Tibet unrest tests India

New Delhi's delicate balance between relations with China and ties with the Dalai Lama is unsettled.
By Henry Chu
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 20, 2008

NEW DELHI — One party feels caught in the middle amid the heated clashes and the battle for public opinion between the Chinese government and pro-Tibet activists: India.

The crisis in Tibet has forced New Delhi into a difficult diplomatic balancing act that pits its improving ties with Beijing against its longstanding relationship with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has made India his base of operations for more than half a century.

The Dalai Lama's presence, and that of the Tibetan government in exile, in the Himalayan city of Dharamsala has long been a source of friction between the two Asian giants. New Delhi's cautious solution has been to provide sanctuary to what the Beijing government insists on calling the "Dalai clique," but to demand that the Tibetans refrain from anti-China activities on Indian soil.

That fragile formula has come under increasing strain from the violent protests that have erupted in Tibet against Chinese rule and the bloody crackdown unleashed in response. India is now under competing pressure to speak out against the clampdown, on the one hand, and, on the other, to restrain some of the rhetoric and activities of Tibetan exiles here.

So far, critics say, India's official statements have been tepid.

The Foreign Ministry says it is "distressed" by the violence in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and has called for the crisis to be resolved "through dialogue and nonviolent means." At the same time, it has reminded activists here that they, "while they are in India, are expected to refrain from political activities and those activities that affect our relations with other friendly countries."

On Wednesday, the Tibetan parliament in exile, fresh from a meeting in Dharamsala, converged here in the Indian capital and held a one-day fast to focus attention on the plight of those back in their homeland.

One parliament member, Youdon Aukatsang, urged India, as the world's most populous democracy, to take a stronger stand.

"They should strongly condemn what's happening inside Tibet. They haven't done that. This is a gross human rights violation," she said. "I don't expect them to take any covert action or anything like that, but at least [make] forceful statements. It's their moral duty."

At least 100,000 Tibetan refugees live in India, more than anywhere else in the world, with thousands more arriving every year. Beyond sheer numbers, the Indian government also is struggling with the fact that many Tibetans here, especially youths, have grown increasingly militant in favor of independence for their homeland. The Dalai Lama, however, endorses greater autonomy for Tibet under Chinese suzerainty.

In recent days, protesters have mounted raucous anti-China protests in Dharamsala, at times burning the Chinese flag and cursing the Beijing government on national television.

Aukatsang acknowledged the increasing polarization of opinion within the Tibetan diaspora, which the Dalai Lama has struggled to hold together with his message of nonviolent dissent. The government in exile announced Wednesday that it was creating an umbrella "Tibet Crisis Committee" to oversee pro-Tibet movements worldwide.

"We are concerned about the growing frustrations among younger Tibetans especially, but the government [in exile] will never endorse violence," Aukatsang said. "Nonviolence is our philosophy."

The Indian government is eager not to upset the small gains it has made in recent years in improving ties with China. Hostility stemming from a border war in 1962 and ongoing territorial disputes has gradually eased as trade grows between the two booming economies.

In 2003, the Indian government recognized Tibet as part of China in exchange for Chinese recognition of the contested state of Sikkim, adjacent to Tibet, as part of India. Two years ago, the historic road linking the two sides, high on a mountain pass, was reopened as a trading route.

"Relations with China are improving. We're making some cautious moves in settling our issues," said Mohan Guruswamy, director of the Center for Policy Alternatives here.

The Indian government has "a carefully calibrated policy" on Tibet, he said. "We don't want something small to snowball into something big."

Last week, Indian authorities arrested a group of Tibetan activists who had vowed to march all the way to Tibet to protest the Olympic Games due to be held in Beijing in August. Aukatsang said that Indian police had also detained demonstrators who protested outside the Chinese Embassy here.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, while acknowledging Tibet as a sensitive bilateral issue, publicly thanked New Delhi for the "steps taken by the Indian government in handling Tibetan independence activities masterminded by the Dalai clique."

Not just Tibetan activists but some Indian leaders as well have accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of being soft on China.

Thupstan Chhewang, a member of parliament from the Himalayan region of Ladakh, bordering China, called on the government to press the United Nations to mount an international inquiry on the situation in Tibet.

"India should come out very strongly in support of the Tibetan people," Chhewang said. "Most of the people in India support the cause of freedom."

henry.chu@latimes.com

World Bank, India to Probe 5 Health Projects

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 15, 2008; D01

The World Bank and the Indian government have launched official investigations in response to an internal bank report that found "serious" incidents of fraud and corruption in five bank-financed health projects in India.

The findings in the report, released in January by the World Bank's internal investigation arm, include possible bid-rigging in a bank-funded program that may have distributed faulty HIV-test kits to clinics and blood banks in India. Although the bank did not specify which allegations it would probe, its board Thursday agreed to work with the Indian government to conduct independent procurement audits.

The bank said it would launch nine separate investigations that could lead to broad institutional revisions of how its programs are monitored and conducted. The government of India also referred three related cases to its Central Bureau for Investigation.

"We take these indicators of fraud and corruption extremely seriously," World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick said in a statement. "Working with the Indian authorities, we will take action against those responsible, including debarment and sanctions against firms and individuals from doing business with the Bank and disciplinary action against bank staff if warranted."

Critics said the case has highlighted a history of lax oversight on a number of World Bank projects. Yesterday, some of them took aim at the bank for a slow, convoluted response to allegations of corruption in the India projects.

The report, published by the bank's Department of Institutional Integrity, reviewed funds for five projects, some dating back to 1997, to combat HIV-AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Some of the most notable findings involved programs aimed at preventing the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, including funds for HIV-test kits.

The report noted that five medical facilities in Mumbai that received HIV test kits from one supplier hired by the Indian government and paid with World Bank funds had complained in 2004 and 2005 of high rates of false negatives and other invalid results. After reviewing data on test-kit use, the examiners determined that "some of the test kits supplied by particular companies often performed poorly by producing erroneous or invalid results, potentially resulting in the further spread of disease or in the wastage of blood."

In addition, the examiners found evidence of corruption. The review showed one supplier had won a test-kit contract even though the firm appeared not to have complied with technical specifications, had submitted apparently fraudulent documents and was not the lowest bidder.

The findings appeared to lend credence to warnings from Kunal Saha, a physician specializing in AIDS retained by the World Bank to review some of those programs last April. After his trip, Saha said he had brought evidence of faulty test kits to the attention of both Indian and World Bank officials in May. Of particular concern, he said, were high rates of false negatives, which posed the risk of tainting blood supplies and failing to notify HIV-positive patients of their conditions.

"But nothing was done," said Saha, a self-described crusader who founded a patients' rights group in India after the death of his wife there in 1998 from what he says was medical negligence. In recent months, he has worked closely with the Government Accountability Project, a Washington nonprofit group, to press the bank on faulty HIV test kits in India. "Everyone did everything they could to ignore this," he said.

World Bank officials said that following Saha's claims, they hired a consultant late last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to review the data. The consultant's findings, the officials said, did not support Saha's opinion that the kits were faulty. In a news release dated Dec. 14, 2007, and distributed in India by health authorities there, Saha's findings were directly refuted. The statement said there was "no evidence of use of poor quality HIV test kits in India."

Despite the examiners' findings, Kees Kostermans, the bank's lead public health specialist for the South Asia Region, refuted claims that some patients tested with some kits in India may have received false results, and said yesterday that he remained confident that the HIV test kits were not faulty. He cited a second outside consultant, Australian HIV expert Elizabeth Dax, who was contracted for a further program review in January. Her review, Kostermans said, indicated that the problems with false negatives were a result of human error rather than with the kits.

"There is no evidence in the data that we reviewed that any patients were given a final false negative HIV results," he said.

Kostermans said the World Bank had received notification from the Indian government that all of the kits in question had stopped being used in 2006. But Saha said he uncovered evidence last April that the kits were still being used in at least one hospital.

Dubai Eyes Reforms for Foreign Workers

By JASON DePARLE

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — They still wake before dawn in desert dormitories that pack a dozen men or more to a room. They still pour concrete and tie steel rods in temperatures that top 110 degrees. They still spend years away from families in India and Pakistan to earn about $1 an hour. They remain bonded to employers under terms that critics liken to indentured servitude.

But construction workers, a million strong here and famously mistreated, have won some humble victories.

After several years of unprecedented labor unrest, the government is seeking peace with this army of sweat-stained migrants who make local citizens a minority in their own country and sustain one of the world’s great building booms. Regulators here have enforced midday sun breaks, improved health benefits, upgraded living conditions and cracked down on employers brazen enough to stop paying workers at all.

The results form a portrait of halting change in a region synonymous with foreign labor and, for many years, labor abuse.

Many rich countries, including the United States, rely on cheap foreign workers. But no country is as dependent as the United Arab Emirates, where foreigners make up about 85 percent of the population and 99 percent of the private work force. From bankers to barbers, there are 4.5 million foreigners here, compared with 800,000 Emirati citizens, according to the Ministry of Labor. About two-thirds of the foreigners are South Asians, including most of the 1.2 million construction workers.

The labor agitation came as a surprise in this city of glass towers and marble-tiled malls where social harmony is part of the marketing plan and political action can seem all but extinct. But when thousands of migrant construction workers walked off the job last year, blocking traffic and smashing parked cars, it became clear that the nonnatives were restless.

“I’m not saying we don’t have a problem,” said Ali bin Abdulla Al Kaabi, the Emirates’ labor minister, who was appointed by the ruling sheiks to upgrade standards and restore stability. “There is a problem. We’re working to fix it.”

Change here is constrained by rival concerns of the sort that shape the prospects of workers worldwide. Like many countries, only more so, the United Arab Emirates needs the foreign laborers but fears their numbers. The recent focus on the workers’ conditions still leaves them under close watch, segregated from the general population, with no right to unionize and no chance at citizenship.

“We want to protect the minority, which is us,” Mr. Kaabi said.

Among those buffeted by recent events is Sami Yullah, a 24-year-old pipe fitter from Pakistan, who arrived four years ago. Like many workers, he paid nearly a year’s salary in illegal recruiter’s fees, despite laws here that require employers to bear all the hiring costs. In exchange, he was promised a job building sewer systems at a monthly salary of about $225, nearly twice what he earned at home.

Mr. Yullah found the work harder and more hazardous than he had expected. Two co-workers were killed on the job, he said, and two others injured, when they fell through a manhole. Conditions at the workers’ camp where he lived, rudimentary at best, disintegrated when his employer let the water and electricity lapse. Then a problem even more basic arose: the company stopped paying the workers.

The owner kept saying, ‘Wait a minute, I will get some money,’ ” said Mr. Yullah, who joined about 400 co-workers last year in walking off the job. “He was taking advantage of us.”

In a break with past practice, Mr. Kaabi’s Labor Ministry backed the workers. Tapping a company bank guarantee, it restored the camp utilities and paid some of the back wages. It barred the company, Industrial and Engineering Enterprises, from hiring more workers, leading it to close its Emirates operation. And it helped workers like Mr. Yullah, who is still owed nearly six months’ back pay, find new jobs.

By global standards, punishing a company that does not pay its workers may seem modest, but Mr. Yullah recognized it as something new.

“The company cheated me,” he said. “But the labor office is standing with the laborers.”

The United Arab Emirates is a rags-to-riches story on a nation-state scale. Until the discovery of oil in the late 1950s, there was little here but Bedouins and sand. To extract the oil and build a modern economy, the rulers imported a multinational labor force that quickly outnumbered native Arabs.

An ethos of tolerance has prevailed, with churches, bars and miniskirts co-existing with burqas. But the construction workers who build hotel rooms that rent for $1,000 a night and malls that sell shoes for $1,000 a pair live segregated lives outside of this prosperous, cosmopolitan world.

They rise before dawn in distant camps, work six days a week at guarded sites and return by bus with time to do little but eat or sleep. Their sheer numbers inspire unease. When the film “Syriana” was released here, the government cut a scene of violent labor protest.

Sonapur, a camp a half-hour’s drive into the desert from Dubai, houses 50,000 workers and feels like an army base. Two- and three-story concrete-block buildings stretch across the horizon, throngs of South Asian laborers fill the streets and desert dust fills the air. Even at midnight the camp roars. Buses ferry workers to third-shift jobs. Earthmovers work the perimeter, breaking ground for more dorms.

Building skyscrapers is inherently dangerous, especially in the heat. Until the government recently began insisting on summer sun breaks, one Dubai emergency room alone was reporting thousands of heat exhaustion cases each month. In a rare count, Construction Week, a local trade publication, canvassed foreign embassies and estimated that nearly 900 foreign construction workers died in 2004, though it could not say what percentage of the deaths were work-related.

The government does not track job-related injuries and deaths, though it is required by law to do so.

Standing on Sonapur’s sand-blown streets, some workers count their blessings. “The work here is no problem,” said Dinesh Bihar, 30, whose $150 salary is four times what he made when he left India.

Some workers count their debts. “I was so eager to come to Dubai, I didn’t ask questions,” said Rajash Manata, who paid placement fees of nearly $3,800, thinking his salary would be six times higher than it is. “I blame myself.”

Some workers simply count the days until they see their families again.

“Three years, four months,” said Cipathea Raghu, 37, when asked how long it had been since he had seen his 10-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son. “They’re always saying, ‘Daddy please, come, when will you come?’ ” he said.

“Tension, tension,” he added, pointing to his heart.

Several years of quickening protests, mostly over unpaid wages, peaked in March 2006, when hundreds of workers went on a rampage near the unfinished Burj Dubai, which is being built as the world’s tallest building. Eight months later, Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, accused the Emirates of “cheating workers.”

For a country courting tourists and investors — and a free trade pact with the United States — the report stung. “If the U.A.E. wants to be a first-class global player, it can’t just do it with gold faucets and Rolls-Royces,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. “It needs to bring up its labor standards.”

Mr. Kaabi, 39, took office in late 2004, with what he describes as a mandate to do just that, for ethical and practical purposes, a departure from the Labor Ministry’s earlier focus on processing employer requests for more foreign hires. “A healthy worker will provide more effective labor — period,” he said in an interview.

He created the summer sun breaks, from 12:30 to 3 p.m. He pledged to increase the number of inspectors to 1,000, from roughly 100, though progress has been slow. And he publicly punished companies caught failing to pay their workers.

The most notable action involved the Al Hamed Development and Construction Company, which was run by a well-connected sheik. After hundreds of workers blocked traffic in Dubai, Mr. Kaabi ordered the company to pay nearly $2 million in fines and temporarily froze the company’s ability to hire new workers.

“A beautiful message was sent: everybody follows the rules,” Mr. Kaabi said.

Acting separately, the emirate of Abu Dhabi has strengthened health benefits and subsidized what is meant to be a model labor camp. Still much about the workers’ lives remains unchanged, including the frequent need to pay high recruiting fees. Mr. Kaabi said that practice was hard to police, since it often occurred in the workers’ home countries. Workers remain tied to specific employers and cannot, without permission, change jobs. And unions remain off limits. Mr. Kaabi said allowing unions would give foreign labor bosses a chokehold on the economy.

“God forbid something happens between us and India and they say, ‘Please, we want all our Indians to go home,’ ” he said. “Our airports would shut down, our streets, construction. No. I won’t do this.”

In July, the government ended a four-day strike at a gas processing plant by sending in the armed forces. There continue to be press accounts of worker suicides.

Faced with complaints about low wages and difficult work, Mr. Kaabi repeats a point often made here: Many workers face greater hardships at home for less pay. “We don’t force people to come to this country,” Mr. Kaabi said. “They’re building a whole new life for their families.” Some come from backgrounds so impoverished, he said, “they don’t know how to use the toilet; they will sit and do it on the ground.”

But Ms. Whitson of Human Rights Watch said, “That’s what exploitation is — you take advantage of someone’s desperation.”

Perched bare-chested on his bunk after a day in the sun, Sadiq Batcha, an 18-year veteran of labor camp life, was of two minds about the recent militancy. “People who did strikes were justified to a certain extent,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Batcha, 40, said his monthly salary of $250 was more than twice what he could make back home in an Indian fishing village. He had built a house, given his sister a dowry of $2,500, allowing her to marry, and sent his children to a private, English-speaking school. “If strikes are made legal, the company will lose money, and eventually we’ll lose our jobs,” he said.

Then with his eyes heavy at 9:30 p.m., Mr. Batcha excused himself. An alarm would sound in six hours and he was eager for sleep.

India starts to pull itself out of China's shadow

Fast-growing nation aims to 'twist the dragon's tail'

Last updated July 5, 2007 8:44 p.m. PT

By MARCUS GEE
THE (TORONTO) GLOBE AND MAIL

NEW DELHI, India -- After more than two decades of eating China's dust, India is starting to pull closer to its sprinting neighbor.

India's economic growth touched 9.2 percent last year, just short of China's 10.4 percent. This year things are going even better. With one estimate putting growth at a seasonally adjusted 11.4 percent in the first quarter, India might even overtake China to become the world's fastest-growing economy in 2007.

The competition between the two Asian giants -- both ancient civilizations, each with more than 1 billion people -- is the great race of the early 21st century, and Indians are watching it with excitement and fierce pride.

Newspapers are full of headlines proclaiming that India will outdo China's success story and "twist the dragon's tail" and that India's booming information technology sector is "15 times bigger than China."

There is nail-biting, too, as if Indians can't quite believe their recent good fortune will last. "India to slip behind China in innovation," worried a recent headline in the Times of India.

For years, India had to stand by as the world applauded China. India's economy grew by an average of 6 percent a year between 1980 and 2002, a healthy rate by global standards but well short of China's full-tilt 9.5 percent. Now that India is gaining ground, Indians are almost obsessive about comparing their performance with China's. "It's our national pastime," said Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

Like spectators at a cricket match, Indians are quick to rattle off the stats of their home team.

China may have a bigger population -- 1.3 billion to India's 1.1 billion -- but India's is growing faster, at 1.6 percent a year compared with China's 0.6 percent.

China may have more export factories and bigger foreign exchange reserves, but India has more billionaires -- 36, according to Forbes magazine's recent listing of the world's superrich, the most of any Asian country.

"In the 60th year of our independence, the rise of the Indian business community on the global arena must be counted as one of India's proud achievements," the Indian Express said in a recent editorial.

Relations between India and China have improved enormously since 1962, when they fought a border war, but the rivalry is still strong. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called China India's "greatest neighbor" this month, a poll showed that more than 60 percent of Indians thought he had been too effusive.

Talk to people on the streets of New Delhi, and they will tell you that India, not China, holds the key to the future.

Even at the China Market, the New Delhi equivalent of a dollar store, owner Mohammed Ali, 32, says Indian goods are better than the cheap Chinese toys, clocks, calculators and assorted gadgets he sells.

"Chinese quality is lousy," he says. "If it stops working, you just throw it out. It's Indian quality that will put us ahead."

"I think for a lot of people, China is a benchmark," said Brij Tankha, a professor in Asian studies at Delhi University. "India is coming into its own and we want to catch up."

If so, there is still a long way to go. India's gross domestic product stood at $915 billion last year, a third of China's. Per capita GDP was $840, compared with China's $2,069. More than 100 million Chinese worked in its teeming manufacturing sector as of 2005, while India's employs just 7 million.

Basic living standards are much lower in India, too. In China, 90 percent of adults can read and write, in India just 61 per cent. The average Chinese can expect to live 72 years, the average Indian 63.

Any visitor to both countries can't fail to notice the gap right away. In India, "our cabs are shabby and the airport bathrooms are dirty," Nair said. In China, with its gleaming new airports and well-maintained highways, "your first impression is how impressive it is. You have an impression of prosperity you don't have in India."

The economic reforms that launched India's current boom began only in 1991, 13 years after the historic economic opening proclaimed by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. As a result, economic analyst Bibek Debroy said, India is 20 to 25 years behind China in economic terms.

"I think this says it all: China is hosting the Olympic Games, we're hosting the Commonwealth Games," Debroy said. "We're not really in the same league."

COMPETING GIANTS

INDIA

# Population: 1.1 billion

# Population growth rate: 1.6 percent

# Economic growth: 9.2 percent in 2006

# Per capita gross domestic product: $840 in 2006

# Adult literacy rate: 61 percent

# Average life expectancy: 63 years

CHINA

# Population: 1.3 billion

# Population growth rate: 0.6 percent

# Economic growth: 10.4 percent in 2006

# Per capita gross domestic product: $2,069 in 2006

# Adult literacy rate: 90 percent

# Average life expectancy: 72 years