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Politicians vie for poor-Muslim votes

FIFTEEN years after he migrated with his family to the bright lights of Delhi, Muhammad Naushad has little to show for it. An illiterate 20-year-old weaver, he earns 2,000 rupees ($43) a month, half of which he sends to his mother in the poor state of Bihar. Amid the evening babble of Nizamuddin, a fly-blown Muslim quarter in the heart of India’s capital, Mr Naushad says his only ambition is to get a better job. It is hard to guess what that might be.

He is all too typical of India’s 160m Muslims. Found mostly in its northern and eastern states, poor giants such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar and West Bengal, they are among the country’s poorest and least educated people. According to a 2006 government-commissioned report, Muslims are almost as badly off as dalits, Hinduism’s former “untouchables”—a finding made tragic by the dashed hopes it represents: many Indian Muslims once converted from Hinduism to escape that reviled low-caste status. ...

The defining battle of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency nears its climax

ODDLY for a politician, South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has never hidden his loathing of politics. During his successful presidential-election campaign he vowed to “take politics out of Youido”, a reference to the island on the Han river that houses the National Assembly in Seoul. Mr Lee’s hero is the dictator Park Chung-hee, architect of South Korea’s rise from basket-case to industrial powerhouse. Much like him, Mr Lee believes politicians are impediments to his country’s progress. Unlike Park, however, Mr Lee has to operate in a robust democracy. He is making rather a hash of it.

In a bitter twist of fate, his nemesis is Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye. She was the rival Mr Lee defeated in 2007 to become the presidential candidate of the Grand National Party (GNP). The two have never been reconciled. Mr Lee believes his election entitled him to rule without opposition within the GNP. But Miss Park has never accepted her defeat and still commands a group of as many as 40 loyalists in parliament. ...

Worries about renewed overheating

DURING Tet, the lunar new year holiday, money is everywhere in Vietnam. It is dished out to children, gambled in roadside card-games, and splurged on gifts, feasts, and trips to home villages. This leads to an annual bump in inflation. And this year’s spike in the consumer-price index, which rose by 2% in February, seemed bearable at a time of rapid growth. GDP grew by 5.3% last year. It came, however, among some more worrying signs.

On February 10th, just before Tet, the central bank devalued the currency, the dong, by 3.4%, following a devaluation of 5.4% in November. The aim was to entice holders of dollars to buy dong. A dollar shortage has been starving Vietnam’s exporters of the currency they need to purchase imported parts and materials. ...

Some scent compromise; more fear a looming showdown

IN THAILAND politics has long been about compromise rather than conviction. Political parties run on expediency, not ideology, which makes it possible to cobble together all manner of oddball coalitions. But in recent years pragmatism has given way to more rigid loyalties. Rival camps rally their base with fiery talk of an all-out struggle for the nation’s soul, all the while tugging relentlessly at its seams.

Might compromise yet make a comeback? Some scented a whiff of detente on February 26th, when the Supreme Court ruled on the family fortune of the former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. But that still seems wishful thinking. The nine judges found Mr Thaksin guilty of abusing his powers while in office to favour Shin Corp, his family-owned telecoms group, which was sold in January 2006 to Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund. The court decided to seize $1.4 billion of the $2.3 billion in proceeds from that sale, which had been frozen after the army deposed Mr Thaksin in September 2006. ...

To a sitting room, mobile telephone or supermarket screen near you soon

ON MARCH 1st China Daily got its biggest makeover since the newspaper was launched in 1981 as China’s first English-language daily. As well as a new look, the paper is boosting the number of its foreign correspondents. With a new investigative-reporting feature, China Daily said that it was aiming to “set the news agenda instead of just follow it”.

So far, this agenda seems unlikely to set foreign pulses racing. Next to this bold new feature China Daily splashed an “exclusive” interview with the foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, under the headline “FM: China is doing all it can in foreign affairs”. Still, the makeover marks a departure for the vapid broadsheet. And China Daily is only the latest Chinese media organ to revamp itself in what President Hu Jintao calls an “increasingly fierce struggle in the domain of news and opinion”. ...

After a hard-won battle, President Yudhoyono has a chance to start again

FEZ-WEARING members of Indonesia’s parliament called each other transvestites, yelled and scuffled. Outside, the police turned water cannon on protesting students. The climax this week of a parliamentary investigation into a government bail-out of a private bank in 2008 superficially recalled 1998, and the chaos surrounding the fall of the dictator Suharto. But this time the stakes were smaller; the government of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was never going to fall. At issue was how well it could govern.

The Bank Century scandal had riveted the press for months. But most of Indonesia’s 240m people have preferred chat shows and Hollywood movies, content that the economy has been doing well, growing by 4.5% last year. Inflation last year was just 2.8%, unemployment is down, and consumer confidence booming. That, however, did not deter Mr Yudhoyono’s enemies from plotting to embarrass him and paralyse his government. They managed to do both. Yet he still enjoys an approval rating of about 75%. ...

A rigged vote keeps the ruling party in power in a failing state

TO THE surprise of no one, the governing People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT) won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections on February 28th, with almost 72% of the vote. Nor was anybody taken aback by the myriad irregularities on election day. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitored the polling, said it “failed to meet many key OSCE commitments”. It noted a high prevalence of family- and proxy-voting and cases of ballot-box stuffing.

Preliminary results give the PDPT, led by Emomali Rakhmon, the president, 53 seats out of 63 in the lower house of parliament. The Islamic Revival Party, Central Asia’s only religiously based party, came second, with 7.7% of the vote and two seats. The party’s leadership, which expected to win around 30% of the vote, has cried foul, and plans to sue the election board. ...

To understand North Korea, look not to Confucius or the Soviet Union, but to fascist 1930s Japan

THE face that North Korea presents to the world is widely held to be unreal. Kim Jong Il once told Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, that the bombast in honour of himself and his late, great father, Kim Il Sung, was so much nonsense. Bruce Cumings, an historian, wonders what Mr Kim can be thinking, “standing there in his pear-shaped polyester pantsuit, pointy-toed elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint, an arrogant curl to his feminine lip…and a perpetual bad-hair day? He is thinking, get me out of here.”

The notion that North Korea does not always believe what it is doing colours even diplomacy, which may soon start up again after months of tantrums on the part of the North. The aim is to get North Korea to give up its nuclear programmes as a prelude to normalising relations on the Korean peninsula. Many policymakers in America believe—against the evidence—that Mr Kim can be persuaded to do a deal. Some think that behind his antagonism lurks a desire for accommodation—and even an alliance. ...

The right to eat cats and dogs is under threat

AT THE National People’s Congress (see main story), the Communist Party decides what laws to draft and when they get passed. But public pressure is beginning to count, too. An attempt to persuade the Congress to ban the eating of dog- and cat-meat has captivated the Chinese press and caused an uproar.

A proposed animal-rights law, circulated in draft last September by Chinese activists and legal experts, would be the first of its kind in a country where animal welfare rarely seems a priority. Pigs destined for slaughter are often seen crammed excruciatingly tightly in cages on the backs of lorries. In safari parks visitors happily pay to dangle live chickens into lions’ dens, or even to have a live calf dragged by its legs behind a jeep past ravenous tigers. But a fast-growing middle class, despite enjoying gory outings, is also fond of pet dogs and cats. ...

Making sure that China’s supreme legislative body is toothless

YAO LIFA, a primary schoolteacher who in 1998 became one of the first legislators in China to be elected without the backing of the Communist Party, is wearily resigned to frequent summons by the police. As China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), prepares for its annual session from March 5th, jittery authorities are stepping up surveillance of Mr Yao and others they fear might use the occasion to air grievances about the party’s grip.

The cautious experiment with grassroots democracy that saw Mr Yao elected to his town’s legislature in the province of Hubei was all too brief. By the next poll in 2003, Mr Yao—by then lionised as a daring independent political voice even by some official newspapers—had no chance of winning again. A handful of other independent candidates did manage to gain seats that year in county and township “people’s congresses”. But in the following elections in 2006 and 2007, the authorities did all they could to stop them winning, from gerrymandering and vote-rigging to intimidation. Mr Yao says he was detained five times last year to keep him quiet during politically sensitive occasions, including the NPC session last March. ...

Life gets harder for Thailand’s guest-workers

THEY sew bras, peel shrimps, build blocks of flats and haul fishing-nets. In return, migrant workers in Thailand are paid poorly, if at all, and face exploitation and abuse at the hands of employers and the security forces. Up to 3m migrants, many undocumented and mostly from Myanmar, fall into this category. So a scheme to start registering this workforce and bring it into the legal fold sounds like a step forward. Migrants have been ordered to apply to their home countries for special passports so that they can work legally in Thailand and, in theory, enjoy access to public services, such as health care.

But the plan has run into practical and political difficulties, mostly among workers from Myanmar, who rightly fear their awful government and do not want to return home, even temporarily. Many are unaware of the registration drive. So the first applicants have come mostly from migrants from Laos and Cambodia, where the authorities are more willing to help. ...

The DPJ is finding that it needs to befriend its bureaucrats, as well as bash them

YOSUKE KONDO, 44, is one of those Young Turks in Japan’s five-month-old government who took office eager to rein in Tokyo’s illustriously educated cadre of senior civil servants. What distinguishes Mr Kondo, however, is that he seems poised to succeed in this goal. So far the rest of the government has seemed more inclined to work with the bureaucracy than against it.

For Mr Kondo’s first target, he aimed high. He took on a man he refers to as “the Last Samurai”, Kazuhiko Takeshima. Mr Takeshima is the epitome of the well-rounded establishment figure. An economics graduate from the prestigious University of Tokyo, he has headed the tax agency and since 2002 has run Japan’s Fair Trade Commission. Mr Takeshima has made a good name for himself as a trustbuster. But for years he has resisted efforts to allow firms to appeal in court against punishments for antitrust violations. In effect, the commission acts as prosecutor and judge. As Mr Kondo notes wryly: “It’s an antitrust authority, but it keeps all the authority to itself.” ...

Last week’s Banyan column used the term “Maratha” in a sense that was interchangeable with “Marathi” or “Marathispeaker “. “Maratha”, however, also refers to one of the dominant castes in the state of Maharashtra, and so is potentially misleading. Many Marathis, in this sense, are not Marathas.

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Hamid Karzai’s shenanigans make the going even harder for NATO

EVER since the aftermath of last year’s disastrous presidential election in Afghanistan, Western diplomats have been talking tough about the need for thorough reform of the country’s rotten electoral system. Never again, the envoys said, would foreign governments pour cash into a machine that was controlled by the president, Hamid Karzai (right), oversaw fraud on an epic scale and handed a propaganda coup to the Taliban.

They promised that foreign support for the next parliamentary election, due in September, would depend on a cull of dodgy officials from the Independent Election Commission (IEC), the body that organised the voting. Most felt that Mr Karzai should lose the right to appoint its chairman and leadership board. ...

India’s Maoist guerrillas carry out two slaughters, then offer a truce

SHORTLY before midnight on February 17th residents of Phulwari, a village in India’s northern state of Bihar, were roused by gunfire, explosions and a shrieking mob. It was led by a few of the Maoist guerrillas encamped on a wooded ridge outside the village. Wearing camouflage-green uniforms, they carried assault rifles and explosives. Around 100 rival villagers, of the locals’ own Kora tribe, came with them, with bows and arrows and a few small children.

Peeping from his mud hut, Kashi, a middle-aged tribal, considered loosing off a few retaliatory arrows, dipped in poison. “But there were too many,” he recalled this week, standing beside the heap of fine, grey ashes that was his home. His aunt and nephew were incinerated inside it. Kashi’s brother—their husband and father—was shot dead while trying to flee with him. In all, 12 villagers were killed that night and around 30 houses destroyed. ...