Bel and Baalsham Temples Destroyed by ISIS; Examining India's Most Transformative Generation; Imagine a World.
AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program. Amidst the human cost, one of the many tragedies of the Syrian War has been the willful destruction of its heritage. When ISIS captured the ancient city of Palmyra in May last year, they quickly destroyed monuments and even murdered the renowned local scholar, Khaled al-Asaad. But the Syrian army, backed by Russian warplanes, has just recaptured the city after days of fighting. And just earlier today, I reached Maamoun Abdulkarim, the director-general of Syria's antiquities in Damascus, for a little bit of good news.</s>AMANPOUR: You must be very happy today. We see these pictures of your government forces having retaken Palmyra from ISIS. How do you feel today?</s>ABDULKARIM: Today, I can confirm you that I am the happiest person in the world. Not just</s>AMANPOUR: So describe to me, then, what ISIS did destroy. And did they destroy more or less than you expected?</s>ABDULKARIM: Yes. You'll remember,</s>ABDULKARIM: -- it is also, is economical source for their children in the future. We have an idea now what happened in the underground of the Palmyra, what happened by</s>AMANPOUR: So you're very happy that the culture, at least most of it there, has been saved. The Bel temple and the others that you described, which were destroyed, can they be rebuilt?</s>ABDULKARIM: Normally, as the director-general of antiquities in Syria, we prefer consolidation and restoration. But as message of</s>UNESCO. AMANPOUR: And just briefly, how long do you think it will take to rebuild?</s>ABDULKARIM: If UNESCO accepts our vision, if we have all the resource today, is through our plan, et cetera, I can give you the confirmation through five years, we can finish our -- not completely but the majority of the work we finish after five years.</s>AMANPOUR: Director-General Maamoun Abdulkarim, thank you so much for joining us from Damascus today.</s>ABDULKARIM: Thank you very much. Thank you.</s>AMANPOUR: So if Syria is the rubble into which hopes of democracy and freedom have collapsed, then India proudly touts itself as the world's largest thriving democracy. It has a young population that's booming -- and I'm talking 1 million people turning 18 every single month. But my next guest says India is, quote, "a democracy that makes promises it has no intention of keeping." Somini Sengupta lived in India as a child, returning some 30 years later as "The New York Times" New Delhi bureau chief. What she found was a vastly different and, on so many levels, troubling country that she has turned into a book called, "The End of Karma," and she joins me now.</s>AMANPOUR: Somini, thanks for being here. So that is quite a provocative thing that I just quoted from you, that India makes promises that it has no intention of keeping when it comes to democracy. What do you mean by that?</s>SOMINI SENGUPTA, FORMER NEW DELHI BUREAU CHIEF, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": You know, in my father's generation, he is part of midnight's children. He was born just before independence. At that time, it was said that democracy is just top dressing on Indian soil, that Indian society is fundamentally undemocratic in everyday life. I think that has really shifted. This generation that I'm writing about, I call them noonday's children. They are red-hot, restive, very pushy. Now democracy is no longer topsoil. Young people expect to be able to write their own destiny. However, that requires something resembling equality of opportunity for both men and women. That is still not in place yet.</s>AMANPOUR: Well, you do call it "The End of Karma." And you talk about the philosophy is, if what happens to you if somehow gets done unto others or vice versa. What do you mean by end of karma? Because there is not just the sort of inequality regarding democracy. There's the whole caste system and the terrible deficiencies in opportunity.</s>SENGUPTA: Absolutely. That is the basis of the stratification of Indian society, is that if you are born into a particular caste, historically, that has not only defined what you do for a living but where you are on the social ladder. What I'm trying to signal by the end of karma is that Indians are trying to overcome their past. They're born with one destiny; they're trying to write another. And I see that repeated across the lives of young Indians. In this book, I profile seven people, seven ordinary men and women who have come of age after 1991. But I think it's their yearnings that are really revealing some of the deepest and most fundamental fault lines of India today.</s>AMANPOUR: You talk about seven people. I think one is Varsha, the daughter of a laundry man. She wants to be a police officer. And it's all about education. Now I believe the father says that he's letting her study but full well knowing that it might preclude her getting married because men of that certain class don't want smart, educated women. So it's sort of a double whammy?</s>SENGUPTA: Well, Varsha's father is her champion, he's her backer. He does want her to get an education. He does not want her to be a laundry man's wife.</s>SENGUPTA: But he doesn't want her to get too much education. He certainly is very wary of her working outside the home. He is -- he can't countenance the idea of his daughter becoming a police officer. But why does she want to be a police officer? Well, because when Varsha was a teenager, there was that horrific gang rape of a young woman, very much like Varsha, trying to really make something of herself and Varsha wanted to serve her nation. She wanted to keep women and girls like her safe. But she had to push and nudge her father every step of the way. And so I tell Varsha's story, because it's like so many young Indian woman I know, they are trying to grow their own wings but also it's a story of so many fathers who have to figure out how much they're going to let them fly.</s>AMANPOUR: Exactly. We had this statistic at the beginning. I think, what is it, 8 -- how many millions of people -- ?</s>SENGUPTA: One million.</s>AMANPOUR: -- 1 million turning 18 every month. And that obviously puts a massive burden on the infrastructure, on the ability to create jobs. What does that mean for opportunity -- again, if we're talking about jobs and money and being able to rise through earning?</s>SENGUPTA: India's youth bulge is staggering. So right now the number of Indians just between the age of 15 and 34, just that age cohort, 420 million, which exceeds the combined population of the United States, Canada and then some. Now they are hungry for economic opportunities and so India's challenge is really unenviable. By some estimates, India needs to create 10 million jobs. By some other estimates that I've read recently, 17 million jobs a year. But it has to do this at a time when it's also under enormous pressure to reduce its carbon footprint and to do it in an era of climate change that affects India and Indians quite seriously. And it has to, again, prepare these 1 million Indians who are coming of age every month, prepare them for meaningful jobs in the global economy. That is a really staggering challenge in a country where, still, so many children are hungry; 30 percent of Indian children under 5 are still clinically malnourished; a country where many more children are going to school but they're not learning a great deal.</s>AMANPOUR: Well, that's a whole another conversation, which we can have about the education system, the ghost schools and the ghost classrooms and this and that. But just quickly, "The End of Karma," your book, you said took on a whole new impetus and urgency when you became a mother.</s>SENGUPTA: I'm a daughter of India. My daughter is a daughter of India. She was born in 2008. And she is part of this generation. So I wanted to understand the country that made the both of us and what the future of this country might look like. But equally, I think it's really important that we all, the rest of the world, learns about India. As a friend of mine puts it, we have seen the future and it's this red-hot, restive democracy of 1.2 billion people.</s>AMANPOUR: Right. And we were just talking about Pakistan earlier in this program. You know, India, when it declared independence, declared it as a secular democracy. Is that at risk, given what's happening next door and, frankly, all over the region, with non-secular militants and violence rising?</s>SENGUPTA: India has faced these risks from the very beginning of its existence. So since 1947, it has been in a restive neighborhood but it's also had lots of internal insurgencies to deal with. It has, with the exception of two years, it has survived as a democracy. And there were two years when democratic rights were suspended in the mid-70s. That was a period when my family left. But it really has survive as a democracy. And it is thriving.</s>AMANPOUR: Incredible. Somini Sengupta, thank you very much indeed for joining us.</s>SENGUPTA: My pleasure.</s>AMANPOUR: Thank you. "The End of Karma."</s>AMANPOUR: And after a break, a little of Pakistan's terrorism and intolerance have sent a small Scottish community reeling. Imagine a Muslim shopkeeper murdered by a fellow Muslim just for saying "Happy Easter." That's next.