By almost any measure – GDP, life expectancy, literacy, exports and more – India has fallen far behind China since 1978 http://bit.ly/w5AEza

PEN responds to Jaipur ban. John Elliott also raised interesting point. See previous post. It’s A Fine Balance on who takes the fall for taking the beach head.

The board of trustees of English PEN today issue a statement of support in solidarity with five writers who have faced harassment for defending free expression in India. Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil, Ruchir Joshi and S. Anand, all attendees at the Jaipur Literary Festival, staged symbolic readings of The Satanic Verses after their fellow writer Salman Rushdie was forced to cancel his planned appearance.  Soon after, local police arrived and began making enquiries about ‘illegal conduct’ at the festival. Salil Tripathi, English PEN Trustee and Chair of its Writers in Prison Committee, said: These events paint a worrying picture of the state of free expression in India.  The Rajasthan police offered no support to Salman Rushdie when he was threatened.  And instead of protecting authors who take a stand defending free expression, the police appear to be harassing them instead. The way the security services have handled this incident falls way short of India’s aspirations and claims to be a democracy.  Gillian Slovo, President of English PEN, said: The Jaipur Literary Festival should be able to showcase a commitment to artistic expression. Unfortunately, the threats against Rushdie, and the subsequent harassment of those who stood up to defend him, demonstrate how difficult it can be to do this in India. The organisers of the Jaipur Literary Festival issued a statement distancing the organisers from the actions of the five authors, saying that “any action by any delegate or anyone else involved with the Festival that in any manner falls foul of the law will not be tolerated and all necessary, consequential action will be taken”.  Responding to the statement, Gillian Slovo said: The ban on The Satanic Verses is an affront to free expression.  It allows the kind of police harassment we have seen this week in Jaipur, and legitimises the threats of violence against authors like Salman Rushdie.  It is disappointing that the organisers of the festival did not use their position to condemn this ban and so support a group of writers who did nothing more than read from a work of literary fiction. Following the events of last week, a group of Indian writers set up a petition, demanding the ban on The Satanic Verses in India be lifted.  English PEN urges all its members to add their name to the petition. Read more: Hari Kunzru explains his decision to read from The Satanic Verses Salil Tripathi describes how the protests unfolded

John Elliott crossing swords over the reading of the banned Satanic Verses at Jaipur. 

It is easy to defy the law from offices and homes in the US, UK and elsewhere – or during a brief stay in India – but it is neither practical nor sensible for a literature festival like Jaipur to put its future and the safety of thousands of people at risk. http://wp.me/pieST-1yG
The Third World War — A Future History

In his down time, Newt Gingrich was a prolific book reviewer. http://amzn.to/t8h827

 From Our Own Correspondent January 21st 21012  

Hundred of thousands children in India are involved in picking and processing cotton. Many are kept out school, work in dangerous conditions and some are not even paid. Campaigners say the big UK clothing stores should do much more to stop child labour being used in their supply chains. One of the main cotton producing areas is Gujarat in Western India. From there Humphrey Hawksley sent this report.

 In a lush green field, speckled with white flowering buds, a little girl in a dirty yellow dress, her eyes squinting against overhead sun, her arms covered in scratches from her work speaks in monosyllables about her life.

Kali isn’t from here, and she has no idea where her parents are. She has a child’s face, but any playfulness seems long drained from it. Her expression is dulled; her movements robotic as she prizes open the dark green bud. 

Pristine raw cotton springs out. It’s like the cotton wool we buy in chemist shops.  Kali drops it into a sack and opens another bud. 

She thinks she’s ten years old, but she’s not sure.  She is illiterate and she doesn’t go to school – one of perhaps half a million children who work in the cotton industry in India. There are several  million around the world.  

No-one knows how many, because no real checks are made, but driving around northern Gurjarat children in cotton fields are easy to find. 

Kali is at the bottom end of a global supply chain whose top end finishes in our high street stores and fashion show cat walks. Worldwide revenues are measured in the trillions.   

The next stage is the factory. Inside you get what labour activists describe as the horror of the white cloud.  Cotton dust is so dangerous it can cause chronic lung problems at an early age. 

We visited three factories, but I don’t plan to name them in order to avoid repercussions against the workers.   The sites were all pretty much the same, and despite what we saw, managers insisted that everything was in order.  

Raw cotton is pushed down into machines that process it to be made into thread. It’s called ginning. 

The air is thick with cotton dust. My chest tightened immediately. My throat became irritable and my eyes began to water.  The noise was deafening. The workers were mainly women and young girls. Some looked no more than ten or eleven. None had masks or safety clothing. 

Next to the machine room in one factory was a warehouse where young men and boys were piling cotton into baskets that were carried out on their heads – the white fluff stuck to their skin, their hair and their clothes. 

Another factory had an old machine whose logo announced it was made in Manchester. It brought to mind William Blake’s descriptions of Britain’s ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ in the early 19^th Century when may have been referring to similar factories here. They were closed down long ago because living conditions for the workers were seen to be unacceptable.  

 But that poses the question – given the present trend towards globalisation – why similar working conditions remain acceptable for children and workers in India and elsewhere. 

Despite phone calls and e-mails, none of the main retailers agreed to be interviewed about their cotton supply chains. Some did issue statements saying they did not tolerate abuse and were committed to fair labour practices. The British government simply said it supported all activity to give better working conditions to those working to supply UK companies. 

The muted response is not unusual and the activists that guided us around Gujurat said they had been asking for help for years, but without success.

 Cotton is only one example of tainted supply chains. Millions of children are also forced to harvest cocoa for chocolate or coltan, the metal used in our mobile phones – sold in glittering shopping malls across the world. 

What perhaps is surprising is how little has changed over the centuries.

In Gujarat, I happened to be carrying Voltaire’s satirical novel of the optimistic adventurer Candide, in which he describes a meeting between the hero and a desolate sugar worker in South America who comments simply on his work and injuries: “It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe.” 

Candide was published in 1759. More than 250 years later, I met 23-year-old Gohil Maganbhai who started work when he was twelve and lost a thumb in a ginning machine. 

And at the last site we visited, we found Pryanka and Versha. They huddled up outside against the factory wall, as they told their stories. Like Kali, their homes were far away. They both said they were eleven years old, sent here by their parents and trafficked in through a labour agency. They never saw their wages. The money went straight to their parents — after the agent took a cut.   

It was impossible not to reflect on Voltaire and ask whether the plight of Kali, Gohil, Pryanka and Versha is simply the price they pay for the cotton we buy in Europe.

Burma is rapidly becoming the focus of superpower rivalry, one more spot in Asia where US security interests are clashing with China’s. Bertil Lintner in Yale Global.

http://bit.ly/ylAMIm

 The Third World War — A Future History