By RAMACHANDRA GUHA
Published: August 15, 2007 (NYT)
Bangalore, India
IN the last months of 1990, a property dispute sparked a series of bloody riots across India. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party sought to “reclaim” for Hindus the birthplace of the legendary god-king Ram, in the small northern town of Ayodhya. That meant demolishing the mosque that had been built there in the 16th century and replacing it with a spanking new temple.
Starting in September, the militant Bharatiya Janata leader Lal Krishna Advani journeyed for five weeks between Somnath and Ayodhya, making fiery speeches at towns and villages en route, denouncing the Indian government for “appeasing” the Muslims. In many places Mr. Advani visited, attacks on Muslims followed.
In New Delhi, where I then lived, Mr. Advani’s march represented a grave threat to the inclusive, plural, secular and democratic idea of India. My boyhood hero had been Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and arguably greatest prime minister.
When India and Pakistan came into existence in 1947, exactly 60 years ago, Mr. Nehru insisted that India would not be a “Hindu Pakistan.” Three months after the partition, he wrote to the chief provincial ministers about the Muslim minority: “whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic state. If we fail to do so, we shall have a festering sore which will eventually poison the whole body politic and probably destroy it.”
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s idea of India was the opposite. Their ideologues treated Muslims as potential fifth columnists. “Pakistan ya Kabristan!” (to Pakistan or the graveyard) they cried during the riots. Nonetheless, many million Muslims stayed in India; after the formation of an independent Bangladesh, in 1971, India had even more Muslim citizens than Pakistan.
Yet among my close friends in India there was not a single Muslim. The novelist Mukul Kesavan, a contemporary, has written that in his school in Delhi he never came across a Muslim name: “The only place you were sure of meeting Muslims was the movies.” Some of the finest actors, singers, composers and directors in Bombay’s film industry were Muslims. But in law, medicine, business and the upper echelons of public service, Hindus dominated. There were sprinklings of Christians and Sikhs, but very few Muslims.
As it happened, my first Muslim friend was a Pakistani I met in America. In the mid-1980s, the economist Tariq Banuri and I, both teaching at East Coast universities, were part of a colloquium on third-world development. Our bond was partly intellectual and partly linguistic, for we had grown up speaking Hindustani, that wonderful hybrid of Hindi and Urdu that was once the lingua franca of much of the Indian subcontinent. My hometown, Dehradun, and Tariq’s, Peshawar, lay at opposite ends of what was once a common cultural zone, fractured by the partition.
After I returned to India, and Tariq to Pakistan, in 1987, the antipathy between our countries meant I could not visit him. The phone lines were blocked, and the Internet had not been developed. News that trickled in from mutual friends was episodic and desultory; inevitably, we lost touch.
In the winter of 1990, Tariq began appearing in my dreams. I was always on the verge of visiting him in Islamabad, only to be thwarted by hostile immigration officials, barbed-wire fences, massed soldiers or canceled flights. That I dreamt of my friend at a time when my fellow Hindus were mounting frequent attacks on Muslims was surely not accidental.
Back in Delhi, I also came to understand (though not support) why so many Indians had favored building a Ram temple in Ayodhya. Once a center of Islamic civilization, later the center of a white man’s Raj, after 1947 Delhi had become a city of the Hindu and Sikh victims of partition. These Punjabi migrants had lost homes and businesses in that bloody summer of 1947. Starting from scratch, they had come to dominate Delhi’s commerce and social life. Yet they remained insecure; who knew when catastrophe might come again? And so they hoarded diamonds and maintained Swiss bank accounts.
They also cheated their tenants. In six years in Delhi, my wife and I had four landlords, all refugees from the Pakistani part of Punjab. All four hooked their appliances to our electricity meter, and all kept our deposits when we left.
In 1995, I finally got to visit Pakistan. I saw Tariq in Islamabad and then proceeded to Lahore, illegally, since my visa was for one city only. I met one of the last seven Hindu families in Lahore and visited the tomb of the Sikh warrior-king Ranjit Singh.
Then I went across to the majestic Badshahi Mosque, built by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. It was Friday evening, and a large crowd of worshipers was coming out after the weekly prayers. Walking against the flow, I had to jostle my way through.
As I bumped into one worshiper, I was seized by panic. In one pocket of my kurta lay my wallet; in the other, an exquisite little statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, dancing. I am not a believer, but this was my mascot, a gift from my sister, carried whenever I was separated from my wife and little children. What if it now fell out and was seized upon by the crowd? How would that turn out — an infidel discovered in a Muslim shrine, an Indian visitor illegally in Lahore?
As a liberal and secular Hindu, I should not have been worried about being found out. But my fear was symptomatic also of the deeper failures of partition. It had been meant to solve, once and for all, the Hindu-Muslim question. But in both countries, the two communities have only grown further apart.
Despite their shared culture, cuisine and love for the game of cricket, India and Pakistan have already fought four wars. And judging by the number of troops on their borders and the missiles and nuclear weapons to back them, they seem prepared to fight a fifth.
Ramachandra Guha is the author of “India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.”
Thursday, August 16, 2007
14/07/08 - Happy Birthday Pakistan
A wonderful piece by a wonderful author... i read his most recent novel; and does it ring true! Misunderstandings have made the world what it is today. Your freedom fighter, Bush's terrorist.
By MOHSIN HAMID
Published: August 15, 2007 (NYT)
London
SIXTY years ago, British India was granted independence and partitioned into Hindu-majority India and my native nation, Muslim-majority Pakistan. It was a birth of exceptional pain.
Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather. He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Independence was only a few months away, and the communal violence that would accompany the partition was beginning to simmer.
My great-grandfather was attacked because he was mistaken for a Hindu. This was not surprising; as a lawyer, most of his colleagues were Hindus, as were many of his friends. He would shelter some of their families in his home during the murderous riots that were to come.
But my great-grandfather was a Muslim. More than that, he was a member of the Muslim League, which had campaigned for the creation of Pakistan. From the start, Pakistan has been prone to turning its knife upon itself.
Yet 1947 is also remembered in my family as a time of enormous hope. My great-grandfather survived. And the birth that year of his grandson, my father, marked the arrival of a first generation of something new: Pakistanis.
My mother recalls a childhood of sugar and flour rations. The 1950s, she says, were a decade of a young country finding its feet. She grew up in a small town and she describes a fierce love for Pakistan felt by her and her schoolmates. Pakistan was theirs, a source of pride and identity, symbolically both a parent and, because it inspired such feelings of protectiveness, a sibling.
In the 1960s, my mother’s family moved to Lahore, which had been the cultural and governmental center of Punjab Province before the region was ripped apart at independence. By then, Pakistan’s economy had begun to boom. My parents speak of cinemas showing the latest films, colleges producing idealistic graduates, and young couples walking along the banks of the River Ravi.
Yet Pakistan’s true glory at that time was the southern port of Karachi, where my uncle, then a young banker, went to live. It was, he says, a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, a place of cafes and sea breezes and visiting international flight crews; it hummed with the energy and ingenuity of millions of former refugees who had come from India.
Still, these rosy family recollections paint an incomplete picture. For the civilian government of Pakistan had been deposed by a military coup in 1958. Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan was a steadfast American ally against the Soviet Union and the recipient of large amounts of American weaponry and aid.
But deprived of democracy for much of my parents’ youth, Pakistanis were unable to articulate an inclusive vision of what their country stood for. Making things worse, the country was divided in two, separated geographically by India. West Pakistan, the army’s heartland, received far more than its fair share of resources. After years of mistreatment and rigged elections, East Pakistanis fought a war of independence, India took up arms on their side, and East Pakistan became the nation of Bangladesh.
I was born in 1971, the year of this second partition, as Pakistan once again turned its knife upon itself.
After the bloodshed, what was left of Pakistan was forced to ask what it stood for. Democracy was restored, and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became wildly popular with a simple slogan: “Bread, clothing and a home.” In other words, Pakistan existed to lessen the poverty of its citizens.
Even I knew this slogan. At the age of two, I was reciting it on the kitchen table, standing tall as I had seen our prime minister do on television. My mother tried to get hold of me, and in my excitement I ran clear off the table, breaking my head on the kitchen floor. I still have the scar. Bhutto faired little better. He was deposed in 1977 and hanged.
So, like my parents before me, I was born in a democratic Pakistan but spent much of my youth in a dictatorship. And like General Ayub Khan before him, the new dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq was a steadfast American ally against the Soviet Union. But whereas General Ayub Khan had been largely secular, General Zia envisioned Pakistan as a theocratic Muslim state. It became a staging-ground for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and underwent a dramatic process of social engineering called Islamization.
Growing up in Lahore in the 1980s was unsettling. Assault rifles and heroin, byproducts of the war in Afghanistan, flooded the city. I had friends with drug problems, others who sometimes carried guns. Our parents had been able to mingle freely and go to the cinema. But we lived in a time of censorship and of women news anchors being forced to cover their heads on television. Preventing teenage boys and girls from falling in love seemed to be an official concern of the state, and avoiding police checkpoints became part of every date.
Although we disliked our president, my friends and I remained fiercely patriotic. We idolized Pakistani sporting heroes in cricket, field hockey and squash. We felt a thrill of achievement when we listened to bootleg cassettes of the first Pakistani rock bands. For us, the success of anything Pakistani was a source of personal pride.
In 1988, shortly before I left for college in America, General Zia died in a suspicious airplane crash and civilian rule was again restored. But the democracy of the ’90s was a disappointment, with power alternated between ineffective, feuding governments.
As my friends married and had children, a third generation of Pakistanis began to arrive. Like my parents’ generation, and like mine, these children were born in a democracy but would spend their youth under pro-American military rule, this time under Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
And now Pakistan is once again turning its knife on itself. Insurgencies simmer in the regions bordering Afghanistan, and suicide bombers have begun to kill fellow Pakistanis with increasing frequency.
For me personally, the 60th anniversary of independence, while worthy of note, is not of the utmost importance. My hopes are already dashing ahead and attaching themselves to the elections that are scheduled for later this year.
On one side are the forces of exclusion, who wish Pakistan to stand only for their kind of Pakistani. These include the political descendants of the man who stabbed my great-grandfather, the people who seek to oppress those who are clean shaven or those who toil for meager wages or those who are from provinces other than their own. But arrayed against them is something wholly new.
Pakistan now has private television stations that refuse to let the government set the news agenda. It has a Supreme Court that has asserted its independence for the first time, restoring a chief justice suspended by the president. And it has an army under physical attack from within and in desperate need of compromise with civil society.
A 60th birthday brings with it the obligation to shed some illusions. Pakistanis must realize that we have been our own worst enemies. My wish for our national anniversary is this: that we finally take the knife we have turned too often upon ourselves and place it firmly in its sheath.
Mohsin Hamid is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”
By MOHSIN HAMID
Published: August 15, 2007 (NYT)
London
SIXTY years ago, British India was granted independence and partitioned into Hindu-majority India and my native nation, Muslim-majority Pakistan. It was a birth of exceptional pain.
Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather. He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Independence was only a few months away, and the communal violence that would accompany the partition was beginning to simmer.
My great-grandfather was attacked because he was mistaken for a Hindu. This was not surprising; as a lawyer, most of his colleagues were Hindus, as were many of his friends. He would shelter some of their families in his home during the murderous riots that were to come.
But my great-grandfather was a Muslim. More than that, he was a member of the Muslim League, which had campaigned for the creation of Pakistan. From the start, Pakistan has been prone to turning its knife upon itself.
Yet 1947 is also remembered in my family as a time of enormous hope. My great-grandfather survived. And the birth that year of his grandson, my father, marked the arrival of a first generation of something new: Pakistanis.
My mother recalls a childhood of sugar and flour rations. The 1950s, she says, were a decade of a young country finding its feet. She grew up in a small town and she describes a fierce love for Pakistan felt by her and her schoolmates. Pakistan was theirs, a source of pride and identity, symbolically both a parent and, because it inspired such feelings of protectiveness, a sibling.
In the 1960s, my mother’s family moved to Lahore, which had been the cultural and governmental center of Punjab Province before the region was ripped apart at independence. By then, Pakistan’s economy had begun to boom. My parents speak of cinemas showing the latest films, colleges producing idealistic graduates, and young couples walking along the banks of the River Ravi.
Yet Pakistan’s true glory at that time was the southern port of Karachi, where my uncle, then a young banker, went to live. It was, he says, a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, a place of cafes and sea breezes and visiting international flight crews; it hummed with the energy and ingenuity of millions of former refugees who had come from India.
Still, these rosy family recollections paint an incomplete picture. For the civilian government of Pakistan had been deposed by a military coup in 1958. Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan was a steadfast American ally against the Soviet Union and the recipient of large amounts of American weaponry and aid.
But deprived of democracy for much of my parents’ youth, Pakistanis were unable to articulate an inclusive vision of what their country stood for. Making things worse, the country was divided in two, separated geographically by India. West Pakistan, the army’s heartland, received far more than its fair share of resources. After years of mistreatment and rigged elections, East Pakistanis fought a war of independence, India took up arms on their side, and East Pakistan became the nation of Bangladesh.
I was born in 1971, the year of this second partition, as Pakistan once again turned its knife upon itself.
After the bloodshed, what was left of Pakistan was forced to ask what it stood for. Democracy was restored, and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became wildly popular with a simple slogan: “Bread, clothing and a home.” In other words, Pakistan existed to lessen the poverty of its citizens.
Even I knew this slogan. At the age of two, I was reciting it on the kitchen table, standing tall as I had seen our prime minister do on television. My mother tried to get hold of me, and in my excitement I ran clear off the table, breaking my head on the kitchen floor. I still have the scar. Bhutto faired little better. He was deposed in 1977 and hanged.
So, like my parents before me, I was born in a democratic Pakistan but spent much of my youth in a dictatorship. And like General Ayub Khan before him, the new dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq was a steadfast American ally against the Soviet Union. But whereas General Ayub Khan had been largely secular, General Zia envisioned Pakistan as a theocratic Muslim state. It became a staging-ground for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and underwent a dramatic process of social engineering called Islamization.
Growing up in Lahore in the 1980s was unsettling. Assault rifles and heroin, byproducts of the war in Afghanistan, flooded the city. I had friends with drug problems, others who sometimes carried guns. Our parents had been able to mingle freely and go to the cinema. But we lived in a time of censorship and of women news anchors being forced to cover their heads on television. Preventing teenage boys and girls from falling in love seemed to be an official concern of the state, and avoiding police checkpoints became part of every date.
Although we disliked our president, my friends and I remained fiercely patriotic. We idolized Pakistani sporting heroes in cricket, field hockey and squash. We felt a thrill of achievement when we listened to bootleg cassettes of the first Pakistani rock bands. For us, the success of anything Pakistani was a source of personal pride.
In 1988, shortly before I left for college in America, General Zia died in a suspicious airplane crash and civilian rule was again restored. But the democracy of the ’90s was a disappointment, with power alternated between ineffective, feuding governments.
As my friends married and had children, a third generation of Pakistanis began to arrive. Like my parents’ generation, and like mine, these children were born in a democracy but would spend their youth under pro-American military rule, this time under Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
And now Pakistan is once again turning its knife on itself. Insurgencies simmer in the regions bordering Afghanistan, and suicide bombers have begun to kill fellow Pakistanis with increasing frequency.
For me personally, the 60th anniversary of independence, while worthy of note, is not of the utmost importance. My hopes are already dashing ahead and attaching themselves to the elections that are scheduled for later this year.
On one side are the forces of exclusion, who wish Pakistan to stand only for their kind of Pakistani. These include the political descendants of the man who stabbed my great-grandfather, the people who seek to oppress those who are clean shaven or those who toil for meager wages or those who are from provinces other than their own. But arrayed against them is something wholly new.
Pakistan now has private television stations that refuse to let the government set the news agenda. It has a Supreme Court that has asserted its independence for the first time, restoring a chief justice suspended by the president. And it has an army under physical attack from within and in desperate need of compromise with civil society.
A 60th birthday brings with it the obligation to shed some illusions. Pakistanis must realize that we have been our own worst enemies. My wish for our national anniversary is this: that we finally take the knife we have turned too often upon ourselves and place it firmly in its sheath.
Mohsin Hamid is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”
Some Baby Bibs Said to Contain Levels of Lead
Children have a right to be safe and parents have a right to procure that safety for their babies. HOW DARE companies making products for children try to cut corners in ways that could possibly endanger babies?
I'm so angry that i am actually at a loss for words!
Materialism and profit will kill our babies!
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: August 15, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — Certain vinyl baby bibs sold at Toys “R” Us stores appear to be contaminated with lead, laboratory tests have shown, making the inexpensive bibs another example of a made-in-China product that may be a health hazard to children.
Mattel Recalls 19 Million Toys Sent From China (August 15, 2007)
Trouble in China Is Good News for American Toy Manufacturers (August 15, 2007) The vinyl bibs, which feature illustrations of baseball bats and soccer balls and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters, are sold for less than $5 each under store brand labels, including Especially for Baby and Koala Baby.
Tests this summer, financed by the Center for Environmental Health of Oakland, Calif., found lead as high as three times the level allowed in paint in several styles of the bibs purchased from both Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us stores in California.
A separate test by a laboratory hired by The New York Times of the same Toys “R” Us bibs, purchased in Maryland, found a similar level of contamination.
“These bibs are exposing children to lead in an unnecessary way,” said Caroline Cox, research director at the Center for Environmental Health, a nonprofit agency that for the last decade has been testing consumer products for lead, in an effort to remove them from the market.
Kathleen Waugh, a Toys “R” Us spokeswoman, said that the company had hired an independent lab to do tests on the bibs as recently as May and they were found to be in compliance with safety standards for lead levels. Any test showing that individual bibs were potentially contaminated should not be interpreted as meaning the problem is widespread, she said, adding that the company’s own tests are more stringent than federal standards. “Our uncompromising commitment to safety has been, and continues to be, our highest priority,” she said in a written statement.
Officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates children’s products, said that they would prefer that there be no elevated levels of lead in bibs.
But their own recent tests of baby bibs on the market in the United States found that the lead, when present, was at levels low enough that a child chewing on or rubbing the bib would not get an unhealthy dose.
As a result, the agency urges parents to discard vinyl bibs only if they are ripped or otherwise deteriorated.
“There is a potential risk of lead exposure from babies swallowing pieces of cracked vinyl on used bibs,” the agency said in a statement, after being presented with the test results on the Toys “R” Us bibs.
But agency officials have not pushed for a recall of lead-contaminated bibs, including a brand sold earlier this year at Wal-Mart Stores, which the Center for Environmental Health also identified. Wal-Mart removed the bibs from its store shelves nationwide, but in Illinois, where 60,000 of the bibs had been sold, a strict lead law required their recall.
The bibs were imported for Toys “R” Us by Hamco Baby Products, the same company that made the bibs for Wal-Mart. The bibs will be retested, Ms. Waugh, the Toys “R” Us spokeswoman, said.
Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us are jointly controlled by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and Vornado Realty Trust. Hamco is a unit of Crown Crafts.
The agency’s approach has drawn criticism from some children’s advocates, and local and state health officials.
“All lead is bad lead,” said Patrick MacRoy, director of the Chicago lead poisoning prevention program. “Why should we allow any lead to be in there?”
The lead tests done for the Center for Environmental Health, conducted by the National Food Laboratory in Dublin, Calif., found levels as high as 1,800 parts per million in the Toys “R” Us bibs — three times the amount allowed in lead paint.
The tests of the Toys “R” Us bibs conducted in July for The New York Times by the same lab found similar results.
A separate test by Bureau Veritas, a testing lab in Buffalo, found little lead in the clear plastic pocket of the bib, but said that the lead in the colorful part of the bib was at levels high enough that minute amounts could transfer to a baby’s fingers.
A third lab, STAT Analysis of Chicago, found extremely low or not detectable levels both of total lead and of what is called “accessible” lead, or the lead a child could ingest by sucking or chewing on the bib.
Federal officials, when testing bibs, do three kinds of tests — one by checking the total amount of lead using solvents; another by rubbing the vinyl with a swab and testing the swab for lead; and a third by soaking the bib in a salty solution and testing the solution for lead.
These tests, on bibs collected from retailers nationwide this year, did at times find low levels of lead. But the C.P.S.C. concluded that even if infants had the bibs in their mouths all day, not enough lead would leach into their blood system to cause harm.
Based on these results, the agency concluded that the bibs did not present a hazard as long as they were not deteriorated.
But Mr. MacRoy, other health officials and children’s advocates argue that the C.P.S.C. uses an antiquated standard for what level of lead in a child’s blood stream represents a hazard. When combined with lead from other sources, including perhaps lead-based paint in an old house or lead-contaminated jewelry, the bibs could still result in poisoning or neurological damage in a child.
As a result, Ms. Cox of the California environmental group, among others, has urged parents to stop buying bibs that have even modest levels of lead.
Industry officials said that even if the lead was not at hazardous levels, they wanted to eliminate it. “We would like it not to be happening,” said Allen Blakey, a spokesman for the Vinyl Institute, a trade association.
Lead ends up in vinyl — otherwise known as polyvinyl chloride or PVC — from one of three primary sources. It is sometimes added as an inexpensive stabilizer; it can come from pigments used to add color; or it can come from recycled vinyl, which may have had lead in it from its earlier use, industry officials said.
Legislation proposed last year in Congress would ban more than trace levels of lead in any product intended for children under 6, similar to the Illinois law.
Given problems with lead found in vinyl, some companies are moving to replace it with other raw materials that they can be assured are lead-safe.
I'm so angry that i am actually at a loss for words!
Materialism and profit will kill our babies!
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: August 15, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — Certain vinyl baby bibs sold at Toys “R” Us stores appear to be contaminated with lead, laboratory tests have shown, making the inexpensive bibs another example of a made-in-China product that may be a health hazard to children.
Mattel Recalls 19 Million Toys Sent From China (August 15, 2007)
Trouble in China Is Good News for American Toy Manufacturers (August 15, 2007) The vinyl bibs, which feature illustrations of baseball bats and soccer balls and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters, are sold for less than $5 each under store brand labels, including Especially for Baby and Koala Baby.
Tests this summer, financed by the Center for Environmental Health of Oakland, Calif., found lead as high as three times the level allowed in paint in several styles of the bibs purchased from both Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us stores in California.
A separate test by a laboratory hired by The New York Times of the same Toys “R” Us bibs, purchased in Maryland, found a similar level of contamination.
“These bibs are exposing children to lead in an unnecessary way,” said Caroline Cox, research director at the Center for Environmental Health, a nonprofit agency that for the last decade has been testing consumer products for lead, in an effort to remove them from the market.
Kathleen Waugh, a Toys “R” Us spokeswoman, said that the company had hired an independent lab to do tests on the bibs as recently as May and they were found to be in compliance with safety standards for lead levels. Any test showing that individual bibs were potentially contaminated should not be interpreted as meaning the problem is widespread, she said, adding that the company’s own tests are more stringent than federal standards. “Our uncompromising commitment to safety has been, and continues to be, our highest priority,” she said in a written statement.
Officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates children’s products, said that they would prefer that there be no elevated levels of lead in bibs.
But their own recent tests of baby bibs on the market in the United States found that the lead, when present, was at levels low enough that a child chewing on or rubbing the bib would not get an unhealthy dose.
As a result, the agency urges parents to discard vinyl bibs only if they are ripped or otherwise deteriorated.
“There is a potential risk of lead exposure from babies swallowing pieces of cracked vinyl on used bibs,” the agency said in a statement, after being presented with the test results on the Toys “R” Us bibs.
But agency officials have not pushed for a recall of lead-contaminated bibs, including a brand sold earlier this year at Wal-Mart Stores, which the Center for Environmental Health also identified. Wal-Mart removed the bibs from its store shelves nationwide, but in Illinois, where 60,000 of the bibs had been sold, a strict lead law required their recall.
The bibs were imported for Toys “R” Us by Hamco Baby Products, the same company that made the bibs for Wal-Mart. The bibs will be retested, Ms. Waugh, the Toys “R” Us spokeswoman, said.
Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us are jointly controlled by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and Vornado Realty Trust. Hamco is a unit of Crown Crafts.
The agency’s approach has drawn criticism from some children’s advocates, and local and state health officials.
“All lead is bad lead,” said Patrick MacRoy, director of the Chicago lead poisoning prevention program. “Why should we allow any lead to be in there?”
The lead tests done for the Center for Environmental Health, conducted by the National Food Laboratory in Dublin, Calif., found levels as high as 1,800 parts per million in the Toys “R” Us bibs — three times the amount allowed in lead paint.
The tests of the Toys “R” Us bibs conducted in July for The New York Times by the same lab found similar results.
A separate test by Bureau Veritas, a testing lab in Buffalo, found little lead in the clear plastic pocket of the bib, but said that the lead in the colorful part of the bib was at levels high enough that minute amounts could transfer to a baby’s fingers.
A third lab, STAT Analysis of Chicago, found extremely low or not detectable levels both of total lead and of what is called “accessible” lead, or the lead a child could ingest by sucking or chewing on the bib.
Federal officials, when testing bibs, do three kinds of tests — one by checking the total amount of lead using solvents; another by rubbing the vinyl with a swab and testing the swab for lead; and a third by soaking the bib in a salty solution and testing the solution for lead.
These tests, on bibs collected from retailers nationwide this year, did at times find low levels of lead. But the C.P.S.C. concluded that even if infants had the bibs in their mouths all day, not enough lead would leach into their blood system to cause harm.
Based on these results, the agency concluded that the bibs did not present a hazard as long as they were not deteriorated.
But Mr. MacRoy, other health officials and children’s advocates argue that the C.P.S.C. uses an antiquated standard for what level of lead in a child’s blood stream represents a hazard. When combined with lead from other sources, including perhaps lead-based paint in an old house or lead-contaminated jewelry, the bibs could still result in poisoning or neurological damage in a child.
As a result, Ms. Cox of the California environmental group, among others, has urged parents to stop buying bibs that have even modest levels of lead.
Industry officials said that even if the lead was not at hazardous levels, they wanted to eliminate it. “We would like it not to be happening,” said Allen Blakey, a spokesman for the Vinyl Institute, a trade association.
Lead ends up in vinyl — otherwise known as polyvinyl chloride or PVC — from one of three primary sources. It is sometimes added as an inexpensive stabilizer; it can come from pigments used to add color; or it can come from recycled vinyl, which may have had lead in it from its earlier use, industry officials said.
Legislation proposed last year in Congress would ban more than trace levels of lead in any product intended for children under 6, similar to the Illinois law.
Given problems with lead found in vinyl, some companies are moving to replace it with other raw materials that they can be assured are lead-safe.
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