Showing posts with label Bangladesh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bangladesh. Show all posts
Saturday, 9 March 2024
Saturday, 24 February 2024
Sunday, 10 September 2023
Monday, 12 December 2022
Tuesday, 2 August 2022
Friday, 17 December 2021
Monday, 26 February 2018
India's' Rohingya' Problem in Assam?
Michael Safi in The Guardian
Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, authorities in the north-east Indian state of Assam published a list of 19 million names. But not Hanif Khan’s.
Early the next morning police found Khan, a taxi driver from Cachar district, dead from an apparent suicide. “I am sure he killed himself after he found his name missing,” his wife Rushka says.
Two years ago, Assam, a lush state bordering Bhutan and Bangladesh, embarked on a vast exercise: to identify every resident who could demonstrate roots in the state before March 1971.
And deport anyone who couldn’t.
An unfinished draft was released on 31 December – minus the names of 14 million other residents. Officials have stressed the final list will include millions more names, but the process is sparking anxiety in Assam, and warnings Indiamight be about to manufacture tens of thousands of stateless people.
Khan, 40, had grown increasingly tense in the weeks leading to the publication of the draft. Though he was born in Assam to an Indian mother, his father was an Afghan national who had long since drifted home.
Hanif Khan, a driver from Cachar district in Assam, India, who was found dead on 1 January, 2018. Photograph: Supplied
“He told me many times that the documents he presented to prove he was a citizen of India were perhaps not enough,” his wife said.
Assam is building a new detention centre to process the “foreigners” it plans to evict in the coming years. At least 2,000 people are already detained in six facilities across the state.
Khan often mentioned the detention centres, and had started to panic at the sight of police cars near his home, Rushka says. “He was extremely frightened. Every day he told me that police would arrest him and push him to Bangladesh.”
By December he was skipping meals and turning down driving jobs in unfamiliar places. Five hours before the list was published, his wife says, he vanished.
The eastern Indian border with Bangladesh traverses five states and more than 4,000km. For centuries until the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, human traffic flowed freely across the territory. In smaller numbers, people have continued crossing in the decades after: Indian security agencies estimate about 15 million Bangladesh citizens work and live in India without authorisation.
Just as with porous borders elsewhere, the flow of migrants from Bangladesh inflames Indian passions. Border guards were accused of gunning down nearly 1,000 people, most of them suspected smugglers, in the decade to 2010. A barbed-wire fence, bolstered in parts by floodlights and cameras, has been under construction since the mid-1980s and will eventually stretch more than 3,300km.
Resentment has been most acute in Assam, where it sparked an anti-migrant movement in the 1980s that paralysed the state and eventually won government. It also fuelled one of India’s worst single-day massacres since partition: a frenzied seven-hour pogrom in a clutch of Muslim villages that left at least 1,800 people dead.
“Here, foreigners are like people from a different planet,” says Aman Wadud, a lawyer who represents people accused of migrating illegally.
Assamese residents complain thousands of migrants have found their way onto voting rolls and take jobs and land from locals. “In the past two decades, loads of Muslims from Bangladesh have settled around us,” says Pankaj Saha, a retailer from Dhubri district.
“Twenty years ago, Hindus formed 75% of my town’s population. Today, the Muslims are in majority.”
Proving the identities of more than 30 million people – many bearing handwritten records, or none at all – has fallen to Prateek Hajela, a senior civil servant. “We have received around 65 million documents,” he says from his office in Guwahati, the Assam capital.
The fate of those who fail to win citizenship is outside his control, he says. “What happens to those people who have applied and are not found to be eligible, I can’t say.”
Yet this is the question dogging the process. Tribunals have already declared about 90,000 people in Assam to be foreigners, according to statistics obtained by IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative.
Only a few dozen have been deported in recent years – Bangladesh and India have no formal repatriation agreement – and officials admit many turn around and return at the first opportunity.
Another 38,000 of those declared to be foreigners in Assam have disappeared into the community, according to police records. Thousands more claim to be wrongly accused and are awaiting citizenship hearings.
The prospect of being suddenly arrested as a foreigner and languishing for years in a detention camp is worrying Bengali Muslims in particular. “There is enormous fear and apprehension in the community,” Wadud says.
Other than Hanif’s, at least two others suicides have been linked to the process. “I am telling people, we need to wait for the second list,” says Subimal Bhattacharjee, an analyst who runs welfare schemes in the state. “A significant number of names will be added. Verification is still going on.”
When the government finally publishes the full list of citizens on 31 May, the ranks of foreigners in Assam could swell by tens of thousands – with no clear plan yet of what to do with them.
The Assam chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, said in an interview last month that foreigners would lose constitutional rights. “They will have only one right – human rights as guaranteed by the the UN that include food, shelter and clothing.”
The issue of deportation, he said, “will come later”.
Officials in the Indian home ministry declined to comment on the record but said their expectation was that Bangladesh would take back any of its citizens, as it currently does on a case-by-case basis.
Bangladesh says it is not aware of any citizens living illegally in Assam, and that India has never raised the prospect of mass deportations from the state. An official at the country’s high commission in Delhi confirmed this position was unchanged.
“Deportations will never happen,” Wadud says. “Bangladesh will never accept these people. I can’t imagine what will happen to them. They will become stateless people with no rights whatsoever.”
Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, authorities in the north-east Indian state of Assam published a list of 19 million names. But not Hanif Khan’s.
Early the next morning police found Khan, a taxi driver from Cachar district, dead from an apparent suicide. “I am sure he killed himself after he found his name missing,” his wife Rushka says.
Two years ago, Assam, a lush state bordering Bhutan and Bangladesh, embarked on a vast exercise: to identify every resident who could demonstrate roots in the state before March 1971.
And deport anyone who couldn’t.
An unfinished draft was released on 31 December – minus the names of 14 million other residents. Officials have stressed the final list will include millions more names, but the process is sparking anxiety in Assam, and warnings Indiamight be about to manufacture tens of thousands of stateless people.
Khan, 40, had grown increasingly tense in the weeks leading to the publication of the draft. Though he was born in Assam to an Indian mother, his father was an Afghan national who had long since drifted home.
Hanif Khan, a driver from Cachar district in Assam, India, who was found dead on 1 January, 2018. Photograph: Supplied
“He told me many times that the documents he presented to prove he was a citizen of India were perhaps not enough,” his wife said.
Assam is building a new detention centre to process the “foreigners” it plans to evict in the coming years. At least 2,000 people are already detained in six facilities across the state.
Khan often mentioned the detention centres, and had started to panic at the sight of police cars near his home, Rushka says. “He was extremely frightened. Every day he told me that police would arrest him and push him to Bangladesh.”
By December he was skipping meals and turning down driving jobs in unfamiliar places. Five hours before the list was published, his wife says, he vanished.
The eastern Indian border with Bangladesh traverses five states and more than 4,000km. For centuries until the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, human traffic flowed freely across the territory. In smaller numbers, people have continued crossing in the decades after: Indian security agencies estimate about 15 million Bangladesh citizens work and live in India without authorisation.
Just as with porous borders elsewhere, the flow of migrants from Bangladesh inflames Indian passions. Border guards were accused of gunning down nearly 1,000 people, most of them suspected smugglers, in the decade to 2010. A barbed-wire fence, bolstered in parts by floodlights and cameras, has been under construction since the mid-1980s and will eventually stretch more than 3,300km.
Resentment has been most acute in Assam, where it sparked an anti-migrant movement in the 1980s that paralysed the state and eventually won government. It also fuelled one of India’s worst single-day massacres since partition: a frenzied seven-hour pogrom in a clutch of Muslim villages that left at least 1,800 people dead.
“Here, foreigners are like people from a different planet,” says Aman Wadud, a lawyer who represents people accused of migrating illegally.
Assamese residents complain thousands of migrants have found their way onto voting rolls and take jobs and land from locals. “In the past two decades, loads of Muslims from Bangladesh have settled around us,” says Pankaj Saha, a retailer from Dhubri district.
“Twenty years ago, Hindus formed 75% of my town’s population. Today, the Muslims are in majority.”
Proving the identities of more than 30 million people – many bearing handwritten records, or none at all – has fallen to Prateek Hajela, a senior civil servant. “We have received around 65 million documents,” he says from his office in Guwahati, the Assam capital.
The fate of those who fail to win citizenship is outside his control, he says. “What happens to those people who have applied and are not found to be eligible, I can’t say.”
Yet this is the question dogging the process. Tribunals have already declared about 90,000 people in Assam to be foreigners, according to statistics obtained by IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative.
Only a few dozen have been deported in recent years – Bangladesh and India have no formal repatriation agreement – and officials admit many turn around and return at the first opportunity.
Another 38,000 of those declared to be foreigners in Assam have disappeared into the community, according to police records. Thousands more claim to be wrongly accused and are awaiting citizenship hearings.
The prospect of being suddenly arrested as a foreigner and languishing for years in a detention camp is worrying Bengali Muslims in particular. “There is enormous fear and apprehension in the community,” Wadud says.
Other than Hanif’s, at least two others suicides have been linked to the process. “I am telling people, we need to wait for the second list,” says Subimal Bhattacharjee, an analyst who runs welfare schemes in the state. “A significant number of names will be added. Verification is still going on.”
When the government finally publishes the full list of citizens on 31 May, the ranks of foreigners in Assam could swell by tens of thousands – with no clear plan yet of what to do with them.
The Assam chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, said in an interview last month that foreigners would lose constitutional rights. “They will have only one right – human rights as guaranteed by the the UN that include food, shelter and clothing.”
The issue of deportation, he said, “will come later”.
Officials in the Indian home ministry declined to comment on the record but said their expectation was that Bangladesh would take back any of its citizens, as it currently does on a case-by-case basis.
Bangladesh says it is not aware of any citizens living illegally in Assam, and that India has never raised the prospect of mass deportations from the state. An official at the country’s high commission in Delhi confirmed this position was unchanged.
“Deportations will never happen,” Wadud says. “Bangladesh will never accept these people. I can’t imagine what will happen to them. They will become stateless people with no rights whatsoever.”
Sunday, 15 May 2016
The wars of Pakistan over India
The Tragedy of 1971 - explained in Urdu by Hamid Bhashani
The story behind the Kargil war - explained in Urdu by Hamid Bhashani
The 1965 War - explained in Urdu by Hamid Bhashani
The 1948 War - explained in Urdu by Hamid Bhashani
Monday, 28 March 2016
The Specious Logic of a TV Cricket Expert
by Girish Menon
As a regular reader of Cricinfo I started this Easter Monday holiday by reading 'Why Ramiz gets Bangladesh's goat' Jarrod Kimber's sensitive enquiry into why Bangladesh cricket fans react so vehemently to cricket commentator Ramiz Raja. Lack of quality among commentators and highly emotional responses by social media users were the conclusions drawn by Kimber. As was habitual for me I then went on to Youtube where the channel recommended that I watch a post match analysis on the India Australia WT20 cricket match played yesterday at Mohali. I clicked on the suggestion and found that it was a Pakistani TV channel show discussing the match with Brian Lara, Rashid Latif, Saqlain Mushtaq and Glenn McGrath as experts.
---Also by this writer
Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?
On Walking - Advice for a fifteen year old
----
In the programme Rashid Latif advanced a thesis that Dhoni and Yuvraj collaborated to deceive the umpire Erasmus into giving Steve Smith the Australian captain out caught behind. Rashid admitted that he indulged in similar behaviour in his playing days and recalled an instance in Sharjah when he conspired with Mushtaq Ahmed to get Dravid out in a similar fashion. Glenn McGrath then stated a fact that that the stump microphone had not detected an edge in the Smith dismissal.
Rashid Latif then commented on how a carefully cultivated image enables a cricketer to trick an umpire into giving them the benefit of doubt which enables them to get an unfair advantage in tight situations. He spoke about Gilchrist's carefully built reputation as a walker and how it helped players like him with umpires in situations when the evidence was not clear cut.
From this discussion I realised that in such a situation not using technology gives the benefitting team an unfair advantage. After all the decision to give Smith out (if he was not out?) had a game changing impact on the match with Smith being Australia's in-form batsman. At the same time I'm sure many Indian cricketers will readily admit the number of times they have been at the receiving end of bad decisions because of BCCI's refusal to use technology to help adjudicate umpiring decisions.
However, I was more worried by the specious logic used by the commentator Rashid Latif to insinuate that Dhoni and Yuvraj cheated like he used to in his playing days. Latif's false argument in the world of logic is called 'Shifting the burden of proof'. It consists of putting forward an assertion without justification, on the basis that the audience must disprove it if it is to be rejected.
Madsen Pirie in his book 'How to win every argument' gives another example to help you understand Latif's false logic:
I believe that a secret company of Illuminati has clandestinely directed world events for several hundred years. Prove to me that it isn't so.
Shifting the burden, Pirie writes, is a common fallacy on which rests the world of conspiracy theories, UFOs, monsters, Gods etc. Advocates like Latif make us the viewer accept the burden of proving that his statement is false. As a viewer I would find it difficult if not impossible to disprove his insinuation.
Also, by shifting the onus of proof Latif is able to put forward mischievous views without producing any shred of evidence. This is dishonesty.
Of course the whole programme appeared to have an anti India bias (not surprising) underpinned by the conspiracy theory that events, grounds, pitches and umpires are all collaborating to ensure that India would win the WT20 cup.
I too felt like Kimber's Bangladesh supporters and realised that the only way India can resolve this shifted burden of proof is by not winning the trophy.
The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs cricket league.
As a regular reader of Cricinfo I started this Easter Monday holiday by reading 'Why Ramiz gets Bangladesh's goat' Jarrod Kimber's sensitive enquiry into why Bangladesh cricket fans react so vehemently to cricket commentator Ramiz Raja. Lack of quality among commentators and highly emotional responses by social media users were the conclusions drawn by Kimber. As was habitual for me I then went on to Youtube where the channel recommended that I watch a post match analysis on the India Australia WT20 cricket match played yesterday at Mohali. I clicked on the suggestion and found that it was a Pakistani TV channel show discussing the match with Brian Lara, Rashid Latif, Saqlain Mushtaq and Glenn McGrath as experts.
---Also by this writer
Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?
On Walking - Advice for a fifteen year old
----
In the programme Rashid Latif advanced a thesis that Dhoni and Yuvraj collaborated to deceive the umpire Erasmus into giving Steve Smith the Australian captain out caught behind. Rashid admitted that he indulged in similar behaviour in his playing days and recalled an instance in Sharjah when he conspired with Mushtaq Ahmed to get Dravid out in a similar fashion. Glenn McGrath then stated a fact that that the stump microphone had not detected an edge in the Smith dismissal.
Rashid Latif then commented on how a carefully cultivated image enables a cricketer to trick an umpire into giving them the benefit of doubt which enables them to get an unfair advantage in tight situations. He spoke about Gilchrist's carefully built reputation as a walker and how it helped players like him with umpires in situations when the evidence was not clear cut.
From this discussion I realised that in such a situation not using technology gives the benefitting team an unfair advantage. After all the decision to give Smith out (if he was not out?) had a game changing impact on the match with Smith being Australia's in-form batsman. At the same time I'm sure many Indian cricketers will readily admit the number of times they have been at the receiving end of bad decisions because of BCCI's refusal to use technology to help adjudicate umpiring decisions.
However, I was more worried by the specious logic used by the commentator Rashid Latif to insinuate that Dhoni and Yuvraj cheated like he used to in his playing days. Latif's false argument in the world of logic is called 'Shifting the burden of proof'. It consists of putting forward an assertion without justification, on the basis that the audience must disprove it if it is to be rejected.
Madsen Pirie in his book 'How to win every argument' gives another example to help you understand Latif's false logic:
I believe that a secret company of Illuminati has clandestinely directed world events for several hundred years. Prove to me that it isn't so.
Shifting the burden, Pirie writes, is a common fallacy on which rests the world of conspiracy theories, UFOs, monsters, Gods etc. Advocates like Latif make us the viewer accept the burden of proving that his statement is false. As a viewer I would find it difficult if not impossible to disprove his insinuation.
Also, by shifting the onus of proof Latif is able to put forward mischievous views without producing any shred of evidence. This is dishonesty.
Of course the whole programme appeared to have an anti India bias (not surprising) underpinned by the conspiracy theory that events, grounds, pitches and umpires are all collaborating to ensure that India would win the WT20 cup.
I too felt like Kimber's Bangladesh supporters and realised that the only way India can resolve this shifted burden of proof is by not winning the trophy.
The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs cricket league.
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
The Curse of KP - Kevin Pietersen
Simon Barnes in Cricinfo
There will be a great deal of analysis of England's performance at the World Cup and their consequent failure to reach the knockout stage after their defeat by Bangladesh. Most of it will be concerned with England's traditional shortcomings in 50-over cricket.
People will point out that England are hopelessly out of date, still stuck in the approach they used when they played ODIs with a red ball - and it was a bit rusty then. They will talk about Joe Root and Ian Bell scoring 24 runs off 38 balls as a classic example of this fuddy-duddiness, and they will be right.
They will speak about English snobbery, the hierarchical way they view the various forms of cricket, with ODIs as the poor relation to Test cricket - even though this overlooks the fact that over the last 18 months England have been almost equally poor in Test matches.
That's not a cheap shot. England's limitations in limited-overs cricket don't matter. The real issue is that the team is broken. Broken in all the forms in which it appears. Shattered. Traumatised. Wrecked. Destroyed. And apparently incapable of healing itself.
The problems with 50-over cricket are what scientists would call the proximate cause of this disaster. If England want to set things aright, they must look to the ultimate cause.
That means checking out the Curse of the Bambino. This is a baseball story: it tells of the problems that affected the Boston Red Sox after they traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. They failed to win the World Series again until 2004: a barren patch of 86 years.
England are suffering from the Curse of KP: and nearly a year after his sacking the team in all its forms is worse off than ever. Against Bangladesh the two witless run-outs, the wading-through-treacle batting, and the tendency for wickets to fall in clusters showed a deeper malaise than their inability to get their heads around a different format of cricket.
How did it begin? I watched England when they were - briefly - at the very peak of the Test match rankings. I watched them destroy Australia in Australia, I watched them hammer India in India, and in both these efforts, Kevin Pietersen was at the heart of it.
England are the team that died of a joke. It's a fact that tyrants and other kinds of egomaniac hate jokes. They don't understand them - apart from someone slipping on a banana skin and breaking his neck. It follows that jokes are often the most powerful weapons against such people.
The parody Twitter account KPGenius caused deep pain to Pietersen. It follows that it gave deep delight to people in the England team who found Pietersen difficult to deal with. The subversive giggling created a deep fissure through the team. When you have such a geology it doesn't take much to create a major landslide.
And that's what happened when England went to Australia in 2013 still fancying themselves a great cricket team. Mitchell Johnson's ferocious bowling acted like a ton of dynamite on that fault line and the team collapsed. A team of talented players found that they could do no right. It was a tour punctuated by the departure of cricketers who could take no more, and it was followed by that of coaches who felt the same.
This was bad enough, but in seeking a cure, England made it far worse. They made a great to-do of sacking Pietersen and setting up his beleaguered captain, Alastair Cook, as a moral rallying point for an England relaunch. This role was too much for Cook and the traumatised team he was leading.
Cook's own form fell away and he was replaced as one-day captain just before the World Cup. They brought in Eoin Morgan instead - not a bad plan, except that Morgan can't buy a run himself, looks like a busted flush in all forms of cricket, and in the decisive match against Bangladesh was out third ball for nought.
All this after England had shunted the Ashes series around - itself a disastrous decision - to give themselves a full winter of white-ball cricket to get ready for this tournament. And just to add another pint of bat's blood to this witch's brew, the incoming chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Colin Graves, has just suggested that there was a way open for Pietersen's return.
Either Graves is stupid or he is deliberately destabilising Cook, Paul Downton, chief exec of the ECB, and the head coach, Peter Moores, all at once. No other interpretation is possible. Certainly it did a grand job of upsetting an already troubled team on the eve of the crucial match of the World Cup.
So the Curse of KP continues. The result is a team in mental paralysis. I remember Steve Davis, the great snooker player, telling me: "It's all right to miss a ball. You're entitled to miss a ball. It's when you start thinking wrong that you're in trouble."
And that's England. They have been thinking wrong ever since Johnson dynamited the fissure and caused England's collapse. The executive, the coaches, the captains, the players: all incapable of thinking straight in the desperately difficult times that began with defeat at the hands of Australia and continue to this day.
England can't play one-day cricket very well, but that's old news. The real problem is that right now they can't play any kind of cricket. I know they beat India in the Test matches last summer, but India, notoriously poor travellers, went out of their way to help them.
This defeat by Bangladesh, this untimely and undignified exit from the World Cup is not a new problem, nor is it a pure cricketing matter. It's the logical result of trauma. Bangladesh were good enough to prey on England's weakness and doubt, and take a famous victory.
The Curse of KP strikes again. Never mind, perhaps England will win the World Cup in 86 years' time.
There will be a great deal of analysis of England's performance at the World Cup and their consequent failure to reach the knockout stage after their defeat by Bangladesh. Most of it will be concerned with England's traditional shortcomings in 50-over cricket.
People will point out that England are hopelessly out of date, still stuck in the approach they used when they played ODIs with a red ball - and it was a bit rusty then. They will talk about Joe Root and Ian Bell scoring 24 runs off 38 balls as a classic example of this fuddy-duddiness, and they will be right.
They will speak about English snobbery, the hierarchical way they view the various forms of cricket, with ODIs as the poor relation to Test cricket - even though this overlooks the fact that over the last 18 months England have been almost equally poor in Test matches.
That's not a cheap shot. England's limitations in limited-overs cricket don't matter. The real issue is that the team is broken. Broken in all the forms in which it appears. Shattered. Traumatised. Wrecked. Destroyed. And apparently incapable of healing itself.
The problems with 50-over cricket are what scientists would call the proximate cause of this disaster. If England want to set things aright, they must look to the ultimate cause.
That means checking out the Curse of the Bambino. This is a baseball story: it tells of the problems that affected the Boston Red Sox after they traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. They failed to win the World Series again until 2004: a barren patch of 86 years.
England are suffering from the Curse of KP: and nearly a year after his sacking the team in all its forms is worse off than ever. Against Bangladesh the two witless run-outs, the wading-through-treacle batting, and the tendency for wickets to fall in clusters showed a deeper malaise than their inability to get their heads around a different format of cricket.
How did it begin? I watched England when they were - briefly - at the very peak of the Test match rankings. I watched them destroy Australia in Australia, I watched them hammer India in India, and in both these efforts, Kevin Pietersen was at the heart of it.
England are the team that died of a joke. It's a fact that tyrants and other kinds of egomaniac hate jokes. They don't understand them - apart from someone slipping on a banana skin and breaking his neck. It follows that jokes are often the most powerful weapons against such people.
The parody Twitter account KPGenius caused deep pain to Pietersen. It follows that it gave deep delight to people in the England team who found Pietersen difficult to deal with. The subversive giggling created a deep fissure through the team. When you have such a geology it doesn't take much to create a major landslide.
And that's what happened when England went to Australia in 2013 still fancying themselves a great cricket team. Mitchell Johnson's ferocious bowling acted like a ton of dynamite on that fault line and the team collapsed. A team of talented players found that they could do no right. It was a tour punctuated by the departure of cricketers who could take no more, and it was followed by that of coaches who felt the same.
This was bad enough, but in seeking a cure, England made it far worse. They made a great to-do of sacking Pietersen and setting up his beleaguered captain, Alastair Cook, as a moral rallying point for an England relaunch. This role was too much for Cook and the traumatised team he was leading.
Cook's own form fell away and he was replaced as one-day captain just before the World Cup. They brought in Eoin Morgan instead - not a bad plan, except that Morgan can't buy a run himself, looks like a busted flush in all forms of cricket, and in the decisive match against Bangladesh was out third ball for nought.
All this after England had shunted the Ashes series around - itself a disastrous decision - to give themselves a full winter of white-ball cricket to get ready for this tournament. And just to add another pint of bat's blood to this witch's brew, the incoming chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Colin Graves, has just suggested that there was a way open for Pietersen's return.
Either Graves is stupid or he is deliberately destabilising Cook, Paul Downton, chief exec of the ECB, and the head coach, Peter Moores, all at once. No other interpretation is possible. Certainly it did a grand job of upsetting an already troubled team on the eve of the crucial match of the World Cup.
So the Curse of KP continues. The result is a team in mental paralysis. I remember Steve Davis, the great snooker player, telling me: "It's all right to miss a ball. You're entitled to miss a ball. It's when you start thinking wrong that you're in trouble."
And that's England. They have been thinking wrong ever since Johnson dynamited the fissure and caused England's collapse. The executive, the coaches, the captains, the players: all incapable of thinking straight in the desperately difficult times that began with defeat at the hands of Australia and continue to this day.
England can't play one-day cricket very well, but that's old news. The real problem is that right now they can't play any kind of cricket. I know they beat India in the Test matches last summer, but India, notoriously poor travellers, went out of their way to help them.
This defeat by Bangladesh, this untimely and undignified exit from the World Cup is not a new problem, nor is it a pure cricketing matter. It's the logical result of trauma. Bangladesh were good enough to prey on England's weakness and doubt, and take a famous victory.
The Curse of KP strikes again. Never mind, perhaps England will win the World Cup in 86 years' time.
Wednesday, 2 July 2014
Why we need a Truth on the Clothes Label Act
We know more about the conditions of our battery hens than of our battery textile workers. A year after Rana Plaza, it's time we were given the facts
'Forcing businesses to admit exactly who is responsible for their economic success, and who reaps the profits, is a good start'. Illustration: Daniel Pudles
Somewhere in Swansea is a woman whose hand I want to shake. My guess is that she's the one responsible for giving Primark such a stonking headache over the past few days. You probably know her handiwork – at least, you will if you saw the stories about how two Swansea shoppers came back from the local Primark with bargain dresses mysteriously bearing extra labels. One read "'Degrading' sweatshop conditions"; another "Forced to work exhausting hours".
How did they get there? "Cries for help" from a production line in deepest Dhaka, claim the merchants of journalese. But surely no machinist could bunk off their punishing workload to script these complaints in pristine English, stitch them in and whisk them past a pin-sharp inspector. The much-more-likely scenario is an activist, holed up in a south Wales fitting room, hastily darning her protests.
In which case: well-needled, that woman. Not only has she gummed up the Primark publicity machine for days on end and brought back into discussion the costs of cheap fashion, she's also given pause to two shoppers. In the words of one: "I've never really thought much about how the clothes are made … I dread to think that my summer top may be made by some exhausted person toiling away for hours in some sweatshop."
In a mall, such thinking counts as disruptive activity. The lexicon for most retailers runs from impulse buy to splurge to treat; they prefer us to wander the aisles with our eyes wide open and our minds shut tight. The whole point of a shopping environment is to drown out those inconvenient headlines about dead textile workers in Rana Plaza with a bit of Ellie Goulding and a lot of advertising. Which is what makes the Primark protests, or the Tesco shelfie campaign, or the UK Uncut rallies so splendidly aggravating – because they undercut the multimillion-pound marketing with point of sale information about poverty pay for shop staff or high-street tax dodging.
They also underline how little we're told about what we're paying for. Look at the label sewn into your top: the only thing it must tell you under law is which fibres it's made out of – whether it's cotton or acrylic or whatever. Which country your shirt came from, or the accuracy of the sizing – such essentials are in the gift of the retailer. A similarly light-touch regime holds for food: after years of fighting between consumer groups and the (now eviscerated) Food Standards Agency, and big-spending food manufacturers, a new set of traffic-light labels will be introduced. Thanks to heavy industrial lobbying, it will still be completely voluntary.
How much sugar is in your bowl of Frosties: this is a basic fact, yet it remains up to the seller how they present it to you. By law you are entitled to more information about the production of your eggs than your underwear. Under current regulations, we know more about our battery hens than we do about our battery textile workers.
A ‘cry for help' label in a top from Primark in Swansea. ‘Big retailers can also display prominently how much tax they pay, and what they pay both top staff and shopfloor employees.' Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Wales News Service
Consider: just over a year has passed since the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory, which saw more than 1,100 staff crushed to death and another 2,500 injured, many permanently disabled. Those people and the thousands of others working in similarly precarious and punishing conditions make the garments we wear and the electronic goods we fiddle about with. Yet they rate barely a mention. Outsourcing and globalisation may have brought down the price of our shopping, but it has also enabled retailers to engage in a facade of blame-shifting and plausible deniability: for Apple to pass the buck for suicidal Chinese workers on to Foxconn and duck the questions about how much of a margin it pays suppliers.
So here's a modest proposal: a new law that mandates more, and more relevant information, on the products we buy. Call it the Truth on the Label Act, which will require shops to display where their goods are made, which chemicals were used in production, and whether the factory is unionised. Stick it on the shelves, print it on the clothes tags. Big retailers can also display prominently in each branch how much tax they pay, and what they pay both top staff and shopfloor employees.
That's because while queuing up for the self-service checkout, hungry commuters might want to know that the boss of Tesco's, Philip Clarke, is paid 135 times what his lowest-paid member of staff is. Or that George Weston, chief executive of Primark's parent company, received over £5m last year, while the young women who sew his firm's T-shirts get less than £30 a month.
Such information is not hard for the big retailers to provide. Long before Google was an algorithm in a programmer's eye, Tesco was in the data-collection business. This information in itself won't change an entire economic system. But forcing businesses to admit exactly who is responsible for their economic success, and who reaps the profits, is a good start. Otherwise, we're entirely dependent on activists in changing rooms.
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