8. A cable made available by Wikileaks describes the telephone call from the Indian foreign ministry to a political counselor at the U.S. embassy, informing the Americans of the expulsion of Lewis Simons of The Washington Post; see www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975NEWDE08681_b.html. Simons recalls his expulsion on July 1, 1975, in “Mrs. Gandhi Turns to Son in Crisis,” an essay published in John Elliot, Bernard Imhasly, and Simon Denyer, eds., Foreign Correspondent: Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia (New Delhi: Viking, 2008), available at https://books.google.com/books?id=GlM7e_1dCjoC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=lewis+simons+emergency+india+1975&source=bl&ots=aLjRbpBcOX&sig=KGM0n5w3GN0h9ir7DDGN50gxuu8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QQlmVar2BcmYyASkjYOwCQ&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=lewis%20simons%20emergency%20india%201975&f=false.
9. Celia W. Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over India’s Politics,” The New York Times, July 27, 2003, available at www.nytimes.com/2002/07/27/international/asia/27INDI.html.
10. Human Rights Watch, “India: A Decade on, Gujarat Justice Incomplete,” February 24, 2012, available at www.hrw.org/news/2012/02/24/india-decade-gujarat-justice-incomplete.
11. Gardiner Harris and Hari Kumar, “Stiff Sentence for Former Gujarat Minister,” The New York Times, September 1, 2012, available at http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/stiff-sentence-for-former-gujarat-minister/.
12. The most senior among these Congress party leaders was Jagdish Tytler. In 2005, he resigned from his post as a cabinet minister in the Congress-led coalition government. See Hari Kumar, “Minister Quits over Riot Report,” The New York Times, August 11, 2005.
13. Zahir Janmohamed wrote a revealing account, in the blog of The New York Times, of the evangelical Christians, Jewish leaders, human rights activists, and Indian-American critics of Modi who teamed up to get the U.S. Congress to impose the visa ban: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/u-s-evangelicals-indian-expats-teamed-up-to-push-through-modi-visa-ban/.
14. Somini Sengupta, “Hindu Radical Is Re-elected in India,” The New York Times, December 24, 2007, available at www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/world/asia/24india.html.
15. Somini Sengupta, “Shadows of Violence Cling to Indian Politician,” The New York Times, April 28, 2009, available at www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/world/asia/29india.html.
16. In December 2012, writing in a newsmagazine called Tehelka, Shashi likened Modi’s critics to the Turkish strongman Kemal Ataturk and the ouster of his heirs by politicians who flirted with political Islam, such as Reyep Tayyip Erdogan; see http://blog.tehelka.com/the-curious-case-of-indian-media-and-gujarat/#sthash.0fb2UTzz.dpuf).
17. The political start-up, a company called Niti Central, was funded principally by a Mumbai technology magnate named Rajesh Jain.
18. See www.ipaidabribe.com/bribe-trends#gsc.tab=0.
19. Modi’s session with Reuters was one of the most important political interviews of the 2014 campaign season: Ross Colvin and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, “Special Report: The Remaking of Narendra Modi,” Reuters India, July 12, 2013, http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/07/12/india-modi-gujarat-bjp-idINDEE96B00Y20130712.
20. Shashi’s team had come up with the name of the website. It was based on the number of seats—272—that the BJP needed for an absolute majority in the lower chamber of parliament. Modi added to the name; he insisted that it should be called India272+, making it clear that a simple majority, which no party had achieved in twenty years, was not enough.
21. The digital strategy had some notable flops too. Once, a Modi supporter posted a fake endorsement by Julian Assange, which was roundly ridiculed. Another time, an automated tool, known as a bot, kept sending Twitter replies to anyone who posted anything mentioning Modi. It was a nuisance, even to his supporters.
22. IndiaSpend’s analysis of voting data was summarized in an article available on its website. See Saumya Tewari, “Look Carefully Where India’s Young Voters Are,” May 27, 2014, available at www.indiaspend.com/cover-story/look-carefully-where-indias-young-voters-are-76889.
23. http://twiplomacy.com/blog/twiplomacy-study-2014/.
24. www.prsindia.org/media/media-updates/profile-of-the-16th-lok-sabha-3276/.
25. Modi made a famous speech about the need to build toilets rather than temples in 2013; see www.ndtv.com/india-news/make-toilets-before-temples-narendra-modi-tells-students-in-delhi-536464. Economists and public health experts have concluded that India’s poor sanitation is to blame for childhood malnutrition and disease—see, for instance, www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PHS2214-109X%2814%2970307-9/fulltext.
26. Around the one-year anniversary of Modi’s taking office, U.S. Ambassador to India Richard Verma said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the Indian government needed to do more to encourage foreign investment, including streamlining regulations. “This will take not just welcoming words” is how he put it, “but decisive actions.” A link to his address is available at http://csis.org/event/recent-developments-us-india-relationship.
27. Gujarat schools went the furthest in pushing the Hindu right’s agenda. They began using books by Dinanath Batra, whose crusade against the University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger succeeded in getting every copy of Doniger’s book on Hinduism voluntarily destroyed by her publisher, Penguin India. In Batra’s books, children learned that ancient Indians had invented cars and that “Akhand Bharat” should be restored, which would mean expanding India’s current borders to include Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. See www.outlookindia.com/article/ramayana-mahabharata-are-true-accounts-of-the-periodnot-myths/291363.
28. “Hindus to the Fore,” The Economist, May 23, 2015, available at www.economist.com/news/special-report/21651334-religious-pluralism-looking-less-secure-hindus-fore. See also Gardiner Harris, “ ‘Reconversion’ of Religious Minorities Roils India’s Politics,” The New York Times, December 23, 2004, available at www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/world/asia/india-narendra-modi-hindu-conversions-missionaries.html?_r=0.
29. Amy Kazmin, “India’s Raghuram Rajan Warns Against Intolerance,” Financial Times, November 1, 2015, available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/86f8b6cc-807c-11e5-8095-ed1a37d1e096.html#axzz3rBqgkBsm.
30. www.niticentral.com/2015/05/25/narendra-modi-bats-rahul-dravid-style-in-test-match-with-t-20-expectations-314215.html.
FACEBOOK GIRLS: SPEAKING UP, TESTING DEMOCRACY’S CONSCIENCE
1. Suketu Mehta’s magnificent book on his hometown, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), contains a chapter about Thackeray and the political evolution of his Shiv Sena party. Among other things, Thackeray was responsible for rechristening the city with its Marathi name, Mumbai.
2. The 2012 figure was an estimate from Socialbakers, a social media analytics firm: www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/india. Socialbakers has stopped making country-by-country estimates, and Facebook itself does not release its own numbers. The following year, Jana, another social media analytics firm, estimated that Facebook users in India were just shy of the numbers in the United States and growing fast. That was reported by Quartz, a business news site: http://qz.com/150274/india-facebook/.
3. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/resources/FOTN%202014%20Summary%20of%20Findings.pdf.
4. Americans especially will find some of these fundamental rights in the Constitution of India familiar. They are remarkably aspirational, considering how poor, fragile, and besieged the country was at its birth. The Constitution is posted at http://lawmin.nic.in/olwing/coi/coi-english/coi-indexenglish.htm.
5. Lawrence Liang, “Reasonable Restrictions and Unreasonable Speech,” in Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media (Delhi: The Sarai Programme, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2004), available at http://archive.sarai.net/files/original/e8cc962416f0a1f2da6bc009347fa387.pdf.
6. I wrote about the film Parzania, which was screened elsewhere in India, in “Response to the Film ‘Parzania’ Raises the Question: Can Gujarat Confront Its Brutal Past?” The New York Times,
February 21, 2007, available at www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/arts/21iht-indfilm.html?_r=0. Nilanjana Roy, a writer and critic, compiled a list of significant banned books from independence to 2012 on her website: http://nilanjanaroy.com/2012/09/30/banned-books-week-banning-books-in-india/.
7. William F. Grimes, “Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s Most Famous Painter, Dies at 95,” The New York Times, June 10, 2011, available at www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/arts/design/maqbool-fida-husain-indias-most-famous-painter-dies-at-95.html.
8. My colleagues at The New York Times have written extensively about China’s efforts to tighten restrictions on Internet access in 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-down-still-harder-on-internet-access.html. They have also written about tools to evade censorship: http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/q-and-a-adam-fisk-on-evading-internet-censorship-in-china/.
9. Data from comScore, a market research firm: www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2013/8/comScore-Releases-the-2013-India-Digital-Future-in-Focus-Report.
10. A software tool made by a California-based firm called Blue Coat allowed Indian officials to either block certain websites or scour the web for content that the government considers to be illegal, according to a worldwide study carried out by the Citizen Lab, a human rights monitoring group based at the University of Toronto. Blue Coat’s software is used by many repressive authoritarian states in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. See https://citizenlab.org/2013/01/planet-blue-coat-mapping-global-censorship-and-surveillance-tools/. In addition, the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society tallied a total of two hundred separate surveillance tools in use in India, used by government agencies, Internet service providers, and telecommunications firms: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/surveillance-industry-india.pdf.
11. Between July and December 2014, the most recent statistics available before this book went to press, India sought information on 4684 users. By comparison U.S. authorities sought information on 20,986 users; Germany, 3883; France, 3752; and the United Kingdom, 2755. See www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/countries/?t=table.
12. According to Facebook’s government requests report for the most recent reporting period, India requested information on 7281 Facebook users or accounts. By comparison, the United States sought information on 21,731 users or accounts. The United Kingdom was third on the list, with information requested on 2890 users or accounts. Facebook posts the data at https://govtrequests.facebook.com/.
13. The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School posted the text of the legislation and a summary of court decisions affecting the legislation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/page/wilmap-india.
14. Turkey came in a distant second: Facebook restricted access to 3624 pieces of content there. Third was Germany, which prohibits neo-Nazi content, with 60. See https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/India/2014-H2/. Likewise, Twitter’s report on government takedown requests is posted at https://transparency.twitter.com/removal-requests/2014/jul-dec.
15. The judgment is available at http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf.
16. In posting its new policies, Twitter maintained that its previous policies had been too narrow and limited the company’s ability to act on “certain kinds of threatening behavior.” See https://blog.twitter.com/2015/policy-and-product-updates-aimed-at-combating-abuse.
APOSTATES: WHEN THEY DARED TO LOVE
1. Delhi is poised to be home to 36 million by 2030, according to “World Urbanization Prospects,” a study conducted by the United Nations Population Division. By the time of the study’s release, in 2014, the majority of humanity was for the first time living in cities, rather than in the countryside. India, China, and Nigeria are expected to account for 37 percent of the projected growth of the urban population between 2015 and 2050, according to the same report. This raises enormous challenges for health, education, and infrastructure, but also potentially portends a change in social norms in many countries. Data tables are available at www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html.
2. Ankit is a common male name. This Ankit is no relation to the young man of the same name in a previous chapter.
3. The national news station NDTV was among the television outlets that aired such interviews; see www.ndtv.com/cities/delhis-triple-honour-killing-family-says-well-done-421643.
4. The India Human Development Survey found that only 25 percent of women surveyed in 2011–2012 said they had met their husbands before their wedding day. The principal author of the survey, Sonalde Desai, referred to the finding in a March 19, 2014, opinion piece in The Hindu, a daily national newspaper, available at www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/declining-sex-ratios-seen-in-gender-scorecard/article5802855.ece. The survey also found that barely 5 percent of marriages were across caste lines. That finding was reported by Rukmini S. in a November 13, 2014, article in The Hindu, available at www.thehindu.com/data/article6591502.ece.
5. The same British-era law is part of the criminal code across most countries of the Commonwealth, with the exception of a few, like New Zealand, that have repealed it. In Malaysia, for instance, Section 377 of its Penal Code was used to prosecute an opposition politician, Anwar Ibrahim, in February 2015.
6. A Bangalore-based group of lawyers who support gay rights posted a transcript of the Supreme Court proceedings: http://orinam.net/377/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/SC_Transcripts_Hearings.pdf.
7. www.unaids.org/en/resources/infographics/20140108freeequal/.
8. The Iyers are a high-caste community from Kerala. The Times of India covered it as a news story: “Mother Seeks Groom for Son in First Gay Matrimonial Ad,” May 21, 2015, available at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Mother-seeks-groom-for-son-in-first-gay-matrimonial-advertisement/articleshow/47363670.cms. Harish Iyer wrote his own version of what happened on the NDTV website; see www.ndtv.com/opinion/im-gay-this-is-what-it-took-to-place-matrimonial-ad-for-me-764603.
9. Somini Sengupta, “Innocence of Youth Is Victim of Congo War,” The New York Times, June 23, 2003, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/23/world/innocence-of-youth-is-victim-of-congo-war.html.
CURSE: A FATHER’S FEARS, A DAUGHTER’S DREAMS
1. In 2004, for instance, right before I moved to India, Indian soldiers were accused of raping a woman named Thangjam Manorama in the northeastern state of Manipur, which was racked by an insurgency and where security forces were by law immune from prosecution. That rape so incensed the women of Manipur they stood naked in front of the gates of a paramilitary base with a banner that screamed “Indian Army. Rape Us.”
2. Jason Burke, “Delhi Rape: How India’s Other Half Lives,” The Guardian, September 10, 2013, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/10/delhi-gang-rape-india-women.
3. Jagori, a feminist group in Delhi, has been conducting safety audits in Indian cities for years, asking women and girls what it would take for them to feel safer in public spaces. The December 2012 gang-rape has drawn new attention to its work. See www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/5/better-lighting-wider-pavements-steps-towards-preventing-sexual-violence-in-new-delhi.
4. Jagori, Safe Cities Free of Violence Against Women and Girls Initiative, “Report of the Baseline Survey Delhi 2010,” available at www.jagori.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Baseline-Survey_layout_for-Print_12_03_2011.pdf. The study was cited in www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures#sthash.cSb5daoV.dpuf.
5. www.hindustantimes.com/newdelhi/78-delhi-women-sexually-harassed-in-2012-survey/article1-983731.aspx.
6. The World Health Organization report is available at http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/85239/1/9789241564625_eng.pdf. In addition, a United Nations report found that 120 million girls under twenty—or one in ten—are subjected to sexual violence. How India ranks among nations worldwide can be found in a U.N. report on the status of women at http://apps.
who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/85239/1/9789241564625_eng.pdf.
7. Kavita Krishnan, “Nirbhaya Film: Solidarity Is What We Want, Not a Civilising Mission,” Daily O, March 3, 2015, available at www.dailyo.in/politics/kavita-krishnan-nirbhaya-december-16-indias-daughter-leslee-udwin-mukesh-singh-bbc/story/1/2347.html.
8. National crime records are quoted in this assessment by a committee appointed by the Planning Commission of India: http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/committee/strgrp12/str_womagency_childrights.pdf.
9. Priya Ramani, “Sorry Boss, We Found Our Voice,” Mint, November 21, 2013, available at www.livemint.com/Opinion/dtKZjcSz9I3iCZs6z748GJ/Sorry-boss-we-found-our-voice.html.
10. Raghbendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India,” Econometrics 72, no. 5 (September 2004), available at http://economics.mit.edu/files/792.
11. The national census in 2011 found the mean age of marriage to be 21.2 for women; the data is available at www.censusindia.gov.in/vital_statistics/SRS_Report/9Chap%202%20-%202011.pdf. The smaller government survey, called the Rapid Survey of Children 2013–14, was carried out by the Ministry of Women and Child Development among more than 100,000 households; it is available at www.wcd.nic.in/issnip/National_Fact%20sheet_RSOC%20_02-07-2015.pdf.
12. World Bank figures, country by country, are available at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS. A separate study, published in October 2014, found slightly higher rates; see Ruchika Chaudhury and Sher Varick, “Female Labour Force Participation in India and Beyond,” available at www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---asia/---ro-bangkok/---sro-new_delhi/documents/publication/wcms_324621.pdf. Most women are concentrated in low-wage work, particularly in the agricultural sector.
13. Prabhat Jha, Maya A. Kesler, Rajesh Kumar,Faujdar Ram, Usha Ram, Lukasz Aleksandrowicz, Diego G. Bassani, Shailaja Chandra, and Jayant K. Banthia, “Trends in Selective Abortions of Girls in India: Analysis of Nationally Representative Birth Histories from 1990 to 2005 and Census Data from 1991 to 2011,” The Lancet 377, no. 9781 (June 4, 2011): 1921–28, available at www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2960649-1/fulltext.
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