Yearbook 2011
India. The ruling Congress party was hit by an opinion race during the year, from 30% support in the spring to just 20% in late summer. A series of noteworthy corruption scandals eroded confidence in the government, and the biggest impact on public opinion was the activist Anna Hazare who, like Mahatma Gandhi, hunger strikes in order to force tougher laws against corrupt politicians and government officials. Tens of thousands of people in all the big cities demonstrated his support for him, while the government was forced into concessions. Hazare demanded that every state be given an ombudsman with the power to bring charges against politicians and officials and that the actions of the prime minister and the higher judges should also be examined. The bill which was submitted to Parliament towards the end of the year was regarded by critics as inadequate. Visit ABBREVIATIONFINDER for the acronym of IND that stands for the country of India.
According to Countryaah official site, the single most notable corruption case was for Andimuthu Raja, who in 2010 was forced to resign as Minister of Telecommunications after the disclosure that the auctioning of the mobile phone’s 2G licenses had cost the state the equivalent of a quarter of a billion SEK. Together with 13 other people – politicians and representatives of telecom companies – he was brought to trial in November. The newly appointed chairman of the State Commission Against Corruption was dismissed by the Supreme Court in March for having been involved in a questionable import business in 1992. The Supreme Court also stopped in July the mining of iron ore in a district in the state of Karnataka, where authorities were mutilated and land was sold at underpriced prices. The personally involved head of government resigned and was later indicted. Parliament set aside a member of the Calcutta High Court, the High Court, and brought him before the national court for extensive theft of public funds. But it was not only the corruption that cut the government’s popularity at the edge. The economy started to have problems. Inflation rose steadily and was 9.1% in November. Despite a series of interest rate increases during the year, to 8.5% in October, the central bank was unable to cope with the price increases and was also forced to write down the growth forecast from 8 to 7.6%. The price of fuel increased most, almost 15%, and food, just over 11%, in both cases, things that the public is most familiar with. The currency, the rupee, was at its lowest level against the dollar in November after a 14% decline since the beginning of the year. Despite the emerging economic problems, the government promised major investments in social issues such as health care and schools as well as subsidies on basic food when the state budget was presented in February. The government also provided conditional clearance for the largest foreign investment since the economy was liberalized in 1991. The South Korean company POSCO was authorized to build a steel plant for the equivalent of US $ 12 billion in the state of Orissa, provided a number of environmental issues could be resolved. In January, the private airline IndiGo commissioned 180 aircraft from European manufacturer Airbus for € 12.6 billion, the largest single order in the history of civil aviation.
Indian aviation has expanded greatly during the 2000s, but was affected by considerable plant pain during the year. The country’s second-largest airline, Kingfisher, was in the fall on the slope of the ruin and several other airlines also suffered major losses and requested state aid. The state elections in West Bengal in May saw a historic result, when the Communists lost power after 34 years. Nowhere in the world have democratically elected communist governments ruled for so long.
Religious clamor in the state of Gujarat in 2002, when well over 1,000 people were killed, got its legal backlog. Eleven Muslims were sentenced to death and 20 to life imprisonment for participating in the murder of 59 Hindu pilgrims burned inside a train. Later, in another court, 31 Hindus were sentenced to life imprisonment for having killed 33 people in a building during the violent persecution of Muslims triggered by the train fire. An even older spot on the Indian reputation was summed up during the year, when 269 police and forest guards were sentenced to prison for between two and ten years for a 1992 rescue against a village inhabited by Dalits (formerly called untouchables) in southern India. The police force was dispatched to the village to look for stolen sandalwood and devoted two days to extensive looting, torture and rape. 54 of the defendants were sentenced posthumously; they had to die during the long trial. A report on an ever-worse distribution of the sex of newborn children upset many. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said it is a shame for the nation that so many girl fetuses are aborted that only 914 girls are born per 1,000 boys. In May, the Supreme Court reversed the 2010 ruling that divided a disputed temple area in Ayodhya between Hindus and Muslims. The court found it unreasonable with a division that neither party had desired. In May, the Supreme Court reversed the 2010 ruling that divided a disputed temple area in Ayodhya between Hindus and Muslims. The court found it unreasonable with a division that neither party had desired.
Foreign policy resumed India this year peace talks with Pakistan. Both sides talked about a new era in relationships and they agreed among other things on greatly expanded trade between themselves. With its eastern neighbor Bangladesh, India signed a border agreement, which was mainly to dissolve the total of 162 small enclaves that existed in the territory of both countries and which have been a major nuisance to the residents there.