Daily Archives: May 6, 2014

South Africa

Zuma is strongest president on HIV/AIDS in South African history

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When Jacob Zuma, now poised for an almost certain second term as South Africa’s president, faced criminal rape charges in 2006 stemming from sexual relations with a woman that he knew to be HIV positive, he later remarked that he didn’t use a condom and claimed that he took a shower afterwards to reduce the risk of contracting HIV. south africa flag

So when he emerged in 2007 as the heir apparent in the ruling African National Congress (ANC), there wasn’t much hope that Zuma would necessarily bring an incredible amount of sophistication to HIV/AIDS policy in a country that’s long suffered from health policy failures.

Yet almost immediately after becoming the country’s third post-apartheid president in 2009, Zuma effected nearly a 180-degree turn on HIV/AIDS policy. There was little doubt that his HIV/AIDS policy could be any worse than that of his predecessors.

Notwithstanding the triumph of Nelson Mandela’s historic presidency, Mandela himself admitted in the 2000s that he didn’t do enough to acknowledge the growing threat of HIV/AIDS infection, which would ultimately kill Mandela’s youngest son Makgatho, a fact that Mandela made public upon his son’s death in 2005.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, was even worse. A proponent of aberrant medical theories that HIV, in fact, might not cause AIDS, Mbeki stalled as the rest of sub-Saharan Africa embraced new treatments and prevention strategies, leading to what some studies claim to be over 300,000 premature deaths in South Africa.

South Africa, like the rest of southern Africa, has one of the world’s highest HIV/AIDS rates. Like many issues in South Africa, race plays a significant role — a recent survey showed that the HIV rate among black Africans is around 15%, with a 3% rate among the ‘coloured’ (the South African term for mixed-race persons) population and a 0.3% rate for whites. The highest risk is for black females, aged 15 to 49, who are affected at a rate of 23.2%.

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RELATED: Even with victory assured, is the ANC’s future at risk?

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Zuma is almost certain to be reelected as president after the May 7 parliamentary elections that will, once again, return the ruling ANC to power.  But amid widespread unhappiness over South Africa’s economic performance and its government’s record on everything from individual rights to corruption, Zuma’s policy turn on HIV/AIDS could ultimately become the strongest policy accomplishment of an otherwise disappointing presidency.   Continue reading Zuma is strongest president on HIV/AIDS in South African history →

Gujarat, India

How the 2002 Gujarat riots became so important to the 2014 election

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Earlier this year, when Narendra Modi, the frontrunner to become  India’s next prime minister, decided to run from Varanasi, a city that many in India consider to be India’s holiest, many of his supporters co-opted a Hindu chant, ‘har har Mahadev,’ a traditional greeting in Varanasi among Hindus.India Flag Icon

The chant praises the Hindu lord Shiva, also known as Mahadev, and it literally means, ‘rid us of pain,’ though it was once a battle cry of ancient Hindu kings.

Modi’s supporters co-opted the chant as ‘har har Modi,’ a turn of events that even left some Hindu scholars uncomfortable. Though Modi and other leaders in his party, the conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, भारतीय जनता पार्टी) eventually called on supporters to desist, it’s become the most notorious ‘dog whistle’ in a campaign where religious tension is bubbling fervently below the surface.

It also confounded worries among India’s religious minorities that they might be second-class citizens under a Modi government. The overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindu, including nearly 80.5% of the Indian population, largely as a result of the 1947 Partition that created the Muslim-majority Pakistan. But 13.4% of India’s population is Muslim — another 2.3% is Christian, another 1.9% is Sikh and another 0.8% is Buddhist. In a country of 1.236 billion people, that translates to over 165 million Muslims, and that’s a fairly large group of folks that could feel threatened by a potential Modi government.

For many Indians, the key question of this year’s national elections has less to do with development or economics but rather about a series of riots in 2002 that left at least 790 Indian Muslims, and possibly up to 2,000 Muslims, dead.

Those riots, which took place in Gujarat, were one of the first crises in the administration of a new chief minister, Narendra Modi, just four months on the job. Modi had succeeded Keshubhai Patel, another BJP chief minister whose rule faltered after the loss of several by-elections and charges of mismanagement of the relief efforts from a devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat.

Twelve years later, Modi’s response to those riots and the lack of clarity over his responsibility for the bloodletting is at the heart of the national election campaign. Suspicion that Modi subtly encouraged the violence has dogged him ever since. Though he’s been technically absolved by the Indian supreme court, the Gujarati riots prevented Modi from receiving a visa to enter the United States in the mid-2000s and Modi himself has refused to apologize for the tragedy that took place on his watch. even as Modi has increasingly used his economic stewardship of Gujarat as the basis of his presidential-style campaign.

So what actually happened? And why has it become so central to the current election campaign?  Continue reading How the 2002 Gujarat riots became so important to the 2014 election →