'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
It just doesn’t compute. Almost every day the news is filled with stories that look to me like corruption. Yet on Transparency International’s corruption index Britain is ranked 14th out of 177 nations, suggesting that it’s one of the best-run nations on Earth. Either all but 13 countries are spectacularly corrupt or there’s something wrong with the index.
Yes, it’s the index. The definitions of corruption on which it draws are narrow and selective. Common practices in the rich nations that could reasonably be labelled corrupt are excluded; common practices in the poor nations are emphasised.
This week a ground-changing book called How Corrupt is Britain?, edited by David Whyte, is published. It should be read by anyone who believes this country merits its position on the index.
Would there still be commercial banking sector in this country if it weren’t for corruption? Think of the list of scandals: pensions mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance scam, Libor rigging, insider trading and all the rest. Then ask yourself whether fleecing the public is an aberration – or the business model.
No senior figure has been held criminally liable or has even been disqualified for the practices that helped to trigger the financial crisis, partly because the laws that should have restrained them were slashed by successive governments. A former minister in this government ran HSBC while it engaged in systematic tax evasion, money laundering for drugs gangs and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Instead of prosecuting the bank, the head of the UK’s tax office went to work for it when he retired.
The City of London, operating with the help of British overseas territories and crown dependencies, is the world’s leading tax haven, controlling 24% of all offshore financial services. It offers global capital an elaborate secrecy regime, assisting not just tax evaders but also smugglers, sanctions- busters and money-launderers. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly has complained, the City “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”. The UK, Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg and Germany are all ranked by Transparency International as among the least corrupt nations in the world. They are also listed by the Tax Justice Network as among the worst secrecy regimes and tax havens. For some reason, though, that doesn’t count.
The Private Finance Initiative has been used by our governments to deceive us about the extent of their borrowing while channelling public money into the hands of corporations. Shrouded in secrecy, stuffed with hidden sweeteners, it has landed hospitals and schools with unpayable debts, while hiding public services from public scrutiny.
State spies have been engaged in mass surveillance. And the police, adopting the identities of dead children, lying in court to assist false convictions and fathering children by activists before disappearing, have infiltrated and sought to destroy peaceful campaign groups. Police forces have protected prolific paedophiles, including Jimmy Savile, and – it is now alleged – a ring of senior politicians who are also suspected of the murder of children. Savile was shielded too by the NHS and the BBC, which has sacked most of the those who sought to expose him while promoting people who tried to perpetuate the cover-up.
There’s the small matter of our unreformed political funding system, which permits the very rich to buy political parties. There’s the phone-hacking scandal and the payment of police by newspapers, the underselling of Royal Mail, the revolving door allowing corporate executives to draft the laws affecting their businesses, the robbing of the welfare and prison services by private contractors, price-fixing by energy companies, daylight robbery by pharmaceutical firms and dozens more such cases. Is none of this corruption? Or is it too sophisticated to qualify?
Among the sources used by Transparency International to compile its index are the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Relying on the World Bank to assess corruption is like asking Vlad the Impaler for an audit of human rights. Run on the principle of one dollar, one vote, controlled by the rich nations while operating in the poor ones, the bank has funded hundreds of white-elephant projects that have greatly enriched corrupt elites and foreign capital while evicting local people from their land and leaving their countries with unpayable debts. To general gasps of astonishment, the World Bank’s definition of corruption is so narrowly drawn that it excludes such practices.
The World Economic Forum establishes its corruption rankings through a survey of global executives: the beneficiaries of the kind of practices I’ve listed in this article. Its questions are limited to the payment of bribes and the corrupt acquisition of public funds by private interests, excluding the kinds of corruption that prevail in rich nations. Transparency International’s interviews with ordinary citizens take much the same line: most of its specific questions involve the payment of bribes.
How Corrupt is Britain? argues that such narrow conceptions of corruption are part of a long tradition of portraying the problem as something confined to weak nations, which must be rescued by “reforms” imposed by colonial powers and, more recently, bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF. These “reforms” mean austerity, privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation. They tend to suck money out of the hands of the poor and into the hands of national and global oligarchs.
For organisations such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, there is little difference between the public interest and the interests of global corporations. What might look like corruption from any other perspective looks to them like sound economics. The power of global finance and the immense wealth of the global elite are founded on corruption, and the beneficiaries have an interest in framing the question to excuse themselves.
Yes, many poor nations are plagued by the kind of corruption that involves paying bribes to officials. But the problems plaguing us run deeper. When the system already belongs to the elite, bribes are superfluous.
The recommendations of the World Bank/IMF are presented to us, the people of the South, as scientific, objective, necessary, fair, and in the best interests of the countries where they are to be implemented. This is why the rebellion episode by the bank staff to its restructuring is so significant
PETER RONALD DESOUZA in The Hindu
In the Financial Times of October 8, the columnist Shawn Donnan, reported that the World Bank was facing an internal “‘mutiny.” Yes, the word mutiny was used. The professional staff were apparently angry about several issues, a deep discontent, because of which the rebellion had been brewing over many days. The key issue was the restructuring exercise being undertaken by the President, Jim Yong Kim, to save, through both the elimination of benefits to staff on mission and also through possible lay-offs, the sum of $400 million. The restructuring exercise, staff felt, was deeply flawed both procedurally and substantively. The columnist reported some members saying that this “thing [restructuring] is affecting everything.” “We can’t do business. We don’t have the budget. It’s a mess, ...” Another staff member complained that “nickel and diming” on travel budgets was causing travelling staff to have to pay for their own breakfasts. “It’s really small beer,” she said. “Has anyone ever thought about the impact of these changes on staff morale?”
Resistance against restructuring
To assuage their feelings, before the semi-annual meeting of the Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) with Finance Ministers and Central Bankers of member countries, President Jim Yong Kim had to hurriedly convene a “town hall” meeting with the staff to discuss their concerns. The issues that was fuelling their anger were: (i) the cost-cutting exercise which meant that items of expenditure that they had been accustomed to, such as a paid for breakfast, were being withdrawn, (ii) the secrecy and opacity of the whole exercise i.e., appointment of consultants, payment of bonus to the senior management, hiring of new senior managers, etc, (iii) the award of a “scarce skills premium” of $94,000 as bonus, over and above his salary of $3,79,000, to the Chief Financial Officer who was carrying out the exercise, and (iv) to the appointment and payment of the huge sum of $12.5 million to external consultants such as McKinsey, Deloitte, and Booz Allen for advice on how to restructure a development Bank, as reported in the Economic Times of October 15, 2014.
For those of us from the Global South, who not only receive but also have to follow the advice of the Bretton Woods twins, on how to “restructure” our economies and change our policies, this episode has four very interesting lessons. The recommendations of the World Bank/IMF are presented to us, the people of the South, as scientific, objective, necessary, fair, and in the best interests of the countries where they are to be implemented. The World Bank is the repository of the most authoritative knowledge on development. It annually publishes the flagship World Development Report (WDR), the first of which in 1978 was titled “Prospects for Growth and Alleviation of Poverty.” Every year since 1978, it flags important themes for development with the 2013 WDR being on “Jobs” and restructuring required to align them with the new economy. The 2015 WDR is on “Mind and Culture” and the World Bank website reports the central argument as being “that policy design that takes into account psychological and cultural factors will achieve development goals faster.” This is scholarly knowledge and is used by many university classrooms as part of required reading. This is what positions the World Bank as a premier knowledge institution on development. Then why is the rebellion episode so significant? There are four aspects of that which merit discussion.
The first is the resistance against the restructuring medicine. This is the same medicine used by the World Bank against the rest of the world. The restructuring exercise, which has eliminated jobs within the public sector, whether this be in government or in the support services required by any public institution, such as of subordinate administrative staff, has produced an underclass of workers, who, although they are still needed, have been deprived of the welfare and security benefits that the permanent staff enjoys and were benefits that had been won by a long history of working class struggles. So, when security guards, drivers, mess workers, sweepers, the class IV workers, have now to live lives filled with anxiety about illness, unemployment, etc., because they work for labour contractors who do not provide any such benefits, the anger of the World Bank professional staff who, because of the restructuring, have to pay for their “breakfast” is a little difficult to understand. The restructuring exercise of economies in the global south has produced an underclass whose livelihood insecurity has increased exponentially. The mutiny at the World Bank appears somewhat paradoxical. Not only is the exercise personally dishonest, given the rebellion when the policy is applied at home, but it is also intellectually dishonest when read against the 2015 WDR. Is this the modern performance of the “mutiny on the bounty”?
Control by the few
The second aspect is the process adopted in the internal restructuring. The Reuters and FT reports tell us that the common complaint of the staff is that the many aspects of the restructuring exercise, initiated by the president, were non-transparent. There was an opacity to the process. For example, questions such as the following needed to be asked. What was the method followed to give the CFO a “scarce skills premium” of $94,000 over and above his salary? Was the work done outside the normal duty of the CFO? How did the president decide on who qualifies for a “scarce skills premium” and how many persons have qualified for this bonus? These were questions asked at the town hall meeting. If the “scarce skills premium” was based on sound management principles, why did the CFO agree to forego the bonus after the uproar? These are good questions and lead one to wonder if countries have the same option of protesting? Did Greece and Portugal and Ireland and Argentina have the protest option? The interesting lesson from this episode is that restructuring produces pain and distress to the many while it rewards the few especially those tasked with implementing it. These few have access to political and intellectual power. They control the methods adopted of public justification which produces a discourse that the restructuring is necessary and will benefit the whole. The few get rewarded while the many pay the price in the restructuring in many countries of the global south.
Neo-liberal triumph
The third aspect is the use of consultants. This is the most disappointing and alarming aspect of the episode. For an institution such as the World Bank, whose main rationale is that it is a knowledge institution about how to promote development, to now implicitly declare that it does not have the knowledge required to restructure itself is a severe admission of the weakness of its knowledge base and skill sets. How does it then prepare a road map to restructure economies when restructuring an institution is infinitely easier than restructuring the economy of a country? Restructuring an institution can draw on the interdisciplinary knowledge of the WDR 2015 such as best practice, graduated approaches, evidenced-based policies, results-based management, measuring and monitoring, etc. (all the keywords of the World Bank itself), to achieve the result of a better, leaner, more efficient, and fair institution. But the decision to hire outside consultants, paying a whopping fee of $12.5 million, shows that the World Bank does not either believe in its own capability, or worse doesn’t have this capability. What is alarming is the message that development thinking will, from now on, be done and propagated by the big global consultancies. Is the World Bank announcing that henceforth even its development knowledge will be outsourced? As reported in the Economic Times, one of the protesters said, “What do they know about development and the complexities of what we do?” Indeed, what do they know? But if we see the economic policy institutions of many countries, we will see a seamless movement of personnel between global consultancies and central banks. Our own development thinking has been outsourced to neo-liberal knowledge institutions, such as global consultancies, ratings agencies and investment banks. We can see this takeover of knowledge production in the area of economic policy, the triumph of the neo-liberal frame, even in India. Look at the key players of our economic policymaking. The World Bank has now given its stamp of approval to this trend. The recolonisation of the Indian mind and the policy discourse is near complete.
The fourth aspect of this troubling episode is the use of words to legitimise the action. In the last few months of the Indian public debate, we have come to see the power of words and the social power the purveyors of these words acquire. The word makes the world. Tagore argued for this philosophical position that language constructs reality, that we see the beauty of the world through our language, and that outside language there is no beauty. Controlling the word, the Bank decides to reward its CFO with a large bonus, while it is reducing the financial package of its other employees; it deploys the justification for this decision as a “scare skills premium.” The CFO gets the additional money because he has scarce skills. The investment Bank fraternity has to be rewarded with huge bonuses because they have scarce skills. Wall Street is built on this justification. This is capitalism’s masterstroke of controlling perception, controlling the public discourse by controlling words. We accept the differentials because we are made to believe it is a “scarce skills premium” to be paid for our own good. Sometimes a typographical error brings out the truth much better. By mistake I typed it as “scare skills premium.” It is.
‘The demands of the
ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and
applied regardless of the outcome.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles
How they must bleed for us. In 2012, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion: just a little less than the entire output of the United Kingdom.
This
is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich
is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax
rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share
of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets
and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the
destruction of collective bargaining.
The policies that made the
global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This
is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman
and their disciples – in a thousand business schools, the IMF, the
World Bank, the OECD and just about every modern government – have
argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and
redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt
to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding
the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a
30-year global experiment, and the results are now in. Total failure.
Before
I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic
growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim –
an aim to which every government claims to subscribe – you couldn't make
a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the
constraints of democracy.
Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development
should have been an obituary for the neoliberal model developed by
Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that
their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they
predicted. As neoliberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich,
privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security)
began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall
and unemployment to rise.
The remarkable growth in the rich
nations during the 50s, 60s and 70s was made possible by the destruction
of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s
depression and the second world war. Their embarrassment gave the other
99% an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and
social security, all of which stimulated demand.
Neoliberalism
was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by
millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful – politically.
Economically they flopped.
Throughout the OECD countries taxation
has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The
result, the neoliberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and
investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As
taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both
the state and poorer people fell, and demand contracted. The result was
that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of
growth.
The neoliberals also insisted that unrestrained
inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But
throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared.
The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries – worse than
in any previous recession of the past three decades – was preceded by
the lowest level of wages as a share of GDP since the second world war.
Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages
suppress demand, which suppresses employment.
As wages stagnated,
people supplemented their income with debt. Rising debt fed the
deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware. The
greater inequality becomes, the UN report finds, the less stable the
economy and the lower its rates of growth. The policies with which
neoliberal governments seek to reduce their deficits and stimulate their
economies are counter-productive.
As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a
belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But
staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the
US, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a
fraud.The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as
sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The
complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its
repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to
do with power.
Is
it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its
ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding
mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,”
the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”
Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read
about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors,
three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms,
gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing
had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of
grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits
had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.
But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion,
India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the
GDP.
The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at
least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t
live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about
ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s
fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such
gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells”.
In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF
“reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the
nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains
and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who
have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been
impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on
less than twenty rupees a day.
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority
controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a
market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that
include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special
Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research
and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares
in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment
channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in
almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence
for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the
technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani
also owns a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the
others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the
other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for
growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin
America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible,
over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more
than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and
largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields,
steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole
townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain,
Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of
bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant
Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without
Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian
economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good
old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s
new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are
those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot
that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream
come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to
buy.
A whole spectrum of corruption A. Raja being led to jail in connection with the 2G scandal. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)
The other major source of
corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over the world, weak,
corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agro-business
corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of
course, this entails commandeering water too.) In India, the land of
millions of people is being acquired and made over to private
corporations for “public interest”—for Special Economic Zones,
infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs
and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never applies
to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their
displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they
ever had is actually part of employment generation. But by now we know
that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After 20
years of “growth”, 60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90
per cent of India’s labour force works in the unorganised sector.
Post-Independence, right up to the ’80s, people’s movements, ranging
from the Naxalites to Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, were
fighting for land reforms, for the redistribution of land from feudal
landlords to landless peasants. Today any talk of redistribution of land
or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic, but lunatic. Even
the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to
what little land people still have. The millions of landless people, the
majority of them Dalits and adivasis, driven from their villages,
living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and mega cities, do
not figure even in the radical discourse.
As Gush-Up concentrates wealth on to the tip of a shining pin on
which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the
institutions of democracy—the courts, Parliament as well as the media,
seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are
meant to. The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we
are that democracy really exists.
India’s
new megacorps—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance—are those who’ve moved to
the head of the spigot that’s spewing money extracted from inside the
earth.
Each
new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look
tame. In the summer of 2011, the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learnt
that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by
installing a friendly soul as the Union minister of telecommunication
who grossly underpriced the licences for 2G telecom spectrum and
illegally parcelled it out to his buddies. The taped telephone
conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists
and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists and a TV
anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes
were just an mri that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long
ago.
The privatisation and illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not
involve war, displacement and ecological devastation. The privatisation
of India’s mountains, rivers and forests does. Perhaps because it does
not have the uncomplicated clarity of a straightforward, out-and-out
accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all being done in the name
of India’s “progress”, it does not have the same resonance with the
middle classes.
In 2005, the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand
signed hundreds of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with a number of
private corporations turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron
ore and other minerals for a pittance, defying even the warped logic of
the free market. (Royalties to the government ranged between 0.5 per
cent and 7 per cent.)
Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MoU for the
construction of an integrated steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the
Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated. The government said
it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up of the
“repression” by Maoist guerrillas in the forest. It turned out to be a
ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and
subsidised by mining corporations. In the other states, similar militias
were created, with other names. The prime minister announced the
Maoists were the “single-largest security challenge in India”. It was a
declaration of war.
On January 2, 2006, in Kalinganagar, in the neighbouring state of
Orissa, perhaps to signal the seriousness of the government’s intention,
ten platoons of police arrived at the site of another Tata Steel plant
and opened fire on villagers who had gathered there to protest what they
felt was inadequate compensation for their land. Thirteen people,
including one policeman, were killed, and 37 injured. Six years have
gone by and though the villages remain under siege by armed policemen,
the protest has not died.
Meanwhile in Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered
its way through hundreds of forest villages, evacuating 600 villages,
forcing 50,000 people to come out into police camps and 3,50,000 people
to flee. The chief minister announced that those who did not come out of
the forests would be considered to be ‘Maoist terrorists’. In this way,
in parts of modern India, ploughing fields and sowing seed came to be
defined as terrorist activity. Eventually, the Salwa Judum’s atrocities
only succeeded in strengthening the resistance and swelling the ranks of
the Maoist guerrilla army. In 2009, the government announced what it
called Operation Green Hunt. Two lakh paramilitary troops were deployed
across Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal.
After three years of “low-intensity conflict” that has not managed to
“flush” the rebels out of the forest, the central government has
declared that it will deploy the Indian army and air force. In India, we
don’t call this war. We call it “creating a good investment climate”.
Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade headquarters and
air bases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the world is
now preparing its Terms of Engagement to “defend” itself against the
poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await
the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which
will give the army legal immunity and the right to kill “on suspicion”.
Going by the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous
cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland, it has shown itself to
be a very suspicious army indeed.
While the preparations for deployment are being made, the jungles of
Central India continue to remain under siege, with villagers frightened
to come out, or go to the market for food or medicine. Hundreds of
people have been jailed, charged for being Maoists under draconian,
undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with adivasi people, many of whom
have no idea what their crime is. Recently, Soni Sori, an adivasi
school-teacher from Bastar, was arrested and tortured in police custody.
Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to “confess” that she was a
Maoist courier. The stones were removed from her body at a hospital in
Calcutta, where, after a public outcry, she was sent for a medical
check-up. At a recent Supreme Court hearing, activists presented the
judges with the stones in a plastic bag. The only outcome of their
efforts has been that Soni Sori remains in jail while Ankit Garg, the
Superintendent of Police who conducted the interrogation, was conferred
with the President’s Police Medal for Gallantry on Republic Day.
We hear about the ecological and social re-engineering of Central
India only because of the mass insurrection and the war. The government
gives out no information. The Memorandums of Understanding are all
secret. Some sections of the media have done what they could to bring
public attention to what is happening in Central India. However, most of
the Indian mass media is made vulnerable by the fact that the major
share of its revenues come from corporate advertisements. If that is not
bad enough, now the line between the media and big business has begun
to blur dangerously. As we have seen, RIL virtually owns 27 TV channels.
But the reverse is also true. Some media houses now have direct
business and corporate interests. For example, one of the major daily
newspapers in the region—Dainik Bhaskar (and it is only one
example)—has 17.5 million readers in four languages, including English
and Hindi, across 13 states. It also owns 69 companies with interests in
mining, power generation, real estate and textiles. A recent writ
petition filed in the Chhattisgarh High Court accuses DB Power Ltd (one
of the group’s companies) of using “deliberate, illegal and manipulative
measures” through company-owned newspapers to influence the outcome of a
public hearing over an open cast coal mine. Whether or not it has
attempted to influence the outcome is not germane. The point is that
media houses are in a position to do so. They have the power to do so.
The laws of the land allow them to be in a position that lends itself to
a serious conflict of interest.
The litfests Along with
film, art installations, they have replaced the 1990s obsession with
beauty contests. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)
There are other parts of the
country from which no news comes. In the sparsely populated but
militarised northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, 168 big dams are
being constructed, most of them privately owned. High dams that will
submerge whole districts are being constructed in Manipur and Kashmir,
both highly militarised states where people can be killed merely for
protesting power cuts. (That happened a few weeks ago in Kashmir.) How
can they stop a dam?
The most delusional dam of all is Kalpasar in Gujarat. It is being
planned as a 34-km-long dam across the Gulf of Khambhat with a 10-lane
highway and a railway line running on top of it. By keeping the sea
water out, the idea is to create a sweet water reservoir of Gujarat’s
rivers. (Never mind that these rivers have already been dammed to a
trickle and poisoned with chemical effluent.) The Kalpasar dam, which
would raise the sea level and alter the ecology of hundreds of
kilometres of coastline, had been dismissed as a bad idea 10 years ago.
It has made a sudden comeback in order to supply water to the Dholera
Special Investment Region (SIR) in one of the most water-stressed zones
not just in India, but in the world. SIR is another name for an SEZ, a
self-governed corporate dystopia of “industrial parks, townships and
mega-cities”. The Dholera SIR is going to be connected to Gujarat’s
other cities by a network of 10-lane highways. Where will the money for
all this come from?
After
three years of trying to flush out the rebels, the Centre’s said it’ll
deploy the armed forces. In India, this is not war, it’s ‘Creating a
Good Investment Climate’.
In
January 2011, in the Mahatma (Gandhi) Mandir, Gujarat chief minister
Narendra Modi presided over a meeting of 10,000 international
businessmen from 100 countries. According to media reports, they pledged
to invest $450 billion in Gujarat. The meeting was scheduled to take
place at the onset of the 10th anniversary year of the massacre of 2,000
Muslims in February-March 2002. Modi stands accused of not just
condoning, but actively abetting, the killing. People who watched their
loved ones being raped, eviscerated and burned alive, the tens of
thousands who were driven from their homes, still wait for a gesture
towards justice. But Modi has traded in his saffron scarf and vermilion
forehead for a sharp business suit, and hopes that a 450-billion-dollar
investment will work as blood money, and square the books. Perhaps it
will. Big Business is backing him enthusiastically. The algebra of
infinite justice works in mysterious ways.
The Dholera SIR is only one of the smaller Matryoshka dolls, one of
the inner ones in the dystopia that is being planned. It will be
connected to the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), a
1,500-km-long and 300-km-wide industrial corridor, with nine
mega-industrial zones, a high-speed freight line, three seaports and six
airports, a six-lane intersection-free expressway and a 4,000 MW power
plant. The DMIC is a collaborative venture between the governments of
India and Japan, and their respective corporate partners, and has been
proposed by the McKinsey Global Institute.
The DMIC website says that approximately 180 million people will be
“affected” by the project. Exactly how, it doesn’t say. It envisages the
building of several new cities and estimates that the population in the
region will grow from the current 231 million to 314 million by 2019.
That’s in seven years’ time. When was the last time a state, despot or
dictator carried out a population transfer of millions of people? Can it
possibly be a peaceful process?
The Indian army might need to go on a recruitment drive so that it’s
not taken unawares when it’s ordered to deploy all over India. In
preparation for its role in Central India, it publicly released its
updated doctrine on Military Psychological Operations, which outlines “a
planned process of conveying a message to a select target audience, to
promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and
behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military
objectives of the country”. This process of “perception management”, it
said, would be conducted by “using media available to the services”.
The army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone
cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is
envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But
for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers,
intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception management”.
And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of
Corporate Philanthropy.
Of late, the main mining conglomerates have embraced the Arts—film,
art installations and the rush of literary festivals that have replaced
the ’90s obsession with beauty contests. Vedanta, currently mining the
heart out of the homelands of the ancient Dongria Kondh tribe for
bauxite, is sponsoring a ‘Creating Happiness’ film competition for young
film students whom they have commissioned to make films on sustainable
development. Vedanta’s tagline is ‘Mining Happiness’. The Jindal Group
brings out a contemporary art magazine and supports some of India’s
major artists (who naturally work with stainless steel). Essar was the
principal sponsor of the Tehelka Newsweek Think Fest that
promised “high-octane debates” by the foremost thinkers from around the
world, which included major writers, activists and even the architect
Frank Gehry. (All this in Goa while activists and journalists were
uncovering massive illegal mining scandals that involved Essar.) Tata
Steel and Rio Tinto (which has a sordid track record of its own) were
among the chief sponsors of the Jaipur Literary Festival (Latin name:
Darshan Singh Construction Jaipur Literary Festival) that is advertised
by the cognoscenti as ‘The Greatest Literary Show on Earth’. Counselage,
the Tatas’ “strategic brand manager”, sponsored the festival’s press
tent. Many of the world’s best and brightest writers gathered in Jaipur
to discuss love, literature, politics and Sufi poetry. Some tried to
defend Salman Rushdie’s right to free speech by reading from his
proscribed book, The Satanic Verses. In every TV frame and
newspaper photograph, the logo of Tata Steel (and its tagline—Values
Stronger than Steel) loomed behind them, a benign, benevolent host. The
enemies of Free Speech were the supposedly murderous Muslim mobs, who,
the festival organisers told us, could have even harmed the
school-children gathered there. (We are witness to how helpless the
Indian government and the police can be when it comes to Muslims.) Yes,
the hardline Darul-Uloom Deobandi Islamic seminary did protest Rushdie
being invited to the festival. Yes, some Islamists did gather at the
festival venue to protest and yes, outrageously, the state government
did nothing to protect the venue. That’s because the whole episode had
as much to do with democracy, votebanks and the Uttar Pradesh elections
as it did with Islamist fundamentalism. But the battle for Free Speech
against Islamist Fundamentalism made it to the world’s newspapers. It is
important that it did. But there were hardly any reports about the
festival sponsors’ role in the war in the forests, the bodies piling up,
the prisons filling up. Or about the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, which make even thinking
an anti-government thought a cognisable offence. Or about the mandatory
public hearing for the Tata Steel plant in Lohandiguda which local
people complained actually took place hundreds of miles away in
Jagdalpur, in the collector’s office compound, with a hired audience of
fifty people, under armed guard. Where was Free Speech then? No one
mentioned Kalinganagar. No one mentioned that journalists, academics and
filmmakers working on subjects unpopular with the Indian
government—like the surreptitious part it played in the genocide of
Tamils in the war in Sri Lanka or the recently discovered unmarked
graves in Kashmir—were being denied visas or deported straight from the
airport.
But which of us sinners was going to cast the first stone? Not me,
who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses. We all watch
Tata Sky, we surf the net with Tata Photon, we ride in Tata taxis, we
stay in Tata Hotels, we sip our Tata tea in Tata bone china and stir it
with teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We buy Tata books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka namak khate hain. We’re under siege.
If the sledgehammer of moral purity is to be the criterion for
stone-throwing, then the only people who qualify are those who have been
silenced already. Those who live outside the system; the outlaws in the
forests or those whose protests are never covered by the press, or the
well-behaved dispossessed, who go from tribunal to tribunal, bearing
witness, giving testimony.
But the Litfest gave us our Aha! Moment. Oprah came. She said she loved India, that she would come again and again. It made us proud.
This is only the burlesque end of the Exquisite Art.
Though the Tatas have been involved with corporate philanthropy for
almost a hundred years now, endowing scholarships and running some
excellent educational institutes and hospitals, Indian corporations have
only recently been invited into the Star Chamber, the Camera stellata,
the brightly lit world of global corporate government, deadly for its
adversaries, but otherwise so artful that you barely know it’s there.
What follows in this essay might
appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand, in
the tradition of honouring one’s adversaries, it could be read as an
acknowledgement of the vision, flexibility, the sophistication and
unwavering determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keep
the world safe for capitalism.
Their enthralling history, which has faded from contemporary memory,
began in the US in the early 20th century when, kitted out legally in
the form of endowed foundations, corporate philanthropy began to replace
missionary activity as Capitalism’s (and Imperialism’s) road opening
and systems maintenance patrol. Among the first foundations to be set up
in the United States were the Carnegie Corporation, endowed in 1911 by
profits from the Carnegie Steel Company; and the Rockefeller Foundation,
endowed in 1914 by J.D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Company. The Tatas and Ambanis of their time.
Some of the institutions financed, given seed money or supported by
the Rockefeller Foundation are the UN, the CIA, the Council on Foreign
Relations, New York’s most fabulous Museum of Modern Art, and, of
course, the Rockefeller Center in New York (where Diego Riviera’s mural
had to be blasted off the wall because it mischievously depicted
reprobate capitalists and a valiant Lenin. Free Speech had taken the day
off.)
J.D. Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and the world’s
richest man. He was an abolitionist, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and a
teetotaller. He believed his money was given to him by God, which must
have been nice for him.
Here’s an excerpt from one of Pablo Neruda’s early poems called Standard Oil Company:
Their obese emperors from New York
are suave smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars
petty tyrants and dictators.
They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.
A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.
When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the
US, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality and lack
of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much
surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People
made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The
idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the
business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive
resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly
non-transparent—what better way to parlay economic wealth into
political, social and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What
better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to
run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing
or two about computers, find himself designing education, health and
agriculture policies, not just for the US government, but for
governments all over the world?
Over the years, as people witnessed some of the genuinely good the
foundations did (running public libraries, eradicating diseases)—the
direct connection between corporations and the foundations they endowed
began to blur. Eventually, it faded altogether. Now even those who
consider themselves left-wing are not shy to accept their largesse.
RIL owns 27 TV channels. But the reverse is also true. Dainik Bhaskar owns 69
companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate and textiles.
By
the 1920s, US capitalism had begun to look outwards, for raw materials
and overseas markets. Foundations began to formulate the idea of global
corporate governance. In 1924, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations
jointly created what is today the most powerful foreign policy pressure
group in the world—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which later
came to be funded by the Ford Foundation as well. By 1947, the newly
created CIA was supported by and working closely with the CFR. Over the
years, the CFR’s membership has included 22 US secretaries of state.
There were five CFR members in the 1943 steering committee that planned
the UN, and an $8.5 million grant from J.D. Rockefeller bought the land
on which the UN’s New York headquarters stands.
All eleven of the World Bank’s presidents since 1946—men who have
presented themselves as missionaries of the poor—have been members of
the CFR. (The exception was George Woods. And he was a trustee of the
Rockefeller Foundation and vice-president of Chase-Manhattan Bank.)
At Bretton Woods, the World Bank
and IMF decided that the US dollar should be the reserve currency of the
world, and that in order to enhance the penetration of global capital,
it would be necessary to universalise and standardise business practices
in an open marketplace. It is towards that end that they spend a large
amount of money promoting Good Governance (as long as they control the
strings), the concept of the Rule of Law (provided they have a say in
making the laws) and hundreds of anti-corruption programmes (to
streamline the system they have put in place.) Two of the most opaque,
unaccountable organisations in the world go about demanding transparency
and accountability from the governments of poorer countries.
Given that the World Bank has more or less directed the economic
policies of the Third World, coercing and cracking open the markets of
country after country for global finance, you could say that corporate
philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary business of all
time.
Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade and channelise their
power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of
elite clubs and think-tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out
through the revolving doors. Contrary to the various conspiracy theories
in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing
secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not
very different from the way corporations use shell companies and
offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the
currency is power, not money.
The transnational equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission,
set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the former US National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (founder-member of the Afghan Mujahideen,
forefathers of the Taliban), the Chase-Manhattan Bank and some other
private eminences. Its purpose was to create an enduring bond of
friendship and cooperation between the elites of North America, Europe
and Japan. It has now become a penta-lateral commission, because it
includes members from China and India. (Tarun Das of the CII; N.R.
Narayanamurthy, ex-CEO, Infosys; Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director,
Godrej; Jamshed J. Irani, director, Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO,
Avantha Group).
The Aspen Institute is an international club of local elites,
businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians, with franchises in several
countries. Tarun Das is the president of the Aspen Institute, India.
Gautam Thapar is chairman. Several senior officers of the McKinsey
Global Institute (proposer of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor) are
members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Aspen Institute.
Coercing
a woman out of a burqa is not about liberating her, but about
unclothing her. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing
her into one.
The
Ford Foundation (liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller
Foundation, though the two work together constantly) was set up in 1936.
Though it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear,
well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US state
department. Its project of deepening democracy and “good governance” are
very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardising business
practice and promoting efficiency in the free market. After the Second
World War, when Communists replaced Fascists as the US government’s
enemy number one, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal with the
Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a
military think-tank that began with weapons research for the US defense
services. In 1952, to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to
penetrate and disrupt free nations”, it established the Fund for the
Republic, which then morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions whose brief was to wage the cold war intelligently without
McCarthyite excesses. It is through this lens that we need to view the
work Ford Foundation is doing, with the millions of dollars it has
invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers and activists, its
generous endowment of university courses and scholarships.
The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind”
include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and
internationally. In the US, it provided millions in grants and loans to
support the Credit Union Movement that was pioneered by the department
store owner, Edward Filene, in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass
consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable
access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a
radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was the
more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on
the first half of Filene’s suggestion, and by disbursing “affordable”
loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US
working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch
up with their lifestyles.
Embracing death Microcredit has been the bane of many a farmer. Many have been forced to commit suicide.
Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished
countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank
brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences.
Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of
suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily
recently published a suicide note by an 18-year-old girl who was forced
to hand over her last Rs 150, her school fees, to bullying employees of
the microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do
not take loans.”
There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
But which of us sinners was going to cast the first stone? We watch Tata Sky, surf the net with Tata Photon, sip Tata Tea. Hum Tata ka namak khate hain!
By
the 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funding several NGOs
and international educational institutions, began to work as
quasi-extensions of the US government that was at the time toppling
democratically elected governments in Latin America, Iran and Indonesia.
(That was also around the time they made their entry into India, then
non-aligned, but clearly tilting towards the Soviet Union.) The Ford
Foundation established a US-style economics course at the Indonesian
University. Elite Indonesian students, trained in counter-insurgency by
US army officers, played a crucial part in the 1952 CIA-backed coup in
Indonesia that brought General Suharto to power. Gen Suharto repaid his
mentors by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Communist rebels.
Twenty years later, young Chilean students, who came to be known as
the Chicago Boys, were taken to the US to be trained in neo-liberal
economics by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago (endowed by
J.D. Rockefeller), in preparation for the 1973 CIA-backed coup that
killed Salvador Allende, and brought in General Pinochet and a reign of
death squads, disappearances and terror that lasted for seventeen years.
(Allende’s crime was being a democratically elected socialist and
nationalising Chile’s mines.)
In 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay
Prize for community leaders in Asia. It was named after Ramon Magsaysay,
president of the Philippines, a crucial ally in the US campaign against
Communism in Southeast Asia. In 2000, the Ford Foundation established
the Ramon Magsaysay Emergent Leadership Award. The Magsaysay Award is
considered a prestigious award among artists, activists and community
workers in India. M.S. Subbulakshmi and Satyajit Ray won it, so did
Jayaprakash Narayan and one of India’s finest journalists, P. Sainath.
But they did more for the Magsaysay award than it did for them. In
general, it has become a gentle arbiter of what kind of activism is
“acceptable” and what is not.
Team Anna Whose voice are they, really?. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)
Interestingly, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement last summer was
spearheaded by three Magsaysay Award winners—Anna Hazare, Arvind
Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi. One of Arvind Kejriwal’s many NGOs is
generously funded by Ford Foundation. Kiran Bedi’s NGO is funded by Coca
Cola and Lehman Brothers.
Though Anna Hazare calls himself a Gandhian, the law he called
for—the Jan Lokpal Bill—was un-Gandhian, elitist and dangerous. A
round-the-clock corporate media campaign proclaimed him to be the voice
of “the people”. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, the
Hazare movement did not breathe a word against privatisation, corporate
power or economic “reforms”. On the contrary, its principal media
backers successfully turned the spotlight away from massive corporate
corruption scandals (which had exposed high-profile journalists too) and
used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further
withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms,
more privatisation. (In 2008, Anna Hazare received a World Bank award
for outstanding public service). The World Bank issued a statement from
Washington saying the movement “dovetailed” into its policy.
Like all good Imperialists, the
Philanthropoids set themselves the task of creating and training an
international cadre that believed that Capitalism, and by extension the
hegemony of the United States, was in their own self-interest. And who
would therefore help to administer the Global Corporate Government in
the ways native elites had always served colonialism. So began the
foundations’ foray into education and the arts, which would become their
third sphere of influence, after foreign and domestic economic policy.
They spent (and continue to spend) millions of dollars on academic
institutions and pedagogy.
Joan Roelofs in her wonderful book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism describes
how foundations remodelled the old ideas of how to teach political
science, and fashioned the disciplines of “international” and “area”
studies. This provided the US intelligence and security services a pool
of expertise in foreign languages and culture to recruit from. The CIA
and US state department continue to work with students and professors in
US universities, raising serious questions about the ethics of
scholarship.
Uniquely placed Nandan Nilekani, ‘CEO’ of Project UID. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)
The gathering of information to control people they rule is
fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and
the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of
outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the
government has embarked on a massive biometrics programme, perhaps one
of the most ambitious and expensive information-gathering projects in
the world— the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have
clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have
election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project
run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to
“deliver services to the poor”, will inject massive amounts of money
into a slightly beleaguered IT industry? (A conservative estimate of the
UID budget exceeds the Indian government’s annual public spending on
education.) To “digitise” a country with such a large population of the
largely illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part
slum-dwellers, hawkers, adivasis without land records—will criminalise
them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off
a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers
into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s
technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill
Gates’s obsession with digital databases, “numerical targets”,
“scorecards of progress”. As though it is a lack of information that is
the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt and skewed
profit-oriented, corporate policy.
Corporate-endowed foundations are the biggest funders of the social
sciences and the arts, endowing courses and student scholarships in
“development studies”, “community studies”, “cultural studies”,
“behavioural sciences” and “human rights”. As US universities opened
their doors to international students, hundreds of thousands of
students, children of the Third World elite, poured in. Those who could
not afford the fees were given scholarships. Today in countries like
India and Pakistan there is scarcely a family among the upper middle
classes that does not have a child that has studied in the US. From
their ranks have come good scholars and academics, but also the prime
ministers, finance ministers, economists, corporate lawyers, bankers and
bureaucrats who helped to open up the economies of their countries to
global corporations.
Corporate
philanthropy is as much a part of our lives as Coca Cola. Global
finance buys into protest movements via NGOs. More troubled an area,
more the NGOs.
Scholars
of the Foundation-friendly version of economics and political science
were rewarded with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments and
jobs. Those with Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded,
marginalised and ghettoised, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one
particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and
multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic
chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the
roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to
dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to
be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the
natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised ordinariness, and
challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging
reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No
Alternative’.
It is only now, thanks to the Occupy Movement, that another language
has appeared on US streets and campuses. To see students with banners
that say ‘Class War’ or ‘We don’t mind you being rich, but we mind you
buying our government’ is, given the odds, almost a revolution in
itself.
One century after it began,
corporate philanthropy is as much part of our lives as Coca Cola. There
are now millions of non-profit organisations, many of them connected
through a byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations. Between
them, this “independent” sector has assets worth nearly 450 billion
dollars. The largest of them is the Bill Gates Foundation with ($21
billion), followed by the Lilly Endowment ($16 billion) and the Ford
Foundation ($15 billion).
Nilekani’s
technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of
Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world
hunger.
As
the IMF enforced Structural Adjustment, and arm-twisted governments
into cutting back on public spending on health, education, childcare,
development, the NGOs moved in. The Privatisation of Everything has also
meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods
disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even
for those who see them for what they are. And they are certainly not all
bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it
would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush. However, the
corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying
into resistance movements, literally like shareholders buy shares in
companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes
on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance
flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to
every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host
countries. (The Ford Foundation requires the organisations it funds to
sign a pledge to this effect.) Inadvertently (and sometimes
advertently), they serve as listening posts, their reports and workshops
and other missionary activity feeding data into an increasingly
aggressive system of surveillance of increasingly hardening States. The
more troubled an area, the greater the numbers of NGOs in it.
Mischievously, when the government or sections of the Corporate Press
want to run a smear campaign against a genuine people’s movement, like
the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or the protest against the Koodankulam
nuclear reactor, they accuse these movements of being NGOs receiving
“foreign funding”. They know very well that the mandate of most NGOs, in
particular the well-funded ones, is to further the project of corporate
globalisation, not thwart it.
Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world,
turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding
artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from
radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of
multi-culturalism, gender, community development—the discourse couched
in the language of identity politics and human rights.
The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human
rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have
played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an
atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out
and both parties in a conflict—say, for example, the Maoists and the
Indian government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas—can both be admonished
as Human Rights Violators. The land-grab by mining corporations or the
history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel
then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is
not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are
not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the
great injustices in the world we live in.
‘Mining happiness’ Vedanta is stripping all that the Dongria Kondh tribals hold sacred. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)
Another conceptual coup has to do with foundations’ involvement with
the feminist movement. Why do most “official” feminists and women’s
organisations in India keep a safe distance between themselves and
organisations like say the 90,000-member Krantikari Adivasi Mahila
Sangathan (Revolutionary Adivasi Women’s Association) fighting
patriarchy in their own communities and displacement by mining
corporations in the Dandakaranya forest? Why is it that the
dispossession and eviction of millions of women from land which they
owned and worked is not seen as a feminist problem?
The hiving off of the liberal feminist movement
from grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist people’s movements
did not begin with the evil designs of foundations. It began with those
movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid radicalisation
of women that took place in the ’60s and ’70s. The foundations showed
genius in recognising and moving in to support and fund women’s growing
impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional
societies as well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of
Left movements. In a country like India, the schism also ran along the
rural-urban divide. Most radical, anti-capitalist movements were located
in the countryside where, for the most part, patriarchy continued to
rule the lives of most women. Urban women activists who joined these
movements (like the Naxalite movement) had been influenced and inspired
by the western feminist movement and their own journeys towards
liberation were often at odds with what their male leaders considered to
be their duty: to fit in with ‘the masses’. Many women activists were
not willing to wait any longer for the “revolution” in order to end the
daily oppression and discrimination in their lives, including from their
own comrades. They wanted gender equality to be an absolute, urgent and
non-negotiable part of the revolutionary process and not just a
post-revolution promise. Intelligent, angry and disillusioned women
began to move away and look for other means of support and sustenance.
As a result, by the late ’80s, around the time Indian markets were
opened up, the liberal feminist movement in a country like India has
become inordinately NGO-ised. Many of these NGOs have done seminal work
on queer rights, domestic violence, AIDS and the rights of sex workers.
But significantly, the liberal feminist movements have not been at the
forefront of challenging the new economic policies, even though women
have been the greatest sufferers. By manipulating the disbursement of
the funds, the foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the
range of what “political” activity should be. The funding briefs of NGOs
now prescribe what counts as women’s “issues” and what doesn’t.
The NGO-isation of the women’s movement has also made western liberal
feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) the
standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles, as usual,
have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and
burqas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double
whammy, Botox and the Burqa.) When, as happened recently in France, an
attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a
situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not
about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of
humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s
about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as
coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social,
political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle
of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use
western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in
2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban.
But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their
problems.
In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of
its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate,
professionalised, special-interest issue. Community development,
leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive
rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into
their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief.
Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.
Poverty too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As
though the poor have not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe
who just happen to exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a
system of grievance redressal (administered by NGOs on an individual,
person to person basis), and whose long-term resurrection will come from
Good Governance. Under the regime of Global Corporate Capitalism, it
goes without saying.
Indian poverty, after a brief
period in the wilderness while India “shone”, has made a comeback as an
exotic identity in the Arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog Millionaire.
These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have
no villains—except the small ones who provide narrative tension and
local colour. The authors of these works are the contemporary world’s
equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honoured for working
on “the ground”, for their brave journeys into the unknown. You rarely
see the rich being examined in these ways.
Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties,
elections, courts, the media and liberal opinion, there was one more
challenge for the neo-liberal establishment: how to deal with growing
unrest, the threat of “people’s power”. How do you domesticate it? How
do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and
redirect it into blind alleys?
Here too, foundations and their allied organisations have a long and
illustrious history. A revealing example is their role in defusing and
deradicalising the Black Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s
and the successful transformation of Black Power into Black Capitalism.
The Rockefeller Foundation, in keeping with J.D. Rockefeller’s
ideals, had worked closely with Martin Luther King Sr (father of Martin
Luther King Jr). But his influence waned with the rise of the more
militant organisations—the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and the Black Panthers. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations
moved in. In 1970, they donated $15 million to “moderate” black
organisations, giving people grants, fellowships, scholarships, job
training programmes for dropouts and seed money for black-owned
businesses. Repression, infighting and the honey trap of funding led to
the gradual atrophying of the radical black organisations.
Stones
were pushed up Soni Sori’s vagina to get her to ‘confess’. Sori remains
in jail; her interrogator, Ankit Garg, was awarded the police medal
this Republic Day.
Martin
Luther King Jr made the forbidden connections between Capitalism,
Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was
assassinated, even his memory became a toxic threat to public order.
Foundations and Corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a
market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Junior Centre for
Non-Violent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was
set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil,
Western Electric, Procter & Gamble, US Steel and Monsanto. The
Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights
Movement. Among the many programmes the King Center runs have been
projects that “work closely with the United States Department of
Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others”. It co-sponsored
the Martin Luther King Jr Lecture Series called ‘The Free Enterprise
System: An Agent for Non-violent Social Change’. Amen.
A similar coup was carried out in the anti-apartheid struggle in
South Africa. In 1978, the Rockefeller Foundation organised a Study
Commission on US Policy toward Southern Africa. The report warned of the
growing influence of the Soviet Union on the African National Congress
(ANC) and said that US strategic and corporate interests (i.e., access
to South Africa’s minerals) would be best served if there were genuine
sharing of political power by all races.
Black ‘liberation’ Or a bow to the Washington Consensus?. (Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook, March 26, 2012)
The foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the
more radical organisations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness
movement and more or less eliminated them. When Nelson Mandela took over
as South Africa’s first Black President, he was canonised as a living
saint, not just because he was a freedom fighter who spent 27 years in
prison, but also because he deferred completely to the Washington
Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s
great “peaceful transition”, so praised and lauded, meant no land
reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalisation of South Africa’s
mines. Instead, there was Privatisation and Structural Adjustment.
Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good
Hope—to his old supporter and friend General Suharto, the killer of
Communists in Indonesia. Today, in South Africa, a clutch of
Mercedes-driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country.
But that is more than enough to perpetuate the illusion of Black
Liberation.
The rise of Black Power in the US was an inspirational moment for the
rise of a radical, progressive Dalit movement in India, with
organisations like the Dalit Panthers mirroring the militant politics of
the Black Panthers. But Dalit Power too, in not exactly the same but
similar ways, has been fractured and defused and, with plenty of help
from right-wing Hindu organisations and the Ford Foundation, is well on
its way to transforming into Dalit Capitalism.
‘Dalit Inc ready to show business can beat caste’, the Indian Express
reported in December last year. It went on to quote a mentor of the
Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (DICCI). “Getting the
prime minister for a Dalit gathering is not difficult in our society.
But for Dalit entrepreneurs, taking a photograph with Tata and Godrej
over lunch and tea is an aspiration—and proof that they have arrived,”
he said. Given the situation in modern India, it would be casteist and
reactionary to say that Dalit entrepreneurs oughtn’t to have a place at
the high table. But if this is to be the aspiration, the ideological
framework of Dalit politics, it would be a great pity. And unlikely to
help the one million Dalits who still earn a living off manual
scavenging—carrying human shit on their heads.
Do
we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market
for weapons? It’s the one thing that the US hasn’t outsourced to China.
Young
Dalit scholars who accept grants from the Ford Foundation cannot be too
harshly judged. Who else is offering them an opportunity to climb out
of the cesspit of the Indian caste system? The shame as well as a large
part of the blame for this turn of events also goes to India’s Communist
movement whose leaders continue to be predominantly upper caste. For
years it has tried to force-fit the idea of caste into Marxist class
analysis. It has failed miserably, in theory as well as practice. The
rift between the Dalit community and the Left began with a falling out
between the visionary Dalit leader Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar and S.A. Dange,
trade unionist and founding member of the Communist Party of India. Dr
Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the Communist Party began with the
textile workers’ strike in Mumbai in 1928 when he realised that despite
all the rhetoric about working class solidarity, the party did not find
it objectionable that the “untouchables” were kept out of the weaving
department (and only qualified for the lower paid spinning department)
because the work involved the use of saliva on the threads, which other
castes considered “polluting”.
Ambedkar realised that in a society where the Hindu scriptures
institutionalise untouchability and inequality, the battle for
“untouchables”, for social and civic rights, was too urgent to wait for
the promised Communist revolution. The rift between the Ambedkarites and
the Left has come at a great cost to both. It has meant that a great
majority of the Dalit population, the backbone of the Indian working
class, has pinned its hopes for deliverance and dignity to
constitutionalism, to capitalism and to political parties like the BSP,
which practise an important, but in the long run, stagnant brand of
identity politics.
In the United States, as we have seen, corporate-endowed foundations
spawned the culture of NGOs. In India, targeted corporate philanthropy
began in earnest in the 1990s, the era of the New Economic Policies.
Membership to the Star Chamber doesn’t come cheap. The Tata Group
donated $50 million to that needy institution, the Harvard Business
School, and another $50 million to Cornell University. Nandan Nilekani
of Infosys and his wife Rohini donated $5 million as a start-up
endowment for the India Initiative at Yale. The Harvard Humanities
Centre is now the Mahindra Humanities Centre after it received its
largest-ever donation of $10 million from Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra
Group. At home, the Jindal Group, with a major stake
in mining, metals and power, runs the Jindal Global Law School and will
soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. (The Ford
Foundation runs a law school in the Congo.) The New India Foundation
funded by Nandan Nilekani, financed by profits from Infosys, gives
prizes and fellowships to social scientists. The Sitaram Jindal
Foundation endowed by Jindal Aluminium has announced five cash prizes of
Rs 1 crore each to be given to those working in rural development,
poverty alleviation, environment education and moral upliftment. The
Reliance Group’s Observer Research Foundation (ORF), currently endowed
by Mukesh Ambani, is cast in the mould of the Rockefeller Foundation. It
has retired intelligence agents, strategic analysts, politicians (who
pretend to rail against each other in Parliament), journalists and
policymakers as its research “fellows” and advisors.
ORF’s objectives seem straightforward enough: “To help develop a
consensus in favour of economic reforms.” And to shape and influence
public opinion, creating “viable, alternative policy options in areas as
divergent as employment generation in backward districts and real-time
strategies to counter nuclear, biological and chemical threats”.
I was initially puzzled by the preoccupation with “nuclear,
biological and chemical war” in ORF’s stated objectives. But less so
when, in the long list of its ‘institutional partners’, I found the
names of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, two of the world’s leading
weapons manufacturers. In 2007, Raytheon announced it was turning its
attention to India. Could it be that at least part of India’s $32
billion defence budget will be spent on weapons, guided missiles,
aircraft, warships and surveillance equipment made by Raytheon and
Lockheed Martin?
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a
market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, US and Israel
depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t
outsourced to China.
In the new Cold War between US and China, India is being groomed to
play the role Pakistan played as a US ally in the cold war with Russia.
(And look what happened to Pakistan.) Many of those columnists and
“strategic analysts” who are playing up the hostilities between India
and China, you’ll see, can be traced back directly or indirectly to the
Indo-American think-tanks and foundations. Being a “strategic partner”
of the US does not mean that the Heads of State make friendly phone
calls to each other every now and then. It means collaboration
(interference) at every level. It means hosting US Special Forces on
Indian soil (a Pentagon Commander recently confirmed this to the BBC).
It means sharing intelligence, altering agriculture and energy policies,
opening up the health and education sectors to global investment. It
means opening up retail. It means an unequal partnership in which India
is being held close in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a
partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.
In the list of ORF’s
‘institutional partners’, you will also find the RAND Corporation, Ford
Foundation, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution (whose stated
mission is to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that
advance three broad goals: to strengthen American democracy; to foster
the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all
Americans; and to secure a more open, safe, prosperous and cooperative
international system”.) You will also find the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
of Germany. (Poor Rosa, who died for the cause of Communism, to find
her name on a list such as this one!)
Though capitalism is meant to be based on competition, those at the
top of the food chain have also shown themselves to be capable of
inclusiveness and solidarity. The great Western Capitalists have done
business with fascists, socialists, despots and military dictators. They
can adapt and constantly innovate. They are capable of quick thinking
and immense tactical cunning.
But despite having successfully powered through economic reforms,
despite having waged wars and militarily occupied countries in order to
put in place free market “democracies”, Capitalism is going through a
crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself completely yet. Marx said,
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own
grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable.”
Capitalism
is in crisis. The international financial meltdown is closing in. The
two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply
will not work.
The
proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault.
Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been
disbanded. The proletariat has, over the years, been pitted against each
other in every possible way. In India, it has been Hindu against
Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against
caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is
fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In
India, the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of
the richest corporations in their tracks.
Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in
trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s
growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is
pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles
of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis
will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of
global capital.
Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional
Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic
brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact:
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out
of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.
I stood outside Antilla for a long time watching the sun go down. I
imagined that the tower was as deep as it was high. That it had a
twenty-seven-storey-long tap root, snaking around below the ground,
hungrily sucking sustenance out of the earth, turning it into smoke and
gold.
Why did the Ambanis’ choose to call their building Antilla? Antilla
is the name of a set of mythical islands whose story dates back to an
8th-century Iberian legend. When the Muslims conquered Hispania, six
Christian Visigothic bishops and their parishioners boarded ships and
fled. After days, or maybe weeks at sea, they arrived at the isles of
Antilla where they decided to settle and raise a new civilisation. They
burnt their boats to permanently sever their links to their
barbarian-dominated homeland.
By calling their tower Antilla, do the Ambanis hope to sever their
links to the poverty and squalor of their homeland and raise a new
civilisation? Is this the final act of the most successful secessionist
movement in India? The secession of the middle and upper classes into
outer space?
As night fell over Mumbai, guards in crisp linen shirts with
crackling walkie-talkies appeared outside the forbidding gates of
Antilla. The lights blazed on, to scare away the ghosts perhaps. The
neighbours complain that Antilla’s bright lights have stolen the night.
