| As the main UN organ responsible for maintaining international peace and security, the UN Security Council has had this matter formally on its agenda since 1999. What has it done about the situation? It has established a "name and shame" list of groups using child soldiers and actively victimizing children. Those who abduct, abuse and brutalize children in order to use them as killers are supposed to be "shamed" by having their groups named in a UN document. The Council met last week to expand the list. Other choice bits of UN madness include the following: Disarmament Conference: On 1 July, Ambassador So Se Pyong of North Korea took over the rotating chairmanship of the Geneva-based Disarmament Conference, the world's only multilateral body to negotiate arms control. Most countries ignored the absurdity of the situation but the Canadians, earnest as ever, declared they would boycott the body till his six month term is over. ECOSOC: July is when the world's diplomats gather for the annual meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the main coordinating organ of the UN System. It is when the world is hit with a ton of new reports, estimates and projections. Among the notable (if not entirely laudable) efforts this year are the following: World Economic Survey: Produced by the central secretariat of the UN in New York, this 280-page report calls for the greening of the world economy at the cost of $72 trillion over the next 40 years. This is a pipedream; the total GDP of the United States is $14.6 trillion. Millennium Development Goals: A 72-page report from the UN tells about progress towards the goal (set by world leaders in 2000), of halving world poverty by 2015. China and India have made significant progress because of their rapid economic growth. The report projects China to have only 5 percent of its 1.4 billion people living in poverty in 2015. India, with a matching population, will have 22 percent below the poverty line then; it used to be 51 per cent in 1990. Sub-Saharan Africa has made very slow progress; 58 percent of its people lived in poverty in 1990; by 2005 that had fallen only to 51 per cent. If the world economy should sink into the cataclysmic crisis that now seems to be building in the financial systems of Europe and China, all projections will have to be radically recalculated. African Development: The UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), note that Africa accounts only for 1 per cent of global manufacturing and recommend increasing that share. As is historically true of UN reports, UNIDO and UNCTAD do not look at any of the real reasons for Africa’s miserable economic performance – instability, war and corruption, all part of the continued and scandalous neo-colonial exploitation of the continent. |
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Midsummer Madness at the UN
Over the last decade an estimated 2 million children have been killed in armed conflicts and 6 million left disabled. Around 300,000 children now serve as soldiers. Little girls fare the worst. Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, reported last month that "sexual violence is becoming systemic and across the world, classrooms and the kids sitting in them are increasingly seen as legitimate targets."
UN Reform: Efforts to improve the performance of the United Nations were briefly energized after the Obama administration signalled its intention to seriously engage in multilateral diplomacy, but they are now back to normal. As in a Noh drama, the action is glue-like, the plot incomprehensible, and the whole thing of interest only to afficianados. There is need for a radical change of focus and approach, but UN member States are so reluctant to give up the devil they know that it is impossible to entertain the slightest hope of real change. (For what is necessary to bring about real UN reform see my Discussion Paper; this is a topic on which we need to get a global conversation going.)
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Indian Press - 1: the colonial era
Readers today will have a hard time imagining the lengths to which the British went to keep Indians unaware of their political situation.
At a time when the only journalists at work in India were a handful of Englishmen putting out weekly 8-pagers read by a few hundred people, Warren Hastings issued regulations banning the publication of any news of India-related discussions in Britain. That included discussions in the Court of Directors of the East India Company and the British parliament.
Editors were not to carry “alarmist” reports likely to arouse “suspicion” in the local population, comment on the local administration, or print anything about "private scandals" and public conduct of Company officials that would cause dissension in society. (British journalists in India then were generally disreputable figures, as interested as they are now in the sexual excesses of others.) Nor could they carry extracts from the Press in Europe that broke these rules. An official censor reviewed all material before publication. The situation eased somewhat after a British court ruled that the censor rather than the editor should be held responsible for libel, but Company officials continued to review all material. The punishment for offending them was deportation.
The first Indian to venture into this highly sensitive area was Gangadhar Bhattacharjee, a teacher in Calcutta who in 1816 began publishing the weekly Bengal Gazette. He was associated with Ram Mohun Roy’s Atmiya Sabha and the publication lasted only a year.
During this period, Christian missionaries from the nearby Dutch territory of Serampore were increasingly active journalists, putting out Samachar Darpan in Bengali and Friend of India in English from 1818.
In response, Bhowani Charan Banerji began publication in December 1821 of Sambaud Kaumudi, a weekly in Bengali; it was taken over the next year by Raja Ram Mohun Roy, who also began to issue the weekly Mirat ul Ukhbar in Persian and the less frequent Brahmunical Magazine intended to counter missionary propaganda. Meanwhile Banerji, who was a more orthodox Hindu than Roy, came out with Chandrika Samachar.
In 1822, the Bombay Samachar began publication in Gujarati. All these publications had small circulations of between 100 and 200, but it worried the officials of the regime enough to try and encourage the European-controlled Press: the East India Company subscribed to 100 copies of Friend of India and allowed it cut-rate mailing privileges.
A hawkish faction of Company officials was not satisfied with such indirect means to air their views, and in 1822, eight of them joined in launching John Bull in the East. Even that was considered inadequate, and when one of the eight assumed the top slot in the Company’s local hierarchy he required that all publishers should be licensed by the regime, a move aimed especially at Indian editors and publishers who could not be deported.
That led Ram Mohun Roy to stop publication of his Persian weekly, the one most often criticized by officials. He explained that presenting an affidavit in open court as required by the new regulations was “very mean and censurable.” Further, “after incurring the disrepute of soliciting and suffering the dishonour of making the affidavit, the constant apprehension of the license being recalled” would “disgrace the person in the eyes of the world … and create such anxiety as entirely to destroy one’s peace of mind.”
Thomas Munro, a leading figure in Calcutta presented the British view of the matter: “A free Press and the domination of strangers are things which are quite incompatible. … If we, for the sole benefit of a few European editors of newspapers, permit a licentious Press to undermine among the natives all respect for the European character and authority, we shall scatter the seeds of discontent among our native troops and never be secure from insurrection.”
After Roy’s exit from the editorial scene Dwaraknath Tagore came on stage, launching the Bengal Herald in English and the Banga Dhoot in Bengali. Another Tagore – Prassana Kumar – published the Reformer.
In Bombay, Bal Shastri Jambhekar began issuing a group of publications between 1832 and 1944 ranging from a weekly to a monthly, the most prominent of which were the weekly Prabhakar and monthly Upadesha Chandrika (the latter a response to the missionary publication Dyanodaya). In Madras, the Company funded several small publications, but the most successful ones continued to be issued by missionaries.
All these licensed Indian publications were mute about the racially charged uprising of 1857, but "manuscript newspapers" proliferated. One estimate at the time said that that the “king of Awadh” was paying 3,194 rupees to 65 news writers.
British owned newspapers were openly racist and intemperately anti-Indian during the uprising. In promulgating the Control of the Press Act of 1857 Charles Canning (whose tenure as the Company’s chief honcho in India straddled the war years) complimented the English Press for its loyalty and support; the constraints in the new law, he assured its editors, were meant for their Indian counterparts (including the manuscript Press).
Indian-owned papers were generally ill financed and made do with the cheapest of everything: the machinery used to found The Amrita Bazaar Patrika was bought for 32 rupees, and it was operated by the editor himself.
The 1878 Vernacular Press Act (modeled on the Irish Coercion Act) sought to exploit the financial weakness of Indian media by requiring publishers to post bonds that would be forfeit if they should be judged seditious. The Act also provided for the confiscation of printing machinery, paper and other materials, allowed the search of any media establishment, and other summary action, all without going to court. In Ireland publications subjected to such high-handed treatment had the right to sue for damages; in India that right was reduced to the right to appeal to the Viceroy’s Council – in other words, to the same officials responsible for the Act.
The first result of the new law was to silence one of the most strident Bengali voices, Motilal Ghose’s Amrita Bazaar Patrika, but not the way the British expected. Convinced that he was a particular target of the Act and would not long survive under it, Ghose switched his paper overnight from Bengali to English, avoiding its jurisdiction altogether. Other Bengali papers were unable to avoid the law, which was implemented on the basis of material they had published in the past. The most prominent victim was Shome Prakash which closed after it was served with a notice.
The Vernacular Press Act must have seemed to the emerging Indian intelligentsia to mark the depth of their defeat and helplessness under foreign rule. However, in retrospect that was when they lit the nationalist fuse. The effort to muzzle the expression of Indian opinion occurred under the viceroyalty of Robert Edward Lytton, one of the two most hated British regents in India (the other was George Curzon at the turn of the century).
Lytton affected an air of distant hauteur towards all Indians and with studied inhumanity organized amidst the worst famine of his time an obscenely gluttonous Durbar at Delhi to celebrate Victoria declaring herself “Empress of India.” He also spent a great deal of money on what he grandiloquently called his “forward policy” on Afghanistan, a foolish and futile bid to bribe and intimidate its Emir into becoming a British vassal – after a war had failed to do it. The enormous cost of these follies he passed on to Indians by raising the Salt Tax, the most painfully regressive of all British imposts, for it lay most heavily on the poorest people.
It was in that context that Indian editors took the momentous decision to form the Native Press Association. It shaped a new sense of solidarity among Indian editors, publishers and readers opposing the Vernacular Press Act, and laid the foundation for a pan-Indian political awareness. These developments were unplanned, but not altogether fortuitous; the need to promote a common Indian consciousness and counter British propaganda had become clear to a growing number of people. In Lahore, Dayal Singh Majithia founded The Tribune to balance the The Civil and Military Gazette, where Rudyard Kipling cut his teeth as imperial propagandist.
More to come
At a time when the only journalists at work in India were a handful of Englishmen putting out weekly 8-pagers read by a few hundred people, Warren Hastings issued regulations banning the publication of any news of India-related discussions in Britain. That included discussions in the Court of Directors of the East India Company and the British parliament.
Editors were not to carry “alarmist” reports likely to arouse “suspicion” in the local population, comment on the local administration, or print anything about "private scandals" and public conduct of Company officials that would cause dissension in society. (British journalists in India then were generally disreputable figures, as interested as they are now in the sexual excesses of others.) Nor could they carry extracts from the Press in Europe that broke these rules. An official censor reviewed all material before publication. The situation eased somewhat after a British court ruled that the censor rather than the editor should be held responsible for libel, but Company officials continued to review all material. The punishment for offending them was deportation.
The first Indian to venture into this highly sensitive area was Gangadhar Bhattacharjee, a teacher in Calcutta who in 1816 began publishing the weekly Bengal Gazette. He was associated with Ram Mohun Roy’s Atmiya Sabha and the publication lasted only a year.
During this period, Christian missionaries from the nearby Dutch territory of Serampore were increasingly active journalists, putting out Samachar Darpan in Bengali and Friend of India in English from 1818.
In response, Bhowani Charan Banerji began publication in December 1821 of Sambaud Kaumudi, a weekly in Bengali; it was taken over the next year by Raja Ram Mohun Roy, who also began to issue the weekly Mirat ul Ukhbar in Persian and the less frequent Brahmunical Magazine intended to counter missionary propaganda. Meanwhile Banerji, who was a more orthodox Hindu than Roy, came out with Chandrika Samachar.
In 1822, the Bombay Samachar began publication in Gujarati. All these publications had small circulations of between 100 and 200, but it worried the officials of the regime enough to try and encourage the European-controlled Press: the East India Company subscribed to 100 copies of Friend of India and allowed it cut-rate mailing privileges.
A hawkish faction of Company officials was not satisfied with such indirect means to air their views, and in 1822, eight of them joined in launching John Bull in the East. Even that was considered inadequate, and when one of the eight assumed the top slot in the Company’s local hierarchy he required that all publishers should be licensed by the regime, a move aimed especially at Indian editors and publishers who could not be deported.
That led Ram Mohun Roy to stop publication of his Persian weekly, the one most often criticized by officials. He explained that presenting an affidavit in open court as required by the new regulations was “very mean and censurable.” Further, “after incurring the disrepute of soliciting and suffering the dishonour of making the affidavit, the constant apprehension of the license being recalled” would “disgrace the person in the eyes of the world … and create such anxiety as entirely to destroy one’s peace of mind.”
Thomas Munro, a leading figure in Calcutta presented the British view of the matter: “A free Press and the domination of strangers are things which are quite incompatible. … If we, for the sole benefit of a few European editors of newspapers, permit a licentious Press to undermine among the natives all respect for the European character and authority, we shall scatter the seeds of discontent among our native troops and never be secure from insurrection.”
After Roy’s exit from the editorial scene Dwaraknath Tagore came on stage, launching the Bengal Herald in English and the Banga Dhoot in Bengali. Another Tagore – Prassana Kumar – published the Reformer.
In Bombay, Bal Shastri Jambhekar began issuing a group of publications between 1832 and 1944 ranging from a weekly to a monthly, the most prominent of which were the weekly Prabhakar and monthly Upadesha Chandrika (the latter a response to the missionary publication Dyanodaya). In Madras, the Company funded several small publications, but the most successful ones continued to be issued by missionaries.
All these licensed Indian publications were mute about the racially charged uprising of 1857, but "manuscript newspapers" proliferated. One estimate at the time said that that the “king of Awadh” was paying 3,194 rupees to 65 news writers.
British owned newspapers were openly racist and intemperately anti-Indian during the uprising. In promulgating the Control of the Press Act of 1857 Charles Canning (whose tenure as the Company’s chief honcho in India straddled the war years) complimented the English Press for its loyalty and support; the constraints in the new law, he assured its editors, were meant for their Indian counterparts (including the manuscript Press).
Indian-owned papers were generally ill financed and made do with the cheapest of everything: the machinery used to found The Amrita Bazaar Patrika was bought for 32 rupees, and it was operated by the editor himself.
The 1878 Vernacular Press Act (modeled on the Irish Coercion Act) sought to exploit the financial weakness of Indian media by requiring publishers to post bonds that would be forfeit if they should be judged seditious. The Act also provided for the confiscation of printing machinery, paper and other materials, allowed the search of any media establishment, and other summary action, all without going to court. In Ireland publications subjected to such high-handed treatment had the right to sue for damages; in India that right was reduced to the right to appeal to the Viceroy’s Council – in other words, to the same officials responsible for the Act.
The first result of the new law was to silence one of the most strident Bengali voices, Motilal Ghose’s Amrita Bazaar Patrika, but not the way the British expected. Convinced that he was a particular target of the Act and would not long survive under it, Ghose switched his paper overnight from Bengali to English, avoiding its jurisdiction altogether. Other Bengali papers were unable to avoid the law, which was implemented on the basis of material they had published in the past. The most prominent victim was Shome Prakash which closed after it was served with a notice.
The Vernacular Press Act must have seemed to the emerging Indian intelligentsia to mark the depth of their defeat and helplessness under foreign rule. However, in retrospect that was when they lit the nationalist fuse. The effort to muzzle the expression of Indian opinion occurred under the viceroyalty of Robert Edward Lytton, one of the two most hated British regents in India (the other was George Curzon at the turn of the century).
Lytton affected an air of distant hauteur towards all Indians and with studied inhumanity organized amidst the worst famine of his time an obscenely gluttonous Durbar at Delhi to celebrate Victoria declaring herself “Empress of India.” He also spent a great deal of money on what he grandiloquently called his “forward policy” on Afghanistan, a foolish and futile bid to bribe and intimidate its Emir into becoming a British vassal – after a war had failed to do it. The enormous cost of these follies he passed on to Indians by raising the Salt Tax, the most painfully regressive of all British imposts, for it lay most heavily on the poorest people.
It was in that context that Indian editors took the momentous decision to form the Native Press Association. It shaped a new sense of solidarity among Indian editors, publishers and readers opposing the Vernacular Press Act, and laid the foundation for a pan-Indian political awareness. These developments were unplanned, but not altogether fortuitous; the need to promote a common Indian consciousness and counter British propaganda had become clear to a growing number of people. In Lahore, Dayal Singh Majithia founded The Tribune to balance the The Civil and Military Gazette, where Rudyard Kipling cut his teeth as imperial propagandist.
More to come
Friday, July 8, 2011
Corruption in India - 5
The issue of “black money” is one of the focal points of the current debate about corruption in India but neither the discussion nor the proposals to deal with it show any understanding of the phenomenon. This is not surprising, for corporate mass media have done little to illuminate the issue. A brief history lesson is necessary to show its real nature and magnitude.
The term itself is historically recent. It came into popular usage only after the emergence of the global black market in the 1960s, itself the result of European colonial Powers adjusting to the loss of their empires. Britain led the way, for it had several decades of relevant experience: after the first Opium Convention of 1912 banned the lucrative drug trade into China (an American initiative foisted on the reluctant Europeans), the British simply took the whole business underground. Its corporations became drug runners and its banks became adept at laundering the huge revenues of the trade.
When decolonization transformed Africa, Asia and the Caribbean in the decades after World War II, the European colonial Powers, again led by the British, did two things. One was to ensure remote control of the territories they gave up, either by transferring power to a co-opted native group or by arranging fratricidal conflicts that allowed them to manipulate the “newly independent” countries. Secondly, they put in place a new institutional support structure for a system of transnational crime that replaced colonialism.
It consisted of over a million shell companies (corporations with unidentifiable owners and assets), and nearly 80 “tax havens” or “offshore financial centres.” Most of this globally distributed system consisted of bits and pieces of former European empires. There were two primary hubs to the system, perennially neutral and passive Switzerland with its long tradition of sheltering criminals and their assets, and The City (financial centre) of London, continuing its actively predatory policies.
The system now receives and manages a mindboggling amount of hot money. Washington-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) reported in 2009 that developing countries were losing between $858 and $1.06 trillion annually. In 2005 London-based Tax Justice Network (TJN) estimated that the world’s High Net-Worth Individuals held some $11.5 trillion in offshore tax havens. In 2010 the International Monetary Fund estimated that just the “small financial centres” (i.e. excluding Switzerland and London), held some $18 trillion in secret assets. The overall size of the underground economy is anyone’s guess. The United Nations estimated money laundering in 2010 at two to five per cent of global GDP: $800 billion to $2 trillion. The base from which the laundering takes place must necessarily be much more.
These criminal flows have become indistinguishable from the aboveground economy which processes electronically over $1.9 trillion per day, or nearly as much as the total annual amount of U.S. exports and imports. Much of the illicit flow is from tax havens into the aboveground economy; the available estimates do not include assets moved in the form of cash and other untraceable items, but even incomplete, they are impressive. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported in its 2010 World Investment Report that the flow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Hong Kong in 2009 was more ($52.2 billion) than those of mainland China ($48 billion). Tiny British Virgin Islands had more FDI ($26 billion) than all of oil-rich West Asia ($23 billion) or the “Tiger” economies of South-East Asia ($21 billion). India’s FDI in 2009 was $14.8 billion.
In terms of FDI stock (cumulative total), Hong Kong has $834 billion and the British Virgin Islands $224.8 billion, adding up to more than half the FDI stock of the United States and dwarfing China’s $229 billion and India’s $77 billion. States have been very half-hearted in coming to grips with money laundering; there is no mandatory international framework of rules and regulations, and no initiative to ban shell companies or tax havens. The main vehicle for preventive action is a Financial Action Task Force (FATF) which has issued 40 non-binding guidelines.
Against this background, it is obvious that unilateral action by India cannot hope to bring black money home. The problem is not internal to India; it is global.
However, public discussion of the issue should help focus attention on the fact that we cannot continue to sleepwalk into “development” as currently envisaged. The problem is not only that corporate globalization cannot ensure prosperity for all without destroying the planetary environment. It is also a vast engine of corruption deeply inimical to democracy.
If we are to continue the Indian renaissance that began four centuries ago with Kabir and Guru Nanak and found its slow but sure-footed way to Gandhi, we will have to find an alternative means of generating wealth consonant with our traditions and under democratic control.
The term itself is historically recent. It came into popular usage only after the emergence of the global black market in the 1960s, itself the result of European colonial Powers adjusting to the loss of their empires. Britain led the way, for it had several decades of relevant experience: after the first Opium Convention of 1912 banned the lucrative drug trade into China (an American initiative foisted on the reluctant Europeans), the British simply took the whole business underground. Its corporations became drug runners and its banks became adept at laundering the huge revenues of the trade.
When decolonization transformed Africa, Asia and the Caribbean in the decades after World War II, the European colonial Powers, again led by the British, did two things. One was to ensure remote control of the territories they gave up, either by transferring power to a co-opted native group or by arranging fratricidal conflicts that allowed them to manipulate the “newly independent” countries. Secondly, they put in place a new institutional support structure for a system of transnational crime that replaced colonialism.
It consisted of over a million shell companies (corporations with unidentifiable owners and assets), and nearly 80 “tax havens” or “offshore financial centres.” Most of this globally distributed system consisted of bits and pieces of former European empires. There were two primary hubs to the system, perennially neutral and passive Switzerland with its long tradition of sheltering criminals and their assets, and The City (financial centre) of London, continuing its actively predatory policies.
The system now receives and manages a mindboggling amount of hot money. Washington-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) reported in 2009 that developing countries were losing between $858 and $1.06 trillion annually. In 2005 London-based Tax Justice Network (TJN) estimated that the world’s High Net-Worth Individuals held some $11.5 trillion in offshore tax havens. In 2010 the International Monetary Fund estimated that just the “small financial centres” (i.e. excluding Switzerland and London), held some $18 trillion in secret assets. The overall size of the underground economy is anyone’s guess. The United Nations estimated money laundering in 2010 at two to five per cent of global GDP: $800 billion to $2 trillion. The base from which the laundering takes place must necessarily be much more.
These criminal flows have become indistinguishable from the aboveground economy which processes electronically over $1.9 trillion per day, or nearly as much as the total annual amount of U.S. exports and imports. Much of the illicit flow is from tax havens into the aboveground economy; the available estimates do not include assets moved in the form of cash and other untraceable items, but even incomplete, they are impressive. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported in its 2010 World Investment Report that the flow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Hong Kong in 2009 was more ($52.2 billion) than those of mainland China ($48 billion). Tiny British Virgin Islands had more FDI ($26 billion) than all of oil-rich West Asia ($23 billion) or the “Tiger” economies of South-East Asia ($21 billion). India’s FDI in 2009 was $14.8 billion.
In terms of FDI stock (cumulative total), Hong Kong has $834 billion and the British Virgin Islands $224.8 billion, adding up to more than half the FDI stock of the United States and dwarfing China’s $229 billion and India’s $77 billion. States have been very half-hearted in coming to grips with money laundering; there is no mandatory international framework of rules and regulations, and no initiative to ban shell companies or tax havens. The main vehicle for preventive action is a Financial Action Task Force (FATF) which has issued 40 non-binding guidelines.
Against this background, it is obvious that unilateral action by India cannot hope to bring black money home. The problem is not internal to India; it is global.
However, public discussion of the issue should help focus attention on the fact that we cannot continue to sleepwalk into “development” as currently envisaged. The problem is not only that corporate globalization cannot ensure prosperity for all without destroying the planetary environment. It is also a vast engine of corruption deeply inimical to democracy.
If we are to continue the Indian renaissance that began four centuries ago with Kabir and Guru Nanak and found its slow but sure-footed way to Gandhi, we will have to find an alternative means of generating wealth consonant with our traditions and under democratic control.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Af-Pak Plot Thickening into War
The scenario projected in my post on "Ilyas Kashmirir: The Trend" (5 June 2011) is playing out to the letter. While militant pressure grows in Pakistan's tribal frontier, Islamabad has developed a new sincerity in attacking the problem of terrorism. It even discovered that a serving Brigadier was providing aid and comfort to terrorist organizations.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have gone south rapidly. On 6 July Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani called Afghan President Hamid Karzai to express “serious concern” about the activities of militants on their border. That followed several days of intense Pakistani rocket attacks across the border, about which Afghanistan lodged a formal complaint.
Pakistani officials told reporters that Gilani's call followed what they described as an attack on the north-western Upper Dir region by "hundreds of militants" and clashes with local tribesmen and soldiers. Militants also attacked Pakistani Army forces in the town of Miran Shah.
In a statement issued on the evening of the 6th, Gilani's office said the Pakistani army was exercising the “utmost restraint, despite repeated cross border incursions by the militants." It urged that the situation be “defused quickly” and offered to send representatives to a meeting on how the two countries could thwart the militants.
Meanwhile, Britain has moved to strengthen its representation in Kabul by having UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appoint British diplomat Michael Keating as Deputy to the UN's Special Representative there. Since 2008 the British have been on the diplomatic backfoot in Kabul because two of its senior officials working for multilateral agencies were summarily expelled by President Karzai, who also shot down the proposed appointment of Paddy Ashdown, a former MI-6 agent turned politician, to a proposed new post combining UN, EU and NATO representation (see post of 10 February 2008: "Why Karzai Nixed Paddy Ashdown").
On 6 July British Chief of the Defence Staff General David Richards was in Islamabad for the first meeting of an "Enhanced Strategic Dialogue" with Pakistan that was set up during Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to the country in April. Speaking to reporters about the event, Pakistan's new Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, the beauteous Hina Rabbani Khar, recalled President Zardari’s recent visit to Britain and expressed satisfaction at the excellent bilateral relations between the two countries She welcomed Cameron’s "support and solidarity" with Pakistan and Britain's positive and constructive role in the region.
In reality, Britain has played a deeply destructive role in Pakistan since creating the country as a proxy in South Asia when India gained independence in 1947. It has been the main architect of "Islamic terrorism," working through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (which it also created in dismantling the Ottoman Empire). As the central node of the global black market it created as the British Empire slipped away, London has also been the world's primary money laundering hub, with Hong Kong as the main portal servicing the criminally corrupt regime in China.
Among the most ominous developments is that Pakistan has brought Beijing firmly into the South Asian picture by giving it what looks like a military role in Occupied Kashmir. Beijing's incentive to cooperate is rooted in its fear that the economic armageddon it faces will dislodge Tibet from its colonial grip. All in all, it really looks as if the London-Islamabad-Beijing Axis is ready to put up a fight to protect overlapping national interests in drug trafficking, terrorism and tyranny.
For India, these developments have a positive aspect. Pakistan has moved the bulk of its troops to the Afghan border, and as Foreign Secretary Nirupama Sen found at the recent meeting with her counterpart in Islamabad, there seems to be a newly serious attitude to tackling terrorism in Pakistan. Looking farther ahead, that will not matter much if the Afghan-Pakistan scenario deteriorates into regional war.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have gone south rapidly. On 6 July Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani called Afghan President Hamid Karzai to express “serious concern” about the activities of militants on their border. That followed several days of intense Pakistani rocket attacks across the border, about which Afghanistan lodged a formal complaint.
Pakistani officials told reporters that Gilani's call followed what they described as an attack on the north-western Upper Dir region by "hundreds of militants" and clashes with local tribesmen and soldiers. Militants also attacked Pakistani Army forces in the town of Miran Shah.
In a statement issued on the evening of the 6th, Gilani's office said the Pakistani army was exercising the “utmost restraint, despite repeated cross border incursions by the militants." It urged that the situation be “defused quickly” and offered to send representatives to a meeting on how the two countries could thwart the militants.
Meanwhile, Britain has moved to strengthen its representation in Kabul by having UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appoint British diplomat Michael Keating as Deputy to the UN's Special Representative there. Since 2008 the British have been on the diplomatic backfoot in Kabul because two of its senior officials working for multilateral agencies were summarily expelled by President Karzai, who also shot down the proposed appointment of Paddy Ashdown, a former MI-6 agent turned politician, to a proposed new post combining UN, EU and NATO representation (see post of 10 February 2008: "Why Karzai Nixed Paddy Ashdown").
On 6 July British Chief of the Defence Staff General David Richards was in Islamabad for the first meeting of an "Enhanced Strategic Dialogue" with Pakistan that was set up during Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to the country in April. Speaking to reporters about the event, Pakistan's new Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, the beauteous Hina Rabbani Khar, recalled President Zardari’s recent visit to Britain and expressed satisfaction at the excellent bilateral relations between the two countries She welcomed Cameron’s "support and solidarity" with Pakistan and Britain's positive and constructive role in the region.
In reality, Britain has played a deeply destructive role in Pakistan since creating the country as a proxy in South Asia when India gained independence in 1947. It has been the main architect of "Islamic terrorism," working through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (which it also created in dismantling the Ottoman Empire). As the central node of the global black market it created as the British Empire slipped away, London has also been the world's primary money laundering hub, with Hong Kong as the main portal servicing the criminally corrupt regime in China.
Among the most ominous developments is that Pakistan has brought Beijing firmly into the South Asian picture by giving it what looks like a military role in Occupied Kashmir. Beijing's incentive to cooperate is rooted in its fear that the economic armageddon it faces will dislodge Tibet from its colonial grip. All in all, it really looks as if the London-Islamabad-Beijing Axis is ready to put up a fight to protect overlapping national interests in drug trafficking, terrorism and tyranny.
For India, these developments have a positive aspect. Pakistan has moved the bulk of its troops to the Afghan border, and as Foreign Secretary Nirupama Sen found at the recent meeting with her counterpart in Islamabad, there seems to be a newly serious attitude to tackling terrorism in Pakistan. Looking farther ahead, that will not matter much if the Afghan-Pakistan scenario deteriorates into regional war.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Corruption in India - 4
There is a tendency among elitist Westernized Indians to think of corruption as an obstacle to the coming of the corporate Promised Land where “People Like Us (PLU)” enjoy the benefits of the free market untroubled by government gnats.
There seems to be no awareness that the joint-stock corporation has been the greatest fount of corruption in human history.
Since 1600, when a group of merchants in London founded the first one, the East India Company, corporations have been the primary vehicles of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the production of increasingly deadly weaponry used to kill some 250 million people in the wars of the 20th Century. They have poisoned air, land and water, promoted the widespread use of carcinogens, and trafficked in opiate drugs that ruined the lives of millions of people, mostly young. (“Heroin” was a Bayer trademarked drug promoted as a treatment for menstrual cramp and colic in babies.) The giant “scams” that have kept us entertained in India over the last few years, from the Satyam boondoggle to the 2-G auction shell game, have all centered on corporate interests.
The reasons for the inherent tendency of corporations to generate corruption are set out in Adam Smith’s classic work on the operation of free markets, The Wealth of Nations. Published in 1776, the year of the American Revolution, it noted two reasons.
One was the corporate tendency to establish selfish monopolies regardless of the cost to society. In making that point, Smith pointed out how the enormous economic potential of the Americas and Asia had, by the “savage injustice of the Europeans” been rendered “ruinous and destructive,” how “all the benefits which could have resulted” from free trade had “been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes” visited on the native populations. Only the imperial monopolists profited from such policy; the British people certainly did not, for they not only paid for the products of the colonies but bore “the whole expense of maintaining and defending the empire.” Just the interest on the debt incurred by the government to retain the American colonies by force, Smith argued, was “greater than the whole extraordinary profit, which it ever could be pretended, was made by the monopoly of the colony trade.”
The second reason was that the ease with which investors could buy and sell stock and their limited exposure to the liabilities of the company resulted in its directors having command of very large sums of money. Smith held out the example of the South Sea Company, established to carry on the slave trade. Its trading stock at one point amounted to over £33,800,000, some three times the entire capital of the Bank of England, which at the time was £10,780,000. With “an immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors” the company had been run into the ground by the “folly, negligence, and profusion” of its managers and the “knavery and extravagance … the profusion and depredations” of their “factors and agents; some of whom are said to have acquired great fortunes.”
Such profligate corruption was the rule, not the exception. The “managers of other people’s money” did not exercise “the same anxious vigilance” with which private partnerships “frequently watch over their own,” Smith wrote. “Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.” He cited as another example the East India Company, also a behemoth. In telling its story, Smith noted that after the acquisition of Bengal in 1757 the Company had an income of over £3 million a year (about £3 billion now). Despite those “splendid earnings” it “was sunk in debt” by 1773, and had to be bailed out with a government loan. Its story of incompetence, greed and arrogance continued long after Smith's time; it culminated in precipitating the Indian revolt of 1857, a disaster too large even for the profiteers of London to ignore, who finally put it out of business.
On average, over the 400 years that joint-stock corporations have been around, they have been involved in major financial and/or moral scandals once every two years. Smith listed 55 for the first 165 years, and they have grown in frequency as corporations have grown into transnational giants outside the control of any government.
Why haven't governments done more to control them? For one simple reason: the corporation is the most efficient form of wealth creation yet invented. It allows a small group of people to package capital, technology and labour to profit from available resources. This is the reason a country like India or China, with huge and growing populations, cannot afford to turn away from the corporate economy. But we might be approaching a situation where the choice is between growing rich faster and national self-destruction.
To see why, we have to look at a factor that Smith did not note in his analysis of the negative aspects of corporations: the concept of “limited liability.” It had originated in the corporate guilds of medieval Europe in which each individual was responsible only for his own business. With the joint-stock company, that limitation of liability took on an altogether new and sinister meaning. Limited financial liability became moral impunity.
That change occurred initially as corporations dealt with distant lands and “lesser breeds without the law,” but with the Industrial Revolution, European society too became a victim. Investors who had remained untroubled by the miseries of far off peoples were equally unperturbed as workers, including children, were subjected to inhuman conditions in mines and factories; they even remained quiescent as industries poisoned the air, water and land around them.
Today, as that assault on Nature expands in scope and seriousness, as we watch the atmosphere heat up and the polar ice caps melt, as species go extinct at a rate faster than at any time since the dinosaurs disappeared, investors still continue pouring money into "development."
Although social activists and trade unions have managed over four centuries to improve working conditions gradually and put in place some environmental standards, the stockholder tendency to ignore everything but the bottom line has only grown stronger through the 20th century.
As corporations grew into gigantic transnational concerns, they became ever less sensitive to ethical, social and environmental considerations. They took control of the mass media and clothed themselves in a “free market” theology founded on the preposterous claim that The Wealth of Nations commanded the pure pursuit of profit in disregard of the social good. The separation is actually a legacy of the time when the emerging entrepreneurial class of Europe had to fend off feudal authorities; it has stayed in place long after the roles reversed and governments became instruments of the corporate elite.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s when corporations themselves felt the need for government help, a distinction was made between “macroeconomics” and the “microeconomics.” Governments were accorded a continuing macroeconomic “pump priming” role, managing the money supply, keeping a weather eye on business cycles and ensuring a policy framework supportive of business; but they were not to interfere with the running of individual enterprises.
The net result of all this has been the emergence of a global corporate elite that effectively controls what governments can and cannot do. The power of sovereignty thus constrained has been further hobbled by the post-Cold War dispensation of the World Trade Organization that promoted a wide range of corporate freedoms masquerading as “free trade” between hugely unequal participants.
Developing countries have fought a rear-guard action to keep themselves from the tender mercies of giant corporations that have revenues dwarfing the GDP of many of them. India has been one of the leaders of that struggle, but as its own corporations buy into the global network, there are privileged and powerful people within its borders now arguing for seamless integration into a system that is killing the planet. The voices in opposition are a jangle of confused interests ranging from doctrinaire Marxists to tree-hugging environmentalists and farmers desperately fighting to hold onto their land.
How that situation will play out depends very much on how India fares in the current global crisis, now building to an unpredictable climax. (China is already completely at the mercy of foreign corporations and cannot be a factor; other countries do not have the necessary heft to make a difference.) And how India fares will be decided by the efficacy with which we deal with the massive corruptions rooted in the immoral pursuit of corporate interests.
The Lokpal debate is thus actually about much more than the criminal malfeasance of those in power. It brings into focus a set of issues that will determine how creatively India engages with the world, and thus the future of our civilization.
More on that in Part – 5.
There seems to be no awareness that the joint-stock corporation has been the greatest fount of corruption in human history.
Since 1600, when a group of merchants in London founded the first one, the East India Company, corporations have been the primary vehicles of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the production of increasingly deadly weaponry used to kill some 250 million people in the wars of the 20th Century. They have poisoned air, land and water, promoted the widespread use of carcinogens, and trafficked in opiate drugs that ruined the lives of millions of people, mostly young. (“Heroin” was a Bayer trademarked drug promoted as a treatment for menstrual cramp and colic in babies.) The giant “scams” that have kept us entertained in India over the last few years, from the Satyam boondoggle to the 2-G auction shell game, have all centered on corporate interests.
The reasons for the inherent tendency of corporations to generate corruption are set out in Adam Smith’s classic work on the operation of free markets, The Wealth of Nations. Published in 1776, the year of the American Revolution, it noted two reasons.
One was the corporate tendency to establish selfish monopolies regardless of the cost to society. In making that point, Smith pointed out how the enormous economic potential of the Americas and Asia had, by the “savage injustice of the Europeans” been rendered “ruinous and destructive,” how “all the benefits which could have resulted” from free trade had “been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes” visited on the native populations. Only the imperial monopolists profited from such policy; the British people certainly did not, for they not only paid for the products of the colonies but bore “the whole expense of maintaining and defending the empire.” Just the interest on the debt incurred by the government to retain the American colonies by force, Smith argued, was “greater than the whole extraordinary profit, which it ever could be pretended, was made by the monopoly of the colony trade.”
The second reason was that the ease with which investors could buy and sell stock and their limited exposure to the liabilities of the company resulted in its directors having command of very large sums of money. Smith held out the example of the South Sea Company, established to carry on the slave trade. Its trading stock at one point amounted to over £33,800,000, some three times the entire capital of the Bank of England, which at the time was £10,780,000. With “an immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors” the company had been run into the ground by the “folly, negligence, and profusion” of its managers and the “knavery and extravagance … the profusion and depredations” of their “factors and agents; some of whom are said to have acquired great fortunes.”
Such profligate corruption was the rule, not the exception. The “managers of other people’s money” did not exercise “the same anxious vigilance” with which private partnerships “frequently watch over their own,” Smith wrote. “Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.” He cited as another example the East India Company, also a behemoth. In telling its story, Smith noted that after the acquisition of Bengal in 1757 the Company had an income of over £3 million a year (about £3 billion now). Despite those “splendid earnings” it “was sunk in debt” by 1773, and had to be bailed out with a government loan. Its story of incompetence, greed and arrogance continued long after Smith's time; it culminated in precipitating the Indian revolt of 1857, a disaster too large even for the profiteers of London to ignore, who finally put it out of business.
On average, over the 400 years that joint-stock corporations have been around, they have been involved in major financial and/or moral scandals once every two years. Smith listed 55 for the first 165 years, and they have grown in frequency as corporations have grown into transnational giants outside the control of any government.
Why haven't governments done more to control them? For one simple reason: the corporation is the most efficient form of wealth creation yet invented. It allows a small group of people to package capital, technology and labour to profit from available resources. This is the reason a country like India or China, with huge and growing populations, cannot afford to turn away from the corporate economy. But we might be approaching a situation where the choice is between growing rich faster and national self-destruction.
To see why, we have to look at a factor that Smith did not note in his analysis of the negative aspects of corporations: the concept of “limited liability.” It had originated in the corporate guilds of medieval Europe in which each individual was responsible only for his own business. With the joint-stock company, that limitation of liability took on an altogether new and sinister meaning. Limited financial liability became moral impunity.
That change occurred initially as corporations dealt with distant lands and “lesser breeds without the law,” but with the Industrial Revolution, European society too became a victim. Investors who had remained untroubled by the miseries of far off peoples were equally unperturbed as workers, including children, were subjected to inhuman conditions in mines and factories; they even remained quiescent as industries poisoned the air, water and land around them.
Today, as that assault on Nature expands in scope and seriousness, as we watch the atmosphere heat up and the polar ice caps melt, as species go extinct at a rate faster than at any time since the dinosaurs disappeared, investors still continue pouring money into "development."
Although social activists and trade unions have managed over four centuries to improve working conditions gradually and put in place some environmental standards, the stockholder tendency to ignore everything but the bottom line has only grown stronger through the 20th century.
As corporations grew into gigantic transnational concerns, they became ever less sensitive to ethical, social and environmental considerations. They took control of the mass media and clothed themselves in a “free market” theology founded on the preposterous claim that The Wealth of Nations commanded the pure pursuit of profit in disregard of the social good. The separation is actually a legacy of the time when the emerging entrepreneurial class of Europe had to fend off feudal authorities; it has stayed in place long after the roles reversed and governments became instruments of the corporate elite.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s when corporations themselves felt the need for government help, a distinction was made between “macroeconomics” and the “microeconomics.” Governments were accorded a continuing macroeconomic “pump priming” role, managing the money supply, keeping a weather eye on business cycles and ensuring a policy framework supportive of business; but they were not to interfere with the running of individual enterprises.
The net result of all this has been the emergence of a global corporate elite that effectively controls what governments can and cannot do. The power of sovereignty thus constrained has been further hobbled by the post-Cold War dispensation of the World Trade Organization that promoted a wide range of corporate freedoms masquerading as “free trade” between hugely unequal participants.
Developing countries have fought a rear-guard action to keep themselves from the tender mercies of giant corporations that have revenues dwarfing the GDP of many of them. India has been one of the leaders of that struggle, but as its own corporations buy into the global network, there are privileged and powerful people within its borders now arguing for seamless integration into a system that is killing the planet. The voices in opposition are a jangle of confused interests ranging from doctrinaire Marxists to tree-hugging environmentalists and farmers desperately fighting to hold onto their land.
How that situation will play out depends very much on how India fares in the current global crisis, now building to an unpredictable climax. (China is already completely at the mercy of foreign corporations and cannot be a factor; other countries do not have the necessary heft to make a difference.) And how India fares will be decided by the efficacy with which we deal with the massive corruptions rooted in the immoral pursuit of corporate interests.
The Lokpal debate is thus actually about much more than the criminal malfeasance of those in power. It brings into focus a set of issues that will determine how creatively India engages with the world, and thus the future of our civilization.
More on that in Part – 5.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Corruption in India-3
A cardinal aspect of corruption in Indian society, which the Lokpal debate has studiously avoided, is the divisive, oppressive and nationally enfeebling caste system. Perhaps one reason for its absence from public debate is that while the system is widely condemned, it is little understood.
Caste has been the focus of reform efforts for some five centuries, beginning with the Bhakti Poets, most significantly Kabir (1440-1518) and Guru Nanak (1469-1539). Those efforts suffered a severe setback under British colonial rule which could be sustained only by Indian disunity. The British sought to strengthen caste divisions and made it the subject of relentless propaganda aimed at inflaming internecine tensions.
The British invented a prehistoric “Aryan” invasion from Europe that not only sought to legitimize their rule and lay European claim to the origins of Vedic civilization, but presented the Brahmins – the primary Hindu bulwark against religious conversion – as the oppressors of other groups constituting some 95 per cent of the population. At the opposite extreme, British sanitary arrangements imposed the task of “nightsoil collection” on the lowliest groups, pushing them deeper into pariah status.
With the census of 1871 the British also introduced into the traditionally fluid arrangements of caste an unprecedented rigidity. The census set down in cold print what the British believed to be India’s caste hierarchy; it caused a great uproar all over the country, for it obliterated the grey areas that allowed castes to move up when opportunities arose. This mischief was intended, for their own historians had noted the fluidity of the system and how it had benefited two of the greatest figures of Indian history, Ashoka and Shivaji. Indeed, a third of the country’s ruling families from which the British wrested control of the country belonged to castes the census deemed low (and now fall in the category of OBC -- Other Backward Castes).
Indian reform efforts sharpened under British rule, most significantly in the movements led by Gandhi and Ambedkar. The latter, as the primary architect of India’s republican constitution, gave formal shape to the vision of a society without caste discrimination. However, progress towards that ideal has been slow. Electoral politics emphasizing caste-based “vote banks” energized divisions, and it has taken more than a generation for a counter-trend to emerge in the unifying logic of shared development and improved governance.
Today, with the corruptions of the system still raw and oppressive to many, there is a clear need to energize reform but Indian social activists seem to be at a loss on how to proceed. Part of the problem is conceptual, for the confusions spread during the colonial era still prevail, kept alive by a steady flow of “histories of India” from British authors who command a much larger audience than any Indian writer because they are published by the handful of foreign companies that dominate the Indian book market. (Not that Indian writers have set forth a particularly different perspective; our mainstream and “Left” historians are still very much in thrall to the West; those on the “Right” tend to be Hindutva fantasists.)
Meanwhile, modern research, especially genetic mapping, has revealed much that is new about the origin and evolution of the caste system. In September 2009, Nature published the findings of an Indian-American research project that studied some 500,000 genetic markers in a diverse sampling of the Indian population. It found, as one of the senior researchers told the Press, that “it is impossible to distinguish castes from tribes” and that the available evidence supported “the view that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society.”
The sociological implications of that discovery are significant. When the tribal groups that began migrating out of Africa some 70,000 years ago collected in India, they did not settle into eternal conflict as happened elsewhere. Indian society evolved by allowing groups to keep their internal autonomy while fitting them into a pattern of functional interdependence.
The development of a common worldview and shared philosophy was taken up by the Upanishads (literally, to speak sitting together); we would call them “conferences” today, perhaps even “town meetings.” The concepts of a Universal Spirit and the individual soul, of Universal Moral Law (Dharma) and the inescapable Law of Causality (Karma), all emerged from discussions among the best and brightest of Indian society; they were rational concepts that everyone could accept, and served as an umbrella for all manner of tribal customs and beliefs. The amalgamation of those beliefs under that umbrella laid the foundation of what is now “Hinduism” – the “Sanatana Dharma” (the Eternal Law) at the philosophical level, supported by the hydra-headed formations of tribal worship at the popular level.
The decentralized social system that emerged was preeminently tolerant of differences. Although tribal groups fell into the four universal occupations – teachers, warriors, merchants and manual workers – the divisions and many subdivisions allowed great flexibility. There was also a pragmatic acceptance of intercaste liaisons. The Puranas discuss the matter at numerous points and there is mention of entire castes composed of the progeny of such mixing. Indians today share a strong genetic commonality: the 2009 study that showed the tribal origin of castes provided conclusive proof of it. The proportion of shared genes within the Indian population ranges from 49 to 80 per cent in different parts of the country.
Such mixing would appear impossible given the general ban on inter-caste marriages, and the especially strong Brahmin emphasis on the purity of bloodlines. However, we must take into account that in social relationships theory and fact cannot be immutably wedded; and that the record-keeping Brahmin caste had ample incentive and opportunity to present itself as superior and apart.
The tribal origin of caste explains its persistence. For the group and for the individual, it had survival value, not only in the wilderness from which they emerged but in the multi-tribal grouping of Indian society: amidst its bewildering diversity the caste offered the security of shared custom and ceremony, of peerage and order.
The Ramayana celebrated the emergence of a unitary state out of tribal federalism: Rama is the God-King next door, the quintessential family man, a dutiful son, loving husband, loyal brother, kind even to his heartless aunt who engineers his exile from Ayodhya. Everyone, high and low, can identify with him, gain access. The gods in Indra’s heaven applaud as he sits on equal terms with a lowly forest dweller. Lakshman protests when a poor woman offers the prince fruit she has bitten into to make sure it is sweet, but Rama checks him: she acts out of love.
Rama is so conscious of democratic constraints that he even sends away his beloved wife Sita when the citizens of Ayodhya express suspicions about her pregnancy soon after return from Ravana's captivity. The message that "Ramrajya," the ideal State, is marked above all by the integrity of the king, is a constant theme of the epic. Rama accepts 14 years of privation in exile to uphold the sanctity of the king’s pledge, the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of those he rules.
By the time of the Mahabharata, the incorruptible ideal of Ramrajya is long gone; the State is in the hands of evil power-hungry men who drive the country into the fratricidal war that augurs the onset of the Kali Yuga, the dark immoral age in which we now live. In such an age, caste has become merely a tool of narrow-minded sectarian politics, a means for the corrupt to manipulate the group for personal profit.
If we are to continue the process of social renewal that began half a millennium ago, social reformers must address this situation head-on. Denunciation and agitation are not enough; they must provide an alternative to the identity and security offered (even if only notionally) by caste. Perhaps this could be done by organizing social security along new functional lines or at the level of communities, in effect, creating new “tribes” that look after their own, weaning loyalty away from the obsolete shells of caste that benefit only a manipulative elite.
Such an approach will have to deal with the massive trend towards corrupt elite control powered by corporate globalization. That will be the subject of the next post.
Caste has been the focus of reform efforts for some five centuries, beginning with the Bhakti Poets, most significantly Kabir (1440-1518) and Guru Nanak (1469-1539). Those efforts suffered a severe setback under British colonial rule which could be sustained only by Indian disunity. The British sought to strengthen caste divisions and made it the subject of relentless propaganda aimed at inflaming internecine tensions.
The British invented a prehistoric “Aryan” invasion from Europe that not only sought to legitimize their rule and lay European claim to the origins of Vedic civilization, but presented the Brahmins – the primary Hindu bulwark against religious conversion – as the oppressors of other groups constituting some 95 per cent of the population. At the opposite extreme, British sanitary arrangements imposed the task of “nightsoil collection” on the lowliest groups, pushing them deeper into pariah status.
With the census of 1871 the British also introduced into the traditionally fluid arrangements of caste an unprecedented rigidity. The census set down in cold print what the British believed to be India’s caste hierarchy; it caused a great uproar all over the country, for it obliterated the grey areas that allowed castes to move up when opportunities arose. This mischief was intended, for their own historians had noted the fluidity of the system and how it had benefited two of the greatest figures of Indian history, Ashoka and Shivaji. Indeed, a third of the country’s ruling families from which the British wrested control of the country belonged to castes the census deemed low (and now fall in the category of OBC -- Other Backward Castes).
Indian reform efforts sharpened under British rule, most significantly in the movements led by Gandhi and Ambedkar. The latter, as the primary architect of India’s republican constitution, gave formal shape to the vision of a society without caste discrimination. However, progress towards that ideal has been slow. Electoral politics emphasizing caste-based “vote banks” energized divisions, and it has taken more than a generation for a counter-trend to emerge in the unifying logic of shared development and improved governance.
Today, with the corruptions of the system still raw and oppressive to many, there is a clear need to energize reform but Indian social activists seem to be at a loss on how to proceed. Part of the problem is conceptual, for the confusions spread during the colonial era still prevail, kept alive by a steady flow of “histories of India” from British authors who command a much larger audience than any Indian writer because they are published by the handful of foreign companies that dominate the Indian book market. (Not that Indian writers have set forth a particularly different perspective; our mainstream and “Left” historians are still very much in thrall to the West; those on the “Right” tend to be Hindutva fantasists.)
Meanwhile, modern research, especially genetic mapping, has revealed much that is new about the origin and evolution of the caste system. In September 2009, Nature published the findings of an Indian-American research project that studied some 500,000 genetic markers in a diverse sampling of the Indian population. It found, as one of the senior researchers told the Press, that “it is impossible to distinguish castes from tribes” and that the available evidence supported “the view that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society.”
The sociological implications of that discovery are significant. When the tribal groups that began migrating out of Africa some 70,000 years ago collected in India, they did not settle into eternal conflict as happened elsewhere. Indian society evolved by allowing groups to keep their internal autonomy while fitting them into a pattern of functional interdependence.
The development of a common worldview and shared philosophy was taken up by the Upanishads (literally, to speak sitting together); we would call them “conferences” today, perhaps even “town meetings.” The concepts of a Universal Spirit and the individual soul, of Universal Moral Law (Dharma) and the inescapable Law of Causality (Karma), all emerged from discussions among the best and brightest of Indian society; they were rational concepts that everyone could accept, and served as an umbrella for all manner of tribal customs and beliefs. The amalgamation of those beliefs under that umbrella laid the foundation of what is now “Hinduism” – the “Sanatana Dharma” (the Eternal Law) at the philosophical level, supported by the hydra-headed formations of tribal worship at the popular level.
The decentralized social system that emerged was preeminently tolerant of differences. Although tribal groups fell into the four universal occupations – teachers, warriors, merchants and manual workers – the divisions and many subdivisions allowed great flexibility. There was also a pragmatic acceptance of intercaste liaisons. The Puranas discuss the matter at numerous points and there is mention of entire castes composed of the progeny of such mixing. Indians today share a strong genetic commonality: the 2009 study that showed the tribal origin of castes provided conclusive proof of it. The proportion of shared genes within the Indian population ranges from 49 to 80 per cent in different parts of the country.
Such mixing would appear impossible given the general ban on inter-caste marriages, and the especially strong Brahmin emphasis on the purity of bloodlines. However, we must take into account that in social relationships theory and fact cannot be immutably wedded; and that the record-keeping Brahmin caste had ample incentive and opportunity to present itself as superior and apart.
The tribal origin of caste explains its persistence. For the group and for the individual, it had survival value, not only in the wilderness from which they emerged but in the multi-tribal grouping of Indian society: amidst its bewildering diversity the caste offered the security of shared custom and ceremony, of peerage and order.
The Ramayana celebrated the emergence of a unitary state out of tribal federalism: Rama is the God-King next door, the quintessential family man, a dutiful son, loving husband, loyal brother, kind even to his heartless aunt who engineers his exile from Ayodhya. Everyone, high and low, can identify with him, gain access. The gods in Indra’s heaven applaud as he sits on equal terms with a lowly forest dweller. Lakshman protests when a poor woman offers the prince fruit she has bitten into to make sure it is sweet, but Rama checks him: she acts out of love.
Rama is so conscious of democratic constraints that he even sends away his beloved wife Sita when the citizens of Ayodhya express suspicions about her pregnancy soon after return from Ravana's captivity. The message that "Ramrajya," the ideal State, is marked above all by the integrity of the king, is a constant theme of the epic. Rama accepts 14 years of privation in exile to uphold the sanctity of the king’s pledge, the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of those he rules.
By the time of the Mahabharata, the incorruptible ideal of Ramrajya is long gone; the State is in the hands of evil power-hungry men who drive the country into the fratricidal war that augurs the onset of the Kali Yuga, the dark immoral age in which we now live. In such an age, caste has become merely a tool of narrow-minded sectarian politics, a means for the corrupt to manipulate the group for personal profit.
If we are to continue the process of social renewal that began half a millennium ago, social reformers must address this situation head-on. Denunciation and agitation are not enough; they must provide an alternative to the identity and security offered (even if only notionally) by caste. Perhaps this could be done by organizing social security along new functional lines or at the level of communities, in effect, creating new “tribes” that look after their own, weaning loyalty away from the obsolete shells of caste that benefit only a manipulative elite.
Such an approach will have to deal with the massive trend towards corrupt elite control powered by corporate globalization. That will be the subject of the next post.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Corruption in India -2
The confused controversies surrounding Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev have made clear the low level of public understanding of corruption.
Ramdev’s fatuous proposal to force Indian “black money” to return from foreign banks should have won him instant expulsion from serious public discourse but that came only after his comic descent into infamy. “Team Hazare’s” proposal for a new supra-investigative body seems more sophisticated but its premise – that government malfeasance is central to corruption – does not bear close examination.
Corrupt politicians/judges/bureaucrats are indeed a key element of one aspect of the problem but they are more symptom than cause. Subjecting them to an independent public watchdog is unlikely to have much effect because the social dementia of which they are victims remains undiagnosed. To find a remedy we must identify the common denominators in the multiplicity of corruptions afflicting India (see list in the last posting).
The most obvious common denominator is the sense of impunity shared by the corrupt: the belief they can get away with crime. However, the reasons they think so fall into three categories.
Underlying the criminal manifestations of male and caste dominance, the use of child labour and the abortion of female fetuses, is the belief that State mechanisms will not or cannot implement the law. In contrast, gangsters and other low-life know very well that the State will actively pursue and punish them; their sense of impunity reflects the learned lessons of harsh predatory lives in which violence and bribery buy security. The calculus of the third category -- which now dominates our attentions -- is altogether different: top politicians, bureaucrats and business figures believe their power and privilege will insulate them from detection and punishment. Their corruptions spring from cold-blooded decisions to betray the collective interest in pursuit of private profit. In key sectors such as energy, policing and defence, the injury they inflict is not primarily financial or social; they strike at the safety and security of the State.
These very different sources of impunity underlie different genres of corruption and a Lokpal would be largely ineffective in dealing with two of them, the massive social crimes that flow out of our history and modern organized crime. Even in dealing with crimes within the structure of government, the Lokpal cannot be, in that popular expression, a “watchdog;” for a dog can prevent crime and is immune from corruption itself.
The only preventive element in Team Hazare’s version of the Lokpal Bill is the severity of punishment: initially it required the death penalty for high-level offenders, now toned down to life imprisonment. (The government draft calls for a 7-year prison term.) Both versions of the Bill deal with corruption as individual malfeasance; they ignore its existence as a systemic disease with social, economic and political dimensions.
The next post will take up the social aspect, focusing especially on the genesis and coruptions of the caste system.
