BJP and the One-Party State

This morning's Times had an interesting piece about the collapse--to near irrelevance--of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu ultra-nationalists whose rise interrupted generations of Congress Party dominance. What's interesting is that Lydia Polgreen explicitly compares the BJP's flameout to the U.S Republican Party's loss of the presidency last year:

NEW DELHI — It is an all-too-familiar political story.

First there was the electoral drubbing at the hands of a center-left juggernaut. Next came the recriminations, with party leaders taking nasty, public swipes at one another in dueling magazine articles, op-ed articles and talk show appearances. Then came the agonizing debate: should the party lurch rightward to consolidate its base, or rush toward the center to attract moderate voters? And finally, the purge: party members who do not make the ideological cut are cast out or pushed aside.

If the script sounds familiar to those who have followed American politics in the last year, this one is playing out in the majestic, colonial-era halls of power in India’s capital ...

Polgreen points out that, virulent though the BJP may have been, its emergence as a viable alternative to Congress drove New Delhi to actually get things done--which Congress, unopposed in the past, didn't excel at. In the U.S., the Republican Party also shook things up with its dozen years' control of Congress following Democrats' 40 years.

At its roots the BJP is a Hindu fundamentalist party that alienated many with its insistence that a Hindu temple should replace a Muslim mosque, a stance that caused rioting and hundreds of deaths over the past decade or so. Now that it's in the wilderness, the BJP will be forced to reexamine its core beliefs and, like the GOP here, has begun that process with a purge of those judged insufficiently zealous.

It remains to be seen whether later generations see the coming years as the point where these parties were reduced to merely regional power, or expanded their influence by beckoning a wider range of followers.

The GOP has experience with reinventing itself in precisely this way, dating back to the rise of Ronald Reagan. Will the BJP make the same choice, or doom itself to ruling Gujarat?

Innovation in India

TATA MOTORS READIES INDIA'S MODEL T.

Pretty soon it will be as difficult for American car companies to sell their cars in India as it is right now for U.S. aerospace concerns to sell small jets in, say, Brazil.

This cheerful news arrives courtesy “How to Build a $2,500 Car” in Tuesday’s Times, which details Tata Motors’ efforts to build an Indian volkswagen. It’s being introduced in India today, but the Times ran a preview: 30-35 hp, belt-driven transmission, low-speed bearings, tiny trunk—and no radio, power steering, power windows or air-conditioning.

Cries of heresy! would ring out in the West for Tata’s as-yet-unnamed car—but it’s set to be India’s Model T Ford nonetheless:

... Tata is not looking to ply California’s highways. Instead, the company wants to provide four-wheel transportation for the first time to people accustomed to getting around on two, including hundreds of millions of Indians and others in the developing world. ...

“It’s basically throwing out everything the auto industry had thought about cost structures in the past and taking out a clean sheet of paper and asking, ‘What’s possible?’” said Daryl T. Rolley, head of North American and Asian operations for Ariba, which sources parts for Tata, BMW, Toyota and other carmakers. “In the next five to 10 years, the whole auto industry is going to be flipped upside down.”

Not only is the car inexpensive to produce, designing it has upstream effects that benefit the rest of Tata’s and other manufacturers’ lines:

Manufacturers are searching for ways to make small cars for the middle class in India and China; to produce small cars for their own markets, hurt by rising gas prices; and to improve the profit of existing larger cars. Tata’s car would be mined for applicable lessons, Mr. Rolley said, predicting that more would be designed with cost in mind.

Tata understands its market deeply and decided to innovate down to India’s mass market rather than up to its elites. Hopefully Ford and other U.S. auto manufacturers—sorry, I mean “the other U.S. auto manufacturer”—can take Tata’s lessons as a spur to their own innovation, particularly since the developing world can’t afford most of what they and other First World manufacturers sell.

As the Times drily notes, the cost of the Tata “People’s Car” is “as little as the equivalent of $2,500, or about the price of the optional DVD player on the Lexus LX 470 sport utility vehicle.”

All You Bhojpuri Speakers

... RAN OUT TO SEE THE BHOJPURI-DUBBED VERSION OF SPIDER-MAN 3, SETTING INDIAN RECORDS.


Hollywood is increasingly cutting into Bollywood’s ticket sales thanks to simultaneous releases of blockbusters in Indian dialects like Bhojpuri, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

As this Christian Science Monitor article notes, Hollywood movies have frequently not done well in India since dubbed versions, if any, tended to be released only after English-language versions had finished their runs.

U.S. studios are wising up, and Spider-Man 3 is breaking the recent record set by Casino Royale—an American movie about a British spy that takes place in Africa and Europe—which was also released in multiple Subcontinental dialects.

It’s clearly worth the money for Hollywood studios to dub films into major foreign languages and dialects, although I’d love to see where the cut-off is; hypothetically, do the studios decide to spend money to dub for 101 million Bhojpuri speakers but consider dubbing for 90 million Gujarati speakers not worth the investment?

If Hollywood moguls can bring the cost of dubbing for smaller and smaller dialects down, they will. The question is, will Bollywood do the same, toning down its musical melodramas for non-Indian audiences and dubbing into Mandarin, English and Spanish for overseas consumption?

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

Asia in Comic Form

BUT DESIS MAY NOT LOVE “DEVI”.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal covered Virgin Group’s premiere of a new series of comics centered on South Asian mythology:

A sexy villain swoops out of the night sky, her hands morphing into terrifying swords. She intends to kill a girl named Tara, who is driving home from a nightclub. But suddenly a secret society of caped men whisks Tara away—aboard an elephant.

Soon Tara will learn the startling truth: It’s her destiny to become a Hindu goddess.

It’s a key scene in “Devi,” a new comic book that’s part of an ambitious effort by a unit of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Ltd. to develop story lines based on Indian religion and mythology. Others take inspiration from the Sanskrit epic poem Ramayana and traditional legends such as one involving snakes that can take on human form.

East Asia has been big in the comic-book world for years, and appears to be reaching a peak; a friend of mine didn’t see daylight for most of 2006, so busy was he helping to translate Japanese manga comics into English 18 hours at a time.

That said, turning South Asian mythology into comics for both Western and Indian audiences is a new phenomenon. But the Virgin brand is a strong one and chief Richard Branson has a knack for attracting talent; one of the titles at Virgin Comics, “The Sadhu,” is already slated for moviedom with Deepak Chopra writing the screenplay and Nicholas Cage playing the title character, a British chap who finds out he was an Indian holy man in a previous life. (Cage now has his opportunity to mangle two accents in a single film.)

Virgin Comics is “aggressively targeting Indian-Americans, by sponsoring Indian-American events and linking up with student clubs at colleges.” Although the comics are being created in Bangalore, will Desis here respond to Branson—who after all is just a particularly hip white guy—appropriating the foundations of subcontinental culture?

Up next for cultural strip-mining: Perhaps Iran, with the release of a movie based on Frank Miller’s 300, which involves 300 Spartans holding off thousands of Persians at Thermopylae.

On the Punjab Border

AFTER THE OBLIGATORY CHEST-THUMPING, THE SHY SMILES.


Not all public diplomacy is international—at least, not at one of the border crossings between India and Pakistan. NPR’s Philip Reeves reports in “Border Ceremony Draws Crowds in Pakistan, India” that the nightly lowering of the two countries’ flags at a border crossing in the Punjab has evolved into a highly choreographed ritual that combines nationalist rabble-rousing and military chest-thumping, complete with bleachers on each side of the border and vendors hawking beer and peanuts to the crowds that show up to watch.

This would be reminiscent of the “We’ve got spirit, yes we do” scene in Hoosiers, with the addition of guns and goose-stepping.

But then, after the border is closed for the night and the pro-Indian and pro-Pakistani chants have died down, an odd thing happens:

... Bright-eyed and smiling almost bashfully, people begin to wave at the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis wave back. If you think of the history of this landscape, this makes sense. When Pakistan was born after the partition of India, amid terrible communal bloodletting, Punjab was split in two. Families and friends were separated. Those bonds are not forgotten. For all the trumpeting and strutting, there are plenty of people who just want peace.

It’s a hopeful message: Once Official India and Official Pakistan have gotten their quien es más macho messages across, civilians on both sides—remembering they were part of a single country just a few generations back—seem ready to just sit down and have some dal.