritius. Other countries ranked as ``flawed'' included Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Israel and the world's largest democracy, India.

Countries including Lebanon, 85th, Russia, 102nd, and Iraq, 112th, fall in the third class of democracies, hybrid regimes.

Iraq scores ``0'' in the functioning government category, a distinction shared only with Afghanistan and Chad. Iraq's score for political participation is higher than Britain's and level with Japan's. The Palestinian Authority, also classed as a flawed democracy, scores level with Israel on political participation, and above every entry in that sub-category bar the top 14 in the overall ranking.

Ranking Table

North Korea props up the table in 167th, just behind the Central African Republic, Chad, Togo and Myanmar, which, along with most Middle Eastern nations, fall in the bottom group of countries, authoritarian regimes.

The following is a table of the five most democratic nations according to the Economist's ranking, and selected other nations, along with their score (from 1 to 10)

Rank Country Score
1. Sweden 9.88
2. Iceland 9.71
3. Netherlands 9.66
4. Norway 9.55
5. Denmark 9.52
16. Spain 8.34
17. U.S. 8.22
20= Japan 8.15
23. U.K. 8.08
24. France 8.07
29. South Africa 7.91
34. Italy 7.73
35. India 7.68
42. Brazil 7.38
102. Russia 5.02
112. Iraq 4.01
138. China 2.97
167. North Korea 1.03

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: November 21, 2006 05:22 EST

Birthday bash on the wrong tracks
[ 23 Nov, 2006 0125hrs ISTTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]

ALLAHABAD: Samajwadi Party workers here took the cake for a highly imaginative celebration. They took it to the railway line, stopped a train to cut it and celebrate chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav's 67th birthday.

As the members of Samajwadi Party Chhatra Sabha unleashed the innovative celebration at the city's railway station on Wednesday, the passengers of the Kanpur-bound 5004 Chauri Chaura Express seemed in no mood to join the party.

The drama was inacted on platform No 2 at 8.30 am in the morning. For obvious reasons the railway officials and the police looked the other way.

The train and its passengers were held hostage for 17 minutes after its schedule departure time.

The handful of workers had even organised a 'panditji' to conduct a 'puja' on the railway tracks. The 'panditji' gleefully kept chanting 'mantras' as RPF and GRP looked on helplessly.

CPM finally cedes Arunachal to India

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2006 02:55:32 AM]

NEW DELHI: Under attack for its non-committal stand on China’s claim over Arunachal Pradesh, the CPM
effected a subtle change of tack on Friday. For the first time since the controversy surrounding Chinese
ambassador Sun Yuxi’s statements broke out, the party admitted in Parliament that Arunachal Pradesh was
“an integral part of India”.
With the BJP targeting the CPM for being more beholden to China than India, the clash between the two
political sides rocked Rajya Sabha as the BJP repeated its demand for a parliamentary resolution on the
issue.
Leader of the Opposition Jaswant Singh accused the CPM of not accepting that “China had committed an
aggression” and hit out at the government as well as for “mortgaging” its foreign policy to the CPM. He went
on to allege that the CPM did not accept India as its motherland and always looked up to Beijing and
Moscow.
His charge was met with loud protests from Left benches with CPM leader and politbureau member Sitaram
Yechury terming Mr Singh’s statements a “painful allegation”. He added: “I assure the House of our stand that
Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India.”
Lashing out at the senior BJP leader, Mr Yechury asked him not to “mislead the House”. “This is an issue of
dispute” he continued, explaining that is how it had been since 1962, given that China did not accept
Arunachal Pradesh as a part of India. He also mentioned that the matter had to be resolved through
“negotiations and discussions” repeating the formal CPM position on the issue.
When the BJP benches erupted at the mention of the term “issue of dispute”, Mr Yechury retorted by
declaring that his party was “not going to be bulldozed by intolerance”. In the ensuing din during zero hour,
the House was adjourned till 2 pm.
In the House, Mr Singh did not confine his attack to the CPM, and went for the government as well. He said
that “timidity” on part of the government in expressing a robust commitment to the country’s territorial
integrity was not the sign of a good foreign policy.
This led to Congress members V Narayanaswamy and Rajeev Shukla protesting against Mr Singh’s remarks
in the House. Party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi later charged the BJP with “hypocrisy” and said there was
no need for any resolution on Arunachal Pradesh. “The Congress would like to charge the BJP with
irresponsible digression of Parliament’s time,” Mr Singhvi told the media in Parliament.
The CPM’s stand vis-à-vis China’s claims on Arunachal Pradesh can be traced back to former party chief
EMS Namboodripad’s partiality towards China. The late leader had refused to condemn the 1962 Chinese
aggression, taking a pro-Beijing stand terming the war as a conflict between a socialist and a capitalist
country. Mr Yechury’s words had seemed imbued with Namboodripad’s ideas when in response to the
Chinese ambassadors claim on Arunachal Pradesh he had said recently:
“These are historical issues. These are disputes. That’s why these issues are being discussed”. The CPM was
the lone political voice that has not condemned ambassador Sun’s statement that Arunachal Pradesh
“belonged” to China.

Substance in Red Wine Extends Life of Mice

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: November 1, 2006

Can you have your cake and eat it? Is there a free lunch after all, red wine included? Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan.

Doug Hansen/National Institute on Aging

Mice from a study done by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging on the effects of resveratrol.

Their report, published electronically today in Nature, implies that very large daily doses of resveratrol could offset the unhealthy, high-calorie diet thought to underlie the rising toll of obesity in the United States and elsewhere, should people respond to the drug as mice do.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine and is conjectured to be a partial explanation for the French paradox, the puzzling fact that people in France tend to enjoy a high-fat diet yet suffer less heart disease than Americans.

The researchers fed one group of mice a diet in which 60 percent of calories came from fat. The diet started when the mice, all males, were 1 year old, which is middle-aged in mouse terms. As expected, the mice soon developed signs of impending diabetes, with grossly enlarged livers, and started to die much sooner than mice fed a standard diet.

Another group of mice was fed the identical high-fat diet but with a large daily dose of resveratrol. The resveratrol did not stop them from putting on weight and growing as tubby as the other fat-eating mice. But it averted the high levels of glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, which are warning signs of diabetes, and it kept the mice’s livers at normal size.

Even more strikingly, the substance sharply extended the mice’s lifetimes. Those fed resveratrol along with the high-fat diet died many months later than the mice on high fat alone, and at the same rate as mice on a standard healthy diet. They had all the pleasures of gluttony but paid none of the price.

The researchers, led by David Sinclair and Joseph Baur at the Harvard Medical School and by Rafael de Cabo at the National Institute on Aging, also tried to estimate the effect of resveratrol on the mice’s physical quality of life. They gauged how well the mice could walk along a rotating rod before falling off, a test of their motor skills. The mice on resveratrol did better as they grew older, ending up with much the same staying power on the rod as mice fed a normal diet.

The researchers hope their findings will have relevance to people too. Their study shows, they conclude, that orally taken drugs “at doses achievable in humans can safely reduce many of the negative consequences of excess caloric intake, with an overall improvement in health and survival.”

Several experts said that people wondering if they should take resveratrol should wait until more results were in, particularly safety tests in humans. “It’s a pretty exciting area but these are early days,” said Dr. Ronald Kahn, president of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. Information about resveratrol’s effects on human metabolism should be available in a year or so, he said, adding, “Have another glass of pinot noir — that’s as far as I’d take it right now.”

The mice were fed a hefty dose of resveratrol, 24 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Red wine has about 1.5 to 3 milligrams of resveratrol per liter, so a 150-pound person would need to drink from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day to get such a dose. Whatever good the resveratrol might do would be negated by the sheer amount of alcohol.

Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which helped support the study, also said that people should wait for the results of safety testing. Substances that are safe and beneficial in small doses, like vitamins, sometimes prove to be harmful when taken in high doses, he said.

One person who is not following this prudent advice, however, is Dr. Sinclair, the chief author of the study. He has long been taking resveratrol, though at a dose of only 5 milligrams per kilogram. Mice given that amount in a second feeding trial have shown similar, but less dramatic, results as those on the 24 milligram a day dose, he said.

Dr. Sinclair has had a physician check his metabolism, because many resveratrol preparations contain possibly hazardous impurities, but so far no ill effects have come to light. His wife, his parents, and “half my lab” are also taking resveratrol, he said.

Dr. Sinclair declined to name his source of resveratrol. Many companies sell the substance, along with claims that rivals’ preparations are inactive. One such company, Longevinex, sells an extract of red wine and knotweed that contains an unspecified amount of resveratrol. But each capsule is equivalent to “5 to 15 5-ounce glasses of the best red wine,” the company’s Web page asserts.

Dr. Sinclair is the founder of a company, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, that has developed several chemicals designed to mimic the role of resveratrol but at much lower doses. Sirtris has begun clinical trials of one of these compounds, an improved version of resveratrol, with the aim of seeing if it helps control glucose levels in people with diabetes. “We believe you cannot reach therapeutic levels in man with ordinary resveratrol,” said Dr. Christoph Westphal, the company’s chief executive.

Behind the resveratrol test is a considerable degree of scientific theory, some of it well established and some yet to be proved. Dr. Sinclair’s initial interest in resveratrol had nothing to do with red wine. It derived from work by Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in 1955 found a gene that controlled the longevity of yeast, a single-celled fungus. Dr. Guarente and Dr. Sinclair, who had come from Australia to work as a post-doctoral student in Dr. Guarente’s lab, discovered the mechanism by which the gene makes yeast cells live longer. The gene is known as sir-2 in yeast, sir standing for silent information regulator, and its equivalent in mice is called SIRT-1.

Dr. Guarente then found that the gene’s protein needs a common metabolite to activate it and he developed the theory that the gene, by sensing the level of metabolic activity, mediates a phenomenon of great interest to researchers in aging, the greater life span caused by caloric restriction.

Researchers have known since 1935 that mice fed a calorically restricted diet — one with all necessary vitamins and nutrients but 40 percent fewer calories — live up to 50 percent longer than mice on ordinary diets.

This low-calorie-provoked increase in longevity occurs in many organisms and seems to be an ancient survival strategy. When food is plentiful, live in the fast lane and breed prolifically. When famine strikes, switch resources to body maintenance and live longer so as to ride out the famine.

Researchers had long supposed that the increase in longevity was a passive phenomenon: during famine or on a low-calorie diet, organisms would have lower metabolism and produce less of the violent chemicals that oxidize tissues. But Dr. Guarente and Dr. Sinclair believed that longer life was attained by an active program that triggered specific protective steps against the diseases common in old age. It was because these diseases were averted in calorie restriction, they believed, that animals lived longer.

Most people find it impossible to keep to a diet with 40 percent fewer calories than usual. So if caloric restriction really does make people as well as mice live longer — which is plausible but not yet proved — it would be desirable to have some drug that activated the SIRT-1 gene’s protein, tricking it into thinking that days of famine lay ahead.

In 2003 Dr. Sinclair, by then in his own lab, devised a way to test a large number of chemicals for their ability to mimic caloric restriction in people by activating SIRT-1. The champion was resveratrol, already well known for its possible health benefits.

The experiment reported today tests one aspect of caloric restriction, the reduction in metabolic disease. Calorically restricted mice also suffer less cancer and heart disease, and there is some evidence that neurodegenerative diseases are also held at bay.

Critics point out that resveratrol is a powerful chemical that acts in many different ways in cells. The new experiment, they say, does not prove that resveratrol negated the effects of a high-calorie diet by activating SIRT-1. Indeed, they are not convinced that resveratrol activates SIRT-1 at all. “It hasn’t really been clearly shown, the way a biochemist would want to see it, that resveratrol can activate sirtuin,” said Matt Kaeberlein, a former student of Dr. Guarente who now does research at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sirtuin is the protein produced by the SIRT-1 gene.

Dr. Sinclair said experiments at Sirtris have essentially wrapped up this point. But they have not yet been published, so under the rules of scientific debate he cannot use them to support his position. In his Nature article he therefore has to concede, “Whether resveratrol acts directly or indirectly through Sir2 in vivo is currently a subject of debate.”

Given that caloric restriction forces a tradeoff between fertility and lifespan, resveratrol might be expected to reduce fertility in mice. For reasons not yet clear, Dr. Sinclair said he saw no such effect in his experiment.

If resveratrol does act by prodding the sirtuins into action, then there will be much interest in the new class of sirtuin activators now being tested by Sirtris. Dr. Westphal, the company’s chief executive, has no practical interest in the longevity-promoting effects of sirtuins and caloric restriction. For the Food and Drug Administration, if for no one else, aging is not a disease and death is not an end-point.

Generally, the F.D.A. will only approve drugs that treat diseases in measurable ways, so Dr. Westphal hopes to show his sirtuin activators will improve the indicators of specific diseases, starting with diabetes.

“We think that if we can harness the benefits of caloric restriction, we wouldn’t simply have ways of making people live longer, but an entirely new therapeutic strategy to address the diseases of aging,” Dr. Guarente said.