India's Muslim and Christian minority communities are growing at a faster rate than the Hindu majority in the country of more than one billion people, a new census report shows. (AFP File Photo)

We were at a gathering of publishers, and publishers were engaged in what they love best, jockeying for power within an institution. Suddenly a member from a town in north India got up and urged everyone's attention on the census figures. We had a wise man in the chair, who used the first opportunity to interrupt and change the subject. The implication is obvious. Population statistics, and particularly the alleged "leap" in the Muslim population of India, have entered the public discourse.
There have been some tart responses to the tardy sequence of claim, correction, denial and distortion that has been inflicted upon us by the Census Bureau. But this confusion is not, anymore, a cloak that hides facts. It is instead a backdrop on which a single message is being advertised by certain politicians and social activists: That the population of Indian Muslims is rising at an "alarming" rate. This "alarm bell" is a "wake-up call" to Hindus to rise and meet the "challenge".
The dialectic of alarm raises its own dictionary of questions. How do you deal with this "problem"? By competition or elimination? By encouraging Hindus to have more children or by forcible contraception of Muslims.
By encouraging Hindus to have more children or by forcible contraception of Muslims. Those in parties like the BJP or Shiv Sena who raise such questions take care never to provide answers. It is far more convenient to leave answers to the fertility of thought or imagination. The politics of confrontation is played out in the mind, for that is the true battlefield of opinion.
Such politics is not the exclusive privilege of Hindu hard-liners; all through the 20th century a section of Indian Muslim leaders continually upped the ante in their search for "Hindu" enemy. In a sense their need helped create the enemy. At the forefront of such politics were conservative clergy, seeking to convert their influence into control of the community, and salivating politicians, who were sure this was the easiest route to votes.
It may have been a coincidence, but two crises visited India simultaneously. The economic collapse in 1991, symbolized by the transfer of Indian gold reserves to London, forced economic reform. We were fortunate to find an excellent leader in the then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. The social collapse was symbolized by the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992, and the vicious riots that followed. This collapse needed drastic social reform and a doctor and determination of equal ability. This social reform was needed as much among Hindus as Muslims; the mobs that hunt during riots are hardly the paradigm of civilization. Rao had credibility and cachet among Hindus, just as Arjun Singh had the confidence of Muslims. Perhaps it was a moment that called for cooperation between the two. But Rao's horizon generally never crossed self-preservation, and Singh lost the plot.
But when leadership fails, people seek their own answers. Indian Muslims learned the best possible lesson from December 1992. Their trust in politicians withered, and they, at long last, took to education with the kind of missionary zeal that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan induced in the 1880s. This is why at least one census figure has surprised those with conventional ideas about Indian Muslims. They are virtually on par with other communities in literacy and education.
Just as economic reform needed a heavy injection of privatization, social reform also needs privatization. The time has come to privatize facts.
Today the government of India is the sole owner, and therefore the sole dispenser of facts. The census is a case in point. Every ten years we are presented with statistics that are vital to our understanding of our nation, essential to policy-making, and determinants of political behavior that in turn creates or destroys government. These statistics are delivered unto us from a bureaucratic Mount Sinai, with all the certainty of the Ten Commandments. How accurate are they? No one knows. Experience in other matters indicates that while you can accuse a government of many things, you can never accuse it of efficiency. How many errors and prejudices are hidden in those statistics? How much laziness and indifference clogs truth? The simple answer is that we do not know. We will never really know until we have privatized the facts.
M.J. Akbar
ARABNEWS.COM

It will soon be 10 years since Boris Yeltsin launched the first war in Chechnya, and five years since Vladimir Putin resumed it. The result is clear: The war is destroying Russia and merging with international terrorism.
The streak of terrorist attacks, culminating with the horror of Beslan, has confirmed that Russia has a systemic problem. The various immediate responses--the investigative commissions of the Council of Federation, the creation of neighborhood patrols, the firing of government ministers and the dismissal of regional governments--are not only insufficient, they are a senseless imitation of activity to quell public opinion.
This does not mean that we don't need to reform the law-enforcement and intelligence services, or that we don't need to strengthen oversight and control. All this is necessary. But in our situation, all these scratches on the surface do not resolve the problem of security.
To confront terrorism, we need to fundamentally change the political and economic system that has taken shape in Russia over the last 10 years.
This system, so familiar to Russia, has at least seven attributes: absence of independent and politically meaningful mass media; absence of an independent parliament; absence of an independent judiciary; absence of civil control over intelligence and law-enforcement agencies; absence of free elections; the complete fusion of business and government; and rule by clans.
Clearly, the organic medium for such a system is widespread corruption, the suppression of independent parties and opinion, and the fragmentation and deterioration of civic organizations.
What is the public face of this system? Only lies and evasions. We see this daily. The freedom of expression we had in the early 1990s has been exchanged for money, property and power. This did not come about by chance. It was deliberately and consciously created under slogans such as, "We're not ready yet," or "Democracy is not for Russia." The system was touted as "managed democracy," "stability."
This system is perfectly suitable for a narrow group of people that calls itself "the state," and for their economic interests. The intelligence and law-enforcement services are designed to provide security for this group. They are not suited for protecting citizens from danger, or from terrorism.
Thus the issue in Beslan is not what exactly happened, or who did what or made which decisions. It is that the whole system reacted to protect those in power, their priorities, their ambitions--and not the people, not the children.
The political, social and economic system in place in today's Russia is incapable of defending the country against terrorism--or of creating a modern competitive economy, or of ensuring a dignified life for its citizens. All these cosmetic measures--firings and appointments, commissions and ukases--are not going to help.
Yet this is not the whole problem. Under the conditions of life on the ruins of the Soviet system, under the leadership of the worst elements of the Soviet nomenclature and the total breakdown of all moral and cultural guideposts, the organized manipulation of the people has borne fruits. There is no one to change the system.
Still, we have to swim on. We cannot go to the bottom in this sea of cynicism and lies. The broad signposts are there: Our Constitution, with all its many imperfections, presupposes real separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial; public television and the abolition of censorship; civil control over the activities of the government and the security forces; the inviolability of private property, and fair competition. We have most of the answers to the question, "What to do?" The main question is how.
Grigory Yavlinsky is the leader of the Yabloko Party, the oldest liberal party in Russia
IHT.COM

Brazil's President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (r) addresses the media after he and other heads of state, including French President Jacques Chirac, met to discuss international action against hunger and poverty, at the United Nations in New York, Sept. 20. (Reuters File Photo)

Did you know: - Over 60 Heads of State attended a World Hunger Summit at the United Nations in New York on September 20, 2004?
- That the idea of the summit arose from Latin America and was initiated by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva?
- That Lula and French President Jacques Chirac led the effort to successfully convince the 113 assembled world leaders and representatives to issue a new declaration to fight hunger and poverty and to increase funds for development?
- The United States was not among them?
It's a shame the Lula story was mostly passed over--even by the media outlets that claim to carry all that's fit to print. 'Peace will never rise from poverty and hunger,' Lula told the UN General Assembly.
President Jacques Chirac flew to the U.S. solely to attend the poverty and development summit. Although he traveled to New York for the General Assembly session President George W. Bush skipped the poverty meeting, sending instead U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman.
"How many more times will it be necessary to repeat that the most destructive weapon of mass destruction in the world is poverty?" Lula asked. "Fair globalization must begin with the right of everyone to a job," he said, adding, "dignified work, like the fight against hunger, cannot wait."
Terrorism, the Latin American leader said, cannot be fought exclusively by military means. "We have to develop strategies combining solidarity and firmness that are rigidly within the rule of law".
The French and Brazilian leaders, along with the others attending the summit, agreed that the problem of peace and security in today's world cannot be divorced from the reality of hundreds of millions of peoples' daily existence. For instance, that 800 million human beings in the world are undernourished, that some 334 million live in extreme poverty-a number which is expected to increase to 471 million over the next five years--and that 40 percent of the world population lack elementary conditions for health and most have no access to clean water.
"In 1820, the per capita income of the richest nation in the world was five times greater than that of the poorest," said the Brazilian leader. "Today this disparity has reached 80 to 1. The perverse logic of draining the needy to irrigate the bountiful still stands. A powerful and all-encompassing invisible cog wheel runs the system from afar. It often revokes democratic decisions, shrivels the sovereignty of states and imposes itself to elected governments."
Lula called for 'an important shift in the financial flows from international multilateral organisms' to foster ``just and sustainable development.' `
At the summit, Latin American leaders joined in calling attention to globalization's failure to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, and urged global lenders like the International Monetary Fund to allow them to spend more on social projects and infrastructure.
The Summit was held in advance of a special General Assembly summit next year called to assess progress toward meeting the goals of the 2000 Millennium Summit. Those goals included halving the number of people living in dire poverty by 2015, and guaranteeing that all children in the world have an elementary school education, that all families have clean water and that the AIDS epidemic is arrested.
ZMAG.ORG

For the past few days, Italy has been bewitched by 79-year-old Giorgio Angelozzi's quest for a family. The former Latin teacher had placed an advert in the Corriere della Sera, mourning his loneliness as he became increasingly infirm and asked to be adopted as a grandfather. On Friday, besieged by offers, he had found his family.
The story had such a resonance not only for its charm and pathos, but because it spoke to one of the disturbing but increasingly dominant themes in Italian life. Italy is dying--and Mr Angelozzi is a forerunner of what is to come.
For Italy is suffering a baby bust; in 2004, its population is starting to decline. Even if Italian men and women start to form more families earlier and have more babies in the immediate future, Italy's population is set to drop from today's 58 million to some 44 million by 2050. If there is no recovery in the birth rate, its population will fall even further.
No advanced country in modern times has ever experienced such a calamity, a contemporary version of a medieval plague. The consequence of a population falling by these numbers infects every pore of a civilisation.
The rate of economic growth falls before, ultimately, it contracts. Schools and companies alike face stagnation and decline; what grows is every aspect of care for the elderly. Pensions become unaffordable. Music, film, literature, art and theatre all start to wilt before the same ageing and decline contagion. The wellsprings of creativity--optimism, hope for a better tomorrow and the need to explore the human condition--run dry. The defining feelings are of loneliness and defeat.
In Italy, there is an urgent debate about why the birth rate is so low. The Vatican's grip on the country's culture and mores remains fierce, even if attendance at church is in headlong decline; guilt-ridden Italians have children only when they marry. Just 10 per cent of births are outside marriage; in Britain, it is 41 per cent. Moreover, the average 30-year-old Italian man is still living at home, while the average age that an Italian woman has her first child is over 30, compared to under 27 in Britain. Marrying late, Italians necessarily have fewer children.
The most cited reason is housing. Rented accommodation is over-regulated, and buying a house or flat is made impossibly difficult. Regulated Italian banks, protected from takeover by Italy's complex system of family cross-shareholding in Europe's least competitive financial system, are famously hopeless at mortgage lending. While first-time buyers in Britain can expect to borrow as much 100 per cent of the price of their first house or flat, and pay less than 2 per cent in fees and tax, Italian first-time buyers are lucky if they can borrow two-thirds of the value of their first house.
But the decision to have a child is not just about having your own roof over your head; it is about whether the wider economic, social and cultural structures support women's need both to combine independence and the rewards from working with all the demands that fall to them in child-rearing.
There is much less part-time work in Italy than in Britain; childcare structures are even more primitive; working patterns are habitually family unfriendly; and Italian 'new' men, ready to take a half-share in the duties of parenting, are scarcer in Italy than they are in Britain.
The vortex of gender relationships, morality, traditional expectations of women and women's changing expectations of themselves, inflexible work patterns and expensive housing that contribute to the falling birth rate are all more acute, but their irresolution is confronting Italy with a crisis that menaces its very being as a national community and continuing civilisation.
OBSERVER.CO.UK

The European Union's enlargement commissioner has finally given Turkey a clean chit, saying he is satisfied with the constitutional and political reforms Ankara has carried out to strengthen its bid for joining the EU.
Mr Gunter Verheugen said on Thursday that there now remained "no obstacles" to his recommending Turkey for EU membership when he formally reports to the commission next month. Earlier in July, assuming the rotating EU presidency, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkemende had urged member states not to be deterred by Islamophobia among certain segments of Europeans--with France leading the chorus--when reviewing Turkey's case.
Ankara's bid for joining Europe dates back to the creation of the European Community, the predecessor of the EU, in 1963. Its first success came as late as 1999, when the EU officially recognized its candidature, formally requiring Ankara to undertake wide-ranging economic, political and constitutional reforms aimed at meeting the union's democratic and human rights criteria.
The current ruling Justice and Development Party led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made giant strides towards realizing that goal. Among the reforms undertaken in the last two years are: abolition of the death penalty, imposition of limits on the role of the army in politics, recognition of the Kurdish and Armenian minorities and their languages, and abolition of torture in prisons.
The only thing now apparently holding Turkey back from acceptance as an EU member is the vociferous negative opinion held by the Christian right in some EU countries. The Dutch prime minister was thus right in reminding fellow politicians that they should not pander to parochial elements and their narrow-minded view of an expanded EU when they sit down to review Turkey's case in December.
DAWN.COM