India's Bihar Province Women Launch Assault On Alcohol With Dramatic Wins For Families

Women in India's Bihar State province are waging battle against moonshine, writes the New York Times. 

Bihar is a state in East India, bordering Nepal. It is divided by the River Ganges, which floods its fertile plains. Important Buddhist pilgrimage sites include the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya's Mahabodhi Temple, under which the Buddha allegedly meditated. In the state capital Patna, Mahavir Mandir temple is revered by Hindus, while Sikhs worship at the domed, riverside Gurdwara of Takht Sri Harmandir Sahib Ji.

It's easy to conjure up images of women taking their drunk-husband lives into their own hands in the image of Carry Nation, the temperance advocate who attacked saloons in America, hatchet in hand.

But the reality of everyday life in Bihar state province is that the majority of per capita income of $600 a year is routinely spent on alcohol, rather than to advance impoverished families. 

Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar found himself in the fight of his political life two years ago against the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A single womanly voice turned the tide of his political campaign, approaching him after an event with the simple words:

“Brother, ban alcohol.”  With a lot of self-reflection on the possible consequences, Kumar agreed with the pledge: “If I get elected, I will ban alcohol.” He was re-elected and his women supporters were poised for action, saying nada to Kumar's plan to introduce the ban slowly. 

As controversial as the ban has been -- and many agree that the punishments are too harsh -- the impact of the alcohol ban cannot be denied. 

Murders and gang robberies are down almost 20 percent from a year earlier, and riots by 13 percent. Fatal traffic accidents fell by 10 percent.

At the same time, household spending has risen, with milk sales up more than 10 percent and cheese sales growing by 200 percent six months after the ban. Sales of two-wheeled vehicles rose more than 30 percent, while sales of electrical appliances rose by 50 percent. Brick houses are rising in villages where mud huts used to predominate.

Women went after the biggest drinkers, men like Omprakash Ram Chandrawanshi, 35, who was interviewed for The Times.

“If I earned 500 rupees, I would spend 200 on alcohol,” he said. He earns the equivalent of about $200 a month as a driver, he said, but “I often wouldn’t bring any money home.”

Now, his family has more money for food, he pays for tutorials to help the children in school, and he has been able to expand the brick house shared by the extended family. Simply stated, he has dignity.

In an unimaginable show of force, more than 30 million Biharis, fully one-quarter of the population, joined hands along 7,000 miles of roadway in January in a show of support for the alcohol ban. This time men were leading the parade, but there's no doubt who supplied the momentum for families in the province to buy books, not booze. The change happened because of India's women.

Military Boys Club Takes Fellow Women Photos To Dark Web

Writing for The Daily Beast, James LaPorta says that nude photos of US military servicemembers, originally shared in Facebook's Marines United 214 group, are now listed for sale on the dark web. 

As the reporting continues into the nude-photo scandal plaguing the Pentagon, The Daily Beast has learned that some of the Marines United descendant groups are not connected to the U.S. military at all, but are copycat groups set up by foreign nationals to profit from the original group’s notoriety. On the private Facebook group Marines United 214, requests for nude photographs are met with demands for payment and links to the dark-web marketplace AlphaBay, where the photo-sets are listed for sale.

This article goes deep into the details of the fallout from the recent military scandal involving military women. Misogyny much? 

Deana Haggag Leads USA's Fight To Protect The Arts Against Trump's Budget Knife

Photo: Olivia Obineme

Deana Haggag made a strong statement about protecting the arts in America, now under the knife in the Trump administration. The new president and CEO of the philanthropic nonprofit United States Artists until Inauguration day, writes Vogue.com. “It wasn’t lost on me what it means to take on the title of president of an organization whose acronym is USA,” Haggag said recently during an interview in Chicago, her USA home base. 

Less than 100 days later, Haggag is facing Trump's proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Indeed, Big Bird is under the knife. The arts in America represent about $741 million yearly, or less than one tenth of 1 percent of annual federal spending.

The arts generate $135.2 billion annually in a boost to the US economy -- a fact not lost on a growing list of Republicans in Congress, who are against these cuts. 

A letter signed by 11 House Republicans urges Ken Calvert and Betty McCollum, chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, to continue funding the NEA.

They propose a budget of $155 million in fiscal year 2018, a slight increase over the $147.9 million that was allocated in 2016. ArtNet reported on Monday that 11 Republicans in the House signed a letter not only rejecting the zeroing out of federal funding for the the National Endowment of the Arts but proposed a small increase from the 2016 allocation of $147.9 million to $155 million. 

In other ways, it's impossible to quantify the positive impact of the arts on civic life. “We need the arts because they make us full human beings,” sociologist Eve L. Ewing wrote in The New York Times. “But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism.”

In 1937, ascending leaders of the Third Reich hosted two art exhibitions in Munich. One, the “Great German Art Exhibition,” featured art Adolf Hitler deemed acceptable and reflective of an ideal Aryan society: representational, featuring blond people in heroic poses and pastoral landscapes of the German countryside. The other featured what Hitler and his followers referred to as “degenerate art”: work that was modern or abstract, and art produced by people disavowed by Nazis — Jewish people, Communists, or those suspected of being one or the other. The “degenerate art” was presented in chaos and disarray, accompanied by derogatory labels, graffiti and catalog entries describing “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil.” Hitler and those close to him strictly controlled how artists lived and worked in Nazi Germany, because they understood that art could play a key role in the rise or fall of their dictatorship and the realization of their vision for Germany’s future.

Haggag's organization United States Artists was created after deep cuts to the arts in the early 2000s. At 30, she is considered young for her job, coming off a career largely focused on curating in New York City, Cairo, and Baltimore, where she most recently headed the traveling museum The Contemporary. She was raised in a large family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants. “I am not an artist, I never have been, but I’ve come to understand who I am through the arts, as a curator and as a person,” Haggag said. “Also, my parents are from Egypt, so there are ideas about colonialism and blackness and being African and being American and, growing up, when I didn’t have language for those things, there was always an artist who could help navigate that for me in his or her work. Understanding myself as a black woman, a brown woman, an Egyptian, and an American has been through the lens of all these amazing thinkers.” Read her interview with Vogue.