Indian Women Rising

  A hundred and fifty years ago, widows in India used to throw themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands, in a tradition called sati. Today, the leader of India’s most powerful political party (and one of the most beloved figures in that nation of over 1 billion) is a woman. Her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, was India’s prime minister for more than fifteen years. Throughout the world, Indian women are rising to the top of business, science, sports, and the arts. For a group that used to have almost no identity beyond the home, Indian women have come a long way.

  India itself has come a long way. As of 2007, its economy regularly grows at over 8 percent a year, making it second in growth in the world only to China. Its middle class—at 300 million people—is the size of the entire United States. In the last decade, India has lifted more people out of poverty than the number of residents of Western Europe. In the 1990s, India grew its literacy rate 13 points—now up to nearly two-thirds of the population. By the late 2030s, India is projected to have the third-largest economy in the world, after the U.S. and China.

  India’s women have enjoyed a good portion of this national boom. In India’s urban areas, women’s employment has recently grown at over ten times the rate of men’s. The increasingly knowledge-based economy has opened more opportunities for educated Indian women, who no longer need to travel to remote factories to rise in the workforce. And at the top of Indian women’s professional success are the worldwide superstars discussed below.

  Of course, India still has a great deal of work to do, both for national prosperity generally and for women’s share of it. India is still home to the largest number of the world’s poor, with almost 600 million people living on $2 per day and another 250 million living on half that. Almost 2 million Indian children die every year before their first birthday. Two-thirds of the population still live without basic services, including 450 million people who have no electricity.

  Source: Employment and Unemployment Situation in Cities and Towns in India,

  2004–2005; National Sample Survey Organization, Ministry of Statistics and

  Programme Implementation, Government of India, March 2006.

  And women’s gains have their starts and stops. While urban women are rising in the workforce, the majority of their jobs remain low-paid agricultural and domestic work. Primary education for girls is on the rise, but fewer than half of Indian girls make it to secondary school. Sati, mentioned above, and dowry murders—the practice of killing young brides who cannot deliver the price their grooms expected—are formally outlawed, but both still occur. Violence against women throughout India is high; and abortion of girl fetuses seems not only widespread but growing—even among higher-income families. In terms of politics, while there is a mandate at the local level that one-third of legislative seats be filled by women, the bill proposing the same at the parliamentary level has failed over and over to reach consensus.

  But as is the case in every democracy on earth right now, the rise of women in India seems certain, and significant. In politics—apart from the stratospheric Gandhi family—the ranks of women legislators are growing, if slowly. In several Indian states, female representation surpasses the required 33 percent, and scholars are now proving what a difference women’s leadership makes. According to a 2005 study by researchers at the London School of Economics, raising Indian female political representation by 10 percentage points increases by 6 percentage points the probability that an urban Indian child will get a primary education.

  In business, too, women like Naina Lal Kidwai and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw are busting all stereotypes about women and finance. Kidwai, CEO of the European bank HSBC India, was the first Indian woman to graduate from Harvard Business School, and now manages 50 percent of the foreign institutional investment in her country. Within a year of her becoming CEO of HSBC India, reported India Today, the bank’s pretax profits rose 85 percent.

  Shaw, a Bangalorian native who started out as India’s first woman brew-master, and is now chairman and managing director of the biggest biopharmaceutical firm in India, Biocon Ltd., is said to be the nation’s richest woman, with a net worth of nearly $500 million U.S.

  In the arts as well, film director/writer/producer Mira Nair has made it about as big in both Bollywood and Hollywood as a person could hope. From her wildly successful debut Salaam Bombay! to her Best Screenplay–winning Mississippi Masala to her Golden Globe–nominated Monsoon Wedding to her much acclaimed 2007 The Namesake, Nair has decimated any lingering stereotypes about female weakness in male-heavy Bollywood, and through the content of her films arguably has done as much to bridge worldwide cultural understanding as any filmmaker today. Bollywood itself is now such an “it” industry that headliner Hollywood actors—like George Clooney—are scrambling to get in.

  That kind of international impact is spreading in every field. Indians make up the largest group of international students in the U.S., at nearly 15 percent. Many of them stay—after attending Yale School of Management, Indra Nooyi rose to become chairwoman of PepsiCo, and in 2006 was named the fourth most powerful businesswoman in the world. Kalpana Chawla came to the U.S. to study aerospace engineering at the University of Texas; she was the first Indian-born woman to fly into space, and was one of the seven-member crew lost in the space shuttle Columbia disaster.

  Swati Dandekar, Democrat of Iowa, is the first Indian-born woman to be elected to a U.S. state legislature. Tennis star Sania Mirza, the first Indian sportswoman to make the cover of TIME magazine, drew her own personal fatwa because her tennis outfits didn’t comport with the traditional dress codes for Muslim Indian girls.

  Evidently, Kidwai, Shaw, and Nair are good friends—Shaw and Nair since childhood—which may say something about the rarefied environment in which prominent Indian women are rising. Yes, in a nation with a half a billion women, there are clearly going to be more women left behind than make up most nations on earth. But there’s no question about it, Indian women’s ascent is steady and powerful, and with it may yet come huge changes not only for the earth’s second-largest country, but for the entire world.

  Educated Terrorists

  The power of small is biggest when it is destructive.

  Small numbers have always been able to pull off assassinations that changed the course of history, but never have so few been able to upset so much as in the modern world. We all know a terrorist cell with a suitcase-nuke could forever change our society.

  It took but a single crazy person to turn Virginia Tech into a killing field and put a nation in mourning. It took fewer than two dozen hijackers to bring down the World Trade Center.

  But there is a big difference between the two events. The Virginia Tech killings were the product of a single deranged mind whose ideas died with him, while 9/11 was the result of an intellectual and religious movement that has the power to convince even well-educated and seemingly rational people both to give up their own lives and to commit mass murder. If they were willing to ram the World Trade Center, they would have been willing to blow up all of New York if they had had the means.

  The power of any such movement should not be in doubt. With over a billion Muslims in the world, al Qaeda could increase its ranks to 10 million if it convinced just 1 percent to join its movement—a force larger than any current army, and a force that could create a global insurgency that would turn the world into a nightmare.

  In the twentieth century, mass movements like fascism and communism changed the world and were behind many global conflicts. Today, extreme movements can be small and yet create similar havoc. They need no government, no elections, and no state sponsorship (though they are looking for it), but they can potentially put an end to society as we know it.

  Fortunately, al Qaeda still has a long way to go to reach 1 percent.

  According to the Terrorism Knowledge Base, a comprehensive databank for global terrorist incidents and organizations, there are a total of 1,255 terrorist groups in the world. Of those, forty-two have been classified by the U.S. State Department as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). By far, the largest of the FTOs is al Qaeda, with about 50,000 members, and bases in forty-five countries. In fact, the entire membership of the forty-two organizations is only about 125,000 terrorists, showing how relatively enormous al Qaeda is in this space.

  Selected Foreign Terrorist Organizations, as Designated by the U.S. State

  Department

  Name of Organization Base of Operations Estimated Membership

  al Qaeda 45 countries ~ 50,000

  United Self-Defense Forces

  of Colombia (AUC) Colombia >20,000

  New People’s Army Philippines 16,000

  Revolutionary Armed Forces

  of Colombia (FARC) Colombia 12,000

  Liberation Tigers of Tamil

  Eelam (LTTE) Sri Lanka ~8000

  National Liberation Army (ELN) Colombia 3000

  Aum Shinrikyo/Aleph 7 countries including Japan >2,000

  Hamas Israel, West Bank/Gaza >1000

  Hezbollah Lebanon 1000

  Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) Turkey >1000

  DHKP/C Turkey <1000

  Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Israel, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank/Gaza <1000

  Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Israel, West Bank/Gaza 800

  Shining Path Peru 500

  Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) Afghanistan, Egypt >300

  Jemaah Islamiya (JI) Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore >300

  al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Niger 300

  Basque Fatherland and Freedom (ETA) Spain 300

  Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) Ireland, UK <200

  Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) Kashmir, Pakistan >100

  Armed Islamic Group Algeria <100

  Source: MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, 2007

  As a percentage of the world’s population, 125,000 terrorists is about .002 percent. And if we look just at the radical Islamist groups on the list of forty-two FTOs, about twenty-two of them qualify. Those twenty-two groups—ranging from al Qaeda at 50,000; to Hamas and Hezbollah at about 1,000 each; to Jaish-e-Mohammad in Pakistan and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria at about 100 each—together make up about 57,500 terrorists worldwide. As a percentage of the world’s billion or so Muslims, that’s .004 percent. So it is far below a 1 percent microtrend, but it ranks as a critically important and obviously dangerous nanotrend.

  It does not need to become a mass movement to be successful. Rather, it needs a growing cadre of smart, sophisticated, tough operatives. Its growth now depends not on attracting hundreds of millions but on successfully creating a leadership class that can mobilize money and resources and carry out operations.

  While poverty is often cited as a prime reason for the growth of fundamentalism, the founders of the terrorist movement come from surprising backgrounds. In fact, poverty and despair are remarkably unrelated to either the rich and well-educated founders like bin Laden or to many of the frontline terrorists, including the 9/11 hijackers or the July 7 train bombers in London.

  On both sides of the aisle; in the U.S., Europe, and the East; in every religion (including Islam); and in government, business, and academia, leaders have vocally and earnestly linked terrorism to poverty and desperation. When young people’s hopes and dreams for material gain are thwarted, they turn to violence, goes the theory. When they have nothing left to live for—and might even earn a little money for their families, or some immortal rewards—by blowing themselves up, they make the ultimate sacrifice. And so scholars to the left have said the U.S. “can no longer afford to allow states to fail.” And presidents to the right, like George W. Bush, have said, “We fight against poverty, because hope is an answer to terror.”

  It sounds so reasonable. But while studies on terrorists are limited, the empirical evidence does not seem to prove that either poverty or economic desperation alone drives people to strap on explosives and hurl themselves at Western targets. If anything, it’s the opposite. When Israel was destroying the houses of its suicide bombers, the interesting point was that they had houses. The impoverished and uneducated may just be too smart to blow themselves up for this cause.

  In a 1980 study of radical Islamists being held in Egyptian jails, researcher Saad Eddin Ibrahim found that the typical offender was a male in his early 20s; from a normally cohesive, rural, or small-town family; educated in science or engineering; upwardly mobile and had high achievement and motivation. Not poor and desperate, but educated and rising.

  In 2002, professors Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova compared 129 Hezbollah fighters who had died in the 1980s and early 1990s to the Lebanese population from which they were drawn. Whereas the Hezbollah militants had a 28 percent poverty rate, the overall population’s was a higher 33 percent. And whereas 47 percent of the militants had gone to secondary school, only 38 percent of the general population had.

  Similarly, in a 2003 study of suicide bombers in Israel, it was determined that the suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from impoverished families as was the population as a whole. And more than half of the suicide bombers had been educated beyond high school, compared to less than 15 percent of Palestinians overall in the same age group.

  The 9/11 hijackers—and their backers—fit the same description. They came largely from middle-class families and had high-level science and engineering backgrounds. Osama bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, and extremely wealthy.

  In a 2004 study of 400 global terrorists, including the 9/11 perpetrators, forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operative Marc Sageman found that three-quarters of the terrorists came from the upper or middle class. Nine out of 10 came from caring, intact families. Almost two-thirds had gone to college (compared to the 5 or 6 percent that is typical in their countries). Three-quarters were professionals or semiprofessionals, mostly in the sciences and engineering. Nearly three-quarters were married, and the vast majority had children. Fewer than 5 of the 400 had a personality disorder. These men knew three to six languages, including a handful of Western ones. As one historian has sarcastically observed, the root cause of terrorism seems to be “money, education, and privilege.”

  Sageman concluded that what tipped these 400 otherwise intelligent and privileged men to terrorism was their social networks. Because they were so bright, they were sent abroad to study—and once overseas they felt lonely and excluded. They gathered to eat and socialize in and around mosques, and it was there that radical leaders turned them on to violent jihad. Other scholars have said that beyond just social networks, terrorists are motivated by core issues of identity and pride—either at a personal or national level. Suicide bombers have wealth and education, but they feel personally excluded, like nouveau riches disdained by the aristocracy. Or they feel culturally aggrieved, given the fall of Islam from global prominence and achievement. Far from the conventional myths, terrorists are not desperate for material subsistence or, obviously, survival. They are out to change the world by force.

  State Department advisor David Kilcullen has mapped out a ladder of potential Islamic terrorists. At the bottom is the vast population of “Mainstream Muslims”—those who could be drawn to terrorism or allied against it, the bulk of whose grievances can be addressed by political reforms. Above them is a smaller group, whom he terms the “Alienated Muslims.” These people have given up on reform, and are ripe to join the radicals. To dissuade them, he says, we must deploy ideological conversion, like the way youth in this country are turned away from gangs. But beyond that, at the top of the ladder, are the few who are beyond persuasion or coercion. Those are the ones we have to fear. But when you delve more deeply into who they are, it’s quite a surprising picture. It turns out that the soldiers of terrorism are some of the best-educated, most self-sufficient soldiers in the world.

  The significance of getting today’s terrorists right, of course, is enormous. After all, it is lack of correct intelligence that has been one of America’s most dangerous Achilles’ heels. And to date, it is unclear whether what America has done to defeat terrorism has been effective or has helped them gain more recruits. What exactly is the right strategy for defeating terrorism depends a lot on who the real terrorists are and how they got that way.

  While the typical terrorist may not be Patty Hearst, it turns out that he (or she) could be sitting next to you in the library, in Starbucks, or in your college dorm. Terrorists are dedicated because they believe, and their beliefs are elaborate and sophisticated.

  The central terrorist movement of the twenty-first century, unlike communism, will not be defeated with washing machines. On top of the military and social efforts, it will take strong intellectual and religious cohesion—perhaps an interfaith movement dedicated to defining the true path to God that wins back as many converts intellectually as the military is able to find and destroy militarily. The most powerful recruits they are getting—for example, the cell members behind the July 7 train bombing in Britain—are more likely to be found in good schools and on the Internet than in the slums. They are part of a romanticized movement justified by religious doctrine, and we will need to redouble our efforts to shake the intellectual foundations of that movement to stop the flow of these kinds of recruits. The upscale terrorist is not a fluke—the consistent presence of well-educated terrorists shows the power of twisted ideas to twist impressionable young minds, and it shows how seriously we must strengthen our efforts to win the war of ideas.

  Conclusion

  Microtrending