Word: indianness
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...Indian analysts believe Obama's foreign policy team mostly thinks of India in the context of other regional challenges, particularly the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. China, with its booming economy and position as America's primary creditor, now carries far more weight in U.S. calculations. "The ground reality is India at the moment does not count for the U.S. in the same way that China and Pakistan do," says Bahukutumbi Raman, a former top Indian intelligence official and head of the Centre for Topical Studies in Chennai...
Lower-level Indian police officers and border guards remain underpaid and undertrained, while being given almost unchallenged authority over the people they are meant to serve. A 26-year veteran of the Mumbai police told TIME that his monthly salary is Rs. 10,360 (about $230). Less than a week before the one-year anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, the Times of India reported that police officers assigned to round-the-clock duty guarding the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers Hotel had been provided with no quarters, so they were sleeping outside, under the Gateway of India monument...
...these circumstances, security experts say, those at the front lines of national security are prone to accept even small bribes. By late 2006, after the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts and an October 2006 attack in Kashmir, security on the Indian border had become very strict. But Sabahuddin, in his statement, says that Rs. 10,000 ($222) was enough to get past the Central Reserve Police Force. "They asked me to give my address and I gave them a fake address in Kolkata," he says. "To verify me, they called my friend... [and] they got confirmed that...
...Mumbai attackers are believed to have come by sea from Karachi, and over the past year, the Indian government has added new vessels to tighten up security along its long maritime border with Pakistan. But Behera estimates that getting through a checkpoint costs only about Rs. 5,000 ($111). Despite the necessary investment in new boats and training, corruption is still a vulnerability, says Pushpita Das, who is researching coastal security at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. "The liability still remains...
...responsibility for cleaning up the dark corners of Indian life lies not only with the police. Citizens, too, have to demand a better system. Behera says that Indians use elections to throw out politicians perceived as corrupt, but so far, "there is no great social movement against corruption." That could change. India's 2005 Right to Information Act has emboldened some of its citizens to question once-omniscient bureaucrats, but the progress of reform is slow. A judgment on the Mumbai attacks may be handed down in a matter of months; India's verdict on itself will take much longer...