A round-up of recent work: Let’s Buy Afghan Dope, a nearly baked proposal that proved popular with readers at the International Herald Tribune, and was later echoed by Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation; A Hunger Artist, on the cynicism of India’s belt-waving “Gandhian” savior, Anna Hazare; two pieces on the hunger strikes of the scientist-turned-swami GD Agrawal; a brief update on the Kony 2012 campaign; in India, skin-whitening reaches below the belt; in Egypt, the undead lunged for the presidency (only to later be disqualified).

More soon.

This piece first appeared at National Geographic, and was updated Saturday night.

G.D. Agrawal is determined to die.

“At the moment I am quite resigned to my fate,” Agrawal, the 80-year-old dean of India’s environmental engineers, tells me by phone from his hospital bed in the holy city of Varanasi.

Agrawal hasn’t eaten since February 8. He hasn’t taken a drink of water since March 8; an intravenous drip of dextrose and vitamins keeps him lucid.

GD Agrawal, the environmental engineer also known as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand, at the Varanasi hospital where he is on a hunger strike. Agrawal says he will remove his IV tube on Saturday. "At the moment I am quite resigned to my fate," he told Nat Geo News Watch.

At 5 pm Saturday, Agrawal says, he will pull those tubes from his arms, his next – and maybe last – escalation in a years-long battle to force the Indian government to honor its promises to protect the Ganges River.

The 1,569-mile holy river is increasingly choked by dams, drained by irrigation canals, and fouled by industrial, agricultural, and human waste. Since 2008, Agrawal has engaged in four hunger strikes seeking to prevent the construction of hydroelectric dams on the Ganges’ Himalayan source rivers.

His devotion to the river is more than scientific. Last summer, Agrawal, a former chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, renounced the material world and became a swami. He is now known by his disciples as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand. Agrawal is a national figure, and he’s won concessions in the past.

In July 2010, when the Indian government decided to resume work on several hydroelectric plants on the Bhagirathi River, Agrawal went without food for 34 days before the government, represented by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, agreed to cancel dam projects on the river’s upper reaches. Despite these and other successes, the condition of the river continues to deteriorate. An estimated 90 percent of its flow is diverted into irrigation canals and to meeting the water needs of the fast-growing New Delhi capital region.

Agrawal and his supporters say a national body created in 2008 to safeguard Hinduism’s holiest river has been a sham. The National Ganga River Basin Authority has met only twice in three years, and not at all since November 2010. On March 9, board members Rajendra Singh, a Magsaysay Award winner for his work on protecting freshwater resources, Ravi Chopra of the People’s Science Institute, and environmentalist Rashid Hayat Siddiqui resigned from the authority in solidarity with Agrawal. The government body has cost $1.19 billion during its short life, “but we do not have any details about how the money is being used…There is no accountability,” Singh told The Hindu newspaper. Agrawal and the others want a real commitment from the government to protect the Ganges. So far, they say, they’ve received nothing but half-promises.

This week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dispatched the coal minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, to ask Agrawal to stop his fast. Jaiswal left empty handed. “There are a few options that I am willing to give them,” Agrawal told me: Call an immediate meeting of the river authority to formulate plans for effective regulations, or call an immediate halt to upstream dam projects. “So far, there’s been no significant response,” he says.

If Agrawal goes through with his promise to remove his intravenous line, it’s almost certain police will restrain and feed him through an IV drip or a nasal feeding tube. “It depends on how much force they want to use,” he says. “I am not willing to go on like this.” Last year a young swami called Nigamanand died after an epic fast to stop illegal mining of the Ganges riverbed in the northern city of Haridwar. (His comrades insist, somewhat persuasively, that he died not of malnutrition but that he was poisoned by local mining interests.) Nigamanand’s leader, Swami Shivanand, has also engaged in several fasts to protect the river.

This activism isn’t taking place in a vacuum of good deeds (or bad ones). Bolstered by a $1 billion loan from the World Bank, the Indian government recently started a new Ganges clean-up plan. As I mentioned in this piece, this good faith plan teems with expensive lessons learned. It’s obvious that it will take more than a few men starving themselves to death to preserve the Ganges. The question is, why should it require any?

[UPDATE, 9:45 pm Saturday, Indian Standard Time: According to Govind Sharma, secretary of the Ganga Mahasabha organization in Varanasi, Professor Agrawal has removed his intravenous line against the advice of his doctors and is now resting in his hospital bed and reading Hindu scriptures. He has not as of this writing been forced to re-insert the intravenous line, although there is still a possibility that the Varanasi district administration could apply for a court's permission to force feed him.]

GD Agrawal, after removing his intravenous line.

Evelyn Amony was kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army at age12 and was first raped by its leader, Joseph Kony, at 15. One of dozens of girls selected to be Kony's concubines, she had three children including Mercy, 14 months, before escaping to freedom in January 2005. Photographed March 31, 2006, in Gulu, Uganda, by Dan Morrison.

The release this week of the video Kony 2012 and a viral social media campaign by the American NGO Invisible Children has jacked awareness of the vicious Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army into the stratosphere. It’s also provoked a significant backlash from experts who say the film is simplistic, manipulative, and that it narcissistically focuses on the filmmakers themselves over their African subjects. Invisible Children has responded to some of that criticism, and debate over the film and its prescriptions continues across the web, much of it under the Twitter hashtags #Kony2012 and #StopKony.

In this post, which first appeared at National Geographic, my friend Anywar Ricky Richard, a former child soldier of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and director of the northern Ugandan organization Friends of Orphans, responds to the clamor:

Anywar Ricky Richard

I am writing from Pader, Uganda, because I believe the recent conversation about Joseph Kony, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and Invisible Children is not including the voice of those that matter most– the people of Northern Uganda. I know more than I would like to know about the LRA, not from watching “Kony 2012” or reading insightful accounts of the conflict, but because personally I have seen it, have lived it, and have been in it. I was one of the now-famous “child soldiers.” I was abducted at the age of 14 with my brother by the LRA, and remained with them for nearly two and half years. We were picked up in front of our home; our powerless family members were burned to death in our grass-thatched house while we were forced to watch and hear them cry for help. I saw brutality beyond description. I saw tortures, rapes, killing, abduction, and war. Since 1999, through Friends of Orphans, I have worked to rehabilitate countless former child soldiers and others affected by the war to reverse the massive damage the LRA has done to my community and to our youth. I know how bad the LRA are and I demand for the immediate end to this conflict. I believe for this to happen, OUR voices must be heard.

At this moment, the optimism and hope of the people in northern Uganda for the end of violent conflict and the return of peace is more prominent than ever. This is a direct outcome of the protracted negotiation that previously took place in southern Sudan. Even though the peace talks (2006 – 2008) sponsored by the government of South Sudan did not result in a peace agreement between the LRA and the government of Uganda, it has brought relative peace to Northern Uganda, and people have moved back to their original villages from the refugee camps where many had been confined for more than a decade. At least for now, there is no Joseph Kony in Uganda.

I support the peaceful means of ending this conflict rather than the military approach. I encourage it continually, since it has brought tangible results and has saved many lives that would have been otherwise lost to the war. The people of Northern Uganda believe more in a peaceful means of resolving this conflict because it has been tried and it has worked, they have seen the result.

Invisible Children are known in Northern Uganda as an organization supporting the education of former abductees, which is much needed in the region. But they are not known as a peace building organization and I do not think they have experience with peace building and conflict resolution methods. I totally disagree with their approach of military action as a means to end this conflict.

Since 1989 the government of Uganda has consistently used military campaigns against Kony including major operations like Operation Iron Fist (2001) and Lightning Thunder (2008 – 2009). Operation Lightning Thunder was highly expected to end the war by either capturing Kony alive in his haven in the Congo or killing him. It was carried out by the armed forces of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan with technical support from the United States government — and still it failed. Instead of ending the war, Lightning Thunder spread the LRA’s atrocities to the Central African Republic as Kony relocated there. The only known result of the military attacks on Kony is the dispersal of his forces into smaller groups, resulting in new atrocities on civilians including the 2004 Baralonyo attack in the Lira district of Uganda, the Kanga Pa-aculu attack in Pader district, and many others. It is also well known that a majority of the LRA’s soldiers are abducted children, and that he uses these abducted children as human a shields. As a result, any attack will be on the abducted children.

So, how can this be done? Instead of campaigning for military action as a means to end this war, I suggest a continuation of the failed peace talks. I would urge everyone involved in the process to examine what made the peace talks fail and how can we improve and reinstate the process. For example, the government of Sudan, a key player in the financing the war, was not involved in the previous peace talks. I strongly believe they can play a greater role.

Furthermore, there seems to be a continual call for Kony to be taken to the International Criminal Court if captured. Communities agree that if Kony is captured he should be brought to book. Some want Kony to be taken to the ICC while others say he should be tried in Uganda to bring closure to the communities affected. This becomes ever more complicated because others suggest that both parties involved in the war should be investigated and possibly tried. People like Olara Otunnu, the president of the Uganda People’s Congress, have written widely about the involvement of the Ugandan People’s Defense Force in various atrocities during this conflict. The Government of Uganda has denied any wrongdoing. What is certain is that this is not a simple problem that can be solved with a simple solution. Only a systematic approach can bring Kony to book and provide opportunities to all people affected by the war to have a voice in peace building, reconciliation and societal healing. This will prepare the communities of northern Uganda for true rehabilitation.

What we want is to stop the war in a way that will not cause any more atrocities. We’ve shed too much blood. Nobody in northern Uganda supports Joseph Kony; we aretired of wars and want to look at ways in which sustainable peace can be restored.

We thank Invisible Children for making people aware of what has happened in Northern Uganda and request they continue to focus their enthusiasm and resources toward building a better Uganda.

Anywar Ricky Richard is a former LRA child soldier and founder of Friends of Orphans. Ricky and FRO were recipients of the 2008 Harriet Tubman Freedom Award and the 2008 Humanitarian Award from World of Children.

From a “nomad who pursues every form of transportation imaginable to follow Africa’s longest river,” The Black Nile is “an evocative piece of reporting…a portrait of a fractured country just one spark away from a renewal of hostilities.” –Joshua Hammer, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Beautifully written. A masterful narrative of investigative reportage, travel writing, and contemporary history. . . . The Black Nile is all at once thrilling, sad, and—most of all—thoughtful. —The Daily Beast

Dan Morrison takes the reader on an incredible journey in The Black Nile. Weaving together intense travel writing and history, he has produced a supremely entertaining work, and also an important one. –David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

Part On the Road, part Fear and Loathing in Africa, Dan Morrison takes us with him on his journey down the Nile–teaching us, by example, to be explorers of both the world and ourselves. –Kevin Sites, author of In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

When Franklin Roosevelt appointed the business titan and former bootlegger Joseph Kennedy to head his new Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, the U.S. president famously bragged that he had “set a thief to catch a thief.” If India’s politicians follow this strategy, its most populous state will be crime-free in no time.

At least ten state assembly candidates in Uttar Pradesh are presently in jail awaiting trial on charges that include murder and racketeering. In the current assembly, 139 out of 404 legislators are free while facing criminal charges.

My latest, “In Indian Politics, Crime Pays,” is up at the New York Times/International Herald Tribune.

Two recent pieces for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune‘s Latitude blog:

India’s Political Blasphemy, on the Salman Rushdie affair earlier this month at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Come Hell With High Water, on Bangladesh’s approach to global climate change.

Next up: India’s gangster parliamentarians.

Burning marshland, South Sudan, 2007. Photo by Dan Morrison.

This piece first appeared at National Geographic.

An obscure indie-rock b-side kept running through my head last January as I hopped from city to city reporting on South Sudan’s freedom referendum.

The song was Two States, by the band Pavement. The words were simple, the music jaunty and driven.

Two states. We want two states.

North and south. Two states.

Forty million barrels!

Forty million barrels!

The lyrics seemed shockingly, if accidentally, appropriate to the break-up of Africa’s biggest country, and the high-stakes competition for the valuable oil located on Sudan’s contested north-south border. I grinned as the song persisted during my travels in Khartoum, Malakal, and Juba. After decades of civil war and life as second-class citizens, more than 98 percent of southern voters chose to leave Sudan and become masters of their own destinies.

But the chorus I recalled was wrong, misheard many years ago and never corrected.

The accurate chorus, tragically, is perhaps more fitting to the independent Republic of South Sudan than those I had imagined. It goes:

Forty million daggers!

Forty million daggers!

South Sudan is at war with itself. Or its tribes are at war with one another. In Jonglei state as many as a thousand members of the Murle tribe were massacred this month by members of the Lou Nuer. As Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times notes in this vivid and sad piece from the overrun city of Pibor, the bloodshed was revenge by the Nuer for raids by the Murle last August – less than a month after South Sudan became independent – in which 600 Nuer were killed, scores of children stolen, and untold heads of cattle seized.

South Sudan’s tribes have been raiding cattle (and people) from one another for hundreds of years. Cows are money, and prestige, and also something deeper. The young boys who guard the south’s massive cattle camps are deeply familiar with their bovine wards. One boy will be able to recognize each individual cow in a herd of hundreds – and will recall each one by name.

These raids took on a more deadly character in the late 1980s with the introduction of automatic weapons from Sudan’s north-south civil war. Raids that once involved spears and shields were now prosecuted with Kalashnikovs and sometimes even rocket-propelled grenades.

Counting votes in South Sudan's freedom referendum, January 16, 2011. Photo by Dan Morrison

This mutation, or adaptation, was exemplified by the White Army, a giant force of Nuer (and some Dinka) fighters that first emerged to defend community property from outsiders and later became akin to a self-sustaining and independent fighting machine.

As the veteran Sudan researcher John Young notes in a 2007 study of the White Army, “…in contrast to similar [armed] groups in other areas its members became active participants in the civil war. Moreover, while most local armed groups remained under community control, the white army increasingly became an independent force that was at times highly destructive of the community from which it emerged.”

After Sudan’s civil war ended in 2005, southern leaders shut down the White Army in fighting that left at least 600 dead. Members of the Muele tribe located in southern Jonglei state were quick to exploit the power vacuum. They began raids that have continued on and off since 2006.

The Murle have a reputation has fierce, hard-core fighters. “They will eat dirt,” and go without water for days in the search for cattle to steal, a United Nations official once told me. The Nuer, of course, are also quite martial, and far more numerous. In fact, it was reportedly a reconstituted White Army that invaded Pibor this month. Muerle revenge attacks (for the Nuer revenge attacks) are already underway.

So where does the bloodshed end?

When, and how, do a proud and independent people agree to change?

Is there a model anywhere, any example, of armed pastoralists giving up the more destructive aspects of their culture and at the same time maintaining – or being permitted to maintain – their way of life?

This post first appeared at National Geographic, and references “Feral Cats and Social Indicators”, my latest piece at The New York Times’ Latitude blog

The photo you see above is of an adorable stray cat that’s living like a squatter at Bangladesh’s biggest children’s hospital.

The kitty could be called adorable, if a little standoffish. It’s also something of a scourge: Cats shouldn’t be allowed to roam the open halls and wards of a hospital, certainly not one treating vulnerable newborns.

My most recent piece for the New York Times’ Latitude blog looks at a terrible attack that one such stray made on a six-day-old infant, and how such incidents deflect attention from the strong gains Bangladesh is making in terms of health and development.

The steady social progress of countries like Bangladesh is often unnoticed by visitors and short-time expatriates. We see much of what’s obviously wrong, but we often lack the perspective to compare today’s conditions with the 1970s and 80s — when most Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis were born. (Another perspective we’re missing is the rural one: With the exception of a few foreign aid workers, missionaries, and academics, not many outsiders have anything close to a feel for life outside the cities – where most Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis actually live.)

It’s a point I hear a lot when speaking with my colleagues in India and Bangladesh. These are hard-core public-service journalists who make their careers exposing the human costs of corruption, prejudice, and bad governance. In private, however, they’re anything but pessimistic about the ultimate trajectory of their respective countries.

Here’s a sample from my Times piece:

Last month there was an extraordinary attack at the Dhaka Children’s Hospital. One of the dozens of stray cats that call the hospital home reportedly walked into a neonatal ward, mounted a bed where a six-day-old girl was receiving phototherapy treatment for jaundice and tried to take her as prey. According to the Daily Star, the cat had pulled the newborn off her bed and onto the floor, and dragged her partway to the ward’s open door before anyone noticed.

Not unlike Bangladesh itself, this 500-bed pediatric hospital provides the setting for both eye-popping outrages against human dignity and also unheralded social progress. Over the last two decades, Bangladesh’s poverty rate has fallen from 59 percent to 40 percent. The country remains a hard place to live in, but on most days its people successfully navigate a minefield of destitution, corruption, ignorance and maladministration. It’s when they don’t that we read about it in the newspapers.

A version of this post first appeared at National Geographic, and references my piece, Grunge on the Ganges, at The New York Times’ Latitude blog.

Varanasi, India — A couple years ago, one of India’s leading industrial houses announced a revolutionary new household filter that would for the first time bring affordable, safe drinking water to millions of homes. The Tata Swach combines the inexpensive carbon of burnt rice husks with silver nano-particles to kill and remove deadly microbes including cholera, E coli, and the rotavirus.

The Swach doesn’t need electricity or running water. Unlike some filters sold in the United States, the Swatch’s filter bulb cuts off the flow of water when it’s exhausted, meaning it’s impossible to drink unclean water that’s passed through a spent filter. (There’s no risk in drinking unfiltered water in New York or Denver, but it’s a different story in India, where waterborne diseases kill as many as half a million children each year.)

And it’s hugely affordable: The unit costs less than $20 and monthly filter replacements are just $7.

More than a million of these filters have been sold since 2009, and it’s not hard to imagine the public health benefits that will follow. More Indian companies are jumping into the low-cost filter business, which could push prices even lower.

This Indian success story, however, can also be seen as a thin bit of cover for the country’s scandalously poor public services.

In the West, there is often a suspicion of municipal water. In my hometown, families spend good money to filter water that’s rigorously tested each day. Even worse, they pay for bottled water that often comes from the same city mains as the local tap water.

Indians need to filter and boil their water because the stuff their government sends them is often poisonous. This was driven home last month when, during a seven-day boat journey down the Ganges, I came across a jaw-dropping sight: A sewage pipe pouring waste into the river just upstream of a water pumping station that in turn sent the dirty water right back into people’s homes.

With no one else looking out for their health, individual households take on the burden and financial cost of what is clearly one of the basic jobs of government.

William Nanda Bissell, in his 2010 book “Making India Work,” describes the economic activity generated by these gaps in governance as “forced consumption.” The money Tata and other companies earn from innovations like the Swach is money that Indian families could have saved or spent on education, housing, health care or, God forbid, culture and entertainment. The massive investment required to deliver clean water to Indian households is still less than the total amount being spent by hundreds of millions of families to do the job at home –- and of the work and school hours and health expenses lost to waterborne diseases.

According to a new report by the Delhi-based Center for Science and the Environment, India’s cities are drowning in their own waste due to poor planning and administration. “Every city was the same old story,” Souparno Banerjee, lead researcher on the 3 ½ year effort, told the Wall Street Journal. “It had devastated its surface water, it was depleting its ground water and it had no plan for managing its water or wastewater.”

Speaking with the Journal, the Center’s director, Sunita Narain, asks some disturbing questions:

“Is it a reflection of the caste system of Indian society, where removing waste was someone else’s business? The business was untouchable. Certainly it was unspeakable. Or is it a reflection of the current governance systems, where water and waste are government business and, within that, it is the sole business of a lowly water and sanitation bureaucracy?”

“Or is it simply a reflection of Indian society’s extreme arrogance — our belief we can fix it all as and when we get rich?”

Dan Morrison is a journalist and author of The Black Nile.

Satellite images of the effects of quarrying on the Ganges near Haridwar between 2003 and 2010. Image courtesy Matri Sadan ashram.

This post first appeared at National Geographic News Watch, and references “A Sacred River Under Assault,” which ran on the New York Times/International Herald Tribune’s Latitude blog on December 8. My first contribution to the NYT/IHT Opinion section, “A Dam’s Unexpected Winners,” appeared November 25.

An 11-day hunger strike by the swami of a small ashram ended on Monday night when the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand banned stone and sand mining from the Ganges riverbed near the city of Haridwar pending an environmental impact statement.

Officials slid the written order under the bolted door of a room of the Matri Sadan ashram, where 65-year-old Swami Shivanand had barricaded himself to prevent his arrest on charges of attempted suicide.

Shivanand read the order, unlocked the door, and broke his fast with glasses of lemon water and apple juice. This fast was Shivanand’s sixth. The longest, in 2000, was 21 days.

Shivanand and his followers have been fighting since 1998 to defend the Ganges from the effects of mining. Their environmental cause is driven by a spiritual imperative.

Quarrying from the Ganges riverbed is a big business, one that appears to have infected the local government and law enforcement. Shivanand and his followers (“saints” in local parlance) have endured years of false arrests and assaults aimed at stopping their advocacy.

For example, here’s a link to a video provided to me by the Matri Sadan from 2009. It shows a 20-year-old hunger-striker named Yajnanand as he is abducted by masked men. Local officials had come to the ashram with the stated purpose of having the young monk’s condition assessed by a doctor. Instead, the video shows, men in balaclavas emerge from behind the trees and drag him away. (The first three and a half minutes are shaky and extraneous; the abduction begins around the 10:45 mark.)

Yajnanand was jailed for two months and force-fed through a nasal tube until a court ordered his release on grounds that he’d been illegally detained.

I first met Swami Shivanand last June, following the death of a senior member of the ashram. Swami Nigamanand, 38, had died after a 68-day fast. India’s Central Bureau of Investigation is investigating if he was poisoned in his hospital bed by the state’s so-called “mining mafia.” A medical report lists “organophosphate poisoning” – pesticides, in other words, as a possible cause of death. (In 2003, another member of the ashram, Swami Gokulanand, was killed with an injection of scoline, a pre-anesthetic drug, while keeping vigil against developers in the Nainital forest.)

Swami Shivanand, photo by Dan Morrison

A May 26 ruling by the state’s High Court shut down the operation that Nigamanand had been protesting. By that time, he was already in a coma. The court’s decision spelled out the damage mining has done to the Ganges and surrounding farmlands.

According to the High Court, the mining and stone crushing, which feeds the state’s construction industry, had made barren more than a million acres of farmland and orchards. By digging into the Ganges riverbed, the miners had lowered the water table to such an extent that irrigation wells and drinking water pumps had all gone dry.

On November 1, the state green-lighted mining on two nearby stretches of the river. An outraged Shivanand began his fast November 25. Having met him and his single-minded followers, I have no doubt he might have taken the hunger strike to the brink of death, if not beyond.

“The quality of a saint is to be brave, to be fearless,” Shivanand told me. “A saint can make the other world tremble.”