Lawyer to Contest Congress Leader Sajjan Kumar’s Acquittal in 1984 Riots Case

Gurinder Osan/Associated Press Congress party leader Sajjan Kumar in New Delhi on Aug. 9, 2005.

NEW DELHI â€" A Delhi court acquitted the Indian Congress Party leader Sajjan Kumar Tuesday for the murder of five men during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, but the lawyer for one of the victims said he is already planning to appeal the decision.

“This is very, very unfortunate,” said H.S. Phoolka, a lawyer who has spent more than two decades trying to prosecute politicians who were allegedly involved in the massacre of at least 3,000 Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. “We will appeal against it,” he said in a telephone interview.

While Mr. Kumar was acquitted, five other men were convicted for their involvement in the murder of the same five men in the Raj Nagar area of Delhi on Nov. 1, 1984.

Balwan Khokkar, an ex-city councilor, Girdhari Lal and Captain Bhagmal were found guilty of murder, the Press Trust of India news agency reported. Mahender Yadav, an ex-state legislator, and Kishan Khokkar were found guilty of rioting. Lawyers for Mr. Kumar say he was not in the area at the time of the murders.

But it was Mr. Kumar who was by far the highest-level politician on trial and who drew the most attention, and protests erupted outside the Delhi court after he was acquitted by Additional Sessions Judge J.R. Aryan.

Indian news channel CNN-IBN reported that the president of the All India Sikhs Students Federation, Karnail Singh Peer Mohammad, was arrested after he hurled a shoe at the judge inside the courtroom.

Mr. Phoolka said that the Delhi police faced political pressure to shield politicians allegedly involved in revenge attacks against Sikhs, which erupted after Prime Minister Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards on Oct. 31, 1984.

“The Delhi police have intentionally fudged records to shield him,” the lawyer said, referring to Mr. Kumar.

Raveendran/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Sikh widows, holding portraits of Congress officials and police officers who were allegedly involved in the riots in 1984, at a demonstration in New Delhi on Oct. 31, 2002.

Nirpreet Kaur, a prosecution witness, who claims that she saw Mr. Kumar inciting mobs to kill Sikhs on Nov. 1, told India Ink that after his acquittal she had lost faith in the judicial system.

“Even the Muslims got some justice after 10 years,” she said, referring to convictions last year, including of a state-legislator of the Bharatiya Janata Party, for the 2002 killing of Muslims in the state of Gujarat.

“It’s been almost 30 years but we Sikhs will never get justice in this country,” said Ms. Kaur, whose own father was killed in the riots.

Earlier this month, Additional Sessions Judge Anuradha Shukla Bhardwaj reopened an investigation into another Congress party politician, Jagdish Tytler, for allegedly inciting a mob at a Sikh temple in Delhi, on Nov. 1, 1984, where three Sikhs were killed.

Airports and Hotels in Emerging Markets Outpace the West

Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai is part of a $9 billion investment program.

FROM Asia to Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the business of business travel is booming in emerging countries. And it shows.

Some airlines are increasing the frequency of flights to São Paulo, above, and other Brazilian cities.

Travelers at the Beijing Capital International Airport. China’s business travel market is set to overtake that of the United States by next year.

Dubai, an emirate with global ambitions to diversify, expanded its airport recently with a new terminal paved with white marble, devoted to its growing fleet of Airbus A380s double-deckers. Similarly, Beijing and Shanghai greet foreign travelers with gleaming and spacious new international terminals.

Istanbul, ancient capital of empires, is successfully refashioning itself as a modern transportation hub with better connections to Asia than rivals in the United States or Europe. And Brazil, a rising oil power, is pouring billions into infrastructure as it prepares to host the soccer World Cup next year and the Olympic Games in 2016.

Business travelers are expected to spend about $1.16 trillion on airfare, accommodations and other travel this year, according to the Global Business Travel Association, up from $1.07 trillion last year. Much of that growth is coming from developing nations, prompting a boom in new construction in emerging markets while business travel in the United States recovers at a slow pace and Europe, mired in the euro crisis, remains stagnant.

“What we’ve seen in terms of infrastructure in recent years recalls the old baseball adage â€" if you build it, they will come,” said Tony Davis, a partner at Irelandia Aviation, an investor in low-cost airlines like VivaAerobus in Mexico and Tiger Airways in Singapore.

The growth in passenger travel tells the story. Global traffic rose 4 percent last year, according to the Airports Council International, a trade group that represents more than 1,700 airports in 170 countries. In North America and Europe, airports had only modest gains. But air transportation in emerging economies has been buoyant â€" a testament to their dynamism and growth prospects in time of low interest rates, and their opportunities in raw materials, commodities and trade.

Traffic last year grew by 7.5 percent in Asia, 7.3 percent in Latin America, 6.4 percent in Africa and 13 percent in the Middle East, according to the airport trade group, outpacing Western airports by a wide margin. Five airports in emerging markets, each with more than 40 million annual passengers, reported double-digit growth â€" Istanbul, Dubai, Jakarta, Bangkok and Singapore â€" according to a report released last month by the airport group.

Atlanta, currently home to the world’s busiest airport, grew 3.3 percent. Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the second-busiest in the United States, actually shrank slightly, according to the report.

Nowhere has the growth in business travel been more robust and prolonged than in China. Passengers at Beijing Capital International Airport tripled in the last decade, and most travel experts expect that it will jump ahead of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport as the world’s top airport by passenger traffic next year.

China’s business travel spending has grown an average of 15.5 percent each year from 2000 to 2013 and is set to reach $226 billion this year, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Remarkably, that figure is growing even as China’s export-led economy begins to slow and make the transition to a consumer-oriented one.

Chinese business travel is forecast to increase nearly 17 percent next year, and China is set to overtake the United States as the world’s top business travel market by then.

Shanghai built a new terminal at the Hongqiao International Airport as part of a $9 billion investment program that also included a transportation hub linking the airport to city buses, subways and a new high-speed rail network. The airport, which opened three years ago and can handle 300,000 flights a year, has high-end shops like Armani and chains like Starbucks.

To cater to China’s rising middle class and fulfill the leadership’s desire to reduce the economy’s reliance on exports, businesses will need a better travel infrastructure across the vast Chinese interior. To that end, the Chinese government has outlined plans to build another 100 airports throughout the country over the next couple of years.

“You really have a changing landscape throughout the developing economies,” said Michael W. McCormick, the executive director of the Global Business Traveler Association, a group whose members include corporate travel managers. “The infrastructure is clearly racing to catch up with demand.”

Of course, travel off the beaten path holds its share of perils and inconveniences. Hotel infrastructure is often inadequate. Roads can be hazardous. Sometimes vaccines and antimalarial medication may be necessary.

Climate is another challenge. Summer temperatures in Qatar, which won its bid to host the 2022 Soccer World Cup, exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit on average from May through September and can reach highs of 120 degrees. (Rest assured, there are plans for high-end cooling technology at match venues or, alternatively, to hold the tournament in the winter.)

There are other hazards presented by a rise in global travel, notably a greater risk of rapid disease transmission and pandemics. The latest threat emerged in China, where a previously unknown influenza virus infected dozens and killed at least 17 people recently. Another virus, similar to the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was also recently identified in the Middle East.

Security issues are another consideration. In some places, the risk of kidnapping cannot be ruled out. Business travel suffered throughout the Middle East in recent years during the Arab uprisings, though they have also created new opportunities in the region. The Libyan economy had one of the world’s fastest growth rates last year, according to the International Monetary Fund, reflecting a strong recovery after its collapse during the uprising that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

While air travel is going through its safest period in its history â€" the United States recently had an exceptional four-year stretch without a fatal crash â€" flying in some parts of the world remains perilous. With just 3 percent of global traffic, airlines in Africa accounted for 17 percent of airline crashes last year, according to the International Air Transport Association, a group that represents most of the world’s airlines.

Africa has the worst record. Airlines, globally, averaged one accident for every five million flights last year. Africa lost one commercial plane every 270,000 flights. That figure has actually improved in recent years. In 2009, the rate was one accident for every 100,000 flights.

That poor safety record is hurting the region’s economic potential, according to Tony Tyler, I.A.T.A.’s director general. Of the 12 airlines in Central West Africa, for instance, only three have committed themselves to international safety standards â€" Cabo Verde Airlines, Air Burkina and Trans Air Cargo.

“With a few kilometers of tarmac, the most remote region can be connected to the global community,” Mr. Tyler said in a speech in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, last month. “And that could mean access to vital sources of health care and emergency assistance; jobs selling products in global markets or welcoming tourists; or opportunities for education, exploring the world or creating business.”

But, he said, “the biggest challenge for air transport in Africa is safety.”

Obviously Africa is not the only place with safety concerns. In April, a new Boeing 737 operated by Lion Air crashed into the sea as it tried to land at the Bali airport in Indonesia, though all the passengers survived.

Differences across countries and regions make it impossible to draw broad conclusions for business travelers, said Henry Harteveldt, a travel analyst at Hudson Crossing, a consulting firm in San Francisco. In many cases, the situation will vary greatly by country or by city. “It is very inconsistent,” he said.

The growth in emerging-market passenger demand has attracted the attention of big hotel chains, who are making large strategic bets throughout Asia, Latin America and the Middle East to cater to foreign business travelers and a growing number of domestic travelers.

Starwood Hotels, which owns the Sheraton and W Hotels chains, plans 100 new hotels in China over the next few years, many designed for the Chinese domestic audience and local tastes.

Last year, Marriott outlined a $2 billion, three-year plan to open new hotels around the world with an emphasis on emerging nations. A third of those will be in Asia. It plans to more than double its 54 hotels in China, with midprice hotels aimed at China’s middle class along with luxury five-star hotels.

As they cope with all this growth, global hotel chains are also bringing more consistent travel standards to emerging markets, said Christie Hicks, who runs Starwood’s sales operations and its business-to-business relations. Business travelers increasingly expect to find the same sort of amenities anywhere they travel, including high-speed Internet connections and Wi-Fi, fitness centers and healthy food options.

“They want a brand they recognize,” Ms. Hicks said. “They want all the things they need to feel at home when they are abroad.”

Yet travel experts still warn of room shortages and high hotel rates as the supply of accommodations fails to keep up with rising demand.

Largely because of a persistent shortage of hotel rooms, Moscow was the most expensive city for business travelers for the ninth consecutive year in 2012, according to the Hogg Robinson Group, a corporate services company based in Britain. Lagos, Nigeria, came second, despite a rise in new hotel construction for big-name brands like Sheraton, Ibis, Radisson Blu and InterContinental. Reflecting the room shortage, the Radisson Hotel in the city’s Victoria Island neighborhood advertises a standard room at about $410 a night.

In Latin America too, room rates have soared as capacity has failed to keep up with demand. Business travel spending in Brazil has tripled since 2000 and is expected to reach $34.5 billion this year, according to the Global Business Travel Association. At that pace, the country is set to overtake France, Britain and Italy in travel spending in the next two years.

But even though Brazil is pumping billions of dollars into airports as it prepares for the World Cup and Olympics, work on hotels is still lagging, travel experts said. The last luxury chain to open a hotel in São Paulo did so 10 years ago, according to Hogg Robinson. Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo registered the biggest room rate increases, rising as much as 19 percent last year.

“The development is challenging in Brazil,” Ms. Hicks said. “There are not enough hotel rooms for either the Olympics or the World Cup. Everybody could use a lot more hotels in Brazil. Like anything â€" it does not happen fast enough.”

The airlines, at least, hope they are moving fast enough. They plan more flights with more direct routes from the United States, and they are investing in more comfortable seats on their international flights along with tastier meals for business passengers.

United Airlines has unveiled a new service between Houston to Lagos, as well as between Washington and Guatemala City this year. Delta Air Lines will start daily nonstop flights between Seattle and Shanghai in June. Its partner in Europe, Air France, just introduced a new service between Paris and Kuala Lumpur. And Lufthansa will soon fly Airbus A380s between Frankfurt and Shanghai five times a week.

American Airlines is starting a new route this summer between Miami and Manaus, Brazil. It is also increasing the number of weekly flights between Dallas-Fort Worth and São Paulo, as well as increasing frequency of service to Brasilia and Belo Horizonte. The airline bought new Boeing 777s, which can fly long-range routes, and outfitted them with its newest lie-flat seats. Those planes, which will become the flagship of its fleet, will serve both London and São Paulo from New York.

Airlines are also expanding their international alliances to offer travelers seamless connections and more destinations than they could on their own.

Star Alliance, the largest of the three major global alliances, added Shenzhen Airlines, Avianca of Columbia and Eva Air of Taiwan. Separately, China’s Xiamen Airlines, Aerolinas Argentinas, Saudi Airlines and Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines all joined SkyTeam last year.

After months of speculation, Latam Airlines, which is the result of the merger between Lan Airlines of Chile and Tam Airlines of Brazil, said it would join the Oneworld alliance. The decision means that Tam will withdraw from the Star Alliance next year.

The megacarriers from the Persian Gulf, long reluctant to join in the alliance game, have also entered the fray lately. Qatar Airlines joined Oneworld last year. Etihad Airways has taken equity stakes in several airlines, including Air Berlin, Air Seychelles and Virgin Australia.

Even Emirates, which is based in Dubai and is the largest and most successful of the three gulf carriers, has entered into a partnership with Qantas Airlines, the Australian carrier.

The airports of Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, where the three carriers are based, now serve about 15 percent of all passenger traffic going from Asia to Europe, and from Europe to the South West Pacific region, including Australia, according to Amadeus, an air travel technology developer.

And while Paris, Frankfurt or London find it difficult to expand their airports to accommodate higher traffic, and often run at full capacity, Dubai has outlined plans for an entirely new airport to eventually replace the current one.

All this activity augurs well for business travelers. A recent survey of global routes by Amadeus found that the global industry had become more competitive over the last three years, with a higher percentage of air routes served by three or more airlines. The survey said the Asian market had the most competition among airlines, with 75 percent of air passenger volume served by three or more airlines.

“I am absolutely sure the future growth of our business is in Asia,” said Dr. Jurgen Weber, the chairman of Lufthansa. “Living standards are going up and it turns out that the Chinese like to travel even more than the Japanese do.”

And finally there is India, one of the world’s most populous nations with a vibrant economy, but a country that is still hobbled by poor investments and a cumbersome bureaucracy.

Ian Carter, the president for international development at Hilton, said that in most regions of the world, good infrastructure â€" airports, roads and highways â€" generally comes before the hotels.

“It is rarely the other way round, the exception being India,’ he said. “Generally speaking there are beautiful hotels there but getting there is like navigating an obstacle course.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 1, 2013, on page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: Globe-Trotting.

Is It Crazy to Think We Can Eradicate Poverty?

At a news conference during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in late April, Jim Yong Kim held up a piece of paper with the year “2030” scribbled on it in pen. “This is it,” said Kim, the genial American physician who took over as president of the World Bank last summer. “This is the global target to end poverty.”

It sounds like the sort of airy, ambitious goal that is greeted by standing ovations but is ultimately unlikely to ever materialize. Development experts don’t see it that way, though. The end of extreme poverty might very well be within reach. “It’s not by any means pie-in-the-sky,” says Scott Morris, who formerly managed the Obama administration’s relations with development institutions. When I asked Jeffrey Sachs, the development economist, if the target seemed feasible, he said, “I absolutely believe so.” And Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, the powerful Washington policy group, told me, “In many ways, it’s a very modest goal.”

In part, this is because the bar is set very low. The World Bank aims to raise just about everyone on Earth above the $1.25-a-day income threshold. In Zambia, an average person living in such dire poverty might be able to afford, on a given day, two or three plates of cornmeal porridge, a tomato, a mango, a spoonful each of oil and sugar, a bit of chicken or fish, maybe a handful of nuts. But he would have just pocket change to spend on transportation, housing, education and everything else. The 1.2 billion people living in such extreme poverty, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, might own land, but they are not very likely to own durable goods or productive assets â€" things like bicycles â€" that might help them raise themselves out of poverty. In such families, about half or three-quarters of income goes toward food.

Fortunately, this deadly and cyclical form of poverty is already on its way toward obsolescence, and much faster than many development economists expected. The first Millennium Development Goal â€" to halve the proportion of the world population living in dire poverty by 2015 â€" was met five years early, as the rate fell to an estimated 21 percent in 2010, from 43 percent in 1990. Some economists had feared that the recession would arrest or even reverse the trend, given how interconnected the global economy is, but the improvement continued, unabated. Annual growth dipped for developing economies in 2009 but has since rebounded to about 5.3 percent a year, a figure dragged down by weaker peripheral European economies.

For much of the improvement, the world can thank one country: China, which alone accounts for about half of the decline in the extreme poverty rate worldwide. It has also driven significant gains across the region. In the early 1980s, East Asia had the highest extreme-poverty rate in the world, with more than three in four people living on less than $1.25 a day. By 2010, just one in eight were. But other middle-income countries, like Brazil, Nigeria and India, have experienced significant growth, too â€" in no small part because tens of millions of the very poor have moved from rural areas to cities, where they become richer, healthier and more productive for their economies.

Since 1980, the proportion of the developing world living in urban areas has grown to about 50 percent, from 30 percent, and according to the World Bank, that migration of hundreds of millions has been instrumental in pulling down poverty rates â€" and will be for a broader set of countries going forward. Cities bolster access to health services and public resources; infant-mortality rates, for instance, are 40 percent lower in urban Cambodia than in rural Cambodia. And workers themselves become more productive, often by making the switch from labor-intensive work like farming to capital-intensive work like manufacturing. Urban poverty is hardly attractive â€" slums are cramped, unplanned, unhygienic places â€" but it is, in many cases, less deadly. (Except when it’s not. A recent factory collapse in Bangladesh killed dozens of workers â€" a reminder of the sometimes-catastrophic human costs associated with rapid, unchecked urbanization and industrialization.)

Social assistance has also improved in many middle-income countries and a number of low-income ones as well. In the past decade, for instance, Brazil and Mexico have pushed down their poverty rates in part by simply giving money to the poor â€" making direct transfers, as economists call it â€" and India is trying the same. Lant Pritchett of Harvard Kennedy School, a former World Bank economist, notes that by this logic, the world could eliminate extreme poverty for about $45 billion a year, or roughly the amount spent on movie tickets annually worldwide.

Of course, making it above the $1.25-a-day mark doesn’t guarantee a white picket fence and a Caddy in the driveway â€" indeed it doesn’t even guarantee a proper meal. For that reason, some economists have criticized the bank for setting its targets too low. “It’s small,” Pritchett says. “It’s penurious. It’s charity-like. It’s not development.” He says that the billions who live on a bit more than $1.25 a day are still deeply impoverished by any reasonable standard. “Why are we focused on a line, above which nothing happens, set by some technocrats in Washington?” Another 1.2 billion live on between $1.25 and $2 a day, an only slightly less dire form of deprivation.

For the poor living in poor countries, particularly the profoundly unstable ones, gains have been harder-fought and slower, a trend that the World Bank’s own economists describe as worrisome. But that is not to play down the successes so far. In 2008, for the first time since the bank started measuring the statistics, the number of people living in dire poverty and the dire-poverty rate fell in every region around the world. Extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa has at last dipped below the 50 percent mark. Still, many within the development world doubt the ability of NGOs to cure the world’s most troubled nations of their woes. “I don’t think we have a recipe for fixing the Congo or South Sudan or Afghanistan,” says Birdsall, of the Center for Global Development.

In an interview, Kim sounded energetic and optimistic about the prospect that the great brute force of growth would keep on lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty â€" and about the bank’s role in nursing the process along. Given how big the world is, how big the goal is and how diverse economies are, it would take a multipronged approach, he said. For parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it would mean huge electrification projects. For China, it would mean smarter urbanization and clean energy. For India, it would mean enormous infrastructure investments that the World Bank could help finance. It also might mean replicating what has worked for those big, quick-growing emerging economies in poorer, poverty-stricken developing ones.

More slums â€" as horrible as they are â€" could be a good thing.

Back in Washington, while Kim delivered a sunny forecast for the developing world based on the premise that growth would continue, his counterpart at the I.M.F., Christine Lagarde, seemed stuck talking about problems â€" in particular, the economic malaise of the richest countries on Earth. Would the Bank of Japan’s plan to end deflation by bathing the economy in yen work? Would Congress delay some of the sequester cuts? Might Germany cool it with the austerity? Call them first-world problems if you like. They are, but they do tend to find their way into the streets of Hyderabad, Accra and Lima. “The developing world has gotten its act together,” Birdsall says. But poverty reduction “depends on the advanced economies getting their act together, too.”

Annie Lowrey is an economics reporter for The Times.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 5, 2013, on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Movin’ on Up.

Critics of Israel’s West Bank Occupation Say Calm Before New Violence Was an Illusion

A video report from Arutz Sheva, an Israeli settler news organization, on the funeral of Evyatar Borovsky, who was killed Tuesday near his home in the West Bank by a Palestinian attacker.

As my colleagues Isabel Kershner and Fares Akram report, the tension of daily life in the occupied West Bank exploded into deadly violence on Tuesday, when a knife-wielding Palestinian man attacked and killed an Israeli settler at a bus stop. The attacker, identified as Salam Zaghal, a 24-year-old who recently spent three years in jail for throwing stones, then seized the dead man’s pistol and engaged in a shoot-out with police officers.

Before the victim, Evyatar Borovsky, a 31-year-old father of five, was laid to rest in an emotional ceremony, vigilantes from the Israeli settlements that dot the West Bank sought to punish their Palestinian neighbors by smashing the windows of a mosque, setting fields on fire and throwing stones at a school bus.

The school bus that was attacked by Israeli settlers the girls could have been killed by this #SettlerTerror http://t.co/qwHkEDG1QN

â€" Tweet_Palestine (@Tweet_Palestine) 30 Apr 13

On social networks and in statements to the news media, representatives Israel’s military and the leadership of the settler community were in no doubt about the nature of the attack, describing the killing as the murder of an Israeli civilian by a Palestinian terrorist.

This morning: #Palestinian #terrorist murdered Evyatar Borovsky, an #Israeli father of five http://t.co/L1IeVznUtZ

â€" IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) 30 Apr 13

Some supporters of the national-religious settlement project, like the editors of The Jewish Press in Brooklyn, even blamed the officers who responded to the attack for not just killing the attacker on the spot. “It is not clear,” The Press reported, “why they shot the terrorist in the leg, and not the head.”

From Palestinians and Israelis who oppose the occupation, though, condemnations of the killing were mixed with calls to pay attention to the broader context â€" in which an Arab community of 2.5 million, living under military rule for 46 years, is forced to accommodate itself to an influx of hundreds of thousands of Israeli migrants to expanding Jewish-only settlements, defended by armed soldiers, officers and civilian guards.

In a statement offering “condolences to the family of the murder victim,” the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights said it was “horrified by the nationalistic murder,” but also suggested that Palestinians are engaged in “a morally justified campaign against a discriminatory military regime.” The rabbis quickly added, however, that even a just cause “does not justify harm to civilians, and we harshly condemn any attack such as this.”

Condolences to the family of the murder victim today at Tapuah Junction | Rabbis for Human Rights http://t.co/qOzaA2JpFz

â€" Rabbi 4 Human Rights (@rhreng) 30 Apr 13

According to Yousef Munayyer, the director of The Palestine Center in Washington, his group has documented more than 1,200 incidents of violence by settlers in the 18 months since the last killing of an Israeli civilian in the occupied territory.

#Israel settler killed by a Palestinian today in the WB for first time since Sept ’11 during which 1200+ settler violence incidents occurred

â€" Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) 30 Apr 13

In a post for the Israeli news blog +972, Mairav Zonszein, argued that the 18 months since the last fatal attack on an Israeli in the West Bank had created “an illusion of calm and stability” in a status quo that is unsustainable. Ms. Zonszein, an Israeli-American blogger who works with Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish group that supports rural Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, wrote:

During this “calm” period, most Israelis continue going about their lives. They aren’t affected by the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a daily basis. But days like today, when the phrase “terror attack” is back in the news, Israelis suddenly remember that we are in a violent conflict. The government, of course, does a good job of reminding us we are the victims.

But on all those days when there is no violence against Israelis in the news, on all those days when Israelis can go about their business, the situation is actually not at all stable or calm. It’s definitely not calm for the Palestinian population, specifically in the West Bank where life under occupation is anything but free of violence.

By way of explanation, Ms. Zonszein cited remarks published last year by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, on the constant pressure of life in the West Bank, between outbreaks of deadly violence, in which he asked the rhetorical question: “What goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e. when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)?” His answer was:

What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians in the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

“To avoid any kind of misunderstanding,” Mr. Žižek added, “taking all this into account in no way implies any ‘understanding’ for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.”

In the days before the deadly attack, Ms. Zonszein’s fellow-activists at Ta’ayush were working to draw attention to how very tense daily life in the occupied West Bank can be when Israeli soldiers try to keep Palestinian farmers away from land near Israeli settlements.

Over the weekend, Ta’ayush released a brief video clip showing an Israeli soldier shouting with rage at Israeli activists who had accompanied Palestinian shepherds from a West Bank village as they tried to graze their sheep on land near Othni’el, an Israeli settlement.

Video recorded by an Israeli activist in the West Bank this month showed an Israeli soldier screaming at Palestinian shepherds and their Israeli supporters.

According to Ms. Zonszein’s translation, when a Ta’ayush activist named Guy interrupted the soldier as he was shouting at a shepherd, the reservist turned to Guy’s camera and screamed “Get out of here you Israel haters!” After threatening to hit the activist, he added: “You are worse than the Arabs!” The officer then shouted at a female Israeli activist: “Shut up, Israel hater who goes to bed with Arabs!”

After the video was featured on the Web site of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli military called the officer’s conduct unbecoming, but suggested that the confrontation had been provoked by the “left-wing activists” who recorded it.

Activists from Ta’ayush have also documented an apparent effort by Israeli officers in the West Bank to prevent footage of what ordinary aspects of the occupation look like from being recorded. In another video clip, released with a blog post on Saturday, soldiers can be seen repeatedly blocking the lens of Ta’ayush activists as they attempted to film the shepherds being forced away from land near the settlement.

Video of Israeli officers using their own phones and cameras to block the lenses of Israeli activists attempting to record their work in the West Bank.

Asked about this footage, in which officers can be seen using their own phones and cameras to block the lenses of the activists, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Capt. Eytan Buchman, told The Lede: “a Palestinian shepherd, accompanied by Israeli activists, tried to illegally graze a field adjacent to the town of Othni’el in a blatant attempt to create a provocation. Security forces arrived in order to distance the shepherd and activists without the use of force.”

Guy, Ta’ayush Israeli soldiers blocked the cameras of Israeli activists who were recording their activities in the occupied West Bank this month.

Amiel Vardi, a Hebrew University classics professor and one of the founders of Ta’ayush, was with the shepherds in South Mount Hebron when the video was recorded. He told The Lede in an e-mail, “the soldiers gave no reason,” for blocking their cameras. “On the contrary, they insisted that they do not restrict our filming â€" only filming us too, as is their right. So much for what they said. As for what they actually did, I suppose they know that they have no legal authority to drive the shepherds away from these lands, and are not to keen to be filmed doing it.”

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, Mr. Vardi “was shot in 2006 by a settler when he and friends tried to help Palestinian farmers reach their vineyards during the grape harvest.”

According to the Ta’ayush activists, the effort to prevent them from recording scenes of routine confrontations in the occupied West Bank is a concerted one. Last month, they posted a video compilation of officers blocking their cameras during several visits to the area, and at the start of this month, they were even detained for several hours by police officers investigating a complaint filed by settlers who accused the activists of “disturbing public order” by filming construction at a settlement.

Image of the Day: April 30

Dar Yasin/Associated Press Indian security personnel inspecting the parts of a bomb, which they detected and defused, on the outskirts of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir.

Image of the Day: April 30

Dar Yasin/Associated Press Indian security personnel inspecting the parts of a bomb, which they detected and defused, on the outskirts of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir.

4-Year Old Rape Victim Dies in India

NEW DELHI â€" A four-year old girl who was raped and dumped near a crematorium in central India died on Monday evening from cardiac arrest, hospital authorities said Tuesday.

The girl, the daughter of day laborers, was lured from her home in the town of Ghansor in Madhya Pradesh state on April 17, and found the next day by her parents, bleeding profusely, the police said.

Her kidnapper seized her after promising to buy her bananas from a nearby shop, a police official said Tuesday.

She had been in a coma since April 18, Ashok Tank, a doctor who cared for her at CARE Nagpur Hospital, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. She suffered severe brain injuries and severe injuries to her vagina, he said, and was on a ventilator.

“Her heart and lungs stopped functioning,” Dr. Tank said. “It is very inhuman that such a young girl was subjected to sexual abuse.”

The girl was transferred from a hospital in Madhya Pradesh to CARE in nearby Maharashtra state on April 20.

The police have arrested Firoz Khan, 27, a welder who worked at the nearby Jhabua Power Plant, in the attack. They have also arrested a second man, Rakesh Chaudhary, 25, who allegedly brought the girl to her attacker, but did not rape her himself.

“The investigation is going on,” said Mithlesh K Shukla, superintendent of police for the Seoni district. “They will be charged soon and we will ensure that they get the strictest punishment.”

The number of reported sexual assaults of girls under the age of 18 has climbed steadily in India since the 1990s, and reported rapes of girls under the age of 10 have more than doubled to 875 from 1990 to 2011.

Some experts believe this is because more families are coming forward to report the crimes, while others blame a combination of social and cultural factors, including massive migration of unskilled labor from rural areas to urban centers, and the breakdown of the traditional closely-knit Indian family. On Monday, one Indian religious leader said a rise in rapes was due to increased consumption of meat and alcohol.

In India’s capital city of Delhi, just in the month of April, the police said several juvenile girls have been raped. The rape of a five-year old girl in Delhi ignited sometimes violent protests earlier this month in the nation’s capital, but as of Tuesday at noon, there was little public reaction in Madhya Pradesh over the recent death.

“The value of life for a little girl whether in Delhi or Madhya Pradesh is the same,” said Varun Amar, a lawyer from Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh. “So why are people not coming on to the streets when this girl has died?”

“The girl from Delhi got 24-7 coverage, but this girl’s death has hardly been covered,” he said.

A Conversation With: Director Feroz Abbas Khan

Courtesy of New York Indian Film Festival Feroz Abbas Khan.

The 13th annual New York Indian Film Festival will open on Tuesday evening in Manhattan with the premiere of “Dekh Tamasha Dekh,” which was directed by Feroz Abbas Khan. The five-day festival is a showcase of more than 40 features, short films and documentaries, presented by the Indo-American Arts Council, a Manhattan-based nonprofit.

“Dekh Tamasha Dekh,” held at the Skirball Center for Performing Arts, part of New York University, is a political and social satire based on a true story about finding out the religious identity of an impoverished deceased man.

The 54-year-old filmmaker behind this story is known for raising the quality of theater in India: he was the first festival director of the Prithvi Theater in Mumbai and has directed plays such as “Saalgirah,” “Tumhari Amrita” and “Salesman Ramlal.” Though he was a respected playwright for more than a decade, his fame rose a notch with his 2007 film “Gandhi, My Father,” about the troubled relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and his son.

The day before his Indian Film Festival debut, Mr. Khan spoke with India Ink about the event that led to his latest work, the state of Indian cinema today and why Bollywood stars won’t act in theater.

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Q.

What was your inspiration for “Dekh Tamasha Dekh”?

A.

The former police commissioner of Mumbai, Mr. Satish Sawhney, narrated an anecdote to me about an unusual communal situation he had to handle in one of his first jobs as a police officer: A dispute broke out about the religious identity of a horse cart plier who was electrocuted by live wires of an uprooted electricity transmission pole.

While both families, poor and socially discriminated, reached an understanding, the religious bigots found an opportunity in the conflict to further their agenda of hatred and mayhem.

The revelation of his identity and unexpected religious rites left me stunned with the audacity and absurdity of identity politics. This incident encapsulated the fragile nature of social peace in India that can be shattered by a minor irrelevance, and I decided to share this farce as a political and social satire.

Q.

Does your creative process differ when working on a play versus a movie?

A.

The process of directing a play and film are two different mindsets. For a play you prepare yourself for a journey where you discover the meaning and power as you rehearse , improvise and stumble. It is always a work in progress, changing and transforming from rehearsals to performance and beyond.

A film needs days, weeks and maybe months of working alone to make aesthetic and practical choices that best realize the story you need to share. Every detail needs visualizing and then you pre-visualize the film with storyboards, photographs, painting, pieces of music or conversations.

Q.

What are the major differences in making a movie versus producing a play?

A.

The movie allows you to explore all possible spaces and people constrained only by time and finances available. A play needs very little money- there is quality rehearsal time but restricted by available spaces for performance.

Q.

You’re known for bringing the quality of Indian theater to a high standard. Do you think the productions in India match those of the West End in London or Broadway in New York?

A.

West End and Broadway are mostly celebrated for musicals â€" they are simply breathtaking.

In India we do not have any performance spaces to accommodate the technical wizardry of these musicals. Most of our big theaters are multipurpose auditoriums that host everything from plays to music and dance performances to marriage parties and shareholder meetings.

We do have the talent and stories but we need the infrastructure and finances to achieve the quality of Broadway productions.

Q.

India is obviously famous for Bollywood, and it seems as though every aspiring actor wants to break into that industry. Do you find it a struggle to recruit high-caliber actors to theater?

A.

Since we have a burgeoning film industry it will always remain a huge attraction. I tell my actors to work in all mediums but never abandon theater â€" it is in theater they realize their highest aspirations as actors.

Somehow I have been able to get the best talent to work with me for a sustained period of time, but I do admit we will need to have a training and financial program to get a regular flow of fine actors.

Q.

Is there ever any crossover in India from actors taking part in both film and theater as there is in the U.S.? Would a Bollywood star, for example, act in a play?

A.

In India the crossover from theater to film seems logical but from film to theater almost impossible. Most of the Bollywood stars aspire to become bigger stars not better actors. The discipline, dedication, hard work and skill needed to perform in theater will drive them insane.

Q.

What project is next for you?

A.

I am procrastinating and am undecided!

I.M.F. Warns of ‘Middle-Income Trap’ in Asia

SINGAPORE â€" Asia needs to guard against asset bubbles, and its emerging economies must improve government institutions and liberalize rigid labor and product markets to encourage development, the International Monetary Fund said Monday.

“Emerging Asia is potentially susceptible to the ‘middle-income trap,’ a phenomenon whereby economies risk stagnation at middle-income levels and fail to graduate into the ranks of advanced economies,” the I.M.F. said in its Regional Economic Outlook report for Asia and the Pacific.

Economies in Asia “are less exposed to the risk of a sustained growth slowdown” than those in other regions, the international funding agency added. “However, their relative performance is weaker on institutions.”

The I.M.F.’s warning comes at time when Asia looks set to lead a global economic recovery.

“While the external risk of severe economic fallout from an acute euro area crisis has diminished, regional risks are coming into clearer focus,” the I.M.F. said. “These include some ongoing buildup of financial imbalances and rising asset prices.”

The I.M.F. is monitoring credit ratios and output levels in Asia closely, as conditions cold worsen very quickly, Anoop Singh, the fund’s director for the Asia-Pacific region, said at a news briefing in Singapore. He said the regional authorities needed to respond early and decisively to potential overheating.

The I.M.F., which recently cut its 2013 and 2014 growth forecasts for greater China, India, Singapore and South Korea but raised its outlooks for Malaysia and the Philippines, sounded generally positive about near-term prospects.

“Growth in Asia is likely pick up gradually in the course of 2013, to about 5.75 percent, on strengthening external demand and continued robust domestic demand,” the report said.

China, Indonesia, India and the Philippines need to improve their economic institutions, while India, the Philippines and Thailand are also exposed to a larger risk of a growth slowdown stemming from subpar infrastructure, the report said.

China and Malaysia are the highest-ranked developing Asian countries on an I.M.F. chart measuring institutional strength, while India, Indonesia and the Philippines are at the bottom. The I.M.F. defined institutional strength as demonstrating higher political stability, better bureaucratic capability, fewer conflicts and less corruption.

For many developing Asian economies, there remains ample room for easing stringent regulations on products and in some cases labor markets, the fund said.

The I.M.F. also said that various statistical approaches indicated that growth rates had slowed in China and India. For China, growth appears to have peaked at about 11 percent in 2006-7, while India’s growth is now about 6 percent to 7 percent, compared with about 8 percent before the financial crisis. “By contrast, trend growth for most Asean countries seems to have remained stable or to have increased somewhat, with the notable exception of Vietnam,” the fund said. Asean is the acronym for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Mr. Singh, the fund’s regional director, said that the I.M.F. appreciated Japanese efforts to stimulate its economy, and that quantitative easing â€" in which a central bank buys assets like bonds with newly created money to help growth â€" was just part of a package of measures that included cutting debt and structural overhauls like increasing women’s participation in the work force.

“In Japan, we have welcomed the measures taken,” he said. “It’s because they are focused on addressing the deflation that has affected Japan for the last 10 to 15 years. As Japan moves back to sustainable positive growth, it’s going to help the region and the global economy, and that is the most important.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 30, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

I.M.F. Warns of ‘Middle-Income Trap’ in Asia

SINGAPORE â€" Asia needs to guard against asset bubbles, and its emerging economies must improve government institutions and liberalize rigid labor and product markets to encourage development, the International Monetary Fund said Monday.

“Emerging Asia is potentially susceptible to the ‘middle-income trap,’ a phenomenon whereby economies risk stagnation at middle-income levels and fail to graduate into the ranks of advanced economies,” the I.M.F. said in its Regional Economic Outlook report for Asia and the Pacific.

Economies in Asia “are less exposed to the risk of a sustained growth slowdown” than those in other regions, the international funding agency added. “However, their relative performance is weaker on institutions.”

The I.M.F.’s warning comes at time when Asia looks set to lead a global economic recovery.

“While the external risk of severe economic fallout from an acute euro area crisis has diminished, regional risks are coming into clearer focus,” the I.M.F. said. “These include some ongoing buildup of financial imbalances and rising asset prices.”

The I.M.F. is monitoring credit ratios and output levels in Asia closely, as conditions cold worsen very quickly, Anoop Singh, the fund’s director for the Asia-Pacific region, said at a news briefing in Singapore. He said the regional authorities needed to respond early and decisively to potential overheating.

The I.M.F., which recently cut its 2013 and 2014 growth forecasts for greater China, India, Singapore and South Korea but raised its outlooks for Malaysia and the Philippines, sounded generally positive about near-term prospects.

“Growth in Asia is likely pick up gradually in the course of 2013, to about 5.75 percent, on strengthening external demand and continued robust domestic demand,” the report said.

China, Indonesia, India and the Philippines need to improve their economic institutions, while India, the Philippines and Thailand are also exposed to a larger risk of a growth slowdown stemming from subpar infrastructure, the report said.

China and Malaysia are the highest-ranked developing Asian countries on an I.M.F. chart measuring institutional strength, while India, Indonesia and the Philippines are at the bottom. The I.M.F. defined institutional strength as demonstrating higher political stability, better bureaucratic capability, fewer conflicts and less corruption.

For many developing Asian economies, there remains ample room for easing stringent regulations on products and in some cases labor markets, the fund said.

The I.M.F. also said that various statistical approaches indicated that growth rates had slowed in China and India. For China, growth appears to have peaked at about 11 percent in 2006-7, while India’s growth is now about 6 percent to 7 percent, compared with about 8 percent before the financial crisis. “By contrast, trend growth for most Asean countries seems to have remained stable or to have increased somewhat, with the notable exception of Vietnam,” the fund said. Asean is the acronym for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Mr. Singh, the fund’s regional director, said that the I.M.F. appreciated Japanese efforts to stimulate its economy, and that quantitative easing â€" in which a central bank buys assets like bonds with newly created money to help growth â€" was just part of a package of measures that included cutting debt and structural overhauls like increasing women’s participation in the work force.

“In Japan, we have welcomed the measures taken,” he said. “It’s because they are focused on addressing the deflation that has affected Japan for the last 10 to 15 years. As Japan moves back to sustainable positive growth, it’s going to help the region and the global economy, and that is the most important.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 30, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

Image of the Day: April 29

Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press People waiting for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address a Congress Party campaign rally in Bangalore, Karnataka, ahead of state assembly elections scheduled to be held on May 5.

Image of the Day: April 29

Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press People waiting for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address a Congress Party campaign rally in Bangalore, Karnataka, ahead of state assembly elections scheduled to be held on May 5.

Image of the Day: April 29

Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press People waiting for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address a Congress Party campaign rally in Bangalore, Karnataka, ahead of state assembly elections scheduled to be held on May 5.

Image of the Day: April 29

Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press People waiting for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address a Congress Party campaign rally in Bangalore, Karnataka, ahead of state assembly elections scheduled to be held on May 5.

Guinness Record Holder Dies Performing Stunt Over Teesta River

Diptendu Dutta/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Sailendra Nath Roy, a Guinness World Record holder, attempting to cross the river Teesta on the outskirts of Siliguri in West Bengal on Sunday.

Year after year, stunt after stunt, Indians have had their names imprinted in the Guinness Book of World Records, that official chronicler of human achievement that is often the gatekeeper of the eclectic and the bizarre. One Indian man has the world’s longest mustache, while another was once lauded for the world’s longest fingernails. Yet another struggled to retain his records in the book by attempting all sorts of titles: from writing on a grain of rice to stacking the tallest single column of coins.

Diptendu Dutta/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty ImagesMr. Roy pulled a “toy train” with his ponytail in Siliguri, West Bengal, on Sept. 17, 2012.

That drive to outdo and maintain their claim to fame took a tragic turn on Sunday when record-holder Sailendra Nath Roy, celebrated for pulling a “toy train” with his ponytail, died while performing another rope stunt over the turbulent Teesta River in West Bengal. Mr. Roy was crossing the water by hanging from a pulley tied to his hair when the crank stuck and he reportedly suffered a heart attack. Although he was later pulled to shore by spectators, doctors pronounced him dead.

“His wife used to urge him to quit doing dangerous stunts. Mr Roy convinced her that crossing the Teesta river would be his last. Unfortunately, that became his last stunt,” an unnamed friend of Mr. Roy told the BBC. A spokesman from Guinness had no immediate comment on Mr. Roy’s death.

It’s a fate others have met while attempting to set records around the world, although not necessarily for Guinness.

India’s obsession with setting Guinness records is strong that in 2012, Guinness established an “official” presence in India, one of just a handful outside the company’s London headquarters. Indians submitted the third-largest number of record applications in 2011, Guinness said, behind the United States and United Kingdom.

Guinness Records was established in 1951 by Sir Hugh Beaver, the chairman of Guinness Brewery. He was hunting in County Wexford, Ireland, when he missed a shot at a golden plover. Sir Hugh wondered if the plover was the fastest game bird in Europe but couldn’t find the answer in a reference book. In 1954, Sir Hugh invited sports journalists to compile a book of records; the first U.K. edition was released a year later and became a Christmas best seller. The first U.S. edition followed in 1956. 

This year, the Indians featured in book include the world’s shortest living woman, Jyoti Amge,  all of 62.8 centimeters, or just over 2 feet. Indians who registered records in earlier years include Shakuntala Devi, who earned a place in the 1982 edition by correctly multiplying two 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds, and a 9-year-old from Karnataka who made the list in 2006 for being the youngest director of a professionally made feature length film.

India, as a country, also holds several records. These include the much touted title of “world’s largest democracy,” most centuries scored in international cricket and the place with the highest rainfall, annually.

After Etihad Deal, India’s Airlines May Attract More Foreign Interest

Courtesy of Jet Airways From left: Hameed Ali, acting C.E.O. of Jet Airways, James Hogan, president and C.E.O. of Etihad Airways, Naresh Goyal, chairman of Jet Airways with James Rigney, chief financial officer of Etihad Airways, on Wednesday after the deal between the two airlines was announced.

MUMBAI â€" Could the economic reforms introduced by the Indian government in September save India’s beleaguered aviation industry?

Last week, Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways said it would buy a 24 percent stake in the Indian carrier Jet Airways, the first investment since the Indian government relaxed ownership rules to allow foreign operators to buy 49 percent of local airlines.

Etihad is not alone: on March 6, Malaysia’s AirAsia won approval from India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board to take a 49 percent stake in a new budget airline venture with Tata Sons and Telestra Tradeplace. The next Indian airlines likely to attract foreign investment are SpiceJet and Indigo, which have about 20 percent and 27 percent of the market, respectively, analysts said.

If the Jet-Etihad deal “goes through without any hurdles, it will give confidence to people who wish to invest in this sector,” said A. K. Prabhakar, senior vice president of equity research at AnandRathi Financial Services in Mumbai. SpiceJet and Indigo are the next possible beneficiaries, he said, in part because they will need a foreign partner to compete with the newly buoyant Jet and the new AirAsia.

Amit Dave/Reuters A Jet Airways passenger aircraft taking off from the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on Feb 1, 2013.

India’s aviation sector was considered one of the most promising in the world just a few years ago, attracting investment from Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas and W.L. Ross as India’s new middle class took to the skies. The number of passengers in India is still growing quickly and is expected to increase by more than 40 million in the next five years.

But profitability has proven elusive for most in the industry, thanks to dwindling funding, rising fuel prices and punitive taxes that add to airline costs. Indian airlines lost $2 billion in the fiscal year that ended in March 2012, said the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation.

Kingfisher Airlines, strapped with mounting debt and unpaid bills, stopped flying late last year. Air India, the state-run carrier, lost more than $1 billion last year. The deal with Etihad brings Jet Airways, which has an estimated debt of $2.2 billion, much needed capital as well.

The transaction “strengthens the balance sheet of Jet Airways” and “underpins future revenue streams” for the company, the chairman Naresh Goyal said when the deal was announced.

“Infusion of foreign direct investment in the domestic sector will result in the improvement of the economics of aviation, grow traffic at our airports and create job opportunities,” he said.

The closing of the Jet-Etihad deal, expected in the next month, is likely to be closely watched before other foreign airlines come marching in to India, analysts predicted. The Indian government’s ongoing battle with the British telecom Vodafone Group over an alleged $2 billion owed in back taxes has created considerable anxiety for foreign investors looking to do deals here. Despite slew of reforms announced last year to attract foreign investors, there remains a “lingering sense of apprehension” about tax liabilities, said Ajay Bodke, the head of investment strategy and advisory at Prabhudas Lilladher, a Mumbai brokerage. On a recent road show to Toronto, New York and Boston, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram met with foreign investors to try to allay these concerns.

Etihad Airways/European Pressphoto Agency James Hogan, CEO of Etihad Airways with the airways’ flight crew in Sydney, Australia on March 27, 2007.

Neither Etihad nor Jet disclosed information about how, exactly, the deal was structured to protect it against future tax claims or any other unexpected liabilities introduced by the Indian government. Merger experts said they believed the deal was a preferential share allotment, meaning a company issues new shares to only a select group of investors in exchange for payments into the company.

Because the company is issuing fresh equity rather than selling existing shares to Etihad, there are no capital gains tax implications, experts say.

“If it is done through a preferential share allotment, then there is no taxation exposure on the deal for Naresh Goyal, Jet Airways or Etihad,” said Amarjeet Singh, a partner in tax at KPMG in India, which was not involved in the deal.

However, industry experts say simply welcoming foreign investment into Indian airlines will not be enough to fix the sector.

“India is one of the largest aviation markets in the world and needs to compete on the global stage,” said Sudeep Ghai, who specializes in airline start-up, strategy and commercial performance improvement at Athena Aviation, an airline-consulting firm based in London. “To do this effectively the Indian government needs to eliminate red tape, strike down taxes on airlines, get rid of punitive airport charges that add to airline costs and invest in efficient airports that can handle increasing passenger volumes.”

At Madurai’s Chithirai Thiruvizha Festival, Crowds, Flowers and a Golden Horse

The city of Chennai, formerly Madras, may be the most famous of Tamil Nadu’s cities, but the historical and cultural heart of India’s southernmost state is arguably Madurai.

Madurai, which was referenced by Greek and Roman historians and geographers, holds the festival of Chithirai Thiruvizha every spring at the ancient Meenakshi Amman Temple in the heart of the city. The festival, which ended April 25, celebrates the marriage of Hindu goddess Meenakshi, also known as Parvati, to the god Shiva. Thousands of pilgrims from across the state and across India attend the festival to take part in the processions and visit temples.

Legend has it that Lord Vishnu, Meenakshi’s older brother, intended to be the officiant for the ceremony, but arrived a day late. Upset, he refused to cross the Vaigai River to enter the city. Instead, he met the couple midstream before returning to his home 20 kilometers away. The climactic final day of the festival is a re-enactment of this event.

At Madurai’s Chithirai Thiruvizha Festival, Crowds, Flowers and a Golden Horse

The city of Chennai, formerly Madras, may be the most famous of Tamil Nadu’s cities, but the historical and cultural heart of India’s southernmost state is arguably Madurai.

Madurai, which was referenced by Greek and Roman historians and geographers, holds the festival of Chithirai Thiruvizha every spring at the ancient Meenakshi Amman Temple in the heart of the city. The festival, which ended April 25, celebrates the marriage of Hindu goddess Meenakshi, also known as Parvati, to the god Shiva. Thousands of pilgrims from across the state and across India attend the festival to take part in the processions and visit temples.

Legend has it that Lord Vishnu, Meenakshi’s older brother, intended to be the officiant for the ceremony, but arrived a day late. Upset, he refused to cross the Vaigai River to enter the city. Instead, he met the couple midstream before returning to his home 20 kilometers away. The climactic final day of the festival is a re-enactment of this event.

Boeing Jet Returns to the Air, but It’s Only a Start

Shizuo Kambayashi/Associated Press

A ground crew bowed toward an All Nippon Airways 787 Dreamliner as it returned from a test flight at the Haneda International airport in Tokyo.

HANEDA AIRPORT, JAPAN â€" Katsuhiro Ogami, a top engineer at All Nippon Airways, could not sit still Sunday on the airline’s first test flight of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet fitted with fortified batteries. He peered, and peered again, at a monitor hooked to the plane’s batteries for any signs of overheating.

Technicians from Boeing are working to outfit all the 787 Dreamliners in ANA's fleet with the redesigned batteries.

“We kept on checking the voltage again and again, because we were so nervous,” he said in an interview after the 787 jet landed at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, apparently without incident. “Everything was fine, absolutely fine.”

Mr. Ogami may have gotten over his own jitters, but he and his colleagues at All Nippon, the largest operator of Boeing’s 787 batteries, now must convince an uneasy public of the reliability of the jets â€" most of which were grounded for three months because of concerns that the batteries crucial to the planes’ sophisticated electrical systems might catch fire.

Even as Boeing and the operators of its Dreamliners move swiftly toward getting the jets back in the air, they now face the delicate task of selling passengers on the idea that the jet is safe, even though engineers have still not figured out what exactly caused batteries to burn on two separate planes earlier this year.

In the past week, regulators in the United States, Europe and Japan â€" all of which grounded the 787 fleet after those incidents â€" signed off on fixes to the batteries proposed by Boeing.

Smaller airlines are already moving ahead in reintroducing the jet to their fleets, including Ethiopian Airlines, which used a 787 on Saturday on a two-hour commercial flight from Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, to Nairobi.

But the resumption of 787 flights at All Nippon and Japan Airlines, which together own nearly half the 50 Dreamliner jets Boeing has delivered so far, will prove the real test of whether the modified batteries will eliminate further mishaps.

So both Japanese airlines are being cautious about bringing the Dreamliners back into service, saying they hope to resume scheduled commercial flights only in June. That will give them more time to conduct test flights, retrain their crew and to educate the public about the safety of the improved batteries. (All Nippon said it might introduce Dreamliners on some flights before June, however.)

“It’s up to us to explain how we’ve made these planes safer,” Shinichiro Ito, chief executive of All Nippon and Mr. Ogami’s boss, said at a press conference after flying on the test jet, together with executives from Boeing. “We won’t decide to resume commercial flights until we’re sure our passengers are comfortable with boarding a 787.”

The other airlines that already own 787s are all eager to resume service, although the timing varies. United has scheduled its 787s to start flying domestic routes on May 31 and plans to begin international flights on June 10, from Denver to Tokyo and Houston to London. The airline will then fly its 787s in August from Houston to Lagos, as well as from Los Angeles to Shanghai and Tokyo.

LOT, the Polish national airline, plans to begin commercial 787 flights on June 5 between Warsaw and Chicago. Later, it expects to fly its planes to New York, Toronto and Beijing.

Air India said it hoped to have flights by mid-May. The other airlines that own 787s are Qatar Airlines and LAN of Chile.

But it is in Japan where the 787 has a particularly difficult task in winning back confidence. The Japanese public has been subject to intense coverage of what first appeared to be teething problems of Boeing’s next-generation 787 jet: a cracked cockpit window and a fuel leak.

Then a battery fire on a parked Japan Airlines jet in Boston in January, followed closely by a meltdown of batteries aboard a domestic All Nippon flight, catapulted the story into the nation’s top headlines.

The All Nippon incident, which prompted an emergency landing, has been particularly damaging to the 787’s image in Japan. All day, TV stations played footage of the incident, emergency chutes splayed on the tarmac, with testimony from distressed passengers to boot.

“I was terrified. I didn’t feel alive,” Masaaki Ishikawa, a 40-year-old office worker, told the Sankei newspaper at the time.

Now, some Japanese are understandably worried.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2013, on page B5, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: All Nippon Tests 787 Jet After Repair Of Battery.

Whither Moral Courage?

WE find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage â€" the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures. A man in a cowboy hat vaults a fence to help Boston bomb victims while others flee the scene: we salute his bravery, as we do that of servicemen returning from the battlefront, or men and women struggling to overcome debilitating illnesses or injuries.

Police officers carried off an Occupy D.C. demonstrator in Washington, October 2011.

It’s harder for us to see politicians, with the exception of Nelson Mandela and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as courageous these days. Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power. There are no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore. One man’s hero (Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro) is another’s villain. We no longer easily agree on what it means to be good, or principled, or brave. When political leaders do take courageous steps â€" as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, then president, did in Libya by intervening militarily to support the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi â€" there are as many who doubt as approve. Political courage, nowadays, is almost always ambiguous.

Even more strangely, we have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma.

It was not always so. The writers and intellectuals who opposed Communism, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the rest, were widely esteemed for their stand. The poet Osip Mandelstam was much admired for his “Stalin Epigram” of 1933, in which he described the fearsome leader in fearless terms â€" “the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip” â€" not least because the poem led to his arrest and eventual death in a Soviet labor camp.

As recently as 1989, the image of a man carrying two shopping bags and defying the tanks of Tiananmen Square became, almost at once, a global symbol of courage.

Then, it seems, things changed. The “Tank Man” has been largely forgotten in China, while the pro-democracy protesters, including those who died in the massacre of June 3 and 4, have been successfully redescribed by the Chinese authorities as counterrevolutionaries. The battle for redescription continues, obscuring or at least confusing our understanding of how “courageous” people should be judged. This is how the Chinese authorities are treating their best known critics: the use of “subversion” charges against Liu Xiaobo, and of alleged tax crimes against Ai Weiwei, is a deliberate attempt to blind people to their courage, and paint them, instead, as criminals.

Such is the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church that the jailed members of the Pussy Riot collective are widely perceived, inside Russia, as immoral troublemakers because they staged their famous protest on church property. Their point â€" that the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church is too close to President Vladimir V. Putin for comfort â€" has been lost on their many detractors, and their act is not seen as brave, but improper.

Two years ago in Pakistan, the former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, defended a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, wrongly sentenced to death under the country’s draconian blasphemy law; for this he was murdered by one of his own security guards. The guard, Mumtaz Qadri, was widely praised and showered with rose petals when he appeared in court. The dead Mr. Taseer was widely criticized, and public opinion turned against him. His courage was obliterated by religious passions. The murderer was called a hero.

In February 2012, a Saudi poet and journalist, Hamza Kashgari, published three tweets about the Prophet Muhammad:

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.”  “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.” “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”

He claimed afterward that he was “demanding his right” to freedom of expression and thought. He found little public support, was condemned as an apostate, and there were many calls for his execution. He remains in jail.

The writers and intellectuals of the French Enlightenment also challenged the religious orthodoxy of their time, and so created the modern concept of free thought. We think of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and the rest as intellectual heroes. Sadly, very few people in the Muslim world would say the same of Hamza Kashgari.

THIS new idea â€" that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people â€" is spreading fast, even to countries like India that once prided themselves on their freedoms.

In recent years, the grand old man of Indian painting, Maqbool Fida Husain, was hounded into exile in Dubai and London, where he died, because he painted the Hindu goddess Saraswati in the nude (even though the most cursory examination of ancient Hindu sculptures of Saraswati shows that while she is often adorned with jewels and ornaments, she is equally often undressed).

Rohinton Mistry’s celebrated novel “Such a Long Journey” was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content. The scholar Ashis Nandy was attacked for expressing unorthodox views on lower-caste corruption. And in all these cases the official view â€" with which many commentators and a substantial slice of public opinion seemed to agree â€" was, essentially, that the artists and scholars had brought the trouble on themselves. Those who might, in other eras, have been celebrated for their originality and independence of mind, are increasingly being told, “Sit down, you’re rocking the boat.”

America isn’t immune from this trend. The young activists of the Occupy movement have been much maligned (though, after their highly effective relief work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, those criticisms have become a little muted). Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, “anti-American,” and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian “terrorism.” (One may disagree with Mr. Chomsky’s critiques of America but it ought still to be possible to recognize the courage it takes to stand up and bellow them intothe face of American power. One may not be pro-Palestinian, but one should be able to see that Mr. Said stood up against Yasir Arafat as eloquently as he criticized the United States.)

It’s a vexing time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world. There’s nothing to be done but to go on restating the importance of this kind of courage, and to try to make sure that these oppressed individuals â€" Ai Weiwei, the members of Pussy Riot, Hamza Kashgari â€" are seen for what they are: men and women standing on the front line of liberty. How to do this? Sign the petitions against their treatment, join the protests. Speak up. Every little bit counts.

Salman Rushdie is the author, most recently, of “Joseph Anton: A Memoir,” and the chairman of the PEN World Voices Festival.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 28, 2013, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Whither Moral Courage?.