The global spread of dengue virus has immunologists and public-health experts debating the best way to curb infection.
In 1961, during the first dengue outbreak physician Scott Halstead ever witnessed, children poured into Bangkok’s hospitals, passing and vomiting blood, faint from blisteringly high fevers. Twenty percent of the children would die within a few days as doctors scrambled to find treatments, with some in nearby Vietnam even plunging children into ice baths in an attempt to hold down their soaring temperatures.
The deadly illness caused by dengue virus wasn’t yet known as dengue in Thailand; doctors there referred to it as “Chinese medicine poisoning” based on a demographic quirk. Although half the city’s population was Chinese, the only time Thai doctors—who practiced Western medicine—treated Chinese children was when the children had been stricken with this mysterious, deadly illness. Thus, doctors imagined that a horrific poisoning caused by Eastern remedies was responsible for the influx of Chinese patients. Instead, Halstead explains, Chinese parents had quickly learned that the hospital, rather than traditional medicine, was the best bet—however slim the chances—for defeating dengue.
Halstead who was drafted into the US Army after World War II and originally sent to Japan in 1957 to study encephalitis, had just settled into a lab across the street from the Children’s Hospital in Bangkok. “Everything I’ve ever done,” he says in retrospect, “is related to the treatment of dengue.” In the years that followed, he and his colleagues identified dengue as the cause of the outbreak and began tracking the four different versions of the virus, each transmitted by mosquitoes. Among their seminal discoveries, the researchers learned that the hemorrhagic disease that they saw in 1961 was most common when a child is infected with a second type of dengue—a finding that would prove pivotal in the decades-long search for a vaccine that continues today.
But as research efforts have evolved, so has the reach of dengue infections. The disease has now become prevalent in more than 100 countries, causing as many as 100 million infections per year. And it’s still spreading. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 2.5–3 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world’s population, are now at risk of being infected with dengue—including some in the developed world. In the past few years, cases of dengue have popped up in Texas, Florida, France, and Croatia. Of the 500,000 cases of severe dengue requiring hospitalization and the roughly 24,000 deaths they cause each year, most are in children, according to the WHO. And control measures have been met with challenges. One high-profile vaccine trial conducted by the French vaccine company Sanofi Pasteur partially failed last year, leaving investigators scratching their heads. The defeat comes amid fears of some researchers that vaccines have the potential to exacerbate a dengue infection rather than protect against it. “We’re in a mess,” Halstead says bluntly.
Going viral
When Halstead started digging into dengue in the 1960s, only a handful of countries were home to all four types of the virus, which represent four separate viral jumps from monkeys to humans between 100 to 800 years ago, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But in the decades since, the four types—simply called dengue 1, 2, 3, and 4—have independently made their way around the globe. Poor urban planning and warming climates are partly to blame, having opened new territories to the mosquitoes that carry the virus, and global travel and trade have provided the necessary transit.
Tires may be the best example of mosquito and dengue transport: shipped across the globe on barges, tires collect water rings that offer mosquitoes first-class tickets to new locations. Consequently, dengue’s vectors, Aedes aegypti (the yellow fever mosquito) and A. albopictus (the tiger mosquito), have surged in new locations in Central and South America, Australia, and even in the lower United States. The yellow fever mosquito is particularly insidious, biting during the day, and able to spawn in water-filled crannies no larger than a small cup. Its eggs can withstand drought conditions, allowing the population to quickly bounce back after a dry spell. It is now a common pest of dense urban areas—bringing disease with it.
After a cluster of dengue infections struck continental Europe, the European Union (EU) provided funding in 2011 for researchers to assess where dengue would strike next, amid fear that dengue would continue to spread in the developed world. The disease has traveled so quickly that “we only have estimates of the global burden of dengue, which is astonishing,” says epidemiologist Simon Hay of Oxford University, who is part of a consortium that’s developing risk maps of future dengue spread. The group is currently working on a map of where the disease exists now; only later will it work on how warming climates and city sprawl might change the map, says Jane Messina, the head medical geographer on the project.
Concerns have flared over the possibility that dengue could easily become endemic in Europe and in the United States, which had its own cluster of infections in 2012 in Texas and Florida. Ae. aegypti is now found in 23 states and A. albopictus in 26. “Dengue can occur anywhere the mosquito vectors occur,” says Ronald Rosenberg, the associate director of the CDC’s division of vector-borne diseases and a member of the WHO’s committee on neglected tropical diseases.
If experience from abroad is any indication, the economic impact of a dengue epidemic could be huge. Though severe disease is usually rare, it creates a big burden on health-care systems, says microbiologist and dengue expert Aravinda de Silva, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who works in Sri Lanka where dengue has long been endemic. “Hemorrhagic fever is a massive concern. Every parent is terrified of their child getting it,” he explains. Parents often bring their children into the hospital at the first sign of dengue infection, which leads to many unnecessary hospitalizations—and the costs add up. With precautionary care as well as treatments for those who do get severe disease, dengue outbreaks weigh heavily on local economies—an outbreak in Thailand in 1994, for instance, cost an estimated $51 million, not including dengue prevention programs. Such an economic strain has brought the infection to the top of priority lists in health ministries around the world.
The global spread of dengue over the past 3 decades, however, has driven more resources to research on how the virus spreads and how it can be defeated.
Catching a virus
Before the name “dengue” caught on in the Americas, it was often referred to as “breakbone fever,” or la quebradora in Spanish. The nickname refers to the crippling aches that come with infection. Once delivered by a mosquito, dengue virus hijacks skin and some immune cells and hitchhikes through the lymphatic system, infecting other tissues and organs and loading the bloodstream with viral replicates. The body’s immune system counters with blazing inflammation, causing sharp pains in muscles. Eighteenth-century reports of dengue infection describe the wretched gaits of patients as they staggered on swollen limbs, often in a stupor from fever.
For the lucky, those will be the worst of their symptoms. Others, however, can develop life-threatening disease. If the inflammation firestorm gets out of hand, it can damage the lining of capillaries—the smallest blood vessels—causing gaps through which blood plasma can seep. Systemic internal leaking quickly leads to a drop in blood pressure, followed by shock, organ failure, and massive bleeding.
Between 2005 and 2007, Managua, Nicaragua, saw a mysterious spike in the number of children entering hospitals with dengue hemorrhagic fever and shock syndrome. Since the 1980s, the neighborhoods around the city had been riddled with Ae. aegypti as well as the four dengue types they carry, but no one knew why so many more children were suddenly developing severe disease. Infectious disease researcher Eva Harris and her team from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health had been working on infectious disease there for decades, and noticed severe dengue disease occurred in children reinfected with a second type of the virus, similar to the pattern Halstead saw in the 1960s with second infections.
Simona Zompi, an immunologist working on Harris’s team, was dissecting the immune system’s response to dengue. When a person is initially infected, the dengue viral particles attack skin and immune cells by latching onto receptors on the cell surface. The cells enclose the viruses in a sac—a process called receptor-mediated endocytosis—that would normally digest the viral captives with enzymes in an acidic milieu, like a piece of food in the stomach. But dengue virus particles escape digestion by rearranging their envelope proteins to fuse with the sac’s membrane, opening a channel through which the capsid-encoated viral genome is released into the infected cell’s cytoplasm. Once free, the virus usurps the cell’s machinery to create a viral factory, triggering a full-blown dengue infection.
Zompi and the team focused on B cells, which react to the infection by creating antibodies against the infecting virus. Once the virus is defeated, some of these cells go into hibernation as memory B cells, which become quickly reactivated upon reinfection with dengue for the rest of the person’s life. Those antibodies normally foil infection by blanketing the viral particle, which prevents the virus from binding to cell receptors and entering cells. The antibody-coated virus is then taken up by monocytes or macrophages, which, after endcytosis, can digest the invader because the coated particle is unable to escape the digestive sac.
However, this protective immune response depends on whether antibodies can bind strongly enough to coat and disable—or neutralize—the virus, Zompi explains. Some antibodies bind poorly to the viral particle and, as a result, only a few manage to cling to the virus, which is just enough to entice macrophages and monocytes to engulf them. However, without complete antibody coverage of the viral coat, the virus can still escape from the endocytic sacs of the macrophages or monocytes and take over the very cells that have engulfed it. (See illustration below.) Now, the virus has an additional pathway to enter cells: all of the immune cells recruited and activated by the antibodies could potentially become virus-producing factories. Thus, antibodies with poor binding affinity and neutralizing potential effectively boost the infection, and the inflammatory response can crank to inferno levels, causing hemorrhagic fever and shock syndromes. Scientists refer to this explanation for severe disease as “antibody-dependent enhancement” (ADE) of the immune response.
Most antibodies generated against a specific dengue type, dengue 1 for example, will bind well and be able to thwart future infections of that type. But when a new type of dengue invades—dengue 2, for instance—the reactivated dengue 1 antibodies may only partially recognize the virus and thus lead to ADE. Indeed, Harris and Zompi found that as the predominant circulating dengue virus type switched in Managua, patients hospitalized with dengue made the strongest antibody response to a dengue type from a previous infection, not the current infecting dengue type. And most countries are infested with the four types of dengue that can fluctuate in prevalence.
Some researchers worry that vaccines designed to spur antibody production might instead trigger ADE if the B cells generate low-affinity antibodies rather than those that completely blanket the virus. If that were the case, being vaccinated could predispose children to ADE.
Vaccine development dissension
But not all dengue researchers are convinced that severe disease can be explained by the ADE response, says de Silva. There are two competing hypotheses about how severe hemorrhagic and shock diseases might unfurl: other immune cells, such as T cells, may present different fragments of the virus to the immune system, stimulating a greater inflammatory response; or, more virulent subtypes of each of the dengue types may trigger the more severe immune reaction characteristic of ADE. But the antibody hypothesis is certainly the front-runner, de Silva says—especially after his recent discovery of how dengue-neutralizing antibodies work.
During initial infection, the human immune system makes a range of antibodies with different affinities to the virus. The antibodies capable of neutralizing the virus apparently latch onto a wedge between two adjacent molecules of an envelope protein on the coat of the intact virion. The new finding is significant because it casts doubt on past immunology and vaccine-development studies that have focused on generating an antibody response against only a small fragment of the envelope protein in isolation. Antibodies that don’t neutralize the virus by binding to the wedge may be candidate ADE generators, says de Silva.
Yet many researchers in the field are reluctant to acknowledge the new complication, says Halstead. “A lot of people don’t like to have to address [the possibility of ADE] head on,” he says.
Indeed, current recommendations by the WHO on conducting clinical trials of candidate dengue vaccines don’t include specific guidelines for ADE. In fact, ADE and its potential causes are considered a hypothetical concern that should not interfere with development of a vaccine, according to the WHO.
“[ADE] may not be a concern, in my own opinion,” says infectious-disease researcher Claire Huang, of the CDC’s division of vector-borne diseases, echoing the WHO’s stance. Along with a team of researchers at the CDC, Huang has been toiling for years to develop an effective vaccine, and is working with the commercial vaccine developer Inviragen on a vaccine now in Phase 2 clinical trials. It may be more complicated, she adds, but most antibody responses are protective and robust.
The vaccine she’s been working on is tetravalent, meaning it’s designed to generate antibodies against all four types of dengue. Huang and her team borrowed the genetic backbone of an earlier successful vaccine against the type 2 virus, and dressed that genome, with its attenuating mutations, in the other three viral coats, creating four recombinant viruses. “From the outside, they all look like either dengue 1, dengue 2, dengue 3, or dengue 4, but inside they’re all the same attenuated virus,” she explains. The team hopes that the vaccine will produce a suite of neutralizing antibodies against all types of dengue.
So far, the results look promising. The vaccine sailed through Phase 1 trials, proving safe in healthy children and adults in Colombia and the U.S. who had no prior exposure to dengue. But the earlier tetravalent vaccine made by Sanofi Pasteur also had great early results. After buzzing through initial safety tests and Phase 2 trials, that vaccine moved to a Phase 2b trial, which enlisted 4,000 school-age children in Thailand’s Ratchaburi Province. The vaccine required three shots over the course of a year, and in September the company revealed that only 30 percent might be protected, although none of the results were statistically significant.
“I looked at the vaccine results and wondered if they had given people water,” Halstead says. “It was very surprising,” echoes de Silva. It’s still unclear what went wrong, he says. The vaccine showed 80 to 90 percent protection against dengue types 3 and 4, and around 60 percent protection against dengue 1. But it failed at protecting against dengue 2—the dengue that was circulating that year at high levels. The question we’re left with, de Silva says, is whether that virus was just a mismatch with the vaccine, or if the dengue 2 portion of the vaccine simply didn’t generate a good antibody response in the vaccinated children.
The only triumph of the trial was that it didn’t show an increase in severe disease. Of the 4,000 children vaccinated, only five developed severe disease. “The vaccine was still very safe,” says Dan Stinchcomb, cofounder and CEO of Inviragen. “[The Sanofi] vaccine is somewhat similar to ours, and the trial laid to rest one of the biggest concerns,” he says. The study demonstrated “that if you’re not fully protected against all four viruses, then you’re not more susceptible to severe disease,” or ADE.
But Halstead points out that the trial only followed children for a year—not long enough for them to become infected a second time. In that time frame, it’s impossible to know if the risks of ADE are actually diminished, he says.
A different angle
In the meantime, others are looking to non-vaccine strategies to contain the disease. Despite the potential for spread in the developed world, most global health experts are focused on developing countries. With advanced water-management systems, responsive public-health programs, and effective disease monitoring, dengue outbreaks in the U.S. or Europe have a good chance of being quashed quickly, says Rosenberg. “The risk pales in comparison to the daily risk of getting dengue in the tropics,” he adds.
Because of logistical barriers in developing countries, some experts doubt that vaccines are the best answer to the dengue problem. “Implementing a vaccine is difficult,” says Rosenberg. For example, if the vaccine requires multiple boosters, most people in low-income communities will have difficulty receiving and/or affording all of the doses. “It’s unlikely that the vaccine is going to be the panacea for controlling dengue,” he says.
In the absence of an effective vaccine or a halt to mosquito breeding, clinicians have honed the art of treating severe disease. With no infection-specific protocol, doctors treat severe disease by compensating for lost fluids, which is akin to constantly pumping up a punctured tire. The challenge is to maintain a patient’s blood pressure at a high enough level to circulate blood without going too far and “popping” the system, thus causing life-threatening edemas that saturate the lungs or brain. This is tricky to do in adults, but even trickier in infants and children, who are more likely to develop the disease.
However, more and more doctors are beginning to learn best practices for controlling the disease. In Bangkok, where Thai clinicians are at the forefront of clinical case management, a 20 percent mortality rate of dengue-infected patients in the 1960s is now down to just 0.1 percent. Doctors and nurses convene after each death to discuss in painstaking detail what went wrong. Clinicians now have such a fine understanding of the physiology of the disease—and how to track and control it by monitoring vital signs and urine output, and administering delicate fluid therapies while monitoring plasma volume—that death is avoidable, says de Silva.
In Nicaragua, Harris and UC Berkeley-based researcher Josefina Coloma are working with an international nonprofit group to spur grass-roots community projects to educate residents about the mosquito life cycle, and to motivate them to eliminate standing water that can be a breeding ground for Ae. aegypti. Their preliminary findings showed that community efforts were able to reduce dengue infection. Simply informing people of the link between standing water and disease transmission has had an important impact, Harris says.
Indeed, the inability to keep dengue from spreading is a shame, Halstead says. Despite advanced research, he argues, dengue is a disease of medieval sanitation and water systems, irresponsible urbanization, and a lack of basic education about disease spread. “If we stop dengue by immunizing,” without mosquito controls and other prevention methods, Halstead says, “then I would say that human beings have copped out. If dengue [only] ends because of a dengue vaccine, then we’ve failed in our public-health efforts.”
Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to India, Prasad Kariyawasam, tells INN that his country should be given time and space to carry on efforts for rehabilitation and reconciliation it has embarked upon, after the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ended in 2009. He argues that calls from Tamil Nadu for a referendum on ‘Tamil Eelam’ are not based on ground realities in Sri Lanka. Excerpts from an interview:
How does Sri Lanka view recent clamours from Tamil Nadu – firstly for India to take a hard-line stand on the resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council and then for New Delhi to stop treating your country as a friendly neighbour?
We are surprised by these unfortunate aberrations in our very friendly ties with Tamil Nadu. The people of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu in India have close ties. In the past, not so long ago, even in the 1960s, there were close links between Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu. After the conclusion of the conflict, Sri Lanka looked forward to nurturing our natural people-to-people ties including improving connectivity with Tamil Nadu once again. We were keen on reviving the annual Gopalan trophy cricket match that used to take place between the then Madras and Sri Lanka. Current developments therefore are most unfortunate. Sri Lanka and India at large share very friendly relations that predate modern history.
Recorded history of links between the two countries dates back to 3rd century BC, when Ashoka, the greatest emperor of India, sent his son and daughter, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, to Sri Lanka to spread the message of Buddhism and thus established links with his Sri Lankan contemporary, King Devanampiyatissa of Anuradhapura. All communities in Sri Lanka have connections with India – Tamils with Tamil Nadu, Sinhalese with erstwhile Kalinga. Our connections are very deep. Even in the modern era, our leaders fought together against British colonialism and won independence for both India and Sri Lanka. India, as our President says, is our relation; all other countries are our friends. But even closest neighbours like us can have episodes of stress and strain in their relations. The current situation, primarily driven by groups with vested interests in Tamil Nadu, and fueled by groups outside India, is such a period. But, it will not upset or derail our long-standing robust friendship. It does cause some dissonance and some distress though.
How do you react to Tamil Nadu Government’s move to bar Sri Lankan players from the Indian Premier League cricket matches and the State Assembly’s resolution calling for Tamil Eelam? Do you see a long-term impact on India’s relation with Sri Lanka?
What is currently happening in Tamil Nadu is disconcerting to us. These are happening as a result of a campaign by groups of people, who live faraway from both Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, mostly in western countries. They are sympathetic to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. They are aligned to the ideology of the LTTE. They are the driving force behind the campaign against Sri Lanka in Tamil Nadu. But we think we can get back to the golden days of our relations with Tamil Nadu. We need to act sensibly and talk to each other on issues of concern to both sides. The focus should primarily be on welfare of the Tamils living in Sri Lanka. The Tamils have come out of a long-drawn conflict and have suffered a lot for decades.
They are in need of assistance from all concerned. The current campaign in Tamil Nadu against Sri Lanka and even resolutions and other measures taken by political leadership of Tamil Nadu do not relate to the ground realities of Sri Lanka. There is no call for Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. So extra-regional forces calling for such an end and being supported by Tamil Nadu political leadership is misplaced and only vitiates the atmosphere for reconciliation and political settlement for all communities in Sri Lanka. We feel pained when we see that even the youth in Tamil Nadu are being misled to the extent that some have embarked on self-immolation. This is very unfortunate.
How does Sri Lanka view the resolutions adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council, both last year and this year?
We think Sri Lanka situation need not be internationalized. The resolutions at the UNHRC are uncalled for. They only vitiate the atmosphere in Sri Lanka. The contents of the resolutions do not help because the ground reality is that we have already been doing whatever is in the resolution. We think we should be allowed time and space to complete what we have embarked upon. Any attempt to force us towards the objective that we share with the international community will be counter-productive and will not lead to any immediate result. We are in favour of home-grown solutions that can be sustained over a long period of time.
The three-decades of conflict have created many issues for all communities in Sri Lanka. So we have to rebuild our country, not only physically, but also in terms of creating conditions for promoting communal harmony and confidence among communities and to make each and every Sri Lankan citizen – Tamils, Sinhalese and others - feel that they are equal and their political rights are secure. We can do that, because we are a democratic country. We have held regular elections since 1931. We have robust institutions. We should be allowed time and space to do what we have embarked upon. We share with the international community the objective of consolidating peace in Sri Lanka and providing our citizens social and political rights. But we have to create our own model. Our model may not be similar to that of India. India is a big country. Ours is a small one.
Did India disappoint Sri Lanka by voting on the resolution last year and again this year? India also called upon Sri Lanka to ensure satisfaction of the international community while conducting an independent and credible probe into alleged human rights violations by your country’s armed forces during the 2009 military campaign against LTTE. Do you think such a call could set a dangerous precedent that might even go against the interests of India?
We are disappointed by the stance taken by India. But we do recognize that India is a responsible country and it has its own compulsions. These are just blips in our long-term relations. Our position is that external or extra-regional intervention in regional affair is not a good trend and we need to be very careful while creating precedents. And, in our view, these apply to all countries and all situations in our region.
India always maintained that the end of the conflict had given a unique opportunity to pursue a lasting political settlement, acceptable to all communities in Sri Lanka, including the Tamils. India was also asking for early progress on a meaningful devolution building upon the 13th Amendment and leading to national reconciliation. Could you please update us on the efforts and progresses being made by Sri Lankan Government on these?
Soon after the end of the conflict, we have embarked upon a massive resettlement and rehabilitation programme. India supported our effort and provided us a lot of assistance, starting from de-mining operations and building houses to laying rail-tracks and reconstructing other critical infrastructure. We were able to resettle all the 295000 people, who were displaced and rescued from the LTTE custody. We are now providing them with livelihood support. We set up the Lessons Learnt and Resettlement Commission and now we are in the process of implementing its recommendations step by step. The Government is also trying to evolve consensus on acceptable constitutional provisions to accommodate political aspirations of all communities. Our President has set up a Parliamentary Select Committee to discuss all issues, but unfortunately Tamil National Alliance – a major Tamil political party - has not joined it yet.
The Government’s expectation is that it should join the process and participate in discussions that could lay the foundation for a process which could be finally led by our President. We are seeking a bottom-up political solution, not a top-down approach, which was tried earlier and did not work in Sri Lanka. We are sure we can find a political settlement acceptable to all our communities, if we are not disturbed by extra-regional forces. What we want to make clear is that separatism and ethnic nationalism espoused by the LTTE and its sympathizers are not based upon ground realities of Sri Lanka.
We have a standing invitation for Chief Minister and other political leaders of Tamil Nadu to visit Sri Lanka. We will be very happy to receive them and facilitate their visits to Jaffna and other areas which were affected by the conflict so that they could see for themselves the efforts being made for rehabilitation and resettlement of the displaced as well as for reconciliation and political settlement. They could also interact with the people of these areas and ascertain first hand, their concerns and their views.
Could you please update us on devolution of power under the 13th amendment of the Constitution of Sri Lanka?
The 13th amendment is an integral part of our Constitution. It was adopted 25 years ago as a solution to the conflict. There is however a general feeling that it has not succeeded in the last 25 years. That is why we have to suitably adjust the 13th amendment.
The latest wave of allegations about war crimes and human rights violation started with the release of the pictures purportedly showing the final moments of the LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran’s 12-year-old son Balachandran just before he was allegedly shot dead. Don’t you think instead of dismissing the pictures and allegations straightaway, the Sri Lankan Government could have ordered a probe?
The pictures are morphed. Former Sri Lankan Army chief General Fonseka said that the bunker in which the boy has been photographed does not resemble a Sri Lankan Army bunker. The Sri Lankan Government could have ordered a probe, had they first shared the pictures with us. But they preferred to release it to media and launched what I would call a trial by media. This is not acceptable to us.
The issue of Indian fishermen being detained by Sri Lankan Navy is also an emotive issue and Tamil Nadu chief minister has now demanded that the 1974 pact should be scrapped and Kachchateevu Island should be reclaimed. How do you react to this and cannot there be an amicable solution to this dispute?
The 1974-1976 agreements were the result of long drawn negotiations for demarcating the International Maritime Boundary Line between the two countries and there was give and take of fishing rights. Palk Strait is an eco-sensitive region and fishing must be conducted according to international standards. Internationally banned fishing methods such as Bottom trawling and nylon nets cannot be allowed as it is harmful to the marine eco-system.
Tamil Nadu fishermen should not cross the International Maritime Boundary Line and fish in Sri Lankan waters especially since northern Sri Lankan Tamil fishermen who have not been able to exercise their fishing rights for nearly 3 decades due to the conflict now require to be allowed to fish in their own waters without hindrance and without being overwhelmed by Tamil Nadu fishermen who cross the International Maritime Boundary Line in large numbers, often numbering over 600 boats. However, it is a livelihood issue on both sides and must be handled in a sensitive and responsible manner and we have agreed to treat fishermen in a humane manner at all times.
As the Lok Satta party, with its crop of image-defying politicians, raises hopes for a new brand of politics, INN catches up with party leader Dr Jayaprakash Narayan on the party's hopes at the Karnataka polls and possibilities of a larger wave of political reforms in the country.
The Lok Satta party headed by Jayaprakash Narayan is flexing its muscles in Bangalore as the state gets ready for elections in May. The party has so far named 15 candidates for MLA elections in the state; more are expected. Nine are contesting in Bangalore city itself, and the rest from other parts of Karnataka. Lok Satta has a reformist positioning in the Indian political sphere. It supports clean governance, setting up of a strong Lokpal, liberalising agriculture, closing of populist subsidies, FDI in retail, and so forth.
Jayaprakash Narayan, 57, the charismatic leader who is more widely known in Andhra Pradesh than Karnataka, is the sole MLA of the party anywhere in the country. He ran and won his seat in AP assembly elections from Kukatpally in Hyderabad. In AP, Tamilnadu and Maharashtra, there are a handful of local representatives (in municipal councils and panchayats) of the party.
Given the cynicism around the state of politics in India, many consider the chances of candidates with strong credentials and track records to enter legislatures to be very low. However, in the past few years, India, and urban India in particular has seen a surge of demand in the streets from a largely frustrated young citizenry. There has been an outpouring of protests around the country on several counts. From the huge wave of public support for a Lokpal bill for fighting rampant corruption to the most recent protests over the Delhi gang-rape incident, the yearning for change among large sections of the Indian populace has been evident.
Lok Satta has been at the forefront of many such change campaigns from a time when public angst had not even made itself so visible. In Bangalore for example, Lok Satta party volunteers were originally involved in sparking off Saaku, an anti-corruption movement in the city that peaked during the support campaign for Justice Santosh Hegde. During his tenure as Lokayukta, he had exposed the BJP government's ministers including former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa. Many volunteers who were part of the India Against Corruption (IAC) group that campaigned for the Lokpal bill in the city during Anna Hazare’s fast in New Delhi were also Lok Satta party cadres.
Better known as JP, Jayaprakash Narayan is no mean achiever in public life. He is a doctor by training, and a former IAS officer with a long track record of accomplishments. He is well known for his campaign and role in bringing electoral reforms to India in 2002 that made disclosures by candidates running for office mandatory.
Prior to founding Lok Satta as a political party, he founded it as a movement for better governance in Andhra Pradesh. Lok Satta's work on electricity reforms became visible as it took over and operated four power distribution stations in the state to demonstrate the efficacy of several reform measures they had advocated.
In Bengaluru today, Lok Satta party candidates, most of them reasonably well known in their neighbourhoods and the city, are running for MLAs. Jayaprakash Narayan or JP as he is called has been moved by the upsurge in Bangalore and says it has the most cosmopolitan electorate in the country. “Bangaloreans are more likely to transcend old loyalties and parochial power that mainline parties have,” he says.
As the campaigns in Bengaluru have begun to peak, INN caught up with JP for a detailed conversation. He spoke many things and seems passionate, thoughtful, clear and yet restrained. Excerpts of the Interview.
You have been the single MLA for Lok Satta in AP. What are your hopes for the next AP election (2014)?
Being a single MLA in the assembly is not such a bad thing. We have shown that it is still possible to influence significant public policy outcomes.
We feel 15-20 per cent of the electorate certainly wants change. But there are systemic compulsions in India because of which even if you have good support base, and strong credibility, conversion to votes is not easy.
We are considering issue-based alliances for the AP 2014 elections. If there is an iron clad guarantee on specific issues from a bigger political party in constituencies where we are strong, we may transfer our support to them.
These are issues on which we will seek issue-base alliances:
- Full decentralisation of power to local government at the ward and panchayat level.
- Services guarantee law, with compensation to citizens when there is delay or denial
- Radical change in the power sector
- Agricultural reforms – liberalisation of agriculture, not merely giving short term freebies, but long term benefits
- Anti-Corruption agenda – A Lokayukta for AP with real independent power
- Education and Health care reform.
- We currently have strong presence in 80 constituencies in AP, and there are around 20-25 people who have been working hard in these areas for the people. They may become the MLA candidates for LS in 2014.
What significant outcomes have you been able to influence as MLA, even as a lone representative in the AP assembly?
There are several concrete outcomes. There is a robust Societies Act in use in AP. The Congress party wanted to amend it in a way that would bring in far more controls. The amendment was unconstitutional according to me. I have stood against this and held it up for the past four years in the legislature and have got the rest of the opposition to stand against it as well. The Congress could have passed it by brute force and has not because of the opposition I have led.
Next is the Citizen Services Delivery Guarantee bill. While this is not enacted yet, there has been debate on the bill and the rules the government needs to put in place for it to function effectively. This has already resulted in real action on the ground, even without the bill being passed.
There is a now a Lokayukta bill pending in the AP assembly. This is also my party's work and we have pushed for it. It is not enacted yet, but we will continue to push for it.
In the 2010 elections in AP, Lok Satta had a well articulated vision with many reform points that the Congress party copied from us. Our party has a lot of credibility in the state in arguing its points and other parties have drawn from us whenever they want. That is also impact.
Tell voters what the Lok Satta party has done for Bangalore and Karnataka that legitimises its claim that it is ready to fight big electoral races such as MLA elections.
The Lok Satta party has already contributed to Bangalore, in three areas.
First, through Ashwin Mahesh, whose work on transportation and traffic control for Bangalore is remarkable, especially for its focus on strengthening public departments. He has also been leading the water management efforts, including lake revival.
Second, it has covered a lot of ground in waste segregation and management: N S Ramakanth and Meenakshi Bharath have been doing stellar work in this area. This is part of our focus on urban planning.
Third is the Saaku movement itself. Lok Satta volunteers were at the core of triggering off that movement in Bangalore earlier, with an initial focus on safeguarding the institution of the Lokayukta. The IAC happened immediately and naturally after that.
More broadly, Lok Satta members are at the core of virtually all the civil society-led changes in the city. That is a very good thing. Politics and development should be strongly connected, and the example of our Bangalore party unit is a very good one in this regard.
Some voters think that too often in elections, people run to make statements, satisfy their egos, etc., even though chances of winning are considered slim. This has happened to parliamentary races before. What will you say to Bangalore voters this month who worry that Lok Satta candidates 'might not win'? How should citizens think about 'winnability'?
You have hit the nail on the head. Winnability does seem to dominate during elections. And with our first past the post system (FPTP), winning for new candidates is a challenge. Our political parties – when you talk to individual politicians -- are themselves not so terrible. Many of them also want the right candidates to run, but they are concerned about winnability.
But when people worry about new candidates not being winnable – they should look at the following.
Congress has won in Karnataka, the state is still in a mess. BJP has also won, that is they are winnable too, and they have also not fixed the mess in the state. Likewise with JD(S). So it is not as if the winners of the past have been able to bring about serious reforms or bring down corruption.
Lok Satta candidates, even though they are fewer in number, offer a genuine alternative. Moreover, Bangalore city offers a unique opportunity. It has the most cosmopolitan electorate in the country. Voters in Bangalore are more likely to transcend old loyalties and parochial power that mainline parties have. Secondly, because of the way Karnataka politics has gone, there are now many factions and hence fragmentation of votes. There is an opportunity for Bangaloreans to vote with their heart for candidates with an excellent track record.
There is also a difference between unattached independent candidates who do not belong to parties and party-backed candidates. Parties can articulate an agenda, they have organisational memory which they can bring into the Assembly even if they have only one or a few seats in the legislature. Single independent candidates cannot do that.
Your manifesto makes a promise that implies that 12-hour three-phase power supply in rural Karnataka in possible. How?
It is possible. First we must separate rural electricity feeders from agriculture feeders. Secondly every consumer of electricity, even a farmer who gets free power has to be metered. Long back, when Lok Satta was an NGO, we took over four distribution stations and ran it for the AP government. We brought about an 18 per cent reduction in line losses from 27 per cent to 9 per cent. These are all audited figures, publicly available.
There are around 9.75 lakh transformers in the AP power system. 5-7 per cent of these usually fail each year and when taken down for maintenance, it takes several days for them to come back online. Lok Satta showed that we can spend a few hundred rupees to fix these transformers and bring them back online much sooner which helps in running the power system with less outages.
Separating agricultural power from the rest of rural power itself can ensure that 12 hour supply is possible. This provides a boost to SMEs in rural areas because otherwise they have to come to the cities. Making more rural power available will boost rural investment and employment, and cut back on migration to the cities.
Gujarat is the best example for all this. By taking this approach they have already managed 24-hour single-phase power in all of rural Gujarat. So it is possible to promise and deliver 12-hour single-phase power in rural Karnataka.
An opposing candidate from some mainstream party is going to promise very low-cost housing or some freebie to low-income citizens in his constituency. Are you going to compete with that? People are used to a patronage relationship with their MLAs, you know this.
Yes, Promises will be made. After all elections are all about public money. Lok Satta candidates will explain an alternative vision. Our option is to explain to people that short term freebies are not making problems go away.
Our plan also is go to educated voters and youth, and especially women to get their backing.
We are hearing this view from several people – that women are supporting new candidates who stand for change, more than men. Why do you think this is so?
This is an important question and it must be studied. I can only hazard a guess.
Ultimately men see these battles as power games. Patriarchy, caste, linguistic and regional affiliations are above all about power won over identity and parochial loyalties. Men who already have power as part of patriarchy become concerned about who will win. Once issues are boxed into identity politics, there is no coming out.
Women on the other hand do not have power; they tend to be concerned about survival, and what will happen to family, prices, schooling of their children, etc. So they tend to be more open to voting for change. Women and youth definitely helped us win the MLA seat from Kukatpally. So men are concerned about who, and women are concerned about what.
The first-past-the-post system voting system in India presents serious challenges to new parties. Comment on the chances in the Karnataka elections for your Bangalore MLA candidates.
Yes, FPTP for India is a huge challenge. But I have some good news to report here.
Look at India’s most influential states for parliamentary seats: UP, Bihar, Bengal, TN, Maharashtra and AP. Except AP (even there, Congress is shaking), in none of these states has the BJP or the Congress been able to win on their own. Together these states contribute 65 per cent of Lok Sabha's seats. This is because of the FPTP system; it has already caused serious problems for these parties.
In UP for example, Rahul Gandhi invested a substantial amount of time and strategy. See the results though. Samajwadi Party got 3.7 per cent more vote share and got 127 more seats in the last elections. Even though Congress got 3 per cent more vote share, it got only 6 more seats. In Maharashtra, Congress cannot come to power on its own either.
The FPTP system is hurting the national parties in the most influential states.
But leaders of parties should be alive to this problem, it cannot be that they do not understand all this…?
Parties have not taken a hard look at this problem till now. The reality is that leaders do not have time. They are mostly caught up in day-to-day running of the party and the problems that keep emerging. But this is changing now.
The Congress Party has set up a high-powered committee under Ambika Soni, with Veerappa Moily, Mani Shankar Aiyyar, and others to look at reviewing FPTP. There is discussion on this issue also within the BJP at a mid-level. Left parties are already on board to change the FPTP system.
What is interesting is that this does not require a constitutional amendment or even a change in the law. It is just a rule being used to run our elections. If the parties agree, the rule can be changed.
What would you like the FPTP system to change to? You have advocated proportional representation; does that also mean you will support multiple representatives per constituency?
As a winner-takes-all system, FPTP overweighs the views of the winner and ignores all others. This is true even if the winner himself gets only 15 per cent of the vote, as we saw in one recent case. A proportionate system would correct this, and give voice to a greater diversity of views. This is all the more important when, as in India today, we are seeing an increasing fracture of the vote among different parties. Ideally, an elected representative even in a single-member constituency should represent 50 per cent of the voters at least. That's clearly not the case today; in fact it is the exception.
A number of solutions, including multi-member constituencies, run-offs and other options can be considered. Once we accept that FPTP is hindering the broad representation of public opinion in elected houses, a lot of other things will become possible. It has taken many decades for parties to come to this realisation. Now we must act on this, and strengthen democracy by a new system with greater inclusion of voices and views.
You mentioned Arvind Kejriwal. What happened between Aam Aadmi Party and Lok Satta that they could not come together?
There are genuine issues we have to iron out.
One is the whole approach AAP has about good and evil. An approach that says one side is always good and the other is always evil is not right in a democracy. I have always held that our political parties are not evil and they cannot be blamed for everything that is wrong in India. Yes, our parties have bungled, no doubt.
We have to recognise the historical process we have gone through as a nation. Federalism, states, peaceful transfer of power, and universal adult franchise have all come to stay in the country, and our political parties have seen through this. So it is not right for AAP to make this contest one about good and evil.
The good and evil approach also caused us to lose an opportunity earlier. Take the Lokpal bill. In 2011, the bill that went to Parliament was 80 per cent of the bill “we” wanted. But Hazare and IAC did plenty of grand-standing that it could either be 100 per cent or zero. Media also made it into a big deal. In such a negative climate for the government's bill, the path became clear for other parties to use the ruse of 'states rights' to kill the Lokayukta provision. So now, while the Lokpal bill has Lokpal provisions, mandatory Lokayuktas for all the states is gone from it. But 80 percent of corruption impacting people is at the state level, not central. We have lost the chance for getting that option through the central bill.
We all want an ethical india. But the fight against corruption alone can only be a minimum qualification for politics, it is not the maximum. There needs to be more. AAP, for instance, does not support our positions on FDI in retail, and also on power sector reforms.
Having said this, our differences need not be blown out of proportion in the media. In a democracy, there is always a need for a spirit of accommodation. We have not written off working together.
There was a time when atheists were seen as equal-opportunity offenders of practitioners of virtually every faith on the basis of their advocacy of a scientific and rational outlook that made no concessions in matters of religious faith.
Polemical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who were dubbed the ‘The Unholy Trinity’, have openly criticised religion in their books – such as The God Delusion (Dawkins), God is not Great (Hitchens) and The End of Faith (Harris). But in an earlier time, much of their atheist exertions were focused on the excesses of Christianity, and to a lesser extent, Judaism.
In his book Letters to a Christian Nation, for instance, Harris states that his aim was to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” Religion, he argues, may have served some useful purpose for humanity in the past, but it was increasingly becoming the greatest impediment to building a global civilization.
But the terrorist attacks of September 2001, inspired by a jihadi-minded suicide squad assembled by Osama bin Laden, brought a new planet – Islam – into the atheists’ ken. Since arguably the most audacious terrorist attack in modern times was inspired by Islam, to which Western civilization had not devoted much critical attention, the attention – of media commentators and among the authors who explored the goings-on at the intersection of faith, society and politics – turned to something an obsession with Islam and jihad.
“The men who committed the atrocities of September 11,” wrote Harris, “were certainly not ‘cowards,’ as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.”
More generally, Harris wrote that Islam, “more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”
And while there were “other ideologies with which to expunge the last vapors of reasonableness from a society’s discourse,” Islam, he added, “is undoubtedly one of the best we’ve got.”
Outpourings like these, and other such commentaries and, more recently, Twitter rants by Dawkins (such as this one – where he called Islam the “greatest force for evil today” – and this one – where he established an equivalence between the Koran and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf) have led commentators to wonder if the “New Atheists” – as they are called – are “flirting with Islamophobia.”
Writing in Salon, Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, reasons that the New Atheists found their calling with the September 2001 attacks. “The occasion was, for them, a vindication,— proof that modernity, progress and reason were the winners in the post–Cold War era and that religion was simply man’s play toy, used to excuse the wicked and assuage fears of a fiery, heavenless afterlife as the punishment for such profane deeds.”
And emboldened by the newfound religious fervor in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the New Atheists “joined a growing chorus of Muslim-haters, mixing their abhorrence of religion in general with a specific distaste for Islam,” writes Lean.
As he sees it, conversations about the practical impossibility of God’s existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife “slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling.” The New Atheists, he writes, became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.”
These New Atheists, reasons Lean, have used the “climate of increased anti-Muslim sentiment” to shift their narrative – from trying to convince people that God is a myth – to embracing Islamophobia, the “monster narrative of the day.” That, he says, is not rational or even intelligent: it’s opportunism. “Proving that a religion – any religion – is evil… is just as pointless and impossible an endeavour as trying to prove that God does or doesn’t exist.”
A similar critique of the atheists’ excessive preoccupation with painting Islam as evil is offered up by Murtaza Hussain, a Toronto-based scholar of Mideast Politics. Writing in the Al Jazeera website, Hussain likens leading figures in the New Atheist movement – like Harris – to those from an earlier era who justified racism on pseudo-scientific grounds.
“Citing ‘Muslims’ as a solid monolith of violent evil – whilst neglecting to include the countless Muslims who have lost their lives peacefully protesting the occupation and ongoing ethnic cleansing of their homeland – Harris engages in a nuanced version of the same racism which his predecessors in scientific racism practiced in their discussion of the blanket characteristics of ‘Negroes’,” writes Hussain.
Hussain concedes that Islam as an “intellectual movement” is not above scrutiny; and attempts to shut down legitimate debate using the charge of Islamophobia should, he says, be rejected. “However,” he adds, what is being pursued today by individuals such as Harris and others under the guise of disinterested observation is something far more insidious.”
Where once science was trotted out to justify slavery, today it is being used to push forward the belief that Muslims as a people lack basic humanity and to justify the “wars of aggression, torture and extra-judicial killings”, he adds.
“And just as it is incumbent upon Muslims to marginalise their own violent extremists, mainstream atheists must work to disavow those such as Harris who would tarnish their movement by associating it with a virulently racist, violent and exploitative worldview,” Hussain writes.
Hussain’s column has an epilogue. After Guardian’s columnist Glenn Greenwald tweeted out a link to Hussain’s column, Harris e-mailed him (here) to object to his retweeting “defamatory garbage” and to claim that there was in fact “nothing defamatory” about his criticism of Islam and that he criticised “white, western converts in precisely the same terms.”
The truth, says Harris, is that the “liberal (multicultural) position on Islam is racist. If a predominantly white community behaved this way–the Left would effortlessly perceive the depth of the problem. Imagine Mormons regularly practicing honor killing or burning embassies over cartoons…”
Greenwald responded to Harris to say that he was probably “embarrassed that people are now paying attention to some of the darker and uglier sentiments that have been creeping into this form of atheism advocacy.” In his estimation, he added, “a bizarre and wholly irrational fixation on Islam, as opposed to the evils done by other religions, has been masquerading in the dark under the banner of rational atheism for way too long.”
Jennifer Lopez was too expensive for the IPL. So they got Pitbull instead for a reputed $600,000. No wonder he said he was thrilled to be in India despite the sweltering Kolkata weather.
Big stars and sporting events can be a hot combo. The F1 had Lady Gaga. The Superbowl 2013 had Beyoncé. Beyoncé, by the way, did not charge a penny to perform at the SuperBowl halftime show in America.
“We do not pay,” NFL spokesperson Greg McCarthy told Forbes.“We cover all expenses associated with the performance.”
That can add up to a tidy sum but it still proves something about the Superbowl that a superstar gives her time for free. And it’s not for a worthy cause that will give them Nobel Peace Prize credibility like starving children in Ethiopia. But it’s worth it for Beyoncé or Madonna or the Black Eyed Peas to perform for free because it’s the most-watched musical event of the year. Nielsen estimated 108.41 million watched Beyoncé’s 14-minute gig at the games. Only Madonna has done better with 112.5 million in 2012. Forbes said when Madonna performed at the Superbowl, sales of her old classics such as Like a Prayer jumped 2,437 percent.
Who knows what IPL will do for Pitbull. But it just showed that despite all the razzmatazz of its superstars, the IPL is no Superbowl. The opening night, despite Shah Rukh Khan’s breathless hoohah about duniya ke sabse bada musician (Pitbull), our “greatest musical talents” (Bappi Lahiri and Usha Uthup) and King Khan himself, proved one thing – size doesn’t always matter and a lot of sound and fury can signify little.
IPL6 is, for the first time ever, cutting ad rates, by up to 20 percent because it didn’t get enough advertising last year. Rohit Gupta, president for Network Sales at Multi Screen Media Pvt. Ltd. said 20 percent of television advertisements were unsold during IPL 2012. This means ads that went for 5 lakhs and above could cost a lakh less. IPL6 hopes the addition of a team from Hyderabad will bring in more viewers. But the TRP of IPL has been on a downward slide as the novelty wears off – IPL 1 was 4.81, IPL 2 was 4.17. IPL 5 was 3.27.
So is such a big bash of an opening all about celebrating the grand success of the IPL concept or a desperate attempt to create enough buzz to persuade viewers to not change the channel in coming weeks?
Either way, what’s the point of shipping in a Pitbull from a country that plays baseball to ratchet up cricketing fever in India? “It’s going crazy here,” gushed the hyper-ventilating permanently beaming television anchor while all the visuals on the screen showed a lot of politely befuddled Kolkatans watching a stocky bald man stick his tongue out lascviciously and thrust his pelvis on stage.
“India ke 600,000$ gaye paani mein” tweeted @aam_aadmee. But GreatBong blogged that at least “Pitbull and his Bald Headed League of Bob Christo Fans” made better financial sense than some other IPL investments.
Pitbull provides as much value for his Put-Bill amount of $600,000 as the marginally more expensive ($650,000) Mashrafe Mortaza did for the Kolkata Knight Riders in the 2009 series with his 21-runs-giving last over to Rohit Sharma.
“Itne paise mein itna hi hota hai, yaar” quipped Shah Rukh Khan bringing the show to a close as he hoped “this happiness spreads to West Bengal and to the rest of India” from the City of Joy.
We can get into endless debates about what $600,000, even from a private sports franchise, could be better used for. But that aside, why does the IPL even need a separate standalone opening ceremony? The Superbowl just has a half-time show. Why does the IPL have an Olympics complex?
A flashy kick-off creates a buzz. Sure. And a sports event that goes on for weeks needs that buzz. But does it need to buy a JLo or a Pitbull to show off its brand value? But IPL’s suits should remember that a star’s stardom does not always rub off on the sport. Everyone remembers Lady Gaga and her phallic microphone at the Formula One after party in India. But few remember what happened in the actual Grand Prix.
In a country long defined by its poverty, it’s easy now to find India’s rich.
They’re at New Delhi’s Emporio mall, where herds of chauffeur-driven Jaguars and Audis disgorge shoppers heading to the Louis Vuitton and Christian Louboutin stores. They’re shopping for Lamborghinis in Mumbai. They’re putting elevators in their homes and showing off collections of jewel-encrusted watches in Indian luxury magazines.
They’re buying real estate in comfortable but unpretentious neighborhoods — neighborhoods thought of as simply upper-middle-class just a couple years ago — where apartments now regularly sell for millions of dollars.
They’re just about everywhere. Unless it’s income tax time. Then, suddenly, they barely exist.
The reality is simple: “There are very few people who are paying taxes,” said Sonu Iyer, a tax expert at Ernst & Young in New Delhi. And tax dodging is everywhere. “It’s rampant — rampant.”
If the generalities of that have long been known here, Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram stunned the country in late February when he proposed a new tax on India’s top earners. The surprise wasn’t the temporary 10 percent surcharge on those earning more than 10,000,000 rupees, or about $185,000, per year, but the number of Indians who fall into that category.
That number? Just 42,800 people.
“Let me repeat,” Chidambaram told Parliament in his budget speech, making sure no one thought he had misspoken, “only 42,800″ people say they earn that much.
In a country of 1.2 billion people, a country where years of staggering economic growth annually create tens of thousands of new millionaires and a recent slowdown has done little damage to a thriving luxury goods market, far less than one ten-thousandth of the population admits they are in the top tax bracket.
With so few Indians willing to come clean, the perennially cash-starved government has to scrabble every year for revenue.
Among the rich, dodging taxes has become second nature, said Jamal Mecklai, CEO of Mecklai Financial, a Mumbai-based financial consulting firm. About 158,000 Indians are thought to be dollar millionaires, according to a 2012 Credit Suisse estimate, though some analysts believe the number is far higher.
“It’s just taken as the reality” that most wealthy Indians are cheating, he said, adding that he pays everything he owes. India’s top tax rate is currently 30 percent.
It’s not just the rich evading their taxes. Less than 3 percent of Indians file income tax returns at all, and officials say only about 1.5 million taxpayers say they earn more than 1,000,000 rupees per year — about $18,000.
Most of those not paying have legitimate reasons. Well over half the population earns so little they don’t have to pay income taxes. Despite its ever-growing population of nouveau riche, more than 400 million Indians still live below the poverty line.
Millions more people are exempt because regulations exclude agricultural income from taxes, no matter how much is earned. Since India has hundreds of millions of small farmers, and a powerful bloc of wealthy farmers, that’s a tax break few politicians dare challenge. Various other tax breaks legally keep many more people off the tax rolls.
The bulk of those paying income taxes, experts say, are salaried employees whose companies are responsible for making their tax payments. While those taxpayers can fudge their numbers to an extent, using inflated receipts to magnify tax breaks on expenses like housing, it’s extremely difficult for them to completely escape tax authorities.
But most everyone else — from the barons of family-owned businesses to doctors, lawyers and small traders — operate in largely cash economies that enable them, if they want, to hide most of their income.
The size of India’s underground economy and the amount of lost taxes is widely debated, but even the lowball figures are immense in a country with a nearly $2 trillion GDP. In recent studies, experts estimated that anywhere from 17 percent to 42 percent of the economy operates beneath the official radar.
Billions of dollars are widely thought to be hidden in Switzerland, Singapore and other tax havens.
Then there is the strange case of Mauritius. More than 40 percent of foreign direct investment in India comes through this tiny island in the Indian Ocean. In part, that statistic reflects an India-Mauritius tax treaty that legally eases the flow of investment funds into India. But, experts say, it also allows Indians to launder vast amounts of untaxed wealth by sending their illegal cash to Mauritius, then “round-tripping” it back to India in the form of legal investments.
If it would take concerted effort to shut down complex, international money-laundering operations, catching at least some of India’s high-end tax dodgers should be ridiculously simple. This is, after all, a country where flaunted wealth often seems as common as traffic jams.
How about targeting the buyers of the 25,000 luxury cars sold last year in India? Or the buyers and sellers of big-budget apartments? What about the people racking up thousands of dollars a month in credit card bills? Maybe tax investigators could go to those high-end malls, looking to see who is buying all the expensive shoes.
While the government says it recently has begun targeting some big spenders, mailing notices to tens of thousands of people they say may have underpaid their taxes, few believe officials have truly become aggressive.
“It’s not really that difficult to chase down the tax dodgers,” said Mecklai, the consulting firm CEO. “It’s just a matter of putting the machinery in place.”
So why isn’t the government doing that?
The answers range from sheer incompetence to corrupt tax bureaucrats to a political class accustomed to making vast wealth on the side, and unlikely to do anything that might jeopardize its ill-gotten gains.
Certainly the Indian public sees official corruption as a major part of the equation.
“Of course I don’t pay all my taxes,” said a New Delhi businessman who spoke on condition he not be named because he was admitting to breaking the law. “Why should I pay my taxes while the politicians are getting richer and richer every day?”
Such talk is, experts say, the most commonly heard rationale for tax evasion, one entrenched by decades of political corruption and waves of official scandals.
But it doesn’t explain everything. Iyer, the Ernst & Young tax expert, notes that the culture of tax-avoidance runs deep in India. She points particularly to the way buyers and sellers of real estate openly discuss how much of the price will be paid in “white” declared money, and how much will be paid under the table in “black.”
“No one thinks of it as something to be ashamed about,” she said. “In a country of holier-than-thou’s, no one thinks that it’s a blatant lie” to cheat on your taxes.
Embarrassment, she said, may be what India needs most of all.
“The moment this society establishes a stigma to it, I think you’d see a change.”
President Barack Obama’s nominee Srikanth Srinivasan, currently the principal deputy solicitor general, inched closer to becoming the first Indian American judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which is America’s second most important court.
Srinivasan is very much in the news as a lawyer representing the Obama administration in the high-profile gay marriage case. If the Supreme Court strikes down the section of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) under review, married gay and lesbian couples in nine US states and the District of Columbia will start receiving federal benefits.
Obama had problems in his first term in quickly nominating judges and winning even routine confirmations in the face of a determined Republican opposition. He has had fewer judges confirmed than any president in a quarter of a century.
In his first term, he tried to fill two vacancies on the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which decides challenges to federal regulations. But no luck: Senate Republicans blocked both of his nominees. One of his nominees was Srinivasan, who was first nominated last June, and then re-nominated in January this year.
Now there’s every sign that Srinivasan, who is described by The New York Times as “an exceptional and moderate candidate,” has survived a stalled nomination. The Senate Judiciary Committee announced on Monday that it would hold Srinivasan’s confirmation hearing on April 10.
“Sri is a highly respected appellate advocate who has spent a distinguished career litigating before the US Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals, both in private practice and on behalf of the United States for both Democratic and Republican administrations,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney playing up Srinivasan’s bipartisan appeal.
Srinivasan, who is described by Obama as a “trailblazer,” has all the ingredients called for in a judicial nominee. First, he’s a progressive who happens to have had plenty of conservative bosses: He clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court and won accolades in the solicitor general’s office during the George W. Bush administration. He has since shuttled between private practice at O’Melveny & Myers and stints in the solicitor general’s office.
Secondly, Srinivasan also has a standout bio which isn’t short on human interest. He was born in Chandigarh and later moved to the US with his parents, and played high school basketball in Kansas before going on to Stanford for college and law school. If he were confirmed, Srinivasan, would be the first person of Asian descent to serve on the D.C. Circuit, according to the North American South Asian Bar Association. Four of the nine current US Supreme Court justices previously served in the D.C Circuit.
Obama also has his heart set on Srinivasan’s appointment to the D.C Circuit because it is crucial to increasing his administration’s impact. Firmly in Republican control thanks in part to three appointees of President George W. Bush, the D.C. Circuit recently struck down clean-air rules put forth by the Obama administration for coal-burning power plants.
They are places that most people stay away from. The belief is spirits of those dead haunt the place where they are buried. But not for these 50-odd families as they live among the dead that too in the heart of Secunderabad’s Mettuguda area in Andhra Pradesh.
In this small colony inside the graveyard, three generations have lived in peace with the dead, some buried and a few cremated. The residents treat the tombs surrounding their houses as pieces of furniture. Children play and elders relax on the tombs.
The sign board at the entrance of the Hindu burial ground cautions that there is no place left for burial. The two shelters, darkened by smoke, are still used by locals to cremate the bodies of their kin. Neither the families living among the tombs seem to have any problem with the cremation at regular intervals nor the children in the nearby school have any complaint about the smoke billowing out of the chimneys.
“I used to help my father bury the dead. Owner of the burial ground allowed us to live and provided us a piece of land to build a shelter. I grew up among these tombs,” Jayalakshmi said sitting on one of the recently painted tombs in front of her house. Her father got her married to a boy from the same colony. Jayalakshmi’s daughter also married a man living in the same compound.
“Why would we fear the dead? You should be afraid of living people,” said a philosophical Suvarna, who has been living there for the past 60 years. She claimed that initially outsiders were afraid of marrying their daughters to the residents of the Mettuguda burial ground. “Once they saw how peacefully we live, they came forward and the colony grew,” Suvarna said.
The colony was used to bury the dead till 2000 but thereafter burial stopped because of lack of space. The families, which have been using tombs as furniture, make it a point to keep them clean. “That is why none of the relatives of the dead ever complained,” a resident claimed. The kin of the dead visit the burial ground during Diwali, usually lit candles and offer flowers to the dead. There were also efforts to displace the residents from the Mettuguda ground.
“Once Secunderabad MLA and actor Jayasudha came here. We were told that she was coming here to ask us to vacate the ground. But she came and saw how happily we are all living here and left without saying a word,” Suvarna said.
Over the years, the burial ground shrank. Many residents who sold their houses to outsiders inadvertently triggering a real estate boom, and a large chunk of the ground is under occupation. A partition now separates the old ground from the new colony. “They brought machines and bulldozed all the tombs on the other side. We never damaged a tomb even though we had a chance to do so,”
Jayalakhmi said. The families living in the colony have been paying municipal taxes and have assured water supply.
The children studying in the elementary school abutting the ground,show no emotion when a body is being carried into the ground. The noise made by the drums and the chants apparently has no effect on them. They study and play while the cremation goes on in one of the shelters. “I am not afraid of the dead. We play on these tombs too, they are ideal for hide-and-seek game,” seven-year-old Sravan said.
A schoolteacher, however, had reservations. “I was afraid of working here.
Particularly the smell when the bodies are burnt, used to haunt me,” the lone teacher in the school said. He added that probably the shortage of urban land might have forced the families to settle down here.
“There are a few more burial grounds such as Nagannakunta and Kacheguda where people have constructed houses and live there because the working class wants to stay close to the residential colonies,” said a local resident. The burial ground, which was once far away from Secunderabad, is now surrounded by bustling residential colonies and commercial complexes. There have been efforts from many realtors to evict the residents from the burial ground as cremation here has a bearing on the real estate market.
“There were efforts by many to create fear among the residents in the surroundings in the name of sighting of ghosts and demons,” said Yadagiri, a shop keeper, who sells essentials for the cremation. But the people around the ground refused to believe and never complained to the authorities about any inconvenience they had because of the cremation.
“We have street lights that illuminate the entire ground and children play and women attend to chores. We never felt the presence of any evil spirit. A few might have spread rumours but we feel secure among the dead,” Jayalakshmi added. She believes that proper cremation helps to leave this world and thereafter the dead will not bother those alive. “The problem is only when the ritual is not done properly,”she added.
