Happy 2013!

Next week I’ll experience my third New Year’s Day here in Hyderabad.  It’s amazing how quickly time passes.  I’ve become such a confirmed Hyderabadi that I can even contemplate the possibility of staying up with friends celebrating New Year’s Eve and making it until breakfast is served at 4 am.  (I’m not sure that I’ll actually achieve it, but at least I can contemplate it!)

Happy New Year!                             

As we prepare to usher in 2013, it seems as though the world is drowning in bad news.  Horrific crimes in the U.S. and in India create a pervasive sense of insecurity and highlight the fact that man is capable of unspeakable evil as well as of good.  Discussion of the U.S. economy is focused on the threats of debt and rising inequality, while in India growth has moderated and power woes have intensified.  Turmoil continues to afflict many parts of the world, with the Central African Republic presenting the latest crisis.  There are plenty of reasons to engage in negative thinking.

In this context, the resolution I am making for the New Year is to think and act positively.  By that, I don’t mean ignoring the negative, but refusing to let it immobilize me.  As an individual, it is hard to feel powerful in the face of bad news, but by acting positively, one fosters hope and offers encouragement.  And concerted positive action makes change possible.  Indians and Americans both share this experience; the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the independence movement in India were two of the greatest examples of peaceful citizen activism of the 20^th century. 

What is true about momentous social events is also true on a personal level.  If things go wrong in the office, I remind myself that I love my job, and the minor obstacles that arise don’t get me down.  I’m not perfect, and there are times I let negative emotions affect me, causing me to behave in ways I’m not proud of and affecting both my own happiness and the enjoyment of others.  For example, it happens sometimes when I make a couple of really bad shots on the golf course.  If I get mad at myself and think negatively, I start playing worse, I become much worse company for my playing partners, and I stop enjoying myself.  If instead I take the bad shots in my stride, I generally recover my usual standard of play and I enjoy the game. 

It’s a long way to go from my golf game to the mobilization of citizens to fight violence against women, but in both cases, despair is not helpful.  Envisioning a more positive future provides the energy to make it happen.  And you never know how big a difference your individual decision might make.  A recent editorial column by Nicholas Kristof described how a casual thought of Ted Turner’s transformed millions of lives.  Read it and it’ll make you smile—a great way to start 2013. 

Happy New Year!

One Village’s Solution to Domestic Violence

 The U.S. Consulate General, Hyderabad participated in a number of events observing “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence,” a global campaign dedicated to the awareness and the elimination of gender-based violence. One such event was a trip to Toopran, a village 50 kilometers outside Hyderabad, where Consul General Katherine Dhanani and I attended a meeting of the state government’s Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP). SERP sponsors a number of social programs including a program that utilizes groups of mostly female villagers, known as Social Action Committees (SAC), in conjunction with community-managed Family Counseling Centers to help detect, arbitrate, and resolve domestic issues in local communities. The program is designed to resolve domestic disputes before they are brought into the judicial system, a process which can take many years to reach resolution. The program is mostly rural and utilizes nearly 15,000 members in 1,440 SACs throughout the state to counsel fellow villagers and raise awareness of such social issues as domestic violence, child marriage, girl child education, substance abuse, and dowry harassment.

India, like many countries including the United States, suffers from societal ills such as domestic violence and issues related to substance abuse. India also has a number of issues that we generally don’t see in the United States, including child marriage and dowry harassment. Although both men and women are affected by these issues, women are most often the victims. Furthermore, many women do not have the support systems, education, or resources they need to help them resolve these issues and are often afraid to turn to local police or government authorities. Women seeking assistance and justice can now turn to a group of peers in whom they can find trust and empathy.

A SAC will open a case for the victim and then proceed to take action. To me, the process seems very similar to what we in the United States would consider an intervention. After receiving the complaint, a SAC will attempt to counsel the offending party and convince them to attend a session at one of the Family Counseling Centers along with the aggrieved party. The counselors are a kind of hybrid between a therapist and a legal arbitrator who seek not only to resolve the current dispute but to alter the behavior or mentality that led to the issue in the first place. Community sentiment and involvement are still very strong in rural India today and social pressure can be a powerful force. SACs seek to harness this force to affect change through social obligation as well as legal obligation.

During the meeting, we heard stories of how members of SACs successfully addressed domestic issues in rural areas. During their interaction with the consul general, a few domestic violence victims narrated the problems that the SACs helped them overcome, such as securing a withheld inheritance and overcoming physical abuse. SAC members described the challenges they faced in achieving success with arbitration and counseling. Impressed by the grit and determination shown by the victims as well as the members of the SACs, Consul General Dhanani said that she was truly inspired by the accounts she heard. “You have given me excitement and encouragement,” she remarked. CG Dhanani noted that although men may have greater physical strength, woman have the mental fortitude to overcome any challenge in life.

Travis Coberly is the Political-Economic Officer at the U.S. Consulate General, Hyderabad.

The Role of a Modern Political Convention

As I write this blog, the Republicans had just wrapped up their national convention in Tampa, Florida, and Tuesday, September 4 began the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Both these major party conventions will be elaborate exercises attracting a very high level of media interest throughout the United States.  We all know that the 2012 presidential candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  So it might be reasonable to ask, what is the point of a party convention?

In the abstract, the primary purpose of the convention remains the official selection of the party’s candidate for the presidency.  In the early decades of the history of the United States, congressional delegations met and determined who their parties’ candidates would be.  Dissension led to an expansion of the system to a broader group of party leaders in the 1830s, who met in what was called a convention to make the choice.  It was still a matter of party insiders deciding who to put forward, however, and the process only became more democratic after the controversial 1968 Democratic convention, when anti-war activists demonstrated to protest their lack of voice in the process.  As a result, both the Republican and Democratic parties today hold primary elections in individual states, and those elections determine who the delegates will be who will participate in the conventions.  Since none of this has any official constitutional basis, each party and each state sets its own rules for how the primary will be held, who can participate, and whether the states’ delegates will each support the candidates they stood for in the primaries or whether they will vote as a bloc in favor of the candidate with the most support.  In recent years, the results of primaries have led less successful candidates to withdraw, so the nominee has been known long before the convention, which simply officially endorses the nomination.

The convention also votes on the vice presidential candidate and on the policy platform on which its candidate must run.  Today both of these are also determined in advance and simply endorsed at the convention.  So what was once a significant substantive role for conventions is now largely symbolic.

The convention continues to be important as the launching of the candidate’s official campaign.  It provides an exceptional opportunity for public outreach, and each party carefully selects its roster of speakers and apportions them time slots designed to rally the faithful and attract undecided and independent voters to the campaign.  While both major party candidates have been campaigning against each other in public appearances and through media advertisements for months, it is only after the convention that they hold formal debates.

Of course the Republican and Democratic parties are not the only ones holding conventions, and numerous other parties will endorse their own candidates.  The challenge for third party candidates is to assemble a campaign organization that can meet the requirements to get the candidate’s name on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, since each state has its own rules and requirements for filing fees and signatures.  In 2000, the Green Party and its allies managed to get the name of its candidate, Ralph Nader, on 42 state ballots. 

So while it may seem from here that the U.S. presidential campaign has been underway for a long time, the real campaign is beginning now, and will continue until election day, which is always the first Tuesday in November: this year, November 6.