RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dancing at the Abyss: What Beirut’s Debutante Ball Says about Lebanon

Car bombs are a fact of life and the civil war in neighboring Syria continues to flood Lebanon with refugees. Nevertheless, the Debutante Ball in Beirut takes place every year. Wealthy Lebanese families from across the globe send their daughters to waltz on the brink.

Is it because of 3/4 time, that sweetly narcotic sound of the waltz? Or perhaps due to the white, elbow-length gloves, ball dresses and tiaras? As Beatrice, Nadine and Layal walk up the staircase — smiling as they hold up the shimmering folds of their gowns — they seem lost in reverie. Even the rebellious Gaelle, with her braided armbands and shorter hair, says what everyone is saying: how excited she is to be a princess for an evening. And all in white!
The annual Debutante Ball at the legendary Casino du Liban in Beirut, complete with pomp and pirouettes, is the highlight of the Lebanese ball season. The women spend hours putting on their dresses and getting them to hang just so, each of the garments designed by a different local fashion designer. The preparations, including dancing lessons for the debutantes and their beaus, have gone on for months. And for the last few days, local residents were worried about whether the airport would be open, and whether some attack might make the whole affair seem irreverent. But everything went well this year. The ladies on the ball committee, the management, so to speak, are smiling, and chairwoman Regina Fenianos is issuing her final orders.

That some might find a ball like this, in light of the situation in the country, a bit galling is nothing but a misunderstanding, says Fenianos. Though the circumstances are serious indeed: Opposing camps in the north are firing at each other almost daily, car bombs explode frequently in the south, the economy is in free fall and a fifth of Lebanon’s current population is made up of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

“We know what’s going on,” Fenianos said at the dress rehearsal on the day before the ball. “But we are showing the real Lebanon! We have been holding this ball for 16 years and nothing can stop us, neither crises nor bombs. We also danced in 2006, two months after the war with Israel!”

The longest and most expensive election in India’s history began April 7th and will conclude May 12th at a cost of more than $5 billion. To manage the large electorate — estimated at 815 million — and address security concerns in the world’s largest democracy, the election to seat 543 members of the 16th Lok Sabha, or lower house of the Parliament, is running in nine segments over five weeks. The results will also determine who will rule the world’s largest democracy as prime minister. The victor will ultimately be the party winning the most Lok Sabha seats, a minimum of 272.

Top issues in India’s elections are perennial — government corruption, nepotism and economic growth — but also playing a major factor is the burgeoning Islamization of the country. The bulk of India’s population, around 80% Hindu, is concerned about past government policies that appear to have favored Muslims. The most popular candidate for prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been painted for years as virulently anti-Muslim in an effort to undermine his political power during years of dedicated government service as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. He has been the subject of eight-years of rigorous investigations and most recently by India’s Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), which found no wrong doing on his part, and he has been legally exonerated of all framed charges in 2010. Yet, he has been denied a U.S. visa, despite this lack of proof. The outcome of the elections in India will help determine if the country will slide further under Muslim influence or pursue a path toward democracy and away from preferential laws for Muslims.

Those preferential laws were created under the rule of the Indian National Congress (INC), or “the Congress.” Formed in 1885, the party played a major role in freeing the country from British colonial rule in 1947. But, in more modern times, the pro-Muslim Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has lost support. As the economic growth of India has slowed significantly, government corruption has become rampant and infrastructure deficiencies abound. Modi, a statesman of the country’s other major political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has pledged to institute good governance, end corruption, boost economic growth, and adopt a uniform civil code to foster equal gender justice and equality for Indian Muslim women who are currently governed by Sharia law.

Modi and Gujarat Riots

Although he is clearly the popular favorite for prime minister, Modi must contend with fallout from ongoing Hindu-Muslim strife in India. A major cause of that strife was the defunct Babri Mosque, which was provocatively built by Muslims in 1527 over a Hindu sacred site in Ajodhya believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu Deity, Rama. A study released later by the Archaeological Society of India concluded that excavations revealed distinctive features of a massive, 10th century Hindu temple and the existence of human activity at the site as early as the 13th century B.C. (The violent conversion of non-Muslims’ places of worship into mosques is common worldwide and there is historically documented evidence that at least 2000 mosques in India have been forcibly built on top of demolished Hindu temples at sacred sites). (See Chapter 10 and Appendix of this online book at this link: http://www.voiceofdharma.com/books/htemples1/ )

Conflicts over the Ajodhya site occurred numerous times over the years and culminated in 1992 with the razing of the abandoned mosque structure by a gathering of over 1.1 million Hindu volunteers who had assembled there for a rally. Violence then broke out across India and more than 2,000 people died, as Muslims used the demolition of Babri Mosque as an excuse for ongoing terrorist attacks ever since.