Foreign direct investment in India fell more than 31 percent, to $24 billion, in 2010 even as investors flocked to developing nations as a group.
And in the last two months, foreign investors took $1.4 billion out of the Indian stock market, helping drive the country’s Nifty 50 stock index down 17 percent from the record high it set in early November.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Happy Birthday India and Julia Child!
On How India is like Israel
Israel is a democratic ally in a neighborhood that includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Turkey. India is a democratic ally which shares borders with Pakistan and China.
Both Hindu India and Jewish Israel are occupying lands wherein the majority of occupants are Muslims who believe their homelands have been unjustly annexed. Both India and Israel have nuclear weapons.
For decades, India maintained hundreds of thousands of security forces in Kashmir to fight an insurgency sponsored by Pakistan, which claims this border region, too. The insurgency has been largely vanquished. But those Indian forces are still here, and today they face a threat potentially more dangerous to the world’s largest democracy: an intifada-like popular revolt against the Indian military presence that includes not just stone-throwing young men but their sisters, mothers, uncles and grandparents.
... This summer there have been nearly 900 clashes between protesters and security forces, which have left more than 50 civilians dead, most of them from gunshot wounds. While more than 1,200 soldiers have been wounded by rock-throwing crowds, not one has been killed in the unrest, leading to questions about why Indian security forces are using deadly force against unarmed civilians -- and why there is so little international outcry.
The US gives large amounts of foreign aid to Israel and Egypt so that they won't have a war. The US is trying to keep Pakistan focused on fighting the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, but Pakistan remains focused on its main enemy India. The Afghan Taliban are Pakistan's means to combat Indian influence in Afghanistan. (The Pakistani Taliban is the Muslim extremism of the Afghan Taliban metastasizing back into nuclear-armed Pakistan.)
The US needs to internationalize the Kashmir issue over India's objection so that the Pakistan can focus on the Taliban.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
One subject I've changed my mind on is the usefulness of sanctions, like the sanctions on Iraq. They wrecked the country - technically Saddam plus sanctions did - which made "nation building" so much more difficult after regime change.
Andrew Cockburn reviews Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon.
SRINAGAR, Kashmir -- On June 11, as Tufail Ahmad Mattoo headed home from a tutoring center where he was studying for the medical entrance exam, a tear gas canister fired from close range bashed a hole in his skull. He died almost instantly.
That morning Mr. Mattoo, 17, had been simply a student with a rucksack full of books. By day’s end, he was being called a martyr for the disputed region of Kashmir, and the next day, against his family’s will, he was buried in the Martyrs Graveyard of Srinagar.
Since then at least 15 Kashmiris have died here in the capital and a few other places, most of them young men killed in encounters with Indian security forces or the Kashmiri police. More than 270 security officers have been injured in confrontations with stone-throwing mobs of youths.
The events that have unfolded here over the past month followed a script that has played out every summer for three years.
In 2008 dozens of Kashmiris died and everyday life was paralyzed in disputes over land for Hindu pilgrims. Last year protests flared after two young women were found dead by a stream in the town of Shopian. It appeared that they had been raped and killed by security forces, but Indian investigators concluded they had accidentally drowned.
NEW DELHI -- The Indian Army deployed on the streets of the disputed region of Kashmir on Wednesday, seeking to quell angry street protests that have convulsed the valley.
The protests, aimed at forcing India to withdraw its paramilitary forces from the predominantly Muslim Kashmir Valley, have raged for weeks, killing at least 13 people and paralyzing life in the region, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan.
The streets of Srinagar, the state capital, were deserted as the authorities enforced a strict curfew. The army presence was light and limited to a few patrols, officials in Kashmir said.
"The army has been asked to stand by to help the civil administration," said Taj Mohi-ud-Din, a senior minister in the state government.
Demonstrations in the streets of towns and cities across Kashmir are a regular feature of the summer months in the valley, but they have become particularly heated in recent weeks in the wake of allegations that police officers and soldiers brutalized civilians. The police and paramilitary forces have fired on groups of stone-throwing youths, and television news channels showed Indian forces firing directly into crowds of protesters.
