Author Archives: Suparna Chaudhry

Missing Women, Missing Mechanisms

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In 1990, Amartya Sen coined the term ‘missing women’ to denote the shortage of women contributing to the skewed sex ratios in Asia and Africa, where men outnumber women, in stark contrast to North America and Europe, where women outnumber men. Estimates of missing women were originally meant to represent some measure of the degree of gender discrimination. This discrimination was attributed to three main causes causes: sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and the comparative neglect of female health and nutrition during childhood, which led to their deaths early in life.

In 2010, Anderson and Ray, used the Sen-Coale counterfactual, which compares birth and death ratios of men and women in developing countries to similar populations in developed countries, in order to examine the ratio of these missing women across both age and diseases levels. They found a wide variation in the pattern of these missing women between India and China.

“A large percentage of the missing women in China are located before birth and in infancy. We estimate that around 37–45% of the missing women in China are due to prenatal factors alone. But the numbers for India are more evenly distributed across the different age groups.”

In a more recent work in 2012, they further explore the unlikely distribution of missing women across India, and find that

“… a total of more than two million women in India are missing in a given year….First, the majority of missing women, in India die in adulthood. Our estimates demonstrate that roughly 12% of missing women are found at birth, 25% die in childhood, 18% at the reproductive ages, and 45% die at older ages.”

They also find a great deal of variation in the distribution of missing women by age group across the states: Punjab is the only state where the majority of missing women are found at birth, while Haryana and Rajasthan are the only two states where a majority of these missing women are either never born or die in childhood.

The above results show us that commonly considered explanations such as sex-selective abortion or female infanticide cannot explain the age distribution of these missing women. This is certainly true in India and may hold for other countries with similar distributions of missing women as well. It is not as if the woes of adult women are completely ignored (see Chen and Dreze (1992) and Kochar (1999) ), but contrary to conventional wisdom, it turns out that excess female mortality in adulthood is as serious of a problem as missing girls who are never born or die prematurely in childhood.

So what are some possible mechanisms for the existence of so many ‘missing women’ in adulthood? More importantly, is the number high due to differentiated access to healthcare leading to higher maternal mortality and other diseases or due to overt social basis of gender discrimination leading to dowry death and bride-burning? Bloch and Rao (2002) document how women who pay less dowry are more likely to be victims of marital violence. More research is needed to tease apart these mechanisms and understand the reasons behind the surprisingly large number of ‘missing women’ in adulthood. From a policy perspective, at time when new legislation against sexual violence is being debated in India, it is also important to have a broader conversation about the kinds of discrimination being faced by adult women in order to find the most effective ways to address it.

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Assessing the Effect of Gender Quotas on Politics

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Last week, Natalia Bueno drew our attention to gender quotas in politics, pointing out that while the number of women candidates in elections to the local and federal chambers in Brazil was increasing, the proportion of women actually getting elected was not witnessing a commensurate increase; in fact, it was mostly stable over time. Regardless of whether a quota is for a certain percentage of women that must contest elections, or for a certain percentage of women that must actually hold legislative seats, Natalia raises an important question at the end of her post – is such affirmative action even effective? Like Brazil, India has also been struggling to implement reforms that encourage representation of women in government. While a 1992 amendment to the Indian constitution made it mandatory for 33% of elected seats at the local level (village panchayats) to be filled with women, the bill for implementing this reform at the national level has still not been passed. In light of the debate on women’s issues that has been sparked off by the recent gang-rape in Delhi, a number of proposals are now back into consideration, including the Women’s Reservation Bill, which mandates that 33% of all seats in the lower house of the Parliament and in all state legislative assemblies be reserved for women. But does guaranteeing a certain number of elected seats for women yield their group any benefits?

Government Participation by Women (womenstats.org)

In terms of effectiveness of gender quotas and representation, what exactly are we aiming for? Observers draw a distinction between descriptive representation,  the similarity between the representative and the represented in terms of race/ethnicity/gender, symbolic representation, the subjective feeling of “fair” represented, and substantive representation. This third kind is particularly important as it implies that the legislators actually enact policy which reflects the concerns of the constituents.

Looking at the effects of descriptive representation, Barnes and Burchard, using the Afro-Barometer survey for 20 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, show that increased representation of women in the political sphere is positively related the political engagement of women at the mass level. Political engagement here is measured in a variety of ways – talking about politics, participating in demonstrations, interest in politics, contacting a member of Parliament and contacting a party leader. More importantly, they argue that true gender parity in representation is not even necessary to achieve a commensurate parity in political engagement – as the percentage of women in the legislature increases from 25 to 35%, the difference between male and female turnout in voting during elections virtually disappears.

However, such descriptive representation does not necessarily translate into symbolic or substantive representation. This is a concern in many developing countries such as India and Brazil, where women candidates may often be wives or relatives of male candidates in politics and, therefore, may do little to advance the interests of the constituents who they are supposed to represent.  Evidence of symbolic representation however, can also be found in some contexts. Iyer, Mani, Mishra and Topalova have found that increased representation of women in local councils in India has gradually contributed to an increased reporting of crime against women. In substantive terms, Chattopadhyay and Duflo using the reservation rule mentioned above, find that female leaders invest money in public goods considered more important to women than men, which in this case were drinking water and roads.

The above examples show us that the effectiveness of gender quotas is conditional on many factors and the kind of representation that we choose to focus on. Besides examining the effects of these gender quotas, it would also be interesting to analyze if exposure to power and the formal workings of politics builds capabilities for these female leaders. In other words, what are the effects of these quotas on its direct beneficiaries?

Great Power Confrontation: India and China, 50 Years On

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After a series of smashing victories in the border war with India, Chinese troops swept down from the towering Himalayas and were poised at the edge of the fertile plains of Assam, whose jute and tea plantations account for one-fourth of India’s export trade. Then, with Assam lying defenseless before her conquering army, Red China suddenly called a halt to the fighting.

Radio Peking announced that, “on its own initiative,” Red China was ordering a cease-fire on all fronts….

-       Time Magazine Cover, October 1962

Fifty years after India and China had a month-long confrontation that ended in a humiliating defeat for India, the two great powers still continue to have friction over the northeastern border, the subject of 14 fruitless talks between the two nations. The McMahon Line, the initial cause of the disagreement, was demarcated by British officials in 1914 in order to settle the issue of Tibetan suzerainty. As the map below shows, India claims a part of the northern frontier for its Ladakh. In the eastern part, China claims a huge chunk of one of India’s states, Arunachal Pradesh. The dissatisfaction with these boundaries as well as the Chinese refusal to recognize Tibetan sovereignty resulted in a war that has led to one of the most militarized borders in contemporary times.

Source: The Economist

What does this underlying friction mean for Indian security and defense policy? By looking at Indian efforts towards both internal and external balancing, we might be able to gauge whether India visualizes China as a threat or not. In terms of internal balancing, the graph below shows us the steadily increasing value of Indian defense spending. The biggest jumps  have been in the last two years, with an 11% and 17% increase in the defense budget in 2011 and 2012. One of the main targets of these expenditures has been the development of the Agni-V missile. The missile has a range of more than 5,000 km (3,100 miles), potentially bringing targets in China within range. The development of such long-range missiles was clearly carried out with China in mind, as with its previous level of capability, India already possessed the capability to hit Pakistan, its traditional rival. There have also been growing fears in India over the strength of the Chinese navy. The most powerful signal of recent Chinese naval expansion has been the purchase of an aircraft carrier which they have recently begun testing at sea. Because Indian power and trade is reliant on open access to the seas, it is vital that India try and keep up with the Chinese buildup, at least to a certain extent. To that end, India has set out on its own naval expansion program.

Indian military spending. Data from SIPRI.

Interpreting such developments in terms of an offensive posture, however, might be misleading.  In August 2009, India’s former Chief of Naval Staff declared “In military terms, both conventionally and unconventionally, we can neither have the capability nor the intention to match China force for force…” Pointing out that India’s expenditure on defense has been hovering around a low two-three percent of the GDP in recent years, Mehta said that the strategy to deal with China on the military front would be to introduce modern technology and create a “reliable stand-off deterrent.” Such increasing armaments programs are counter-intuitive from the perspective of deterrence theory, as both India and China already possess nuclear weapons. These efforts then, should not just be interpreted in terms of preparation for explicit military engagement, but rather in terms of containing China’s sphere of influence in the region.

This broader Indian security policy can be understood by looking at efforts involving other nations in military exercises and informal security arrangements. In 2011, India started conducting naval exercises with Japan after a five-year hiatus of not involving any country except the U.S. in such exercises. Indeed, in terms of external balancing, it is not only India who might seek out the U.S., who might very well need India to counter-balance a rising regional hegemon.

Developments in this region do not just have huge implications for India, but for the U.S. as well. Robert Kaplan predicts that the Indian Ocean will replace the Mediterranean as the central arena of global energy flows, container traffic, and politics in this century. Though necessary, systematizing an alliance with India however, will not be the easiest choice for the United States. The Indian government is plagued with uncertainty – this was visible in the stalling that took place in implementing the nuclear deal with the United States. As Narang and Staniland point out, “The combination of tight electoral competition, pervasive patronage, and coalition politics has led to minimal political incentives for ambitious (Indian)politicians to invest in strategic assessment, policy debates, or the other mechanisms of strategic optimization that are supposed to bolster strategic preparation in a democratic polity.” While it is too early to claim that India has gotten to the point of seeing China as an immediate and direct threat to its national interest, it certainly seems that India is hedging its bets, even if it is just in terms of threat preparation via internal balancing.

Biting Off More Than You Can Chew: Turkey, Syria and the PKK

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As the conflict in Syria worsens, an increasing number of Syrians have been heading to Turkey. The UN Refugee Agency warned on Tuesday that the number of refugees in Turkey could increase up to 200,000. Currently, around 80,000 Syrians are already registered in Turkey across nine refugee camps, with Turkey building facilities for six more camps in order to increase their capacity to accommodate refugees. This burgeoning refugee crisis is stoking tensions in Turkey, both on a local as well as a national level.

At the local level, observers have noted increased tensions in the Hatay district of Turkey, where about a million Alawis reside (Alawis are ethnically Arab and are related to the Alawi-dominated Syrian state). While some have cautioned that this in no way means that the Alawis in Turkey are directly supporting the Assad regime in Syria, the conflict has nonetheless turned their presence into a sensitive subject. As evidence, some Turkish media outlets have commented that Syrians in Turkey are being given priority over Turks in public hospitals in the district and are putting a strain on various other public services as well.

At the national level, the refugee crisis has highlighted the increasing inability of the government to deal with the Kurdish “issue.” Aliza Marcus argues in The National Interest that “the real fear isn’t that Syria will be divided. It’s that Kurds are uniting.” About a third of the PKK members are drawn from Kurds residing in Syria and organizational links are said to exist between the PKK in Turkey and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the  PKK in Syria. These ties date back to the early 1980s, from when Abdullah Öcalan, the founding member of the PKK, built up the organization from Damascus once he was forced to flee Turkey.

Intensifying PKK attacks started this July when the PKK took over a large amount of territory in the town of Şemdinli, a district in southeastern Turkey bordering Northern Iraq. Şemdinli then witnessed a two-week showdown between Turkish military and the PKK, with the Turkish government claiming that it killed 150 PKK terrorists in the two weeks. On August 13th, the PKK kidnapped Hüseyin Aygün, a deputy for Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Its most recent public attack (allegedly) was in Gaziantep, a city 30 miles from the Syrian border, where a car bomb killed 9 civilians while injuring 70 others.

The Turkish government’s problems extend beyond the worsening situation in Syria and the refugee problem, however.  Last year, it had tried to strike an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq to import a large amount of oil and natural gas, in exchange for exporting refined petroleum products to the region . While on the face of it, the deal increases the country’s energy and economic security, it was also seen as fulfilling certain strategic goals. Gonul Tol writing in The National Interest argues:

From the Turkish perspective, closer ties to the KRG serve Turkey’s strategic interests in Syria. Turkey would like to use the clout of Barzani (the current President of Iraqi Kurdistan) with the Syrian Kurds to sideline the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the PKK offshoot in Syria, and to gain some influence with the Syrian Kurds in a post-Assad scenario.

However, in April of this year, the Iraqi government declared that the export of oil to Turkey was illegitimate and that the oil and natural gas reserves were the property of all Iraqis and should therefore be federally managed, instead of by the KRG alone. In May, Iraq awarded Pakistan Petroleum the right to explore for gas, officially snubbing Turkey, who is also harboring Iraq’s fugitive former Vice-President.

So what do all these events mean for Ankara? In terms of posing a threat to Turkey, the number of Kurds in Syria are too dispersed and fragmented as compared to their kin in Iraq and Turkey. The issue is most salient nationally as it highlights the inability of the ruling AKP to deal with the issue. Writing in the Hurriyet Daily News, analyst Semih Idiz laments:

What makes it sadder is that the situation in terms of Kurdish cultural rights is much better than it was a decade ago, and the government has the strongest mandate from the electorate any government has had over the past four to five decades. Given this situation, the government was in a position to take bold steps aimed at solving the Kurdish problem.

Instead of moving in that direction, however, it has moved in the traditional direction of considering the Kurdish problem as one that is not political in nature but a simple question of security and terrorism……The prospects for solving the Kurdish problem soon, therefore, do not appear good, which unfortunately points to more bloodshed and increased ethnic estrangement.

Discrimination despite Development: Women’s Position in India

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Although the causes remain unclear, India, considered by most a progressive and tolerant nation, is witnessing a sudden spate of violent crimes against women. Earlier in June, a survey of 370 gender specialists found India to be the worst place to be a woman among all the G-20 countries (a list that also includes Saudi Arabia). Just last week, an 18-year-old in Assam, a state in northeastern India, was molested by a mob of 20 men. While people standing around clearly had enough time to record a video, no one bothered to call the police. Public apathy notwithstanding, official inaction has also contributed to a steadily deteriorating situation. A few months back, police in Gurgaon advised women against venturing out after 8 pm. In February, the government of West Bengal reacted to the gang-rape of a young woman by accusing the victim of having ‘loose morals’ and being part of a conspiracy that would discredit the Chief Minister of the state.

It is not only violent crimes that are commonplace, other kinds of (non-violent) crimes—commonly referred to as “eve-teasing”—are a part of many women’s daily existence while out at work or on public transport, and include being subjected to sexually suggestive remarks and unwanted physical contact. The expression of discomfort by many women led the Delhi Metro to designate separate, women-only carriages on the train. However, as many have rightly claimed, separation of the sexes is not something that increases tolerance. An anonymous blog post by a woman highlights how her ride in the Delhi metro turned nasty when she did not board the ladies’ carriage of the train and instead traveled in the general compartment.

Indeed, it does seem that crimes against women are on the increase: according to the National Crime Records Bureau in India, there was a 7.1% hike in recorded crimes against women between 2010 and 2011. The biggest leaps occurred in cases under “the dowry prohibition act,” which classifies the act of giving or take dowry, as well as violent acts towards a woman after marriage in order to demand material goods from her family as a criminal act (up 27.7%), of kidnapping and abduction (up 19.4% year on year), and of rape (up 9.2%).

India Crime Rates. Source: Iyer, Mani, Mishra and Topalova (2011).

These disturbing trends raise the question of why crime against women has being rising in India. This is all the more puzzling given the overall decrease in other kinds of crime (see figure).

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Underachievers as Leaders? Singh and Obama

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Two weeks after Time magazine ran a cover story on Manmohan Singh labeling him ‘the underachiever’, The Outlook, a weekly Indian magazine, has disclosed that it will be running a cover story on Barack Obama for its next issue using the same label to describe the American president.

Singh and Obama.

Time magazine criticised Singh for being “unable to control his ministers and – his new, temporary portfolio at the finance ministry notwithstanding – unwilling to stick his neck out on reforms that will continue the process of liberalisation he helped start.” Many others, such as Ratan Tata, have come quickly to the defense of Singh and argued that he should not be blamed for the country’s woes.

While some might applaud and take pride at the retort by The Outlook, there are others who are more disturbed by the sudden indignation shown by Indians about having an American magazine call their own prime minister an ‘underachiever’. Shoma Chaudhury, managing editor of Tehelka writes,

The noisy outburst over a Time magazine cover tagging Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as an “underachiever” is embarrassing proof that a large section of India’s ruling elite and media is still handcuffed to a slavish deference to western labels….Time’s covers were not exposés that pointed to any new facts about Indian public life, nor did they argue differently from dozens of domestic media outlets. So why did they trigger such seismic tremors of shame or triumph?

Others have written, “One could in fact argue that the ‘underachiever’ tag is much kinder than many other epithets like ‘complete failure’ that have been doing the rounds in Indian publications.”

While many continue to enjoy this retort, the Indian media may want to reflect on issues relevant to the Indian masses rather than responding with posts just to garner publicity. With the next general elections looming large, and many Indian voters disillusioned with the lack of credible candidates, a reflective debate might do more good than a tit-for-tat response.

Ineligible Insurgents: The Politics of Rehabilitation Programs

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Rehabilitation of ex-combatants is often thought of as one of the essential components of returning to and maintaining peace after a period of civil strife. Such initiatives are not just limited to disarmament, demobilization, reintegration, and rehabilitation (DDRR) programs that are undertaken during a ceasefire or a period of relative peace, but also refer to attempts by governments and IGOs to convince combatants in ongoing insurgencies to give up arms and commit to a rehabilitation program. In 2006, faced with a low-intensity civil war that had been carrying on for decades in many parts of Central and East India, the central government of India first announced its surrender-cum-rehabilitation policy targeted at Maoist insurgents (The term Naxalite and Maoist are often used inter-changeably in this context – the word Naxalite has its origins in Naxalbari, West Bengal, where this movement sympathetic of Maoist ideology first originated). The policy’s success or failure moving forward can be one of the keys toward the resolution of the broader conflict.

Map of the Maoist Insurgency in India

The policy had two main objectives and was applicable to insurgents who surrendered with or without arms:

(i) to wean away the misguided youth and hardcore naxalites who have strayed into the fold of naxal movement and now find themselves trapped into that net.

(ii) to ensure that the naxalites who surrender do not find it attractive to join the naxal movement again.

However, in May 2012, three months after 22 insurgents had surrendered to the West Bengal government and had offered intelligence about the whereabouts of Maoist leaders, they were denied the terms of the rehabilitation package as the cash-strapped administration did not consider these insurgents important enough to be eligible. Such behavior by states is not unheard of. In Nepal, a number of ‘late recruits’ to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of Nepal founded during the Nepalese Civil War, were not deemed eligible for rehabilitation as former full-time combatants. Given the lack of economic and educational opportunities in the conflict-ridden regions of India, it is not unlikely that these surrendered insurgents will return to arms. However, given the inability to gain access to a full or representative sample of insurgents in a conflict, research has been less conclusive while trying to understand why some ex-combatants have been able to integrate successfully, while others not.

In a 2011 article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Annan, Blattman, Mazurana, and Carlson conducted a quasi-natural experiment in Northern Uganda to determine the impact of war on participants, and if ex-combatants threaten social stability, as is normally feared. Their main findings suggest that males suffer a substantial human capital deficit – both in terms of a loss in educational opportunities and a doubling of injuries. Even if males attempt to return to school, the lack of opportunities for adult education makes it hard to acquire the needed skills.With regard to female combatants, their findings are less disheartening:

Our evidence challenges the more pessimistic theories of female psychosocial reintegration: social acceptance is high, many women and girls are psychologically resilient, and there is little evidence of aggression and violence.

While the ability of female ex-combatants to reintegrate socially might be promising, their alternatives (to being a combatant) are said to even more dismal in regions with already low educational and employment opportunities.

The Maoist insurgency mostly affects under-developed parts of India and given the lack of opportunities in these regions, the ill economic effects are likely to persist, as in the aforementioned study. However, unlike most LRA members, Maoists combatants were not forcibly abducted, which raises the danger of their return to arms, especially when faced by the lack of opportunities. Indeed, for the long-term, a more holistic development strategy for the conflict-prone districts needs to be pursued. Valuable lessons can be learnt from the way Mozambique dealt with the demobilization and reintegration of combatants. The government first signed a peace agreement with the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo) in 1992. By 1995, a majority of the ex-combatants had been granted promised job opportunities, most of them initially being employed in road-building projects in under-developed regions, which gave an impetus to the establishment of agriculture and industry in those areas

Just a month ago, journalists discovered that Abujmarh, which was considered the headquarters of the Maoist movement in India and was marked as a no-go zone until 2010, was actually just an area with, “scraggly villages and forlorn clusters of leaf and bamboo huts.” The area and neighboring regions lacked such a fundamental level of services that one of the journalists involved succumbed to a lethal attack of celebral malaria, typhoid and jaundice contracted while on this assignment. The Indian government must realize that simply granting a lump-sum of money to ex-combatants for a period of time cannot guarantee their reintegration—education and training are crucial skills that need to be imparted, but until these skills are used to develop these regions further, there is no guarantee that other civilians might be deterred from taking up arms. In the short term however, the governments must make the effort to establish credibility – initiation of rehabilitation programs that fail to deliver promised benefits will just reduce the conviction among insurgents and their civilian supporters that the government intends to meet them mid-way and achieve some sort of resolution.

When Abortion Leads to the Decline of Nations

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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Across the Atlantic from the abortion debates in Arizona, Virginia, Philadelphia, and most recently, Michigan, a very similar discussion can be found in Turkey. A few weeks ago, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that he considered abortion to be murder. The statement was strongly endorsed by the head of the Parliament’s Human Rights Commission and the Family and Social Policies Minister – both women.

However, unlike their fellow conservatives stateside, this debate is ostensibly not just based on pro-life or religious reasons. According to Erdoğan, keeping abortion legal is “a sly plan to wipe this nation off the global stage.” Such statements are not all that surprising, given that last year Erdoğan expressed concern about a declining Turkish population. He went on to urge Turkish families to have at least three kids, claiming that those who did would receive a ‘prize’.

Though a majority of Turkish citizens are in opposition to a draft bill which would make abortion illegal (abortion is currently legal in Turkey during the first 10 weeks of the pregnancy), the nature of the debate highlights two rather disturbing trends. First, it points to the over-extension of the state into highly private matters. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) has tried to adopt similar extensions into people’s private lives in the past – in 2004, they tried to criminalize adultery, but the proposal was dropped in the face of criticism both from within Turkey and from Europe.

Secondly, and more alarmingly, it showcases a nationalistic fear – of being wiped off the map and of diluting ‘Turkish-ness’. Such an understanding also naturally lends itself to giving no room for the assimilation of minorities or immigrants. In fact, some analysts have argued this decision may have political rather than religious motives behind it as it aims to counter the high birth rates among the Kurdish population of the country. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, in Southeast Anatolia and Central Anatolia, where a majority of the Kurdish population in Turkey resides, the birth rate is 27.3 per 1000 people and 22.9 per 1000 people respectively. This is much higher than the rest of the regions where most of the population is ethnically Turkish, and birth rates are below 19 per 1,000 people, with as low as 11 per 1,000 in some parts of the country (numbers reflect data from August 2011).

A counter-argument might be that the higher birthrates among the Kurds are just caused by a lack of basic services – such as education, provision of health service and birth control, and should therefore, not be linked to some sort of conspiracy by the Kurds to outnumber the Turks. Some have even claimed that the debate over abortion was started by the Prime Minister just to divert the public’s attention from the Uludere incident – where 34 civilians near the Iraqi border were killed in a strike by the Turkish military. However, some analysts have commented that organizations can use ‘ethnic reproduction’ as political tools to reach their goals. Indeed, after looking at Erdoğan’s past statements and his concern about a declining Turkish population, one cannot say with so much certainty that the debate on abortion was initiated just to divert the public’s attention.

While controversial policies geared toward ethnic minorities are nothing new for Turkey, using social policy in this manner is. Moreover, Turkish women’s groups now have to focus on getting the state to offer better alternatives to rape victims, and those women, who out of fear of giving birth to another female child in a highly patriarchal society, will take recourse to illegal and more dangerous options to terminate their girl child. In the longer term however, one must cautiously watch the nature of AKP’s policies, and how they might have troubling consequences for the mindset of Turkish society.

Questioning Democracy: A Look at India 10 Years After The Gujarat Riots

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Is Narendra Modi, the man who was responsible for India’s worst riots since independence, going to become one of the main candidates for the 2014 elections? Ten years after the deadly communal riots broke out in Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, with Narendra Modi as Chief Minister, continues strong, having won the past two state elections with over two-thirds majority. This raises two sets of puzzling questions: Why do voters continue to view Modi in a positive light, despite the knowledge that he colluded with state police to assume a passive role during the course of the riots? And how has the nature of party politics in India allowed such deficiencies in the democratic process to persist?

Sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001, Modi watched as a carnage was committed in broad daylight by Hindu mobs. Mobilized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a volunteer-based Hindu nationalist organization, a large number of Hindu mobs attacked and looted Muslim homes.  The precipitating event for these bloody massacres was said to be an attack by radical Islamists on a train containing VHP activists.

A 2011 report attested that two ministers sat in the police controls, remaining deliberately oblivious to the riots raging outside. Much earlier in 2003, a senior police officer and minister were murdered for having said that the police was instructed by Modi not to intervene.  This is not the only blot on Modi’s record as Chief Minister. Gujarat has also become infamous for its extrajudicial killings, commonly referred to as ‘staged encounters’, where the security forces in the state target ‘terror suspects’ even when they do not have a criminal record.

Despite this, in a poll conduced by India Today, one of India’s leading magazines, in February 2012, 24% voted that they wanted Narendra Modi as the next Prime Minister of India, with Rahul Gandhi, his nearest rival, getting 17% of the votes. This number is astonishing given that, in another online poll, Modi received the highest number of ‘no’ votes on The Times’  100 most influential people, making him the most disliked person on the list. How has Modi managed to gain such popularity despite the obvious doubts cast about him when he presided over the carnage in 2002? Much of his popularity seems rooted in economic performance. In 2008, the Tata Group, one of India’s biggest industrial giants came to Gujarat. This marked a turning point as it gave a positive signal to investors. Soon after, Ford and Peugeot also followed. This carefully crafted image of a state open to FDI, which focuses on improving the welfare of its citizens via economic growth, has its fair share of supporters.

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