Dhruv Rathee is wrong. If Modi is a dictator, why did he fail so often to get what he wants

Dilip Mandal in The Print

Content creator Dhruv Rathee’s recently uploaded video, ‘Is India becoming a DICTATORSHIP?’, has set social media abuzz, amassing over 13 million views on YouTube alone. The viral video examines concerns around Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party’s ‘One Nation, One Party’ ideology, citing instances of media control, horse-trading of MLAs, and the alleged misuse of enforcement agencies against opposition leaders. Of course, it also goes on to suggest that India is becoming a ‘dictatorship’ under Modi.

But in his two terms as Prime Minister, Modi has demonstrated an accommodating and somewhat indecisive leadership style. He really doesn’t carry the authoritarian tendencies of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or Indira Gandhi.

In fact, the PM has, on many occasions, developed cold feet or compromised despite being an undisputed leader of his party and scoring two consecutive Lok Sabha terms. He has never been one to bulldoze, always stopping to rethink his decisions in the face of resistance. Call it statecraft, or simply a compulsion to govern a nation as diverse and complex as India.

I will list here some of those instances:

No reform for the collegium system: Narendra Modi introduced a significant reform in the judiciary shortly after becoming Prime Minister for the first time. The National Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2014, aimed at overhauling India’s judicial appointment process and modifying the collegium system, was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 11 August 2014 and subsequently passed by both houses of Parliament. Endorsed by over 20 state legislatures, its objective was “to broad base the appointment of Judges in the Supreme Court and High Courts, enable the participation of the judiciary, executive, and eminent persons, and ensure greater transparency, accountability, and objectivity in the appointment of Judges in the Supreme Court and High Courts.”However, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court declared the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act and the 99th Constitutional Amendment unconstitutional, arguing that maintaining the judiciary’s independence from government influence forms the basic structure of the Constitution. The Act, which sought to give politicians and civil society a role in the appointment of judges, was struck down by a 4:1 judgment to preserve “judicial independence.”This decision marked the end of the road for Modi’s judicial reform agenda. He did not attempt to reintroduce the bill or press for changes to the Collegium system. A single setback led to the withdrawal of an important reform agenda. The decision of just four judges overruled the will of the people – which was reflected in Parliament and 20 state legislatures – and Modi let it happen. Clearly, he went by the rule book and respected institutions from the get-go.

The death of farm laws: In 2020, the Modi government tried to reform the agriculture sector with three farm laws, namely The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act. The laws were designed to facilitate direct farmer sales beyond Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) and without state taxes, allowing contract farming, deregulating certain commodities’ trade (except in emergencies), and enhancing trade freedom and farmer autonomy. However, the farmers protested saying that the new laws aimed to facilitate outside-APMC trade that would diminish government purchases in mandis, make the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system irrelevant and destabilise their assured income.Landed farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, protested by blocking arterial roads leading to New Delhi. The government soon gave in, stopping the implementation of laws that could have modernised Indian agriculture.

Didn’t push too hard for land acquisition: The Modi government introduced the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Bill in 2015 to simplify the land acquisition process for industries. However, after facing significant opposition from both political allies and competitors, as well as protests from civil society organisations, the government decided to withdraw important amendments to the bill.These amendments included removing the consent and social impact assessment clauses, which were part of the 2013 legislation and made land acquisition for industry difficult. Nine amendments were made to the bill before it was finally passed in the Lok Sabha. This was a big setback for Modi, who has not attempted to reintroduce these changes since. Industrial land acquisition remains a slow process in India because the Modi government prioritised consensus.

Citizenship Amendment Act—a law made but not implemented: The government amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 and passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019 to assist individuals from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh who migrated to India after facing religious persecution in their home countries.Previously, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who entered India without proper documentation or stayed after the expiry of this documentation were considered illegal and faced difficulties in obtaining Indian citizenship.The CAA aims to simplify the process for individuals who arrived in India by or before 31 December 2014, allowing them to become citizens under more lenient rules. This amendment means they will no longer be viewed as illegals and can reside in India permanently. Although the bill was passed by Parliament and published in the Gazette, the government, probably in the wake of extensive anger and protests, has yet to frame the necessary rules. As a result, no one has been granted citizenship under the amended act to this day.

Uniform Civil Code: Despite its long-standing inclusion in the BJP manifesto, the Modi government has never attempted to advance the Uniform Civil Code. This reluctance stems from apprehensions about opposition, making the issue too contentious to handle. However, the Uttarakhand government recently passed a bill to implement the UCC, suggesting that the Union government may be gauging public sentiment and potential resistance before introducing nationwide legislation. A democratic approach, isn’t it?

Rohini Commission, too hot to handle?: In October 2017, the Commission for Other Backward Classes was established via notification to explore the sub-categorisation of OBCs. Justice G Rohini, a retired Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, was appointed as its chairperson. The Rohini Commission submitted its final report to the President in August 2023, marking a critical step in addressing the complexities of OBC classifications.The commission sought 13 extensions before finalising its report. The slow progress of the commission and the government’s inaction on its report indicate that dividing OBCs into sub-categories is proving to be a complex task for the Modi government. This hesitancy raises questions about decisive leadership.

Women’s reservation, a project deferred: This Act intends to reserve one-third of the seats in Lok Sabha and State Assemblies for women. However, its implementation is contingent upon the next Census and subsequent delimitation for seat allocation, postponing its effectiveness until at least the 2029 Lok Sabha elections. The government recognises the contentious nature of this issue and understands that the process of building consensus must continue beyond the bill’s passage through the legislative body.
Ram temple construction: The recent construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya does not bear Modi’s stamp. The government waited for the Supreme Court’s order before proceeding with construction work. It is also waiting for relevant court orders to build temples in Mathura and Varanasi. This approach marks a departure from the BJP era of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, and Murli Manohar Joshi, during which the Babri Masjid was demolished in the presence of top party leaders. The BJP is far more law-abiding under Modi’s leadership.

A rare consensus on the ban on PFI

 

Will blockchain fulfil its democratic promise or will it become a tool of big tech?

Engineers are focused on reducing its carbon footprint, ignoring the governance issues raised by the technology writes John Naughton in The Guardian

Illuminated rigs at the Minto cryptocurrency mining centre in Nadvoitsy, Russia. Photograph: Andrey Rudakov/Getty Images



When the cryptocurrency bitcoin first made its appearance in 2009, an interesting divergence of opinions about it rapidly emerged. Journalists tended to regard it as some kind of incomprehensible money-laundering scam, while computer scientists, who were largely agnostic about bitcoin’s prospects, nevertheless thought that the distributed-ledger technology (the so-called blockchain) that underpinned the currency was a Big Idea that could have far-reaching consequences.

In this conviction they were joined by legions of techno-libertarians who viewed the technology as a way of enabling economic life without the oppressive oversight of central banks and other regulatory institutions. Blockchain technology had the potential to change the way we buy and sell, interact with government and verify the authenticity of everything from property titles to organic vegetables. It combined, burbled that well-known revolutionary body Goldman Sachs, “the openness of the internet with the security of cryptography to give everyone a faster, safer way to verify key information and establish trust”. Verily, cryptography would set us free.

At its core, a blockchain is just a ledger – a record of time-stamped transactions. These transactions can be any movement of money, goods or secure data – a purchase at a store, for example, the title to a piece of property, the assignment of an NHS number or a vaccination status, you name it. In the offline world, transactions are verified by some central third party – a government agency, a bank or Visa, say. But a blockchain is a distributed (ie, decentralised) ledger where verification (and therefore trustworthiness) comes not from a central authority but from a consensus of many users of the blockchain that a particular transaction is valid. Verified transactions are gathered into “blocks”, which are then “chained” together using heavy-duty cryptography so that, in principle, any attempt retrospectively to alter the details of a transaction would be visible. And oppressive, rent-seeking authorities such as Visa and Mastercard (or, for that matter, Stripe) are nowhere in the chain.
 
Given all that, it’s easy to see why the blockchain idea evokes utopian hopes: at last, technology is sticking it to the Man. In that sense, the excitement surrounding it reminds me of the early days of the internet, when we really believed that our contemporaries had invented a technology that was democratising and liberating and beyond the reach of established power structures. And indeed the network had – and still possesses – those desirable affordances. But we’re not using them to achieve their great potential. Instead, we’ve got YouTube and Netflix. What we underestimated, in our naivety, were the power of sovereign states, the ruthlessness and capacity of corporations and the passivity of consumers, a combination of which eventually led to corporate capture of the internet and the centralisation of digital power in the hands of a few giant corporations and national governments. In other words, the same entrapment as happened to the breakthrough communications technologies – telephone, broadcast radio and TV, and movies – in the 20th century, memorably chronicled by Tim Wu in his book The Master Switch.

Will this happen to blockchain technology? Hopefully not, but the enthusiastic endorsement of it by outfits such as Goldman Sachs is not exactly reassuring. The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn’t thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones.

Blockchain engineers also don’t seem to be much interested in the needs of the humans who might ultimately be users of the technology. That, at any rate, is the conclusion that cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike came to in a fascinating examination of the technology. “When people talk about blockchains,” he writes, “they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.”

And we’re nowhere near that point yet.

The Covid crisis is doing what the 2008 crash didn’t: ending the old economic orthodoxies

Larry Elliott in The Guardian

A wealth tax to help pay for the cost of fighting the pandemic. An international agreement to prevent a race to the bottom on corporate tax. An insistence that recovery from the second severe crisis in just over a decade should be green and inclusive. A conviction that governments should spend whatever it takes to fend off the threat of mass unemployment, paying no heed to the size of budget deficit.

There’s nothing startlingly new about any of these ideas, which have been knocking around for years, if not decades. What is different is that these are no longer just proposals put forward by progressive thinktanks or marginalised Keynesians in academia, but form part of an agenda being pursued by the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury under Joe Biden’s presidency.

This matters. From the 1980s onwards, the IMF and the US Treasury forged what became known as the Washington consensus: a set of beliefs that was foisted on any country that ran into economic difficulties and came looking for help. The one-size-fits-all approach involved cutting public spending and taxes, and privatisation, to create incentives for risk-taking entrepreneurs, and making inflation the overriding goal of economic policy. These policies inevitably caused pain, but it was thought the “tough love” approach was worth it.

It has been quite a different story in the buildup to the IMF’s spring meeting this week. Biden’s fast-tracking of a $1.9tn stimulus package through Congress, including direct payments to struggling American families, was significant in two ways. First, at about 10% of the annual output of the US economy, it was much bigger than the emergency support provided by Barack Obama after the global financial crisis of 2008. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it contained no promises of future deficit reduction. Austerity has no part in the thinking of the Biden administration, and nor does the idea that demand fuelled by borrowing inevitably leads to higher inflation.

The next phase in Biden’s plan is to spend a further $2tn on rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure. This will be funded by reversing some of Donald Trump’s cut to corporate tax rates, which will be opposed by Republicans in Congress but not by the IMF. When asked about the projected increase this week, the fund’s economic counsellor, Gita Gopinath, said Trump’s corporate tax cut had not done much to boost investment. Moreover, Gopinath was positively enthusiastic about the idea of a global minimum corporate tax rate, something the US has traditionally been wary of but which it now supports.

For the past year, the IMF has been trying to increase the financial firepower of its member countries through currency reserves known as special drawing rights. Trump’s concern that Iran would secure these rights meant there could be no progress while he was in the White House. Under Biden’s treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, the deadlock has been broken and a $650bn special drawing rights allocation has now been announced.

If the old Washington consensus believed in small states, low taxes and balanced budgets, the new Washington consensus believes in activist governments, inclusive growth and a green new deal. Until relatively recently, the only outpost of the multilateral system that supported such ideas was the UN’s trade and development arm in Geneva.

That is no longer the case. This week’s regular IMF update on the state of the global economy emphasises how the pandemic has made pre-existing inequalities worse. That’s true within countries, where the virus and its economic consequences have been toughest on the poor, the young, women and ethnic minorities. It is also true between countries, with the central banks and finance ministries in advanced nations having far more scope to mitigate the impact of lockdowns than those in poorer parts of the world.

Both the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, are clear that there can be no final victory in the battle against Covid-19 until everybody is vaccinated. The problem is not simply that developing countries lack sufficient doses; it is that their health systems are underpowered and lack the trained staff to deliver treatments. Similarly, if the world is to make the transition to a zero-carbon future, developing countries need to be included. That means extra financial resources. All this at a time when fears of a new developing-country debt crisis are rife.

Make no mistake, the IMF is still no soft touch. The conditions imposed as the price for financial support are often draconian, and critics note the disconnect between the right-on rhetoric of the IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, and the policies imposed by her organisation’s missions to struggling countries.

Meanwhile, pushback against what Biden has been doing has come from both left and right. Some of the president’s critics accuse him of not being nearly radical enough; others are convinced that all the money creation by the US Federal Reserve and the deficit spending by the US Treasury will inevitably mean much higher inflation. Conjuring up the ghost of economist Milton Friedman, they say it will all eventually end in tears.

For now, though, it is the Friedmanites who look marginalised, with the pandemic accelerating a shift in economic thinking that has been gestating over the past decade. Biden’s approach to running the economy – spending freely and taking a tough line with China – has more in common with that of his immediate predecessor than it does with Obama.

The shift in attitudes has partly been caused by a lack of results. Austerity did not lead to the surge in private investment and faster growth that was promised. Instead, the 2010s were a lost decade of stagnant living standards, which explains why Bidenomics is a big hit with American voters.

Crises also encourage experimentation. Furlough schemes to subsidise the wages of those unable to work are not the same as a basic income, but they are similar enough to get people used to the idea. Necessity rather than ideology explains why Rishi Sunak has spent more than £400bn in the past year on emergency support programmes in the UK, but a Labour chancellor would have done much the same.

There is a sense in which history is repeating itself. It took more than a decade after the end of the first world war for the realisation to dawn that the gold standard was finished. It was the second rather than the first oil shock that opened the door to the economics of the new right in the 1980s. Those who thought that the financial crisis would result in a challenge to the Washington consensus were not wrong. The old nostrums are indeed being questioned. It has just taken 10 years longer than they were expecting, that’s all.

Why the economic consensus on Brexit is flawed

Ashoka Mody in The Independent

Consensus amongst economists quickly unravels. In April 1999, “Britain’s top academic economists” voted strongly in favour of switching from the pound to the euro. Mercifully, the government had better sense.

In August 2008, Olivier Blanchard, then a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported that economists shared a common vision of macroeconomics “because”, he said, “facts do not go away.” But in 2014, reflecting on the failures of macroeconomics, Blanchard conceded that economists were “fooled” because they were not looking at the right facts.

In the past few weeks, virtually all official agencies have insisted that leaving the European Union — a British exit or “Brexit” — will impose enormous costs on the British. Indeed, these agencies have competed with each other in escalating the cost estimates.

Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pithily summarised the consensus: the consequences of Brexit, she said, would be “pretty bad to very, very bad”.

The UK Treasury, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the IMF say it is a “fact” that Britain will be permanently poorer because it will trade less with the EU. In a terrifying warning, the Bank of England added that financial markets will panic and create senseless havoc.

Adding comic relief, George Osborne predicts that house prices will fall by 18 percent. Not to be outdone, G7 leaders say that the world economic system, as we now know it, will fall apart if Britain exits the EU.

Michael Mussa, my first boss at the IMF, used to say that a number must pass the “smell test” if it is to be used for making decisions. Conducting a “smell test” requires going back to core principles. When we do that, we reach a humbler conclusion: economics is neutral on whether to leave or remain. The battle for Brexit must be fought on other grounds.

All economists – not just the current protagonists – agree that a country gains by increasing its overall international trade. Greater trade makes it possible to produce more of and export what the country does best (its comparative advantage) and import what it does less well. Everyone gains.

But there is no gain in exporting to Germany, Spain and Poland rather than to the United States, Korea and China. In fact, if preferential access diverts trade away from the United States to Germany, then departure from the country’s comparative advantage hurts rather than helps, as Columbia University’s trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati has long argued.

So the claim that Brexit will impose a huge cost rests on the twin beliefs that British trade with Germany will go down sharply and trade with the United States will not increase. Is that reasonable?

First, British trade with Germany will not decline significantly. As economists have long known, trade is embedded in business and social networks into which partners invest enormous social capital. Studies repeatedly show that businesses make accommodations in profit margins to retain the benefits of trust and reliability.

For this reason, all productive trading relationships will remain intact. For this reason too, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s threat that renegotiation of Britain’s trade arrangements with the EU would be “most difficult” and “poisonous” is bluster. Germans run a trade surplus with Britain. Mr Schaeuble can humiliate the IMF, but he dare not hurt the interests of his exporters (or his importers).

And even if British trade with the EU falls, trade with other regions will undoubtedly increase. Because Europe has been growing at a slower pace than the rest of the world, trade has been shifting away from Europe for years.

With Europe rapidly aging and struggling to revive productivity growth, the shift to non-European markets is bound to continue. Most firms already sell to multiple markets and Brexit will prompt them to strengthen their non-European networks.

What about costs of transition? Britain exports 13 percent of its GDP to the EU. Say about a quarter of those export products – about 3 percent of GDP – have to eventually be sold either in Britain or outside Europe.

If the adjustment each year costs somewhere between one-tenth and one-fifth of 3 percent of GDP, it is possible that GDP will be lower by about half-a-percent in the peak transition year. Thus the costs will be modest and short-lived.

So how do the Treasury, OECD and the IMF conclude that Brexit could reduce GDP by between 6 and 10 percent forever? The vast bulk of those large estimates come from the further assumption that reduced trade will shrink British productivity growth. This is disingenuous. There is simply no evidence that less trade lowers productivity growth – and there is not even a logical connection between productivity growth and a shift in trade from Germany to the United States.

More trade has been associated with higher productivity growth when countries have emerged from economic isolation. But for the sophisticated British economy, this possibility should be completely dismissed.

The Bank of England’s claims are the most outrageous of all. The Bank says that fear of Brexit is holding investment back and, thus, causing growth to slow down in anticipation. How can it know that? British GDP is slowing for so many reasons.

The economy has moved faithfully with the magnitude of fiscal austerity: gratuitous austerity delayed recovery from the Great Recession, brief fiscal easing in 2014 helped achieve a short-lived rebound, and now the IMF projects more austerity in the pipeline and slower growth. Meanwhile, the world economy is slowing: the United States had a weak first quarter, China is struggling and world trade is barely crawling forward. The Bank of England is cynically exploiting its authority by claiming to detect Brexit-induced anxiety in the cloud of short-term data.

But more outrageous is the Bank’s warning of mayhem if Britain votes to leave. Nobel Laureates George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have explained that people act in accordance with the narratives they live. The Bank is, in effect, building a narrative of panic, which could become self-fulfilling. The central bank’s proper role is to reassure and stand-by to stem panic.

Since 2010, official agencies have repeatedly promised global recovery. The forecasts fail because they all disregard inconvenient evidence. Now, the official consensus on the economic costs of Brexit has crossed the line into groupthink. A numerical illusion is masquerading as a “fact.” And when those in authority distort facts, they also subvert the cause of democracy.

Why Kofi Annan had enough over Syria

The UN's special envoy and the Bric countries have got increasingly frustrated with the west's domineering consensus on Damascus

• 
• • Jonathan Steele
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 August 2012 21.00 BST

Free Syrian Army soldiers in Aleppo take a break from the fighting. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

When the history of Syria's catastrophic civil war comes to be written, 30 June 2012 will surely be recognised as the only true moment of hope. On that day in Geneva the five permanent members of the UN security council united behind a communique calling for a transition to a democratic system in Syria and the formation of a government of national unity in which opposition leaders and members of the current government would share power.

They called for a firm timetable for elections in a fair environment. And, with an eye on the chaos that followed the US-imposed scheme of de-Ba'athification in Iraq, said the continuity of government institutions and qualified staff in Syria's public services must be preserved. This included the military and security forces – though they must in future adhere to human rights standards.

They also called on the Syrian government and opposition groups to re-commit to a ceasefire. Sensible, detailed and constructive, the communique was also remarkable for what it did not contain. Although the call for a government of national unity meant Syria's authoritarian regime should be dismantled, the security council's permanent members did not mention the usual cliche of "regime change", which over-personalises complex issues by focusing on the removal of a single towering personality. There was no specific demand for Bashar al-Assad to resign, let alone as the precondition for negotiations between the government and its opponents, as western states and most Syrian opposition groups previously insisted.

In short, the communique appeared to move the US, Britain and France, as well as Turkey and Qatar, which also attended the Geneva meeting, to an even-handed stance at last. It marked Kofi Annan's finest hour as the UN and Arab League's special envoy.

A few days later, Russia circulated a draft resolution at the UN in New York to endorse the new approach. It urged member-states to work in the co-operative spirit of the Geneva text, extend the UN monitors' team in Syria and press for a ceasefire. Then came the spanner. Britain, France and the US proposed a rival resolution with the one-sided elements that provoked earlier Russian and Chinese vetoes – punishment of Assad if he did not comply, threats of new sanctions, no word of pressure on the opposition and veiled hints of eventual military force by referring to chapter seven of the UN charter.

The resolution was a disaster, and it is no wonder that in explaining his resignation (in a Financial Times article on Friday) Annan highlighted the security council's failure to endorse the Geneva recommendations. Annan remains too much of a diplomat to take sides openly but his disappointment with the big western states for their "finger-pointing and name-calling" of Russia and China over Syria is clear.

His frustration is shared by the new powers on the international stage that are increasingly angry with the domineering western consensus on many issues. When the UN general assembly debated a Saudi resolution last week that followed the west in calling for sanctions and Assad's departure, Brazil, India and South Africa all objected. In the west it is easy to pillory Russia for rejecting internationally imposed regime change by saying Vladimir Putin fears a "colour revolution" in Russia (even though there is no such prospect). China's democratic credentials can be sneered at. But when the three other Brics, which hold fair, orderly, and regular elections, object to the western line on Syria, it is time to take note. Indeed, the west did adjust. It got the Saudis to water down the draft lest it receive less than half the world's votes.

The retreat was only tactical. The Obama administration promptly announced it is "accelerating" its support to Syria's rebels by giving them intelligence and satellite data on troop movements. Annan's disappointment must be massive. Until he started work in February, the military pattern in Syria had been consistent for several months – occasional forays by rebels into urban areas followed by excessive reaction by government troops, with artillery, snipers, and mass arrests.

Since then, apart from a few days of relative quiet in April when a ceasefire partially held, Syria has seen a huge influx of arms to the rebels, growing involvement by foreign special forces, and the infiltration of al-Qaida jihadis and other Salafists. What began as a peaceful uprising and then became local self-defence has been hijacked. Under Saudi, Qatari and US leadership, and with British, French and Israeli approval, it has turned into an anti-Iranian proxy war.

This does not mean the democratic aspirations of Syria's original protesters should be abandoned, or that the Syrian government should not start to implement the Geneva principles for transition that Annan briefly persuaded the big powers to accept. The outlook is too desperate. As tens of thousands flee their homes, and the destruction of Aleppo – and perhaps soon of Damascus – looms ever closer, a ceasefire and political compromise have never been more urgent.