Word: austria
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Steves first went to Europe in 1969 at age 14 with his mom and dad, a Seattle-area importer of pianos who made trips to Germany and Austria to survey various makes and models. After a few visits, Steves noticed the carefree teenage backpackers at the train stations and wanted to join the fun. "I saw all these kids and thought, Hey, no parents," he says. "And there I was, at 16, still on my mom's passport." As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, he began backpacking in Europe every summer. Within a few years, he started...
...against small parties, the euroskeptic Conservatives, for instance, will be left pondering how many of its supporters could in the future migrate to UKIP - and how it might keep them from doing so. The triumph of the BNP (along with seats for far-right parties from the Netherlands and Austria) will add to concerns that the economic downturn is fueling a move to fascist parties in some corners of Europe...
...Rudolfsheim Street on the outskirts of Vienna has become a hub of Sikh separatists who supported an insurgency in Punjab during the 1980s and 1990s. The insurgency was eventually stamped down by an iron-fisted state, and many of its supporters sought and received political asylum in Europe. As Austria's legal South Asian community has become more established, thousands of illegal Sikh migrants from all over Europe have gravitated there. "The gurdwara was lush with offerings from a nostalgic and large-hearted diaspora," says Ramesh Vinayak, who heads the Punjab edition of the national daily Hindustan Times...
...Around the same time, the Ravidasias, a lower-caste community who are not considered Sikhs though the groups share some similarities, including worship in gurdwaras, swelled in numbers among Austria's Indian diaspora. Disgruntled lower-caste youths from an increasingly prosperous Punjab - where the landed castes have been reaping the benefits of the Green Revolution since the 1950s and 1960s - were making their way to Europe in droves. "What we see now is a result of rising Dalit assertion," says Vinayak. "The lower castes set up their own gurdwara, splitting the congregation and the [revenue from the] offerings...
...events in Punjab - and thousands of miles away in Austria - point to a broader problem: the dangerous mix of inequitable development and enduring caste-based resentment. The northern state has a higher than national average population of Scheduled Castes, an umbrella term for various lower castes, with 28.95% in Punjab against India's average of 16%. "Dalit Sikhs and Ravidasias, especially in the fertile Doaba belt which sends out a large number of immigrants, have seen immense prosperity lately, and with it, a rising Dalit consciousness and assertion," says Dr. Ronki Ram, reader in the Department of Political Science...