Bikas Das/Associated Press ALLAHABAD, India — Look in any direction at any time in this riddle of a state and you can’t help but find dysfunction.
Yet in the five days spanning Jan. 20 to 25, the Indian government administered polio vaccine to an estimated 172 million children — a number greater than the entire population of Russia — in an ongoing effort that has eliminated the disease here.
How can this be?
From the unsafe water that’s delivered each day into hundreds of millions of homes and village hand-pumps, to a welfare system that allows half of India’s children to go hungry while politicians steal billions of dollars in food aid, it’s clear that poor people often survive here despite, and not thanks to, their citizenship in the world’s most populous democracy.
And yet. In 1988 India had as many as 200,000 new polio cases a year. In 2009, after two decades of vaccinations, it accounted for, at 741 infections, nearly half the world’s total. Last month, however, India marked two years without a single polio infection, a giant victory in a country that’s regularly trounced by its poorer neighbor Bangladesh in a number of health indicators.
India’s successful war on polio shows what can happen when its government sets clear policy goals backed with proper funding and real accountability.
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KARACHI, Pakistan — The Bollywood megastar Shahrukh Khan is causing a stir in Pakistan — and not because he has a new film out. He published an article last week describing at length how he feels persecuted and stereotyped for being a Muslim.
He especially lamented having to defend the extremism of other Muslims: “Whenever there is an act of violence in the name of Islam, I am called upon to air my views on it and dispel the notion that by virtue of being a Muslim, I condone such senseless brutality.”
People have been debating how Bollywood’s leading man could possibly have such a rough time.
And he admitted that he gave his children names that would not easily identify them as Muslims. “I imagine this will prevent my offspring from receiving unwarranted eviction orders and random fatwas in the future,’’ he wrote.
For days, Khan’s article has made headlines here, with special TV news packages including clips from his films dramatizing his perceived plight as a Muslim. At dinner parties, people have been debating how Bollywood’s leading man could possibly have such a rough time.
This response sheds new light on the ever-complicated relationship between Pakistan and India.
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Alexey Sazonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Russian veterans of World War II celebrated Victory Day in Moscow in 2011.LONDON — Last week Prime Minister David Cameron described what distinguishes Britain from other European countries: “argumentative,” “strong-minded,” “an island nation.” This was in a speech in which he promised a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union and discussed how the great trading bloc should be reformed.
For a talk about the future, Cameron spoke an awful lot about the past. He opened with World War II and then dropped references to Winston Churchill and keeping “the flame of liberty alight.” Never mind that the war happened more than two decades before he was born.
Hearing his speech on the radio made me think that in Europe, and possibly the world, no one talks more about World War II than the Brits. Except for maybe the Russians.
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Thienemann Verlag BERLIN — Germany’s most beloved witch has been making mischief for more than 50 years, but now she’s caused an uproar that goes to the heart of what it means to be German in the 21st century.
When the publisher Klaus Willberg announced earlier this month that the next edition of the children’s classic “Die Kleine Hexe” (“The Little Witch”) would appear without outdated, racist terms, he was met with an unexpected storm of protest.
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CAIRO — The spate of demonstrations that has hit Egypt over the last few days is complicated. Some people are protesting against President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood and the country’s new Constitution, which was approved in a rush in December. Some are protesting against police violence and provocation. Some are protesting against unemployment, social injustice and the lack of general improvement in their daily lives since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, two years ago.
Port Said, the 150-year-old city at the northern entrance of the Suez Canal, far from the posturing of politicians and their parties in Cairo, has been the epicenter of the deadliest of these crises since Jan. 26, when a court sentenced 21 of the city’s sons to death. The men were convicted for their role in the deaths of 74 people at the Port Said stadium last February during clashes between fans of the local football team, Al Masry, and of Al Ahly, a Cairo-based team and Egypt’s best.
Relatives and supporters of the accused felt the verdict placed too much blame on Al Masry fans — and not enough on the security officers at the stadium who did nothing to prevent the disaster — and on Jan. 26, after the verdict was read out, they tried to storm the prison where the men were being held. The fighting against police and prison guards that resulted that day claimed 30 lives. Another seven people were killed the following day during a massive funeral procession-cum-protest.
The violence has since continued. Of the 54 people killed in protests throughout Egypt as of Jan. 28, at least 45 were killed in Port Said.
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Ou Neakiry/Associated Press King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia before his weekly audience with people at the royal palace in Phnom Penh in 1994.Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia who died in October and is to be cremated next week after an elaborate four-day ceremony, is invariably remembered as a man of many talents: a political chameleon and a filmmaker, a jazz saxophonist and a ladies man.
He may also have been the first-ever royal blogger. Surely, he was the most prolific.
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ISTANBUL — Someone at the Turkish Foreign Ministry must be muttering to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Erdogan threw the diplomatic equivalent of a cream pie during a late-night television interview last Friday. Understandably, he was expressing frustration at stalled negotiations over Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Incomprehensibly, he suggested that Turkey join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization instead.
Turkish columnists are now debating whether Erdogan is serious about wanting to play in a different league.
The S.C.O. was set up in 1996 to resolve border disputes between its two largest members, China and Russia. It has since attempted to act as an anti-U.S. bulwark in Central Asia. On Friday, Erdogan described the group as “better and more powerful” than the E.U. and as comprising members — such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — with which Turkey has “common values.” He recounted to his interviewer a conversation he had last summer with President Vladimir Putin of Russia during which he said he would willingly stop knocking on the E.U.’s door in exchange for membership in the S.C.O.
Turkish columnists are now debating whether Erdogan is serious about wanting to play in a different league or bluffing in an attempt to force Brussels into serious negotiations. Or he is kicking up a cloud of dust to distract the public from weightier issues like Kurdish rights or lower economic growth? He has been known to propose out of the blue policies that appeal to his conservative base — banning abortion, restoring capital punishment — but that he has little intention of seeing into law.
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Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto Agency A poster of President Vladimir Putin of Russia at an opposition rally protesting a law that prohibits American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.MOSCOW — After a ghastly week during which gay activists faced violence in the streets of Moscow and Voronezh and Parliament voted for a law banning “homosexual propaganda,” I was surprised to hear a sudden chorus of pro-opposition voices calling on the Russian opposition to stop paying attention to the homophobic law in particular and other new repressive Russian laws in general.
Their argument goes something like this: The regime has hijacked the opposition’s agenda by provoking it to demonstrate against a series of increasingly absurd, archaic and aggressive measures. The opposition is too busy protesting, say, the ban on adoptions by Americans to debate fundamental issues like the legitimacy of Parliament itself.
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Tel Aviv — There’s nothing a writer likes less than admitting an error. And there’s no error more troublesome than the fresh one — the one readers remember.
Last week, I wrote on this blog under the headline “Bibi Forever” that no opposition party in Israel’s Jan. 22 election “could unsettle King Bibi.” But final election results showed that the centrists gained ground and that the vote for Netanyahu was “tepid.” Thus, my editors asked that this week I discuss my last post “head on” and explain “what you got right, what you got wrong, why you think you did, what surprised you and what not.”
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Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A Malian prayed in Bamako, Mali, on Jan. 17.BAMAKO, Mali — Last spring radical Islamism took over the north of Mali. Three fundamentalist militias with links to Al Qaeda hijacked a Tuareg uprising and after seizing two-thirds of the country, enforced Shariah at gunpoint and smashed religious monuments, eliciting comparisons to the Taliban.
Now, a republican form of Islamism is peacefully conquering the south of Mali. The High Council of Islam, an Islamist civil society organization, has gradually emerged as the country’s strongest political force.
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