4 .. | THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2012 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE world news asia united states Republicans loosen embrace of Tea Party TEA PARTY, FROM PAGE 1 KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES The Bhats, of Mumbai, watch soap operas together. Durga Bhat, second from right, said the characters in ‘‘Pavitra Rishta’’ (‘‘Pure Relationship’’) resemble her family, ‘‘a joint family.’’ India soap operas hold a mirror to family INDIA, FROM PAGE 1 show — underage marriage is still prevalent enough to wedge its way into the family hour. More shocking, perhaps, is that in more recent episodes the in-laws accept the young heroine as their own and — brace for it — encourage her to leave her husband (he’s a philanderer) and find a better match. That may be a fantasy, but matriarchal interference (call it guidance) is marriage Indian-style. When Indian women discuss the need to ‘‘adjust’’ to matrimony, they do not just mean adapting to a new husband. They mean moving in with his parents, grandparents and siblings, a custom that is still the norm, even in prosperous families. In a country with 1.2 billion people, about 148 million households have television, amounting to as many as 600 million viewers. In the slums of Mumbai, even sections without running water sport satellite dishes on corrugated roofs. Almost everywhere, Indians gather in front of the family television — and the mother-in-law controls the remote. ‘‘Women like to see their favorite characters express their own feelings, so the mother-in-law identifies with the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law with the daughter-in-law,’’ is how Ekta Kapoor explains soap opera transference. Ms. Kapoor, a 37-year-old television and film producer who currently has five shows on the air, became queen of the Indian soap world with her breakthrough series, ‘‘The Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law, Too,’’ one of the all-time hits of Indian television, which ran from 2000 to 2008. Male children are favored in Indian society, and wives join the husband’s family at the low end of the pecking order, often relegated to kitchen drudge work while the mother-in-law rules over the grandchildren. ‘‘We live with our parents until we are married, then we live with someone else’s parents,’’ Ms. Kapoor said. ‘‘There is pressure to give everything to the son. It’s a source of conflict in so many homes.’’ (Ms. Kapoor, the daughter of well-known actors, is single and owns her own house but lives with her parents in their home anyway.) The family structures — and tensions — on soap operas mirror those of the audience with one glaring difference. In many series, yearning and betrayal play out in marble mansions. Women are draped in silk and encrusted in jewels, a fantasy of wealth that has grown all the more seductive since the rise of India’s billionaire class. The formula has lasted for more than a decade because it puts identifiable characters into aspirational settings. The yearning is not for the real-life luxury lofts of India’s new rich. The sets of houses look like a maharajah’s palace; the costumes are so lavish and vivid that they would stand out in a Bollywood wedding scene. Social dynamics, on the other hand, look more like middle-class life in overpopulated Mumbai or New Delhi. Even in vast mansions, family members gather in tight clusters; no dispute, no matter how personal, breaks out without bystanders. A lover’s quarrel takes place in a crowd. The classic Indian soap opera shot has two characters at odds. One says something shocking, or slaps the antagonist’s face, and the camera slowly pans a circle of men and women frozen in horror and dismay, as chords of dramatic music rain down. The television landscape is just as dense. There are many hundreds of channels, and regional television is booming. The most popular soaps are translated into several languages, and many regions, from Punjab to Tamil Nadu, have their own channels and programs. Television is a bigger industry now than Bollywood, and Bollywood actors are beginning to work in television. The field is destined to keep growing because the Internet is not yet siphoning away the nation’s television-viewing youth. There are growing numbers of single career women in India, and in Bollywood romantic comedies, but mainstream television is not yet ready to celebrate their independence. After recently testing a pilot about a group of single Indian women living together, Sony, one of India’s leading networks, dropped the experiment. ‘‘An Indian ‘Friends’ just won’t work here,’’ said Sneha Rajani, a senior Sony executive in charge of programming, referring to a U.S. television show. ‘‘A family unit is essential for success.’’ On their own time, Indian network executives in cosmopolitan Mumbai watch ‘‘Homeland’’ and ‘‘Grey’s Anatomy’’ and say they itch to create comparable niche shows. But right now there is too small an audience. India is in the middle of making the switch from analog to digital, but premium cable is still in the future. Some producers are ready to take the risk anyway, notably the Bollywood star Anil Kapoor, familiar in the West as a star of ‘‘Slumdog Millionaire.’’ He bought the right to adapt ‘‘24’’ and intends to play the superagent Jack Bauer. (Mr. Kapoor played a moderate Muslim leader in Season 8 of ‘‘24.’’) That Fox series was a hit in India, especially with men; it was shown on weekends, when matriarchs hand the remote over to husbands, who turn on cricket and the Indian police procedural ‘‘C.I.D.’’ It is not just the high-tech action sequences of ‘‘24’’ that are daunting to adapt. Government conspiracy and Islamic terrorism are treacherous topics in a country where corruption is widespread and Hindu-Muslim tensions acute. Raj Nayak, the chief executive of Colors, the network behind ‘‘Child Bride’’ that has also teamed up with Mr. Kapoor, said the creative team has not figured out how to navigate the political and religious sinkholes. ‘‘It’s very sensitive,’’ he said. Glossy Indian television ads for cars, motorcycles and beauty products provide some of the most modern — and Westernized — images on television, and even those are careful not to offend. In an ad for ‘‘Attitude,’’ a skin cream, a smiling college student gets out of a car to greet her extended family, gathered for her return. Her relatives freeze when a second woman climbs out; her friend is a tough-looking young woman with Goth-style clothes and matching expression. The chill is broken when the Like many an Indian bride, television occasionally tests the boundaries but mostly finds its way by following the rules. visitor comes forward and bows respectfully at the feet of the matriarch. Everyone sighs in relief, and the family goes inside for a celebration. Some television producers want to embed more conspicuous public service messages in their programs. ‘‘I despise soaps about kitchen politics; they are regressive,’’ said Ajit Thakur, the general manager of Life OK, a sister channel of Star Plus, a network owned by News Corp. Life OK has a soap opera called ‘‘Domestic Violence,’’ designed to focus attention on spousal abuse. But when the channel asked viewers to call in with advice for the abused wife, Mr. Thakur was taken aback that almost half urged her to stay with her wealthy, handsome, if violently possessive husband. A lot of the older women, he said, argued, ‘‘Well, at least he really loves her.’’ (He ends up killing her with poi- ‘Child Bride’ PHOTOGRAPHS BY DESI TASHAN THE PREMISE HIGHLIGHT One of the top-rated shows in India, ‘‘Child Bride’’ is about Anandi, an underage girl who was forced into an arranged marriage by her parents. After nearly six years on the air, Anandi is now an adult woman with new marital problems. Most recently, her in-laws encouraged her to leave her cheating husband and even helped her find a second, happier marriage. ‘I Do’ PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZEE TV THE PREMISE HIGHLIGHT This is a new soap opera about Zoya, an Indian woman who returns home from New York and has to adjust to her traditional Muslim community. The romances are predictable, but the setting is not. Tensions between Hindus and the Muslim minority remain so high in India that ‘‘I Do’’ is the first soap opera about Muslims in ages. Asad is a handsome, brooding businessman who disapproves of Zoya’s modern ways, including her jeans. His mother and sister, while traditional in dress and deference to the man of the house, often side with Zoya. son, but she is reincarnated via heart transplant and the new heroine plots his comeuppance.) Soap opera subplots are often inspired by tales from the ‘‘Ramayana’’ and ‘‘Mahabharata,’’ epics that are the pillars of Hindu culture. Ms. Kapoor said that when she wanted to have a heroine kill a man to avenge his abuse of another woman — not a normal role for women on television — she deliberately shot her in the pose of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. Religion cannot be trivialized, however. Inspired by ‘‘The Tudors’’ and ‘‘Rome,’’ Ms. Kapoor tried to do a more daring series about the ‘‘Mahabharata’’ that humanized the gods. It bombed because it was too irreverent. Life OK is having success with its more traditional depiction of the adventures of Lord Shiva. Family is also not to be trifled with. There are evil twins, fake deaths, comas, resurrections, time leaps, heartbreak, suicide, longing and lots of conflict on soaps — husband scolding wife, wife scolding maid, sister accusing sister, mistress threatening lover — but it is rare to see a younger person speak rudely to an elder. Heroines can be feisty, like the young woman raising her younger siblings by herself on the astonishingly titled ‘‘Hitler Didi.’’ (Hitler is a metaphor for bossy in India.) They can sometimes be defiant, like Sia, who rebelled when her future mother-in-law, Ammaji, the village leader, incited the killing of baby girls on ‘‘Don’t Come to This Land, My Lovely Daughter,’’ a Colors network show that highlighted the problem of infanticide in rural areas and ended (happily ever after) this year. But deference is essential and that is not just made-for-television fantasy. In real life, the Bhats of Mumbai are a modern family of sorts: Durga, 26, works as a secretary at a real estate company, and her husband, Sunil, 32, works in computer technology. They have a 15-month-old boy, Siddanth, and live in a two-room apartment in a concrete tower in an industrial area of Mumbai that happens to have a small paddock of buffalo next door. They share the space, no larger than a recreational vehicle, with Sunil’s mother, Jayshree, 53, and his sister Sheela, 28. His mother’s 78-year-old mother-in-law, Taralaxmi, sleeps nearby and spends her days in the apartment. Both parents work hard, saving to send their son to private kindergarten. But everyone gathers at night to watch ‘‘Pavitra Rishta’’ (‘‘Pure Relationship’’), a top-rated soap opera where the family, Durga said, ‘‘is like ours, a joint family.’’ Taralaxmi is a charmer, full of stories, and one evening before the show began, she pointed to her daughter-in-law, Jayshree. ‘‘She used to be thin,’’ she said cheerfully. ‘‘She put on weight after menopause.’’ Even in India that did not seem like a compliment. Jayshree kept smiling and did not reply. ‘‘Sunil’s grandmother has her views and she loves to talk,’’ Durga said. ‘‘We just let her go, just as I do with my mother-in-law. You have to keep things moving when you live together in this kind of space.’’ Like many a soap opera heroine, Durga has learned to adjust. Alessandra Stanley, chief television critic of The New York Times, has gone abroad to watch foreign television this year. ONLINE: TV WATCH IN INDIA Watch a sampling of television shows from India. global.nytimes.com/arts For continuous coverage and topical conversation about the world’s largest democracy, go to the India Ink blog. nytimes.com/indiaink other way too often,’’ he said. ‘‘They sort of smiled, winked and nodded too often, when they should have been calling ‘crazy, crazy.’’’ The movement is not going away — most Republicans in the House have more to fear from primary challengers on their right than from Democratic challengers. An unpopular budget deal could reignite the Tea Party, as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist predicts. But surveys of voters leaving the polls last month showed that support for the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, U.S. spending and the health care overhaul won the Republicans a majority in the House. The House members elected with Tea Party backing in 2010 forced onto the national agenda their goals of deep cuts to spending and changes to entitlement programs, embodied by the budget blueprints of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who became Mitt Romney’s running mate. And some of those lawmakers led the revolt last week that prompted Speaker John A. Boehner to cancel a House vote on a plan to avert a year-end fiscal crisis by raising tax rates on household income above $1 million. ‘‘The Tea Party put a lot of steel in the spine of the Republican Party,’’ said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. But the Tea Party activists have not been front and center in the fiscal fight. And Mr. Cole added that Tea Party leaders now excoriating Mr. Boehner for offering higher taxes in a budget deal did not recognize political reality. ‘‘These guys want instant success,’’ said Mr. Cole, a member of the House Republican leadership. ‘‘If they want to see a better result, they’ve got to help us win the United States Senate. We’ve thrown away some seats out of political immaturity.’’ But a number of Republican leaders said the Tea Party seemed headed toward becoming just another political faction, not a broad movement. It may rally purists, but it will continue to alienate realists and centrists, they said. ‘‘I think the Tea Party movement is to the Republicans in 2013 what the McGovernites were to the Democrats in 1971 and 1972,’’ said Don Gaetz, a Republican who is the president of the Florida Senate. ‘‘They will cost Republicans seats in Congress and in state legislatures. But they will also help Republicans win seats.’’ Because the Tea Party comprises thousands of local groups, it is impossible to determine whether its ranks shrank after the many electoral defeats last month, which activists said caused grief and deep frustration. Greg Cummings, the leader of the We the People Tea Party in rural Decatur County, Iowa, said his group had picked up 12 members since the election, for a total of about 50. ‘‘If you were in a fight and someone gave you a good left hook, it doesn’t mean the fight is over,’’ he said. But Everett Wilkinson, the chairman of the Florida Tea Party in Palm Beach County, said the number of active Tea Party groups statewide ‘‘has diminished significantly in the last year or so, certainly in the last couple of months,’’ with only a third of what there once was. ‘‘A lot of people gave their heart and soul to trying to get Obama out; they’re frustrated,’’ he added. ‘‘They don’t know what to do. They got involved with the electoral process, and that didn’t work out.’’ FreedomWorks, a national group that has played a crucial role in organizing Tea Party activists and backing insurgent candidates, has been riven by turmoil, leading to the departure last month of its chairman, Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader in the House. Mr. Armey said in news accounts that he questioned the ethical behavior of senior officials in the group, though others told of a power struggle. He was eased out with an $8 million consulting contract, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. FreedomWorks spent nearly $40 million on the 2012 elections but backed a string of losing Senate candidates, including Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana, Josh Mandel of Ohio and Connie Mack of Florida. Some Tea Party firebrands lost their House seats, including Allen B. West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois. Billie Tucker, an activist with the First Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr. Obama’s victory in the state. Activists want to investigate. ‘‘Some people say it’s just a conspiracy theory, but there’s rumbling all around,’’ she said. ‘‘There’s all kinds of data, and no one’s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.’’ CHIP LITHERLAND FOR THE NYT Dick Armey quit as chairman of FreedomWorks, which organized Tea Party activists. Richard Baum, 72, creator of renowned China forum BY WILLIAM YARDLEY Richard Baum, who presided over Chinapol, an online discussion group about China that has become an essential forum for many experts, diplomats and journalists, died Dec. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 72. O B I T U A RY The cause was cancer, said his son, Matthew. Dr. Baum, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was an accomplished China scholar who wrote influential works on Mao Zedong and the period leading to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, as well as on the market-based policies promoted by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping. He advised top U.S. leaders, including President George H.W. Bush. But he had a particular affection for Chinapol. In the 1990s, Dr. Baum spent parts of several years in Japan. He had a steady e-mail dialogue with several dozen other China experts, but keeping it going while he was overseas became increasingly expensive because of Internet charges, which were steep at the time. To save money, he started Chinapol, a Listserv group whose first members were mostly academics. The group steadily expanded to include ambassadors, business leaders and journalists — all seeking insight and perspective as China rose as an economic and political power. Participants had to be approved by Dr. Baum — a recommendation from another member helped, as did an affiliation with a prominent news organization — and advocacy, attacks and self-promotion were not allowed. Violators could be quickly culled, an intolerance that some joked evoked that of China’s leaders. ‘‘Rick was lovingly known as ‘Chairman Rick,’’’ said Clayton Dube, a longtime friend and colleague who leads the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. The forum has been especially useful for journalists working in China. Although posts on Chinapol are confidential within the group, a reporter can contact a member separately to follow up on a post or to request permission to quote from it. ‘‘Off-list replies welcome,’’ a post might read. Members can submit questions to the group, whether they are looking for articles on China’s relationship with Iran or context for news at it develops. Chinapol currently has about 1,300 members. Dr. Baum recently gave responsibility for moderating the forum to Mr. Dube and Richard Gunde, another longtime colleague at U.C.L.A. ‘‘Online groups tend to burn out, burn up, become dominated by certain loud voices and in other ways eventually degrade,’’ James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic who has written extensively about China, said in response to an e-mail about Dr. Baum and Chinapol. ‘‘Through his careful selection of members and infrequent but firm policing of what he considered inappropriate discussion, Rick Baum allowed people from a wide variety of interests to share news, impressions and questions about China, in a way that left nearly all of them better informed.’’ Richard David Baum was born on July 8, 1940, in Los Angeles. He made his name early as a China scholar. As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, he gained rare access to classified documents that shed light on the inner workings of the Communist leaders, and he went on to write extensively about them, including a 1975 book, ‘‘Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party and the Peasant Question.’’ Dr. Baum was director of the Center for Chinese Studies at U.C.L.A. He taught at the university for 44 years. Late in his career, he wrote and delivered ‘‘The Fall and Rise of China,’’ a 48-part video lecture that was published in 2010 as part of the Great Courses series. He published a memoir, ‘‘China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom,’’ the same year. In 2008, Dr. Baum was among more than 160 prominent scholars and writers who asked President Hu Jintao to release Liu Xiaobo, a well-known intellectual and dissident detained that year. Dr. Baum circulated a petition on Chinapol. ‘‘While I have always tried to maintain Chinapol’s political neutrality,’’ Dr. Baum told The New York Times in an email at the time, ‘‘some violations are so egregious that I cannot, as a sentient being, remain neutral.’’ Mr. Liu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, remains in prison.