NEGOTIATIONS on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious trade agreement linking America, Japan and ten other countries—together accounting for 40% of global GDP—have missed so many deadlines that one more may not seem to matter. But talks are reaching a point of no return. Without an agreement in the next few weeks there will not be enough time to complete the TPP before America is embroiled in a presidential election campaign, and progress will be impossible until 2017. American diplomats, however, insist the deal is on track. They sometimes seem to be trying to convince themselves that an aim that has become a linchpin of American strategy is still achievable.
Their nervousness has been heightened by the recent embarrassment over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a new, China-led multilateral development-finance institution. A number of close American allies have applied to become founding shareholders, ignoring American entreaties to shun it as a threat to global standards. After that setback, America needs the TPP to succeed more than ever. It may well do so. But the most recent round of TPP talks, in Hawaii, appears to have ended with some important disagreements still unresolved.
This is not surprising. The TPP is to be a “21st-century” agreement, involving contentious reforms in areas such as intellectual property, the treatment of state-owned companies and environmental and labour standards. It includes economies at very different stages of development—from Peru and Vietnam to America and Australia. And even on 20th-century issues of import tariffs and market access, big differences remain between the two biggest economies in the TPP, America and Japan. In both agriculture and carmaking, America is demanding concessions that Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, will find politically difficult.
The biggest problems, however, may be at home in Washington, DC. The 11 other countries will be loth to show their final position until the Obama administration has “fast-track” Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) from Congress. Without TPA, Congress could unpick any agreement clause by clause rather than have to pass or reject it as a whole. And securing TPA is far from certain. The pact faces criticism from right-wing Republicans as well as from many Democrats. Paul Krugman, an economics Nobel laureate turned New York Times columnist, has called the economic case for the TPP “weak”. In February he wrote that if it does not happen it will be “no big deal”.
Mr Krugman is wrong there. Failure to complete it would be a terrible blow to American interests, for a number of reasons. Trade liberalisation itself is of course one. With prospects of a global agreement at the World Trade Organisation vanishing, America’s hopes lie in the TPP and the more distant Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe. In his state-of-the-union speech to Congress in January, Barack Obama dwelt on “the world’s fastest-growing region”, ie, Asia and the Pacific.
The TPP has also become central to America’s most important alliance in Asia, with Japan. Concluding it would show that the two countries can overcome the trade irritants that have always tested the relationship. It is also seen as a vital part of Mr Abe’s strategy to shake the Japanese economy out of its prolonged torpor, in part by forcing structural reform upon it. This week Mr Obama confirmed an invitation to Mr Abe to the White House on April 28th. Mr Abe will also make a speech to Congress. But an inability to conclude the TPP, combined with renewed difficulties over moving a controversial American marine base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, could make the inevitable professions of eternal friendship ring a little hollow.
More broadly, so would another central boast of Mr Obama’s diplomacy, the “pivot” or “rebalancing” of American interests towards Asia. Diplomatically, this has always looked a little perfunctory, as crises in the Middle East and Europe have distracted America. The military component has so far not seemed very significant. And so more and more emphasis has been placed on the economic element—the TPP. Having advertised it as a symbol of their country’s enduring role as a regional leader, Americans can hardly complain if other countries choose to interpret it that way.
Yet when Mr Obama made his pitch in his state-of-the-union speech for support for TPA, he did not make the argument as one about global trade, the Japanese alliance or “rebalancing” to Asia. Rather, he argued it was needed to protect the interests of American workers and businesses against strategic competition from China, which, he said, wants to “set the rules” in the region.
China is at present excluded from TPP, but is engaged in talks with 15 other countries, including the ten members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, as well as India and Japan, on what looks like a rival trade agreement, known as the RCEP. China has long suspected that the TPP is designed to keep it out—one part of an American policy of containment. Why, for example, its scholars ask, is Vietnam included? Its economy, too, is lacking in transparency and distorted by state-owned industry.
The zero-sum illusion
So the struggle to complete trade agreements seems to have become yet another area of strategic competition between America and China as they tussle for regional influence. As with the AIIB fiasco, this is unwarranted: both countries would gain from the boost to the global economy that the TPP and RCEP would provide. And China is free to join the TPP if it accepts its standards, which it has not ruled out. The dream is that, in the end, the overlapping trade pacts will merge in a broad free-trade area including both America and China—under American-style rules. So each should be cheering the other’s efforts on. Failure to complete the TPP would be a serious defeat for American diplomacy for many reasons. Portraying it as a way of countering China risks adding an unnecessary one: that it would look like a Chinese victory.
IN GINZA, Tokyo’s best-known shopping district, a dozen-odd tour buses disgorge crowds of determined Chinese shoppers at their first stop: a suitcase emporium from which they emerge with the extra capacity they need to cart home the cornucopia of Japanese goods they are about to amass, including what mainlanders now dub Japan’s “four treasures”—brand-name rice cookers, vacuum flasks, ceramic knives and high-tech lavatory seats (see article). In the funky boutiques of Daikanyama, Chinese dandies are hard to tell apart from local counterparts in cropped trousers and round, horn-rimmed spectacles (until recently Chinese tourists always stood out a mile for their unsophisticated dress sense). Meanwhile, mainland Chinese, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and South Koreans are filling hotels and ryokan, traditional inns, from Japan’s northernmost province of Hokkaido to Okinawa, a subtropical island in the south.
The tourism boom began in earnest last year and has far surpassed anything the government dared hope for. Just over 13m foreigners, 11m of them Asian, came to Japan in 2014, up nearly 30% compared with a year earlier and half as many again as in 2010. Chinese arrivals have jumped by more than four-fifths since 2013, and 450,000 mainlanders came for the week of the Chinese new year in February alone.
A huge incentive is the weakness of the yen thanks to the Bank of Japan’s monetary easing. The currency has fallen sharply, including by nearly two-fifths against the yuan, which is loosely pegged to the dollar, since October 2011. The draw for sightseers and shoppers is proving irresistible. Foreign tourists spent ¥2 trillion ($18.9 billion) last year, about double their outlay in 2012. Think of it as the most visible consequence of Abenomics, the plan by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to boost the economy mainly through central-bank easing. Once notorious for its high prices, Japan is now ludicrously cheap. Song Yuanyin, hired by a Shanghainese family to help hunt for rice cookers, says goods are much cheaper than in Shanghai.
Looser visa rules have also helped spur inbound tourism, along with tax-free shopping. Japanese businesses are adapting. No-frills hotels for travelling salarymen are being revamped to cater to foreign tourists—hotels in the Apa group (“Always Pleasant Amenity”) are popular with foreigners for their traditional twist and low cost. Michi no eki, government-designated rest areas for motorists offering restaurants, crafts shops and even onsen hot springs now aim their services squarely at Asian visitors.
The Japanese themselves were once caricatured as they descended upon Europe’s tourist spots by the coach load. Now many Japanese complain about boorish Asian tourists. South Koreans, for instance, always demand discounts, says Kazushi Komatsuzaki, the manager of a men’s clothing store in Daikanyama. Another manager of a clothes shop says that even though Chinese buy as many as 30 items at a time, they tend to eat while fingering all the goods. At onsen, visitors violate a strict etiquette, with Chinese the worst offenders, says Kaori Tsuda, the owner of a thatched onsen resort in Hakone, a national park near Mount Fuji. You are supposed to wash yourself thoroughly before quietly slipping in naked to the communal pool. Instead, some Chinese jump in fully clothed and even try to make bubbles by pouring in liquid soap. In refined Kyoto, Chinese were caught—horrors—shaking a cherry tree to make a shower of blossom. But it is all worth it. A foreign visitor spends on average ¥130,000, and a good chunk of the spending benefits depressed local regions once visitors can be lured away from Ginza.
Besides, visitors seem to take home more than just souvenirs, shopping bags and selfies. Zeng Yang, from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, says that she particularly relishes Japan’s clean air. For Chinese visiting Hakone, the clear skies and pristine environment make a deep impression, says Ling Yun, a guide. In Naha, Okinawa’s capital, Hong Kongers fill huge bags with fresh vegetables and fruit, so wary are they of chemically contaminated produce back home from mainland China.
What is more, as Japanese diplomats observe hopefully, mainland Chinese visitors are often surprised to find that their neighbours are not the blood-curdling imperialists portrayed in anti-Japanese television dramas in China. Instead, they go home with stories of having lost wallets or other items safely returned to them. Indeed, on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, a theme of the “true goodness” of the Japanese has taken off, much to the Japanese tourist board’s delight. For this outbreak of amity, give thanks to the central bank.
LEE KUAN YEW died on March 23rd after spending 47 days in intensive care. His son and prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told the country that Singapore will not see a man like him again. Its first prime minister had “fought for independence, built a nation where there was none and made us proud to be Singaporeans”. After a family wake, the patriarch’s body lay in state on March 25th. Singaporeans came in huge numbers to pay respects: by the afternoon the queues wound all around downtown Singapore, with an eight-hour wait to file past the coffin. Elsewhere, at designated sites, people left flowers, cards and balloons. A typical note read: “Thank you for all the sweat and tears you’ve shed for the building of our nation.”
Another tribute to Mr Lee’s nation-building was the absence of any flicker from the stockmarket on news of his death. True, Mr Lee had not been prime minister for 25 years, and he had been out of government entirely since 2011. But Singapore sits in a region rife with political instability and corruption. By contrast, and thanks largely to Mr Lee, Singapore’s institutions are strong, its governance honest, effective—and dull.
Yet slowly and unmistakably, its controlled politics is changing. When Mr Lee pulled tiny Singapore out of its union with Malaysia, it was poor and faced long odds. Today Singaporeans are well-educated and well-travelled, while GDP per head is among the world’s highest. Having grown up in a rich country, young Singaporeans increasingly chafe at restrictions their grandparents willingly accepted. Public protests remain rare. (One place where they are partly tolerated, Hong Lim Park’s Speakers’ Corner, was closed this week “for remembering” Mr Lee.) But complaining, criticising and venting frustrations on social media are increasingly common.
Rising expectations have already produced popular discontent, or what passes for it in Singapore. The People’s Action Party (PAP), which Mr Lee founded, has governed without interruption since before Singapore became a republic in 1965. But in the most recent general election, in 2011, the PAP posted its worst-ever performance, winning just 60% of the popular vote—6.5 percentage points less than it took in 2006 (though thanks to clever boundary-drawing, it still won 81 of 87 elected seats).
Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore That election, says Kenneth Paul Tan at the Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy, showed the government that “citizens’ views really do matter” and that the old paternalist model of politics that assumed Singaporeans could see no further than their narrow self-interest no longer holds.
Especially since that election, the government has made a point of listening to citizens rather than just lecturing them. Our Singapore Conversation, an initiative launched in 2012, has held more than 660 “dialogue sessions” across the country, during which Singaporeans have discussed their views on government policies. Such programmes may be largely symbolic, but they at least show government openness. And, Mr Tan argues, they help develop the civic and democratic values that years of paternalism had discouraged.
That is a long-term transformation. In the nearer term, the PAP must contest another election—it will probably call one for later this year. No one seriously expects it to lose. At the recent launch of a new political party, Singaporeans First, opposition leaders conceded that Mr Lee’s death and Singapore’s 50th anniversary celebrations in August will boost the ruling party.
But a party does not have to lose to change. In recent years the PAP has overcome its aversion to welfare programmes, expanding financial aid to the elderly and directing more benefits to poorer Singaporeans. It has tried to use persuasion rather than bullying in meeting popular discontent over high rates of immigration and concerns over whether Singapore’s forced-savings scheme can meet the needs of an ageing population. In his time, Lee Kuan Yew would have done it differently. But the times are changing.
TEN months after seizing power in a coup, Thailand’s junta chafes at still having to defend its record. It will soon start handing out to passers-by in busy parts of Bangkok the first of 10,000 glossy booklets recounting the junta’s glorious achievements. It probably hopes the missive will help to quell creeping discontent in the capital, and save Prayuth Chan-ocha, the general serving as Thailand’s prime minister, from endless questioning. He recently said he had been tempted to punch a journalist in the face.
The army’s propagandists have plenty to scribble about. Unburdened of democratic process, its rubber-stamp parliament, the National Legislative Assembly (NLA), has been cranking out new laws—more than 60 since it was set up in September. Among other things it has banned foreigners from paying Thai women to be surrogate mothers. It is mulling economic reforms to help online entrepreneurs (critics warn of more censorship and cyber snooping). It is also legitimising aspects of martial law, including tougher rules on protests and the right to detain civilians for nearly three months without charge.
Just as busy are the bigwigs whom the junta has put in charge of writing a new constitution. Many of the constitutional proposals, which will be published in draft form in mid-April, aim to shrink the power of political parties. They may include reducing the size of the national assembly’s lower house and encouraging the growth of independent candidates. It all seems designed to prevent any party gaining the dominance that was enjoyed by Pheu Thai, a populist outfit abhorred by Bangkok’s coup-backers but which easily won both the general elections it contested.
See our study of Thailand's volatile politics in graphics A new constitution may well allow for an unelected prime minister in times of crisis—a similar rule kept the army in charge throughout the 1980s. Thailand’s half-elected senate will probably be replaced by a fully-appointed one with more powers—a “House of Citizens”, the idea’s supporters call it. The constitution may also create high-level committees to make sure that future governments continue social and economic programmes which the junta is now launching.
Yet as the army tightens its grip on the political machinery it is finding it harder to command obedience among ordinary Thais. Student protesters are proving indefatigable. Prosecutors will soon decide whether or not to charge four high-profile activists who staged a mock election. An uptick in low-level violence is perhaps the biggest concern. Recently someone threw a grenade at a Bangkok courthouse. In February two pipe bombs exploded outside a shopping centre in the capital. And on March 22nd police found a cache of explosives hidden in forests not far from where the junta will soon hold a cabinet meeting.
Heavy-handedness could embolden dissent rather than suppress it. Two young people sentenced to 2½ years in prison for their part in a satirical play are among many feeling the stricter enforcement of Thailand’s lèse-majesté law. On March 19th Yingluck Shinawatra, prime minister until last May, learnt that she faces a trial for negligence in political office that could see her jailed for a decade. Anti-corruption officials want the NLA to consider banning more than 200 of her former MPs from holding political office.
The junta says that its new constitution will be finalised in September, perhaps allowing for a general election to be held next February. But before that it will have to decide whether the constitution should be put to a referendum, as happened in 2007. The junta’s supporters seem to be discouraging the idea, claiming that it would delay the return to democracy.
As for politicians from Thailand’s two main political parties, both turfed out of parliament by the coup, they are starting to look unusually united in their opposition to the junta’s plans. This month Abhisit Vejjajiva, leader of the pro-establishment Democrat Party and a former prime minister, called the constitutional proposals “a step back for democracy”. Members of Pheu Thai warn that the new constitution could cause fresh conflict. The generals had always promised that their takeover would help Thailand’s feuding politicians find common ground. It has happened in ways they did not intend.
DURING his first visit to Washington as Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani said everything his infuriating predecessor, Hamid Karzai, did not. Where Mr Karzai could sound insultingly ungrateful, Mr Ghani heaped thanks on his American hosts for the roughly $1 trillion spent in Afghanistan since 2001, and the more than 2,200 American lives lost—even, at a Pentagon ceremony, addressing some of the families of those who died. He emphasised a determination to crack down on corruption. And he won praise from President Barack Obama for having “taken on the mantle of commander-in-chief in a way that we have not seen in the past from an Afghan president.”
Mr Ghani comes away with a prize, of sorts: a tweaking of Mr Obama’s plans to pull American forces out of Afghanistan. Instead of nearly halving the American force, to 5,500, from the middle of this year, Mr Obama said all 9,800 soldiers would now remain until the end of the year. They will not be sent into combat but rather continue in the “train, advise and assist” role they adopted at the end of 2014. By the end of 2016, when Mr Obama leaves office, even that supporting role will supposedly be over, with only a military assistance office remaining.
Opinions polls show that Afghans fear a complete departure of foreign troops. The pause should help Afghanistan get through the “fighting season” against the Taliban and other insurgents in the warmer months of this year. The country’s security forces need continuing training and they still struggle with logistics and basic management. American military types in Kabul, the capital, blame an alarming shrinkage in the size of the Afghan army last year not on a lack of appetite among young Afghans to join security forces suffering horrendous casualties fighting the Taliban, but on the failure of ministries to meet recruitment targets because they do not have the bureaucratic capacity.
The hope now is that a strong showing by Afghan forces in the coming months, even if losses remain high, will help nudge the insurgents to the negotiating table. It is something that Pakistan, the Taliban’s former sponsor, is also encouraging, now that Mr Ghani is also mending fences with Afghanistan’s eastern neighbour.
Nor is it clear that the withdrawal of all American forces by the end of next year is set in stone. Mr Obama long wanted to be able to say at the end of his presidency that he had ended the foreign wars in which America was engaged, and had brought all the troops home. However, the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq now makes it an impossible boast; that in turn weakens the political imperative of getting fully out of Afghanistan. Moreover, Ashton (“Ash”) Carter, Mr Obama’s new defence secretary, is reckoned to be more committed to ensuring a respectable denouement in Afghanistan than was his predecessor, Chuck Hagel. If Mr Carter thinks some troops should stay on, Mr Obama might find it hard to overrule him.
Yet in the end, foreign cash may prove more critical than foreign troops in sustaining a fragile government against an insurgency. Mr Obama promised to ask Congress, which Mr Ghani addressed on March 25th, to pay for the country’s 352,000 police and soldiers at least until the end of 2017. Mr Ghani was careful to thank not just American soldiers but also “the American taxpayer for his and her hard-earned dollars”.
PHOTOGRAPHS of parents scaling the walls of an exam hall to pass cheat sheets to students offer the latest evidence of India’s failing school system. The examinees in Bihar, a largely rural state, were in the matriculating class, known as class ten. A good mark might be a gateway to college and a decent job in government, computing or banking. Sadly a big decline in school standards has made this far harder to achieve, at least by fair means. Hence the lengths—or heights—to which parents will go.
A recent report on education in rural India shows how far standards have slipped in the past decade. Fewer than half of pupils in class five could properly read a text written for class two pupils. Almost a fifth in class two could not recognise single-digit numbers.
An education system that favours elitism over basic schooling is in part to blame. The OECD found that the top 5% of 15-year-olds in two Indian states performed as well as average rich-country children in reading, mathematics and science. But the rest were far behind. And there are shortcomings even in higher education. Technology firms complain that graduate recruits are not up to scratch. Only a quarter with technical degrees are considered employable, according to one industry body. The pictures from Bihar will encourage employers to be still more sceptical about Indian qualifications.
IN THE gay bars and clubs of Shinjuku, a lively part of Japan’s capital, the talk is all about what the neighbouring district of Shibuya is up to. The local mayor, Toshitake Kuwahara, is on the verge of introducing certificates which would recognise same-sex relationships as equivalent to marriages. Lots of couples are preparing to get hitched, say clubbers. Some are moving to Shibuya. Assuming the ordinance is passed, the first certificates could be issued in the summer.
Tokyo’s gay activists hope that this will eventually lead to the full national adoption of gay-marriage laws. Japan is one of only a handful of rich countries not to give legal rights to same-sex partnerships. But Shibuya’s move is already sparking a backlash, says a bar-owner in Shinjuku who goes by the name of Masaya. He says he wishes that Mr Kuwahara had left gays alone to live their lives discreetly.
Japan’s brand of homophobia is understated but powerful. The country’s attitude is akin to the American military’s former rule of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, says Wataru Ishizaka, an assembly member in Nakano ward, who is one of only two openly gay elected politicians in the capital. The prospect of recognising gay partnerships is shocking to conservatives. There have been demonstrations against the idea in the capital, and much ranting online.
In fact, the proposed changes would fall far short of the full recognition of gay marriage. The certificates would apply only in Shibuya. They would not be legally binding, though they would ask (for example) hospitals to grant gay people access to their partners, and give protection for transgender people sometimes turned away from voting booths. Yet the proportion of Japan’s gay people who have come out is small, so the number of people likely to apply for the certificates may not even reach a thousand.
Over time, Shibuya’s move is likely to be copied elsewhere. In Tokyo, Setagaya and Toshima wards are considering similar measures; so is Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city. Local governments have often shown themselves to be more progressive on social matters than the national legislature, which later follows suit.
But it’s odd people that we really loathe
Few Japanese frown on gays on religious or moral grounds. Rather, the objection is that they depart from the norm—which is something that new laws might change. Conservatives also oppose gay marriage out of a general sense of panic over traditional marriage. Japanese couples are getting married either later or not at all, resulting in a low birth rate (since few children are born out of wedlock).
Marriage as an institution in Japan is fragile, says Masakatsu Kondo, the head of a conservative group which opposes Shibuya’s initiative. He says it would be weakened further if same-sex partnerships were to acquire quasi-legal standing. Yet it is hard to believe that a few certificates for gay couples could have a greater deterrent effect than the strictures and costs of traditional marriage—the result of deep-seated factors, ranging from long working hours to old-fashioned sexual stereotyping.
At the moment, politicians of the Liberal Democratic Party are criticising Shibuya’s initiative. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, has pointed out that Article 24 of Japan’s (American-written) constitution refers to marriage as based on the mutual consent of “both sexes”. But as many people in the bars of Shinjuku wryly note, in other areas of policy, Mr Abe’s dearest wish is to rewrite the bits of the constitution that he finds archaic.
IT IS hard to imagine what more could go wrong for Congress, which has dominated Indian politics for much of the country’s independent life. Last year’s parliamentary elections were disastrous: the party took just 44 seats (out of 543) in May, too few to count as the official opposition. In five state assembly polls since then it has been crushed. In February’s election in Delhi, a territory it ran for 15 years up to 2013, Congress won no seats.
Awful electoral losses might be explained as part of a political cycle. Failed leadership and division are graver threats. The biggest problem is Rahul Gandhi, the 44-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, who expects to become Congress’s “working president” this year. Mr Gandhi led the party to its worst-ever national defeat last year, but tells colleagues that all blame rests on the previous, unpopular, Congress-led government.
He has a habit of shirking responsibility. He spurned offers from Manmohan Singh, who was prime minister from 2004 to 2014, to enter the government. An MP who knows him well suggests he thought a mere ministership beneath him. He rarely speaks in parliament and has declined to lead Congress’s MPs in the lower house. After guiding Congress to a thumping defeat in state elections in Uttar Pradesh in 2012, he disappeared from public view for months. He is missing again: since February 23rd he has taken an unspecified period of leave in a secret location. The timing is terrible: parliament’s budget session is under way. Last week Narendra Modi’s government passed its biggest reform yet, to let more foreign investment into the insurance industry.
With Mr Gandhi away, his mother, Sonia, is trying to rally the demoralised troops. Thanks to the electoral timetable, Congress will retain a strong presence in the upper house of parliament for a couple more years, and has been busy opposing government bills there. This week Mrs Gandhi led a march in Delhi against proposals to weaken farmers’ property rights to make it easier for investors to buy land. Last week she took around 100 Congress politicians to the home of Mr Singh, supporting him after a special court ruled that he must appear next month, as an accused, over a massive coal scandal.
The prosecution of the former prime minister (if it happens) could be a slim opportunity for Congress as well as a threat. Mr Singh took personal charge of a notoriously crooked coal ministry, so he needs to explain how favoured companies—donors to political parties—won control of valuable coal deposits. A trial could confirm Congress’s reputation for shady deals, but abandoning Mr Singh to take the rap on his own could backfire on the party, since he was known to do the bidding of the powerful Gandhi family. Congress is reluctant to repeat the shabby treatment of its only other prime minister in the past quarter of a century, Narasimha Rao. He was seen as a rival to Mrs Gandhi, so the great reformer of the 1990s was hounded by his party, then abandoned to face trials for corruption, until just before his death in 2004.
Being seen to rally around Mr Singh makes better sense, especially if Congress can somehow accuse the government of trying to win unfair political advantage from a trial. For the moment, Mr Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have mostly stayed sensibly silent about it. Congress is speaking up, though, especially its younger leaders. Jyotiraditya Scindia, an MP and friend of Mr Gandhi who is rising in the party, says Congress is “300% behind Mr Singh”.
Congress is still stuck in the doldrums, however. Its fate now probably depends on how far other parties fill the space it has lost. In Delhi that means the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Arvind Kejriwal, a former anti-corruption campaigner, who is secular, populist and a vocal critic of Mr Modi. The chief minister of the national capital territory wants AAP to expand to other states, including Punjab. To do that, he needs first to address divisions in his own party, as rival leaders accuse him of being autocratic and “unilateral”. But at least Mr Kejriwal, despite ill health, shows he has energy and ambition. Few would say the same of Mr Gandhi.
OVER the past five years, Filipino police and armed forces have tried and failed nine times to capture Zulkifli Abdhir, a Malaysian bomb-maker better known as Marwan, who was reportedly involved in the Bali bombings in 2002 that left hundreds dead. These repeated failures made Getulio Napeñas, a former head of the Special Action Force (SAF), an elite police squad, suspicious that members of the armed forces were leaking information about operations in advance.
So he organised a raid without them. On January 25th 392 SAF troops assembled at Mamasapano, a town in the Muslim-majority province of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, to capture Marwan and two other men, Usman and Baco, who are suspected of involvement in various bombings and kidnappings. The trio were protected by fighters from the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), a small secessionist group that split away from the larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which signed a peace agreement with the government in 2014. What was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab turned into a disaster: after a daylong firefight, 44 SAF troops were dead, along with 18 MILF fighters, at least five civilians and an unknown number of BIFF rebels. Marwan was killed; Usman and Baco escaped.
Benigno Aquino, the Philippines’ president, has not been quite so lucky. Since the raid he has endured the toughest stretch of his presidency. Ever since taking office in 2010, Mr Aquino had been unusually and durably popular. But since the botched raid he has gone from honeymoon to lame duck without the usual intervening period of normal government. Mr Aquino has consistently blamed Mr Napeñas for the carnage; Walden Bello, a former congressional ally of Mr Aquino’s, called that strategy “the latest development in the shrinking of the man from a credible president to a small-minded bureaucrat trying desperately to erase his fingerprints from a failed project to save his own ass.”
Two new reports pile on the agony. The first, released on March 13th by a board of inquiry commissioned by the police, found that the president had violated the chain of command. It said he had approved the raid, allowed Alan Purisima—who had been suspended as head of the Philippine National Police more than a month earlier—to participate in its planning and execution and “deliberately fail[ed] to inform” both Mr Purisima’s replacement and Mar Roxas, the interior secretary, of his actions.
The second report, released on March 17th by a senate committee, reached a similar conclusion. It said Mr Aquino “is ultimately responsible for the outcome of the mission” and urged him to “admit the mistakes he made.”
Mr Aquino will not do that. Nor is he likely to resign. Instead, he faces two lingering political threats. The immediate one is to peace in Mindanao. A campaign against BIFF has, according to the army, killed more than 120 rebels but displaced more than 90,000 civilians. A law aimed at ending the long insurgency by creating an autonomous political entity in Mindanao (see map) was meant to come up for congressional approval this spring. But in the wake of the Mamasapano raid, progress has halted: it has lost at least two sponsors, and members of Congress have been calling for more hearings.
The longer-term threat is to Mr Aquino’s legacy. Not only has his signature achievement—lasting peace in Mindanao, which no previous president had achieved—been imperilled. But if he continues to lose allies, popularity and credibility, potential candidates in next year’s presidential election will distance themselves from him. Not long ago Mr Aquino’s supporters considered changing the constitution to let him serve a second six-year term. Now it looks as though finishing one would be achievement enough.
AT A cost of $1.4 billion, Colombo port city is Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign-financed project. The idea is to reclaim land from the sea and build fancy houses on it. The state-owned China Communications Construction Company won the contract from the ports ministry, run by the then president, Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The megaproject fits neatly into China’s plans for what it calls a new maritime Silk Road to increase trade across the Indian Ocean. But in Sri Lanka, the deal is hugely controversial. It has become a test of how far the new government can turn its back on the Rajapaksa era and how skilfully it can steer its foreign policy between Asia’s two giants, China and India.
During the election campaign, Maithripala Sirisena, who is now president, promised to review the plan and investigate all foreign-funded projects for corruption and other problems. On March 5th work on the port city was suspended after an initial study found various planning and other permits had not been obtained.
The trouble is that the project has opened up divisions within the new government, a fragile alliance between parts of the old opposition United National Party, defectors from Mr Rajapaksa’s ranks (including Mr Sirisena himself), and smaller groups. In February a senior minister said the project would continue. A day later the prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, said two parliamentary committees would have to investigate “serious suspicion regarding this transaction” before a decision was made. The onus for securing the missing contracts rests on Sri Lanka’s ports authority, a state-owned body. Piling on the pressure, the Chinese—who are financing the port city—have said they cannot afford any more delays.
The project is a headache partly because geopolitics is at play. India dislikes China holding land near Colombo’s port, a trans-shipment hub for Indian cargo. Last year, it objected strongly to a Chinese military submarine docking at the port’s Chinese-run commercial harbour. It was no coincidence that work on the port was suspended just before India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, arrived in Sri Lanka, the first bilateral visit for 28 years. It would have been inconceivable for construction to be in progress when he arrived, said a senior diplomat.
Mr Sirisena is keen to repair relations with India. There have been four high-level bilateral visits between the countries since January, plus a slew of agreements, including Sri Lanka’s first civil nuclear partnership with any foreign government.
The president is also rebuilding ties with the West, which have been damaged by Mr Rajapaksa’s refusal to investigate alleged war crimes committed at the end of Sri Lanka’s decades-long military conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels. Eschewing his predecessor’s intransigence, Mr Sirisena has promised to set up a domestic inquiry within a month.
But he does not want to turn his back on China, which is not only offering easy terms for the project, but also contributed an abundance of weaponry to the war on the Tigers at a time when other countries hesitated or were critical. “India is a good neighbour,” says Mr Sirisena. “China is a good ally.” Keeping both countries happy is proving a tricky task.
TROPICAL cyclones are frequent in the south-west Pacific between November and April, with an average of ten a year. They are born near the equator and scythe southward. Rivers burst their banks and crops are destroyed, but the loss of life is usually small. People stock up on tinned food and bottled water. Householders who own a fridge stuff newspaper around their food as insulation for when the electricity blacks out.
But Cyclone Pam, which ripped through the Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu on the night of March 13th, was quite out of the ordinary. With sustained winds of 145 knots (268km per hour), it was the worst storm to hit the South Pacific since at least Cyclone Zoe in 2002. It brushed the east coast of Efate, the island on which the capital, Port Vila, sits. Eleven people were reported to have died, but the number is likely to rise.
Vanuatu has a population of around 267,000, spread across 65 islands. The more remote southern islands of Erromango, Tanna and Aneityum took direct hits from Cyclone Pam. Tanna, home to around 28,000 people, bore the brunt. Most of the islanders are subsistence farmers, many living in traditional thatched houses which were flattened. Reports from the stricken outer islands will take weeks to arrive.
These days Pacific islanders usually get early notice of approaching big storms. Meteorological agencies have improved their warning systems over the past decade and are better linked to local radio stations. On remoter islands, the threatening signs of an approaching hurricane tend to be obvious: a high swell and darkening skies. In 2002, when Cyclone Zoe hit the Solomon Islands’ Tikopia, just west of Vanuatu, coastal villages were washed away and many islanders were feared dead. But the inhabitants had moved inland to shelter in caves, a traditional defence.
Vanuatu’s president, Baldwin Lonsdale, was attending a UN conference on disaster risk in Japan when his country was devastated. Responding to his plea for “a helping hand in this disaster”, Australia, New Zealand and France sent flights to survey the damage and provide relief. Britain promised £2m ($3m). The immediate threat is that contaminated water may spread infectious diseases and diarrhoea. Food prices may rise as a result of crop damage. Reconstruction will take years.
In 2006 Vanuatu briefly made the headlines for coming top of the world’s “Happy Planet Index”, an alternative to GDP that combines estimates of well-being with a country’s ecological footprint. Account would now need to be taken of the huge damage left by the catastrophe of Cyclone Pam.
If you talk or speak out of both sides of your mouth, you say different and contradictory things to different people, so that people are left unsure or confused.
SINCE the turmoil of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, South-East Asia has, with some glaring exceptions, enjoyed remarkable political stability. Its leaders have used that calm to promote greater integration of their club, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, or ASEAN. This was supposed to reach something of a climax at the end of 2015, with the birth of the ASEAN Community, which would set up an “economic community”, turning a region of 630m people into a “single market and a single production base”. But this looks likely to be a hollow achievement. There will be myriad formal legislative targets but little genuine integration. One reason is that the political backdrop has changed. Throughout the region, governments are increasingly preoccupied by crises at home.
The usual sources of instability, such as Thailand and Myanmar, remain troubled. A coup last year has imposed a phoney calm on Thai politics. But the central dilemma—that voters keep electing governments the establishment cannot tolerate—is no nearer resolution. Thais have long feared unrest or worse after the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, now a frail 87-year-old. The worry makes the generals even less willing to restore anything like real democracy, in case the monarch should die with the wrong sort of people in charge.
In Myanmar two linked and perilous processes were meant to reach fruition this year: democratisation, with an election in late 2015 that should, in theory, mark the transfer of power from the army’s representatives to a popularly elected government; and a national ceasefire, followed by formal peace talks to end decades of strife with the ethnic groups ringing the country’s borders. But the election may be held under a constitution that continues to give the army a veto over radical change. And hopes that a formal peace process might have been launched by now have been dashed (see article).
ASEAN has long survived the difficulties of these two countries. What has changed the regional outlook more is the emergence of political trouble in three of its founder members, all of which had seemed on course for a few years of stability and growth: Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Indonesia’s neighbours were relieved by the victory in last year’s presidential election of Joko Widodo, or Jokowi. As the first president from outside the established elite, Jokowi seemed to represent a victory for the democratic process itself and hence for stability. And his economic platform was not marred by the aggressive nationalism of his opponent, Prabowo Subianto. But Jokowi is struggling to manage his party, which has forced him into a bruising confrontation over his nominee (later withdrawn) to head the police force. His priorities remain domestic, as he showed with his refusal to heed pleas from foreign governments not to execute their citizens convicted of drug smuggling. ASEAN frets that he thinks Indonesia has outgrown it, and that he might try to pursue his country’s diplomatic interests more on his own.
Malaysia holds the rotating chair of ASEAN this year. Some observers think that may help Najib Razak, the prime minister, keep his job. His enemies, though, seem unconcerned about such niceties. Having apparently secured his post until 2018, in a narrow election victory in 2013 (in which his coalition lost the popular vote), Mr Najib is under fire from his own side. Mahathir Mohamad, a grumpy former prime minister fond of making mischief in Mr Najib’s United Malays National Organisation, points to a series of scandals and has suggested Mr Najib consider resigning.
Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, until recently a remarkably popular president, faces similar calls: from church and civil-society groups, from legislators and even from his aunt and uncle (brother of his revered mother, the late Corazon Aquino). A botched commando raid in January against Islamist rebels on the southern island of Mindanao led to the deaths of 44 special-forces troops and a row over who knew what and when. Mr Aquino will probably survive the storm. But his administration, at long last beyond its honeymoon, is on the brink of its long goodbye: talk of amending the constitution to allow him more than the permitted single six-year term ending in 2016 has been dropped. The favourite to succeed him is his vice-president, who, as often in the Philippines, is from the opposition.
Even Singapore, ASEAN’s richest country and famous for the tedium of its politics, faces uncertainty. Its founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, has been in intensive care with pneumonia for over a month. The current prime minister, his son, Lee Hsien Loong, is recovering from an operation for prostate cancer. It was reportedly successful. His father retired from the cabinet in 2011. But so dominant was the elder Mr Lee in the shaping of modern Singapore that his ill health raises questions. And, with a big celebration planned this year to mark the 50th anniversary of its eviction from the Malaysian federation and birth as an independent country, Singapore, too, has domestic preoccupations, including the date of an election due to be held by early 2017.
We’ll always have Brunei
That leaves, within ASEAN, only four stable spots, all dictatorships: two Communist ones (Laos and Vietnam); one Islamic Sultanate (Brunei); and one thugocracy (Cambodia). None is likely to take a lead within ASEAN to foster integration.
So, as Barry Desker, a former Singaporean diplomat who is now an academic, says: “ASEAN integration remains an illusion.” Writing in Singapore’s Straits Times, he pointed to two dangers. One is that ASEAN splits into two tiers, with poorer Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar all shunning the—albeit stately— “fast” track to integration. The other is that ASEAN’s diplomatic unity frays as external powers, notably China, court individual members. For the moment, ASEAN offers little to shield its members from internal political upset or external diplomatic pressure.
FOR most of the past three weeks 19 members of the Yang family have lived in “125”, a refugee camp that straddles the Myanmar-China border. They left their homes in February when fighting flared up between Burmese government troops and local rebels, says one of the Yang sisters, carrying the youngest of her six children on her back in a red velvet sling. But after shelling came perilously close to the camp one night, they fled again, this time crossing into China, laden down with bedding, clothes and “water-smoking pipe”, or giant bamboo hookah. They joined the 60,000 or so Burmese who, the Chinese state media say, have entered Yunnan province since early February.
The fighting in Kokang, a small region in Myanmar’s northern Shan state, is the bloodiest the country has seen for years. It risks undermining Myanmar’s ceasefire talks. It also worsens an already turbulent relationship between Myanmar and China and highlights differences between the central government in Beijing and far-flung Yunnan, one of China’s poorest provinces, which shares a 2,000km border with Myanmar.
The conflict involves China partly because the fighting is on its doorstep: on March 8th stray bombs damaged a house on the Chinese side. Kokang also retains a special place in China’s psyche. It was part of the country until the Qing dynasty ceded it to Britain in 1897. Around 90% of the Kokang are ethnic Han-Chinese (a similar proportion make up China’s own population); they speak Mandarin, use Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, and many have friends and relatives in Yunnan. Some have Chinese identity cards.
The government of Myanmar claims the Chinese are training Kokang fighters. Some accuse them of arming or financing the Kokang militia, too, and of allowing them to use Chinese territory to outflank government troops. The militia’s octogenarian leader, Peng Jiasheng (known as Phone Kyar Shin in Burmese), denies these allegations but has tried to whip up Chinese support online, reminding the Chinese of their “common race and roots”. Though they are not Chinese citizens, the Kokang’s ethnicity increases domestic pressure on China’s government to respond in some way, reckons Enze Han of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Some Chinese people criticised the government when it failed to react to anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998.
China’s government has tried to dissociate itself from the conflict. An editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper warned people to “avoid any premature stance or interference” in Myanmar’s affairs; Chinese news reports refer to “border people” rather than “refugees”. The government has yet to allow the United Nations refugee agency access to the camps. A facility for refugees at the international convention centre in Nansan, a town just across the border from the main crossing-point in the Kokang capital, Laukkai, was shut within three weeks of the conflict starting. It is unclear what happened to the inhabitants. Some richer Kokang booked into hotels or rented places in Nansan, but the city is not overrun with Burmese—and few have returned to their homes.
For the government in Beijing the local conflict is bothersome: China’s leaders care more about domestic stability and regional economic ties than border tribes. Official policy towards Myanmar, as elsewhere, is not to intervene. Myanmar’s military junta relied on China when the West imposed sanctions in the 1990s, which led to a backlash against the country in 2011 after Thein Sein came to power. Some contracts have since been renegotiated and Chinese investment has recovered. China now sees Myanmar mainly as a trading partner and energy supplier.
But the influx of Kokang has forced China to become more involved. Resources have been mobilised quickly to deal with the incomers and several temporary facilities opened—though at least one has been closed, and there have been unconfirmed reports of refugees being forced back to Myanmar. Still, the situation is a lot better than in the recent past. In 2009 30,000 people fled another flare-up in Kokang, the largest refugee crisis on China’s border since the war with Vietnam in 1979. In 2011-12 hostilities in Kachin again forced thousands into Yunnan. On both occasions, China’s humanitarian response was weak and late, says Yun Sun of the Stimson Centre, a think-tank in Washington. Since then a succession of natural disasters has given China more experience in dealing with internally displaced people.
The conflict also sheds light on the different priorities of Beijing and Yunnan. Although trade with Myanmar accounts for less than 1% of China’s total, it makes up 24% of Yunnan’s. Residents on both sides benefit from being allowed to move freely, but fighting jeopardises that. So local Yunnanese ought to have a strong incentive to end the fighting.
At the same time illegitimate commercial activities conducted by Chinese companies in northern Myanmar—including illegal mining, logging and smuggling conducted under the noses of local officials—help to finance local militias. These illicit ventures are sources of conflict with locals. And they are at the root of Burmese accusations that China is supporting and arming the separatists. The government in Beijing could do more to clamp down on such trade.
It has already moved to increase its oversight of Yunnan and the border with Myanmar. In 2009 provincial officials either did not know or did not tell the authorities in Beijing that a conflict was brewing. Now the Chinese army, rather than the local border police, controls the boundary. And officials in Beijing have established direct links with ethnic groups inside Myanmar, rather than going through their Yunnanese counterparts, as before. But the Chinese authorities do not have an appetite for being sucked in. Unless the violence gets much worse, the government in Beijing is unlikely to step in to try to make peace between Myanmar’s government and the Kokang.
RUSSIA is not the only former Soviet republic where opposition leaders are being gunned down in the street. Last week, Umarali Kuvatov, leader of a Tajik movement called Group 24, who fled the country in 2012 reportedly after a business deal with the president’s son-in-law went wrong, fell ill while having dinner in Istanbul. That (speculate the Turkish media) was a result of poisoning. Whether true or not, when he went outside for medical help, he was shot in the back of the head. His assassin vanished.
The murder came days after a parliamentary election in Tajikistan on March 1st. Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an inter-governmental body, said half the votes they saw being counted should have been thrown out. They also reported ballot-box stuffing and intimidation.
Tajikistan has never had an election that was judged fair by independent observers. But in the past the opposition has been allowed to take a few seats—not enough to make a legislative difference, but a way of dealing with conflicts which, in the 1990s, erupted into a civil war that pitted a jumble of opposition parties against former Communist bosses led by Emomali Rahmon, now president. A peace agreement in 1997 guaranteed the opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), 30% of government positions. Over the years Mr Rahmon has steadily reneged on the deal; this month, the IRPT was shut out of the national legislature for the first time.
The president seems to have turned his back on the country’s fragile post-civil-war order. The fear is that some opponents—angry at being denied even the vestiges of influence—may now respond violently.
AROUND 9m people have fled their homes in Syria. Over 3m have taken refuge in neighbouring countries. But thousands more have fanned out across the world, some to as far away as Japan. There, they have found the drawbridge up. The world’s third-largest economy has yet to grant asylum to a single Syrian.
The treatment meted out to Syrians is consistent with Japan’s stingy record on sheltering people fleeing conflicts of all kinds. In the decade to 2013, the country gave asylum to just over 300 refugees. In 2014, the number fell to 11.
These figures are all the more remarkable considering that the number of stateless people is growing, and that many are knocking on Japan’s door. Last year, the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people topped 50m worldwide for the first time. In Japan there were more asylum applications than at any time since the country signed the UN refugee convention in 1981.
Once they arrive, asylum seekers can face a grim experience. Some are locked up for years while their claims are processed. Immigration officials give the impression that they just want refugees to leave, says Gloria Okafor Ifeoma, a Nigerian asylum-seeker who arrived in Tokyo in 2007 and has spent about 30 months under lock and key. Japan’s media revealed last month that there are no full-time doctors in the country’s three immigration centres. (Part-time doctors visit a few hours a day.) Last March two foreigners died in detention.
Not surprisingly, criticism is growing. On a visit to Tokyo last year, Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said Japan’s asylum system is rigid and restrictive. Hiroshi Miyauchi, a lawyer, calls the rejection of all 61 applications from Syrian refugees since 2011 “appalling”. He represents four Syrians who are suing the justice ministry to reverse its decision. Eri Ishikawa, chair of the Japan Association for Refugees, a non-profit organisation, says Japan’s system for gathering information about asylum seekers from the refugees’ countries of origin is primitive. She claims that many claimants are being needlessly rejected.
The government bristles at such criticisms. Japan, it points out, is the world’s fourth-largest financial contributor to UNHCR. Immigration officials merely apply standard criteria when reviewing asylum applications. If the approval rate is low, insists a spokesperson for the justice ministry, that’s a problem with the criteria. Anyway, over half the Syrian applicants have been granted special permission to stay on humanitarian grounds.
But pressure for change is building. The justice ministry is reviewing how it processes asylum claims. The UNHCR is helping draw up its final recommendations. Optimists expect the result to be fairer and more transparent. Perhaps. But Mieko Ishikawa, director of Forum for Refugees Japan, a network of refugee associations, fears it might actually make things worse. Immigration officials, she worries, could get more power to weed out “abusers” from the desperate human flotsam that increasingly washes up on Japan’s shores.
“THIS is an international conspiracy to defame India,” raged one minister in parliament last week, upset by a foreign film about a rape in Delhi. Another, Rajnath Singh (the home minister), claimed that he would somehow order Britain’s state broadcaster, the BBC, not to show it. Pressed by the opposition, the government prevented the film from being shown on national television—guaranteeing it a large audience online.
Thin-skinned Indian politicians often claim that a “foreign hand” is plotting against the country and besmirching its good name. When outside researchers point to worryingly high levels of air pollution, open defecation or bad public hygiene, for example, nationalists call such observations malign or defamatory.
A fuss in the past few days over the BBC documentary is typical. It retold the terrible story of the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, a medical student, in 2012. Controversially, it aired interviews from jail with one of her unrepentant killers, who blamed his victim for her own murder. “It takes two hands to clap,” he said. An attention-seeking defence lawyer described how he would kill his own daughter in public if she “dishonoured” him.
Such comments make Indian men look repressive and thuggish. In fact in the film, and elsewhere, many voices (men included) speak sensibly about the wider causes of women’s ill-treatment. “These men are ours,” says the author of a judicial commission on rape in India. His point is that Indians are perfectly capable of confronting abusive attitudes: denial helps nobody.
To his credit, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, has done more than most to discuss social problems. Since becoming prime minister last year he has called rape a national “shame”; he has talked about the “mental illness” of ill-treating girls; he has called for a minimum level of representation of women in parliament (a third); and has said bluntly that sex-selective abortion “needs to stop.” Female foeticide remains prevalent, reflecting a cultural preference for boys.
The government might also welcome a wider debate because it has a decent case to make. Maternal mortality has fallen by almost half since 2000. Female literacy rates have risen (see table). Even the increase in the numbers of rape cases reported to the police might indicate greater willingness to report it, as well as (or rather than) rising incidence. Of course, too few women have jobs or bank accounts; murders happen over dowry and “honour”; fathers and husbands wield most control overall. Nonetheless, a national debate should be possible on fixing social ills.
Instead, most politicians have plumped for denial, “the one form of intellectual argument we have mastered,” says Mihir Sharma, author of a book on Indian policymaking. Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist, says India’s leader “in general says the right thing, but significant sections of his party say the opposite”. Even Mr Modi’s record is mixed. He refused to speak out against religious violence during this year’s state-election campaign in Delhi, even as several churches were burnt or damaged. He did vow to ensure “equal respect to all religions”. But this came only after the electoral rout of his Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) in the Delhi election, and following a warning from Barack Obama, America’s president, that India must avoid “splintering” along religious lines.
On environmental matters and freedom of expression, Mr Modi’s government—adopting the habits of its predecessors—has tended to silence those who would raise awkward subjects. In January officials at Delhi airport used trumped-up charges to stop an Indian woman leaving the country. She had planned to tell a parliamentary committee in Britain that a coal-mining project would harm forest dwellers in India. She worked for Greenpeace, a non-governmental organisation, which, like other NGOs, is facing visa bans and a financing clampdown. On March 12th the Delhi High Court, calling the action “illegal and arbitrary”, said the government could not stop her from travelling.
The national censor board (now crammed with BJP appointees) in January upheld a decision to cut the word “Bombay” from a music video, because nationalists want only to hear the city’s official name, Mumbai. Also in January, ruling BJP politicians in that city filed a legal complaint and launched an official investigation over a comedy stage show that they deemed “vulgar”. Its online broadcasts promptly ended. A year ago (shortly before Mr Modi came to office) Penguin, a publisher (part-owned by Pearson, which is The Economist’s largest shareholder), limply gave up publishing books by a respected American academic, Wendy Doniger, because Hindu nationalists dislike her view of Indian history.
Of course, Indians sometimes have cause for complaint. A German professor in Leipzig had to apologise on March 9th for saying that Indian men could not apply to be her interns because of India’s reputation for sexual violence. Swapan Dasgupta, a columnist close to Mr Modi, thinks foreign opinion is distorted by a caricatured “Oxfam view” of India as a place only of “poverty, inequality, oppression of women and now the added element of rape”. But the best way to correct such views would surely be to rebut them, not (as so often now) to censor them.
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Tieng Anh Vui
