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KLMNO THE WORLD LETTER FROMNEW DELHI


A sobering retreat for French workers


givebacks to keep their jobs from moving to Mexico


by Edward Cody


strasbourg, france — A group of French factory hands have just written an illuminating chapter in the history of the global economic crisis, bending re- luctantly to a growing realization that France can no longer afford all its lavish social protections. By a 70 percent majority, the 1,150


PHOTOS BY SWATI AUSTA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Nidhi Khurana says New Delhi is no stranger to change, and she sought to convey that in the mural she created for the exhibit.


Artists deconstruct urban renewal


Works inspired by city’s fevered makeover for games


by Rama Lakshmi in new delhi


A heap of construction dust, traffic signs, bricks and concrete slabs


rarely excites well-heeled art aficionados here. But curators and artists called this display, in a white cube of an art gallery in the


heart of New Delhi, a critical commentary on the capital’s construction frenzy. For the past two years, this congested city has undergone an extrava- gant makeover in preparation for the Commonwealth Games, a mega sporting event in which 71 nations and territories of the former British Empire will compete. New roads, colorful sidewalks, hotels, stadiums and an airport terminal are being built. Medieval monuments are get- ting a fresh coat of paint, new signs and bright lighting.


But the games have generated a debate among lawmakers, the media, activists and sports figures, with many applaud- ing New Delhi’s rush to become a world- class supercity but some questioning spending millions of dollars on a sport- ing event when the nation still has so much poverty. Even the monsoon was dragged into the discourse — with some lawmakers thrilled about boosted agricultural out- put and others bemoaning that the rains will stall the last-minute scramble to fin- ish construction.


Now artists have entered the debate. At a gallery this week, 16 artists un- veiled works that reflect on the city as it breathlessly builds anew. Titled “The Transforming State,” the


two-month residency program at the Religare Arts.i gallery enlisted Indian and international artists and included discussions on the city’s history, its ne- glected water channels, the felling of hundreds of trees and the games. One set of sculptures comments on the


ongoing reconstruction of the British- built, circular shopping and office com-


plex called Connaught Place. As workers make the colonnade shiny and new ahead of the games, Jitesh Malik, 39, has sculpted broken fragments of graying columns, peppered with colored stains. “The white-columned colonial archi-


tecture was built to impose order on the city during the British rule. Over the years, it yellowed, grayed and changed with use. It had the look of a natural, in- habited place,” said Malik, adjusting his retro-spectacles. “I find it odd that they are now restoring it to its original white- ness for the games.” In one installation, streaming video showed construction sites through a floor-to-ceiling maze


of


hundreds of white friendship wrist- bands. “We asked the


artists to reflect on what these changes mean,” said Sumakshi Singh, a mentor for the program. “Who


Indian Ocean


are


we becoming? Who is this change for? . . . Art can enter the debate in a language that is subtle and subversive.” Rebecca Brown, an artist based in New


York, hung pieces of colorful saris and scarves from wooden ladders, resem- bling construction sites where workers also eat and sleep. Another American, Rebecca Carter of Texas, took words from construction-site signs — “Diversion,” “Stop,” “Keep Distance” and “Attention” — and wove them in glittering, colorful threads on a wall. “The whole city is a work in progress.


We are told to bear with the mess for the sake of the beauty that will come during the games. Now that mess has come into the art gallery,” Umesh Kumar, who at- tended the program’s preview, said with a wry smile. “The artists have spoken, but their message does not bring much comfort.” A government commission recently is- sued a report critical of the city’s new construction. Human rights activists say thousands of slums have been demol- ished, and they warn that the games are creating deep social divisions. But artist Nidhi Khurana said the city


has, after all, changed a thousand times in history.


She painted a large mural that looked


like an aerial map of the capital, in- terspersed with her musings — construc- tion signs, monuments, auto rickshaws and grocery lists. In some places, she used the kidney-shaped 1857 map of the old city and in another a 1961 map. “We have to accept change,” she said.


New roads are part of the preparations for hosting the Commonwealth Games.


“Change is always a mixed bag, why pro- nounce moral judgments?” lakshmir@washpost.com


DIGEST PAKISTAN


At least 800 dead in northwest flooding The death toll in the massive flooding


in Pakistan surged past 800 as waters re- ceded Saturday in the hard-hit north- west, an official said. The damage to roads, bridges and communications net- works hindered rescuers, while the threat of disease loomed as some evacu- ees arrived in camps with fever, diarrhea and skin problems. Monsoon rains come to Pakistan every


year, but rarely with such fury. The dev- astation came in the wake of the coun- try’s worst-ever plane crash, which killed 152 people in Islamabad on Wednesday. In neighboring eastern Afghanistan, floods killed 64 people and injured 61 others, while destroying hundreds of homes and huge stretches of farmland, said Matin Edrak, director of the Afghan government’s disaster department. As rivers swelled in the northwestern


Pakistani city of Nowshera, people sought high ground or grasped for trees and fences to avoid getting swept away. Buildings crumbled into the raging river in Kalam, a town in the northern Swat


Valley, Geo TV showed Saturday. Reports coming in from districts around the northwest, where such flood- ing has not been seen since 1929, in- dicated that at least 800 people had died, said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the region’s information minister. The U.N. estimat- ed that some 1million people nationwide were affected by the disaster. More than 30,000 Pakistani army troops had evacuated 19,000 trapped people by Saturday night, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, an army spokesman. The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad an- nounced the United States would be pro- viding 12 prefabricated steel bridges to temporarily replace damaged spans. — Associated Press


SOUTH AFRICA


Activist urges tolerance in Mandela lecture


Chilean American author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman said Satur- day that former enemies in post-apart- heid South Africa and in Chile after dic- tatorship must show remorse if peace is to be achieved within their nations. Dorfman was giving the eighth Nelson


RUSSIA


A woman sits in the burned remains of her house in the village of Mokhovoye, about 80 miles outside Moscow. Amid the country’s worst heat wave in decades, forest fires have raged across central Russia, killing more than 30 people.


Mandela Annual Lecture, organized by the Nelson Mandela Foundation to foster dialogue on key social issues. He fled Chile in 1973, labeled a “dirty commu- nist” for criticizing the overthrow of Sal- vador Allende by Augusto Pinochet.


Mandela, who celebrated his 92nd


birthday on July 18, is in frail health and did not attend the lecture at the Univer- sity of the Witwatersrand. Dorfman, 68, related the story of a Chilean carpenter named Carlos who


ARTYOM KOROTAYEV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES


kept a hidden portrait of Allende despite harassment and killings by Pinochet’s se- curity forces, then showed a short film of a woman crying for Pinochet after he died of cancer. He said the two needed now to recognize each other’s right to ex- ist, mourn and remember.


— Associated Press


Hamas says commander dead in Israeli strike: An Israeli airstrike has killed Issa Batran, a Hamas military commander and rocket-maker, in the Gaza Strip, the group said Saturday. Batran was the first Hamas commander killed in such a strike since Israel’s 2009 offensive there.


Mexican journalists freed: Federal po- lice in northern Mexico rescued two TV cameramen Saturday, five days after they were kidnapped by drug traffickers.


Jamaican police held in suspect’s death: Police detained three of their own in Ja- maica on Saturday after a video surfaced allegedly showing them beating and fa- tally shooting a suspect. The officers were initially said to have acted in self- defense, but that story changed after the footage aired on television. — From news services


New Delhi


workers of a General Motors transmis- sion plant on the edge of Strasbourg vot- ed to forgo their annual bonuses, six days of vacation and any salary increases for the next three years. Moreover, they en- dorsed a reduction in the workforce by 198 people, chiefly through early retire- ment. The givebacks, designed to reduce pro-


duction costs by 10 percent, were the price set by General Motors for continu- ing to build transmissions in eastern France rather than moving operations to Mexico and a cheaper labor force. The ul- timatum from an iconic U.S. company emerging from bankruptcy was a raw demonstration of the new economic en- vironment and its threat to the high-cost workers of Western Europe. For French workers in particular, nourished over the years on a tradition of Marxist-inspired labor unions, 35-hour workweeks and six-week vacations at the beach, the vote marked a sobering re- treat and a recognition that things are not the same since the world economy went shaky two years ago. “Do we have the choice?” asked Jean-


Marc Ruhland, a three-decade veteran at the factory and a union leader who ad- vocated voting yes on the givebacks. “This is not a victory,” he added, “but


I’d rather take my pants down a little than end up totally naked in front of the employment agency.” Ruhland’s reasoning, laid out over cof- fee in the factory cafeteria, closely re- sembled the arguments being put for- ward by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s con- servative government in another shift symbolic of the new economic realities in France: pushing back the legal retire- ment age from 60 to 62.


Since it was instituted in the 1980s by the Socialist government of President François Mitterrand, retirement at 60 had come to be seen as an untouchable part of France’s generous social protec- tion system. No more, said Sarkozy, be- cause the country cannot afford it in the post-crisis era of deficits and budget tightening. Martine Aubry, the Socialist Party’s


general secretary, at first suggested that the move was probably necessary, if re- grettable. But she has since steered the party into strong opposition to Sarkozy’s reform, appealing to the labor vote and creating what is likely to become a major campaign issue for the presidential elec- tion in 2012, in which she hopes to be the Socialist candidate. In Strasbourg, however, the local So- cialist leadership enthusiastically backed the pullback at General Motors, eager to avoid adding 1,150 workers to an unemployment rate that already has 100,000 people looking for jobs in the Strasbourg area. The Socialist mayor, Ro- land Ries, and the Socialist president of the broader urban community, Jacques Bigot, issued a joint statement offering their support and saying the agreement should make it possible for General Mo- tors to keep the factory humming in the years ahead. Ruhland’s union, the French Labor


Federation, which has traditional links to the Socialist Party, also backed signing


70% at GM plant approve


up for the GM deal, seeing it as the lesser of two evils. As the strongest union at the plant, its support was key in generating the 70 percent favorable vote July 19. The second-strongest union, the Gen-


eral Labor Federation, which has tradi- tional ties to the Communist Party, de- nounced the GM offer as a capitalist trick designed to bring the labor movement to heel and to maximize profits on the backs of French workers. “They are gangsters, these bosses,” the


union’s GM delegate, Robert Roland, said at a rally Tuesday evening at which workers vented their anger at being forced to renounce benefits acquired in previous years. “Unions are not all the same,” he add- ed, denouncing Ruhland’s willingness to compromise and vowing not to add his signature to the deal. “Some support the benefits we have acquired. Others crawl. They lie down in front of the bosses.” Bernard Fussner, a 63-year-old retiree


and General Labor Federation activist who spent most of his career at the GM plant, compared the union’s holdout to


“This is not a victory, but I’d rather take my pants down a little than end up totally naked in front of the


employment agency.” — Jean-Marc Ruhland, GM factory worker and union leader


the struggle of the Popular Front, the his- torical Socialist-Communist alliance in the 1930s that under Prime Minister Lé- on Blum brought France a 40-hour work- week, paid vacations and health insur- ance. “When they try to set workers in one


part of the world against those in an- other part, well, we see just how perverse capitalism is,” shouted Andre LeToutlec, 68, a retired printer and General Labor Federation activist who denounced the threat to move to Mexico in a stem- winder in which his face displayed sever- al shades of red. But the next day, after local govern- ment authorities intervened, Roland’s union quietly signed a separate agree- ment with GM management vowing not to oppose the deal approved by other unions, arguing that it was obliged under the rules of democracy to abide by the majority’s will. With that signature, General Motors had the guarantee of production cost savings and union docility that it had laid down as a condition for continuing operations. Company officials said the outcome would be communicated to GM headquarters in the United States, where a final decision was likely in the coming weeks. The Strasbourg factory, which started up in the booming 1960s, technically has been the property of a holding firm, Mo- tors Liquidation Co., since General Mo- tors Corp. filed for bankruptcy two years ago and began a worldwide reorganiza- tion of its assets. Under the plan being discussed, GM would buy back the plant from Motors Liquidation at a nominal price and launch a new product line that would begin production sometime after 2013.


When the final decision is announced,


however, most of the plant’s employees probably will not be around to hear about it. Summer vacation is this month, workers said, and the factory will close for two weeks while they hit the beach. codyej@washpost.com


SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010


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