Showing posts with label empire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empire. Show all posts
Tuesday 12 April 2022
Monday 11 April 2022
Sunday 6 March 2022
Wednesday 24 June 2020
Britain's persistent racism cannot simply be explained by its imperial history
It played its part, but empire does not explain all of Britain’s record of elitism, exploitation and discrimination writes David Edgerton in The Guardian
Enoch Powell electioneering in his Wolverhampton constituency, 1970. Photograph: Leonard Burt/Getty Images
The question of empire has become central to discussions of Britain’s national past. Some see residual imperialism as the prime element in a deficient, delusional, racist culture. Others think emphasising the dark underside of empire is an attempt to erase British history. The problem is that although long historical tradition sanctions criticism of imperialism, national history has proved far more resistant.
Talk of empire is now omnipresent, but it was previously written out of history. In the 1940s the unashamed imperialist Winston Churchill didn’t offer an imperial history of the second world war, or even a national one, but an Anglo-American, cold-war version of events in his six-volume work, The Second World War. Subsequently, what’s striking about postwar historiography is the lack of imperialist histories and the absence of condemnation for nationalist and anti-imperial forces. At most there were sotto voce claims that the British empire should have done a deal with Adolf Hitler in 1940 to keep itself alive.
More importantly, national histories ignored empire altogether. The reason is easy to find: after the war, a new nation arose that wanted to tell a national, not imperial, history of itself. This story was about the dawn of the welfare state, the Labour party and the National Health Service. This country’s ancestry lay in the industrial 19th century, but it only became a true nation in 1940, during the Battle of Britain and the blitz.
Putting the empire in its proper historical place is hugely important for understanding the sheer scale of slavery, the racialised nature of the imperial project, and how this project shaped the Conservative party into the 1950s. For much of the elite, the UK was seen as a part of something far bigger: the empire. This is why we have an Imperial War Museum and an Imperial College, and why the head of the army was called the chief of the imperial general staff. Britain’s second world war, as it was understood at the time, involved the whole British empire (and many, many allies). In 1940, no one in authority could say “Britain stood alone”. If anything was alone, it was the entire empire.
It’s also important to remember the important role anti-imperialism played for radical liberals and socialists. Radical liberals in 19th-century Britain criticised imperialism as the cause of unnecessary wars, and for sustaining a useless elite. More recently, the British centre-left has cited imperialism as the cause of war, militarism, nuclear weapons, economic decline, the failure to join the common market in the 1950s, and the failure to adapt to it since. For some historians, the demons and ghosts of empire are the spectres driving contemporary racism and Brexit, too. The UK, according to these critics, seems perpetually trapped in an Edwardian imperial mindset.
Blaming empire is a deep-seated reflex that feels reassuringly progressive. But it has also been a way to avoid confronting things that lie a little closer to home. It has long been easier, and less morally and intellectually contentious, to castigate the actions of the British state and elite in faraway colonies than confront their actions at home. Far too many ills of past and present are lazily laid at this door.
To make empire the dominant story in British history is to misunderstand the nature of Britain, its elite and its exploitative power, and its persistent racism. The racism of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, for all its roots in the past, was a self-consciously post-imperial nationalist one. Imperialism reluctantly granted British Caribbean people UK citizenship. These rights were stripped away by nationalists, right down to Theresa May – this was the essence of the Windrush scandal. People voted for Brexit not because they were imperialists, but because they were nostalgic for a national Britain. They were certainly not voting for the return to free immigration from the old imperial territories. The history that seems to matter most to Brexiteers is a particular account of the second world war, one that is decidedly nationalist.
Empire has only ever been part of the British story, but it can never stand for the whole. Even at its peak, it represented only a fraction of Britain’s relations with the rest of the world, not least in war, but also in trade. From the late 19th century onwards, the Caribbean empire was tiny in terms of trade and population compared with Canada and Australia. In population numbers, India accounted for four-fifths of the entire empire, but trade with India was significantly less important than trade with the dominions. And the history of migration to and from the UK stretches wider than the empire, too – with people flowing into and out of the country to the US and from Europe. Britain’s global history, in other words, is not the same as its imperial history.
If we want to look for great silences in our history, empire is hardly the only one. There has been a glaring hole where the history of British capitalism and the British capitalist class should be; in its place are overwrought stories of decline and of imperial finance. The neglect of the British working class is particularly stunning. Giants of (anti-imperialist) postwar history such as EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm made this their field, and inspired countless others in a historical endeavour that peaked in the 1970s, but has since decayed even more rapidly than the industrial working class. Around 1900, Britain’s industrial proletariat was one of the three largest in the world, comparable to those of the US and Germany. The British working class alone accounted for roughly 30% of the population of the entire empire outside India, and a far higher proportion of those producing for capitalist markets.
There are many aspects of British history – many dark sides, too – other than imperialism. We should not admit the framing of the debate about history as a question of a dark imperial history sullying a bright national story. To do so would be to ignore a more difficult truth: all our national history needs rethinking.
The question of empire has become central to discussions of Britain’s national past. Some see residual imperialism as the prime element in a deficient, delusional, racist culture. Others think emphasising the dark underside of empire is an attempt to erase British history. The problem is that although long historical tradition sanctions criticism of imperialism, national history has proved far more resistant.
Talk of empire is now omnipresent, but it was previously written out of history. In the 1940s the unashamed imperialist Winston Churchill didn’t offer an imperial history of the second world war, or even a national one, but an Anglo-American, cold-war version of events in his six-volume work, The Second World War. Subsequently, what’s striking about postwar historiography is the lack of imperialist histories and the absence of condemnation for nationalist and anti-imperial forces. At most there were sotto voce claims that the British empire should have done a deal with Adolf Hitler in 1940 to keep itself alive.
More importantly, national histories ignored empire altogether. The reason is easy to find: after the war, a new nation arose that wanted to tell a national, not imperial, history of itself. This story was about the dawn of the welfare state, the Labour party and the National Health Service. This country’s ancestry lay in the industrial 19th century, but it only became a true nation in 1940, during the Battle of Britain and the blitz.
Putting the empire in its proper historical place is hugely important for understanding the sheer scale of slavery, the racialised nature of the imperial project, and how this project shaped the Conservative party into the 1950s. For much of the elite, the UK was seen as a part of something far bigger: the empire. This is why we have an Imperial War Museum and an Imperial College, and why the head of the army was called the chief of the imperial general staff. Britain’s second world war, as it was understood at the time, involved the whole British empire (and many, many allies). In 1940, no one in authority could say “Britain stood alone”. If anything was alone, it was the entire empire.
It’s also important to remember the important role anti-imperialism played for radical liberals and socialists. Radical liberals in 19th-century Britain criticised imperialism as the cause of unnecessary wars, and for sustaining a useless elite. More recently, the British centre-left has cited imperialism as the cause of war, militarism, nuclear weapons, economic decline, the failure to join the common market in the 1950s, and the failure to adapt to it since. For some historians, the demons and ghosts of empire are the spectres driving contemporary racism and Brexit, too. The UK, according to these critics, seems perpetually trapped in an Edwardian imperial mindset.
Blaming empire is a deep-seated reflex that feels reassuringly progressive. But it has also been a way to avoid confronting things that lie a little closer to home. It has long been easier, and less morally and intellectually contentious, to castigate the actions of the British state and elite in faraway colonies than confront their actions at home. Far too many ills of past and present are lazily laid at this door.
To make empire the dominant story in British history is to misunderstand the nature of Britain, its elite and its exploitative power, and its persistent racism. The racism of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, for all its roots in the past, was a self-consciously post-imperial nationalist one. Imperialism reluctantly granted British Caribbean people UK citizenship. These rights were stripped away by nationalists, right down to Theresa May – this was the essence of the Windrush scandal. People voted for Brexit not because they were imperialists, but because they were nostalgic for a national Britain. They were certainly not voting for the return to free immigration from the old imperial territories. The history that seems to matter most to Brexiteers is a particular account of the second world war, one that is decidedly nationalist.
Empire has only ever been part of the British story, but it can never stand for the whole. Even at its peak, it represented only a fraction of Britain’s relations with the rest of the world, not least in war, but also in trade. From the late 19th century onwards, the Caribbean empire was tiny in terms of trade and population compared with Canada and Australia. In population numbers, India accounted for four-fifths of the entire empire, but trade with India was significantly less important than trade with the dominions. And the history of migration to and from the UK stretches wider than the empire, too – with people flowing into and out of the country to the US and from Europe. Britain’s global history, in other words, is not the same as its imperial history.
If we want to look for great silences in our history, empire is hardly the only one. There has been a glaring hole where the history of British capitalism and the British capitalist class should be; in its place are overwrought stories of decline and of imperial finance. The neglect of the British working class is particularly stunning. Giants of (anti-imperialist) postwar history such as EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm made this their field, and inspired countless others in a historical endeavour that peaked in the 1970s, but has since decayed even more rapidly than the industrial working class. Around 1900, Britain’s industrial proletariat was one of the three largest in the world, comparable to those of the US and Germany. The British working class alone accounted for roughly 30% of the population of the entire empire outside India, and a far higher proportion of those producing for capitalist markets.
There are many aspects of British history – many dark sides, too – other than imperialism. We should not admit the framing of the debate about history as a question of a dark imperial history sullying a bright national story. To do so would be to ignore a more difficult truth: all our national history needs rethinking.
Saturday 29 December 2018
Sunday 22 April 2018
Windrush saga exposes mixed feelings about immigrants like me
Abdulrazak Gurnah in The FT
In 1968, soon after arriving in England from Zanzibar as an 18-year-old student, I was talking with a friend while a radio played in the background. At some point we stopped talking and listened to a man speaking with tremulous passion about the dangers people like me represented for the future of Britain.
In 1968, soon after arriving in England from Zanzibar as an 18-year-old student, I was talking with a friend while a radio played in the background. At some point we stopped talking and listened to a man speaking with tremulous passion about the dangers people like me represented for the future of Britain.
It was Enoch Powell and we were listening to a clip of his “Rivers of Blood” speech. I knew little about British politics and did not know who Powell was. But in the days and weeks that followed, I heard him quoted at me by fellow students and bus conductors, and saw television footage of trade union marches in his support.
I have lived in Britain for most of the past 50 years and have watched, and participated in, the largely successful struggle to prevent Powell’s lurid prophecies about race war from coming true. But it would be foolish to imagine that all is set fair for the future of Britain and its migrant communities, because every few weeks we are provided with another example of the obstinate survival of antipathy and disregard. The treatment of the children of the “Windrush generation” who moved to the UK from the Caribbean several decades ago is the latest such episode.
The injustice is so staggering that Theresa May, the prime minister, and Amber Rudd, the home secretary, have been forced to apologise. But the consequences for Caribbean migrants who grew up in Britain of the “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants could hardly have been news to them.
In 2013, at the instigation of the Home Office, vans emblazoned with the message “Go home or face arrest” drove around parts of London with large immigrant populations. It may not have been intended that the clampdown on illegal immigration would snare such embarrassing prey as children of migrants who spent a lifetime working in the UK; but political expediency required that this small complication be ignored until it went away. That it has not is a result of the work of welfare, legal and political activists to make sure that the abuses against migrants and strangers are kept in plain sight.
Before the second world war, there was no law to restrict entry or residence in Britain for people who lived in her colonial territories. That is what it meant to be a global empire, and all the millions who were subjects of the British crown were free to come if they wished. There was no need to worry about controlling numbers because, if they became a problem, they were sent back, as happened after the race riots in various British port cities in 1919. In a rush of imperial hubris, the British Nationality Act was passed in 1948 to formalise the right of British colonial subjects to enter and live in the UK.
If the 1948 law was a desperate recruitment poster for cheap labour disguised as imperial largesse, the purpose of the successively meaner pieces of immigration legislation that began in 1962 was to slow and ultimately stop the arrival of dark-skinned former subjects of the British crown. It continued Britain’s centuries-long prevarication between sanctuary and xenophobia.
Why has the Windrush saga been so embarrassing for the government? The answer has to do with Britain’s fraught relationship with the Caribbean and a history of racial terror instigated and supervised for centuries by British money and power. Caribbean institutions are still largely modelled on British ones and, until recent disillusioning decades, the Caribbean sense of identity was linked with a connection to the British empire. It is remarkable that this should be so given the brutalities of the plantation economies that prevailed in the Caribbean territories. This is an ambivalence that Caribbean intellectuals have reflected on for more than a century. The most perfunctory browse through the writing of the region will provide examples of its intricate legacy.
What is now referred to as the Windrush generation was far from homogeneous. It included peasant workers, nurses, teachers, writers and artists. They came in response to the recruitment drive and because they were ambitious for a better life. They are in Britain for the same reasons that all migrants are here.
In time they brought their children, and those children grew up, were educated and worked all their lives in this country. As any stranger knows, particularly if he or she is black in Europe, it is vital to keep your paperwork in order. What recent events have shown is that not all the children of the Windrush generation did because they were confident that they were at home and had no need to prove their right to be here. It seems they reckoned without the ruthless politics of contemporary Britain, in which xenophobia and hatred do not repel, but instead win votes.
The Windrush saga has made headlines this week, but it has been going on for months — the bullying letters, the threatening sanctions against employers, the loss of employment, the withdrawal of benefits and healthcare, the detention and expulsion. Bullying in pursuit of bringing down the immigration numbers is never just or humane. But it is wrong to deny these people what are evidently their moral and legal rights. Their contribution to British society and culture has been immense.
When it became clear the law had caught the wrong people, someone should have called a halt instead of pressing on with the bullying. As Sentina Bristol, the mother of Dexter, a 57-year-old man born a British subject in Grenada who died after several months of going through this process, observed of the government in a recent interview: “They are intelligent people, they are people of power. We expect better from them.”
Thursday 5 April 2018
Spasms of Resurgent Nationalism are a Sign of its Irreversible Decline?
Rana Dasgupta in The Guardian
What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.
The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.
But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.
What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.
The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.
But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.
Presidents Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Vladimir Putin of Russia in Ankara. Photograph: Reuters
If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.
It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.
The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.
Let us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state: the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world. The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities – the template for modern European life.
By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today – in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike. Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.
The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes – omniscience and omnipotence – were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state’s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.
During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere. But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves – more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur. Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development. For a few decades, state power was monumental – almost divine, indeed – and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known.
The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.
The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state. We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise – but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.
There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind. And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.
If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.
It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.
The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.
Let us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state: the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world. The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities – the template for modern European life.
By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today – in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike. Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.
The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes – omniscience and omnipotence – were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state’s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.
During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere. But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves – more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur. Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development. For a few decades, state power was monumental – almost divine, indeed – and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known.
The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.
The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state. We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise – but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.
There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind. And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.
US president Donald Trump in Washington. Photograph: AP
Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.
The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it. He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult – blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state’s impotence. He cannot heal America’s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look “tough” – declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders. He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset – US citizenship – whose value he can “talk up”, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels. Like Putin or Orbán, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.
These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: political authority is running on empty, and leaders are unable to deliver meaningful material change. Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: hatred of foreigners and internal enemies, for instance, or the euphoria of meaningless military exploits (Putin’s annexation of Crimea raised the hugely popular prospect of general Tsarist revival).
But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. As Putin’s Russia has shown, chauvinism is more effective than we like to believe. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: deep down, they know to be scared of what will happen if the power of the state is revealed to be a hoax.
In the world’s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the “normal” mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today’s fractured Middle East. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.
Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out – and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.
Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states. And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.
If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.
The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma), Hissène Habré (Chad), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia), the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Moussa Traoré (Mali), General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).
Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.
The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it. He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult – blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state’s impotence. He cannot heal America’s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look “tough” – declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders. He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset – US citizenship – whose value he can “talk up”, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels. Like Putin or Orbán, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.
These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: political authority is running on empty, and leaders are unable to deliver meaningful material change. Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: hatred of foreigners and internal enemies, for instance, or the euphoria of meaningless military exploits (Putin’s annexation of Crimea raised the hugely popular prospect of general Tsarist revival).
But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. As Putin’s Russia has shown, chauvinism is more effective than we like to believe. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: deep down, they know to be scared of what will happen if the power of the state is revealed to be a hoax.
In the world’s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the “normal” mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today’s fractured Middle East. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.
Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out – and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.
Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states. And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.
If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.
The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma), Hissène Habré (Chad), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia), the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Moussa Traoré (Mali), General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).
Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán. Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images
Such countries were generally condemned to remain what one influential commentator has called “quasi-states”. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizens.
Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker. The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: with the UN’s moral rejection of foreign rule came a universal imperative to respect national sovereignty, no matter what horrors went on behind its closed doors. But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: at least 15 million died in the proxy wars of that period, in theatres as dispersed as Afghanistan, Korea, El Salvador, Angola and Sudan. And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals.
There was nothing stable about this cold war “stability”, but its devastation was contained within the borders of its proxy states. The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries – and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all. Destroyed political cultures have given rise to startling “post-national” forces such as Islamic State, which are cutting through national borders and transmitting chaos, potentially, into every corner of the world.
Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces – whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity. Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building. Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.
Such a network currently extends from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north. This eats away the old political architecture from the inside, making several nation states (such as Mali and the Central African Republic) essentially non-functional, which in turn creates further opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Several ethnic groups, meanwhile – such as the Kurds and the Tuareg – which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories. It is in the world’s most dangerous regions that today’s new political possibilities are being imagined.
The west’s commitment to nation states has been self-servingly partial. For many decades, it was content to see large areas of the world suffer under terrifying parodies of well-established Western states; it cannot complain that those areas now display little loyalty to the nation-state idea. Especially since they have also borne the most traumatic consequences of climate change, a phenomenon for which they were least responsible and least equipped to withstand. The strategic calculation of new militant groups in that region is in many ways quite accurate: the transition from empire to independent nation states has been a massive and unremitting failure, and, after three generations, there needs to be a way out.
But there is no possibility that al-Shabaab, the Janjaweed, Seleka, Boko Haram, Ansar Dine, Isis or al-Qaida will provide that way out. The situation requires new ideas of political organisation and global economic redistribution. There is no superpower great enough, any more, to contain the effects of exploding “quasi-states”. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay.
Let us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself. The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – “national self-determination,”, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate. Today, after a century of lugubrious “international relations”, the only aspect of this principle we still remember is the one most familiar to us: national independence. But Wilson’s original programme, informed by a loose international coalition including such diverse visionaries as Andrew Carnegie and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), aimed for something far more ambitious: a comprehensive intra-state democracy designed to ensure global cooperation, peace and justice.
How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law? The new order of nations only made sense if these were integrated into a “society of nations”: a formal global society with its own universal institutions, empowered to police the violence that individual states would not regulate on their own: the violence they perpetrated themselves, whether against other states or their own citizens.
The cold war definitively buried this “society”, and we have lived ever since with a drastically degraded version of what was intended. During that period, both superpowers actively destroyed any constraints on international action, maintaining a level of international lawlessness worthy of the “scramble for Africa”. Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: gangsterism. The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: the US is today dependent on lawlessness in international society, and on the perpetual warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence.
Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition, the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed. In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future. All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection. But such passports are difficult to get.
That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself. The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century. It will be remembered that the group’s most triumphant publicity was associated with its penetration of the Iraq-Syria border. This was presented as a victory over the 1916 treaties by which the British and French divided the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Isis’s PR arm issued the Twitter hashtag #SykesPicotOver – and inaugurated a century of Mesopotamian bombing. It arose from an entirely justifiable rejection of a system that obstinately designated – during the course of a century and more – Arabs as “savages” to whom no dignity or protection would be extended.
The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. And, while revolutionary groups attempt to destroy the system “from below”, assertive regional powers are destroying it “from above” – by infringing national borders in their own backyards. Russia’s escapade in Ukraine demonstrates that there are now few consequences to neo-imperial bagatelles, and China’s route to usurping the 22nd-richest country in the world – Taiwan – lies open. The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create.
The three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen. First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces. Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility. And third, the illegitimacy of an “international order” that has never aspired to any kind of “society of nations” governed by the rule of law.
Since they are all rooted in transnational forces whose scale eludes the reach of any one nation’s politics, they are largely immune to well-meaning political reform within nations (though the coming years will also see many examples of such reform). So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse.
Such countries were generally condemned to remain what one influential commentator has called “quasi-states”. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizens.
Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker. The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: with the UN’s moral rejection of foreign rule came a universal imperative to respect national sovereignty, no matter what horrors went on behind its closed doors. But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: at least 15 million died in the proxy wars of that period, in theatres as dispersed as Afghanistan, Korea, El Salvador, Angola and Sudan. And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals.
There was nothing stable about this cold war “stability”, but its devastation was contained within the borders of its proxy states. The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries – and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all. Destroyed political cultures have given rise to startling “post-national” forces such as Islamic State, which are cutting through national borders and transmitting chaos, potentially, into every corner of the world.
Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces – whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity. Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building. Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.
Such a network currently extends from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north. This eats away the old political architecture from the inside, making several nation states (such as Mali and the Central African Republic) essentially non-functional, which in turn creates further opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Several ethnic groups, meanwhile – such as the Kurds and the Tuareg – which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories. It is in the world’s most dangerous regions that today’s new political possibilities are being imagined.
The west’s commitment to nation states has been self-servingly partial. For many decades, it was content to see large areas of the world suffer under terrifying parodies of well-established Western states; it cannot complain that those areas now display little loyalty to the nation-state idea. Especially since they have also borne the most traumatic consequences of climate change, a phenomenon for which they were least responsible and least equipped to withstand. The strategic calculation of new militant groups in that region is in many ways quite accurate: the transition from empire to independent nation states has been a massive and unremitting failure, and, after three generations, there needs to be a way out.
But there is no possibility that al-Shabaab, the Janjaweed, Seleka, Boko Haram, Ansar Dine, Isis or al-Qaida will provide that way out. The situation requires new ideas of political organisation and global economic redistribution. There is no superpower great enough, any more, to contain the effects of exploding “quasi-states”. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay.
Let us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself. The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – “national self-determination,”, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate. Today, after a century of lugubrious “international relations”, the only aspect of this principle we still remember is the one most familiar to us: national independence. But Wilson’s original programme, informed by a loose international coalition including such diverse visionaries as Andrew Carnegie and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), aimed for something far more ambitious: a comprehensive intra-state democracy designed to ensure global cooperation, peace and justice.
How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law? The new order of nations only made sense if these were integrated into a “society of nations”: a formal global society with its own universal institutions, empowered to police the violence that individual states would not regulate on their own: the violence they perpetrated themselves, whether against other states or their own citizens.
The cold war definitively buried this “society”, and we have lived ever since with a drastically degraded version of what was intended. During that period, both superpowers actively destroyed any constraints on international action, maintaining a level of international lawlessness worthy of the “scramble for Africa”. Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: gangsterism. The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: the US is today dependent on lawlessness in international society, and on the perpetual warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence.
Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition, the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed. In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future. All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection. But such passports are difficult to get.
That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself. The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century. It will be remembered that the group’s most triumphant publicity was associated with its penetration of the Iraq-Syria border. This was presented as a victory over the 1916 treaties by which the British and French divided the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Isis’s PR arm issued the Twitter hashtag #SykesPicotOver – and inaugurated a century of Mesopotamian bombing. It arose from an entirely justifiable rejection of a system that obstinately designated – during the course of a century and more – Arabs as “savages” to whom no dignity or protection would be extended.
The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. And, while revolutionary groups attempt to destroy the system “from below”, assertive regional powers are destroying it “from above” – by infringing national borders in their own backyards. Russia’s escapade in Ukraine demonstrates that there are now few consequences to neo-imperial bagatelles, and China’s route to usurping the 22nd-richest country in the world – Taiwan – lies open. The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create.
The three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen. First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces. Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility. And third, the illegitimacy of an “international order” that has never aspired to any kind of “society of nations” governed by the rule of law.
Since they are all rooted in transnational forces whose scale eludes the reach of any one nation’s politics, they are largely immune to well-meaning political reform within nations (though the coming years will also see many examples of such reform). So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: AP
This is not a small endeavour: it will take the better part of this century. We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions. From the standpoint of our present, they will seem impossible, because we have not known any other way. But that is how radical novelty always begins.
The first is clear: global financial regulation. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation states, materially and symbolically. There is no reason to heed those interested parties who tell us global financial regulation is impossible: it is technologically trivial compared to the astonishing systems those same parties have already built.
The history of the nation state is one of perennial tax innovation, and the next such innovation is transnational: we must build systems to track transnational money flows, and to transfer a portion of them into public channels. Without this, our political infrastructure will continue to become more and more superfluous to actual material life. In the process we must also think more seriously about global redistribution: not aid, which is exceptional, but the systematic transfer of wealth from rich to poor for the improved security of all, as happens in national societies.
Second: global flexible democracy. As new local and transnational political currents become more powerful, the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable. Nations must be nested in a stack of other stable, democratic structures – some smaller, some larger than they – so that turmoil at the national level does not lead to total breakdown. The EU is the major experiment in this direction, and it is significant that the continent that invented the nation state was also the first to move beyond it. The EU has failed in many of its functions, principally because it has not established a truly democratic ethos. But free movement has hugely democratised economic opportunity within the EU. And insofar as it may become a “Europe of regions” – comprising Catalonia and Scotland, not only Spain and the UK – it can help stabilise national political upheaval.
We need more such experiments in continental and global politics. National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations. Oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments – this was always part of Wilson’s vision and its loss has been terrible for humanity.
Third, and finally: we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing. Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.
If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult. Your mobility – as a Finn – is also very different. But in a world system – rather than a system of nations – there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility. Deregulating human movement is an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following.
Contemporary technological systems offer models for rethinking citizenship so it can be de-linked from territory, and its advantages can be more fairly distributed. The rights and opportunities accruing to western citizenship could be claimed far away, for instance, without anyone having to travel to the west to do so. We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth? What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq or Afghanistan?
On the eve of its centenary, our nation-state system is already in a crisis from which it does not currently possess the capacity to extricate itself. It is time to think how that capacity might be built. We do not yet know what it will look like. But we have learned a lot from the economic and technological phases of globalisation, and we now possess the basic concepts for the next phase: building the politics of our integrated world system. We are confronted, of course, by an enterprise of political imagination as significant as that which produced the great visions of the 18th century – and, with them, the French and American Republics. But we are now in a position to begin.
This is not a small endeavour: it will take the better part of this century. We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions. From the standpoint of our present, they will seem impossible, because we have not known any other way. But that is how radical novelty always begins.
The first is clear: global financial regulation. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation states, materially and symbolically. There is no reason to heed those interested parties who tell us global financial regulation is impossible: it is technologically trivial compared to the astonishing systems those same parties have already built.
The history of the nation state is one of perennial tax innovation, and the next such innovation is transnational: we must build systems to track transnational money flows, and to transfer a portion of them into public channels. Without this, our political infrastructure will continue to become more and more superfluous to actual material life. In the process we must also think more seriously about global redistribution: not aid, which is exceptional, but the systematic transfer of wealth from rich to poor for the improved security of all, as happens in national societies.
Second: global flexible democracy. As new local and transnational political currents become more powerful, the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable. Nations must be nested in a stack of other stable, democratic structures – some smaller, some larger than they – so that turmoil at the national level does not lead to total breakdown. The EU is the major experiment in this direction, and it is significant that the continent that invented the nation state was also the first to move beyond it. The EU has failed in many of its functions, principally because it has not established a truly democratic ethos. But free movement has hugely democratised economic opportunity within the EU. And insofar as it may become a “Europe of regions” – comprising Catalonia and Scotland, not only Spain and the UK – it can help stabilise national political upheaval.
We need more such experiments in continental and global politics. National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations. Oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments – this was always part of Wilson’s vision and its loss has been terrible for humanity.
Third, and finally: we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing. Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.
If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult. Your mobility – as a Finn – is also very different. But in a world system – rather than a system of nations – there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility. Deregulating human movement is an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following.
Contemporary technological systems offer models for rethinking citizenship so it can be de-linked from territory, and its advantages can be more fairly distributed. The rights and opportunities accruing to western citizenship could be claimed far away, for instance, without anyone having to travel to the west to do so. We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth? What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq or Afghanistan?
On the eve of its centenary, our nation-state system is already in a crisis from which it does not currently possess the capacity to extricate itself. It is time to think how that capacity might be built. We do not yet know what it will look like. But we have learned a lot from the economic and technological phases of globalisation, and we now possess the basic concepts for the next phase: building the politics of our integrated world system. We are confronted, of course, by an enterprise of political imagination as significant as that which produced the great visions of the 18th century – and, with them, the French and American Republics. But we are now in a position to begin.
Saturday 28 October 2017
Yes, we must decolonise: our teaching has to go beyond elite white men
Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.
Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.
Rather than acknowledge that a major university was right to be responsive to student concerns, two British newspapers saw fit to turn an open letter from Cambridge English students into a trumped-up existential crisis for white male writers. By “decolonising” the curriculum this endangered species would now be sacrificed, apparently, like so many hapless Guys on bonfire night, to the burning fires of black and minority ethnic special interest. Nice dramatic scenario, pity about the truth content.
The real danger is that the substantive issues at stake that concern us all, not just ethnic minorities, become obscured in this facile attempt at stoking a keyboard race war with real-life consequences at a time when hate crimes are on the rise. The young people who wrote this letter, however, have an admirable clarity of vision and a robust faith in knowledge that is inspiring. They are interested in asking challenging questions about themselves and others, and how we see ourselves in relation to each other.
Decolonising the curriculum is, first of all, the acceptance that education, literary or otherwise, needs to enable self-understanding. This is particularly important to people not used to seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of conventional learning – whether women, gay people, disabled people, the working classes or ethnic minorities. Knowledge and culture is collectively produced and these groups, which intersect in different ways, have as much right as elite white men to understand what their own role has been in forging artistic and intellectual achievements.
However, it is not only about admiring yourself in the mirror – a fact that eludes those shrieking about the nonexistent elimination of straight white men from the curriculum. Real knowledge is not self-puffery, the repeated validation of oneself. In English literature, it involves learning about the lives of others, whether these be Robert Wedderburn, the fiery black Scottish working-class preacher who believed in self-emancipation; the working-class poet Robert Bloomfield; or Una Marson, the suffragist and broadcaster who wrote eloquently about race and the colour-bar in Britain as well as resonant poetry about her native Jamaica.
Cape Coast Castle, Ghana: ‘Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced.’ Photograph: Alamy
Surely, Sultana’s Dream, the early 20th-century fantasy story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – where men stayed home while only women went out – has a relevance for our understanding of Muslim women’s long and rich history of writing and debate. (Yes, it exists.)
To decolonise and not just diversify curriculums is to recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations. In a society still shaped by a long colonial history in which straight white upper-class men are at the top of the social order, most disciplines give disproportionate prominence to the experiences, concerns and achievements of this one group. In my native India, upper-caste Hindu men have long held sway over learning and efforts are being made, in the face of predictable resistance, to dislodge that supremacy.
Britain has a long history of black and Asian communities that contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage
A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.
It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.
Scholars such as Peter Fryer and Rozina Visram have shown that black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and that these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage. In fact, the very idea of what it meant to be “white” or “English” relied on the presence of those, including the Irish, who could be marked as neither.
Yet decolonisation is not just about bringing in minority texts but also how we read “traditional” texts. Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced – indeed, in which the very idea of “English” literature came to be.
The British empire, love it or loathe it, paradoxically provides the common ground upon which our histories and identities were forged, whether those be of a white Etonian with Sandhurst military training or a queer British Asian female social worker. Between total denial of imperial history and mindless celebration of it comes actual knowledge of what happened. British literature has a great dissident tradition which acknowledges this. Barry Unsworth’s magisterial 1992 Booker prizewinner, Sacred Hunger, a powerful novel set in the context of the triangular slave trade of the 18th century, shows how the emergence of capitalist greed, the “sacred” unquestionable value, inflicted suffering on black men and women, and on working-class Britons, in different ways.
Ultimately, to decolonise is to ask difficult questions of ourselves. The Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid puts it thus: “And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?” Our students have chosen the demanding way.
To decolonise and not just diversify curriculums is to recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations. In a society still shaped by a long colonial history in which straight white upper-class men are at the top of the social order, most disciplines give disproportionate prominence to the experiences, concerns and achievements of this one group. In my native India, upper-caste Hindu men have long held sway over learning and efforts are being made, in the face of predictable resistance, to dislodge that supremacy.
Britain has a long history of black and Asian communities that contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage
A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.
It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.
Scholars such as Peter Fryer and Rozina Visram have shown that black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and that these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage. In fact, the very idea of what it meant to be “white” or “English” relied on the presence of those, including the Irish, who could be marked as neither.
Yet decolonisation is not just about bringing in minority texts but also how we read “traditional” texts. Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced – indeed, in which the very idea of “English” literature came to be.
The British empire, love it or loathe it, paradoxically provides the common ground upon which our histories and identities were forged, whether those be of a white Etonian with Sandhurst military training or a queer British Asian female social worker. Between total denial of imperial history and mindless celebration of it comes actual knowledge of what happened. British literature has a great dissident tradition which acknowledges this. Barry Unsworth’s magisterial 1992 Booker prizewinner, Sacred Hunger, a powerful novel set in the context of the triangular slave trade of the 18th century, shows how the emergence of capitalist greed, the “sacred” unquestionable value, inflicted suffering on black men and women, and on working-class Britons, in different ways.
Ultimately, to decolonise is to ask difficult questions of ourselves. The Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid puts it thus: “And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?” Our students have chosen the demanding way.
Thursday 22 December 2016
Corruption and the Tata empire
Geeta Anand in The New York Times
In India, where corruption is a fact of life, the Tata Group — a powerhouse conglomerate that makes Land Rovers, operates the historic Pierre Hotel in New York and sells the world Tetley tea — has been held up as the exception to the rule.
Its patriarch, Ratan Tata, 78, is a revered figure here, a cross between Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates whom even schoolchildren know and look up to as Mr. Clean — the billionaire whose family built its name in part on zero tolerance for corruption.
His company symbolizes the role an ascendant India sees for itself on the global stage. In 2010 Mr. Tata arranged a $50 million donation to the Harvard Business School, the school’s largest gift from an international donor, and its dean sits on the board of the empire’s umbrella organization, Tata Sons. Mr. Tata has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
Now, however, Mr. Tata is caught up in a nasty public fight for control of the business — with the man he had chosen to succeed him as chairman. The company finds itself defending against serious allegations of wrongdoing.
Some of the claims have been raised by his chosen successor, Cyrus Mistry. Mr. Tata ousted Mr. Mistry in late October, saying it was necessary because “the board of Tata Sons lost confidence in him and in his ability to lead the Tata Group in the future.”
Mr. Mistry, 48, told Tata’s board in a letter that an internal audit indicated that its airline joint venture, AirAsia, had made more than $3 million in “fraudulent transactions” with two companies. In recent days, India’s Directorate of Enforcement has started an investigation into the AirAsia payments. The directorate did not respond to requests for comment.
“Never before has the Tata Group, including the philanthropic objectives of the Tata Trusts, been in jeopardy to this extent and scale,” Mr. Mistry said in a public statement this month. He said he was fighting “to protect the Tata Group from capricious decision-making by the interim chairman,” a reference to Mr. Tata.
Separately, on Friday, a crusading member of India’s Parliament, Subramanian Swamy, called in a court complaint for an investigation into allegations from a government report that Mr. Tata in 2008 used a front company to apply for a telecommunications license, potentially circumventing the limits on the number of licenses one investor could hold. This is alleged to have happened at a time of furious maneuvering among companies trying to win the rights to offer cellphone service in India — a battle that resulted in one of India’s biggest corruption scandals ever.
Ultimately the scandal helped sweep India’s founding political party, the Congress party, from power in an epic defeat.
The New York Times has reviewed government documents showing that India’s Serious Fraud Investigation Office recommended prosecuting Mr. Tata in 2013. For reasons that are not clear, the government did not file a case in court.
Ratan Tata, the patriarch of the Tata Group, in Mumbai in 2009. The conglomerate’s many elements include a leading manufacturer of trucks. CreditKunal Patil/Hindustan Times, via Getty Images
The fraud office documents, which Mr. Swamy filed as part of his court complaint, say that the Tata Group invested $250 million in eight subsidiaries of a real estate firm, Unitech — a sum roughly equivalent to the telecom license application fee. Unitech used that money to apply for a license on Tata’s behalf, the report from the government’s fraud office said.
A Tata spokesman said the company made “a bona fide real estate deal” with Unitech unrelated to telecom licenses, adding that “no evidence was found which could be attributed to any criminality.”
The Tata Group was started in 1868, when the British ruled the Indian subcontinent. The founder, Jamsetji Tata, was a descendant of Persian immigrants, known as Parsis, who form a tiny and vibrant community in Mumbai. He began with a trading business, and over the decades the company grew — building India’s first steel mill, its first hydroelectric power station, its first locally made trains and its first airline.
In 1903, Mr. Tata opened India’s first luxury hotel serving Indians, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which is today considered a national landmark. In 2008 the hotel was one of the targets of the dayslong Mumbai terrorist attack by Pakistani infiltrators that shocked India and the world.
The company today has its hand in almost every business imaginable, from consulting to automobiles. Ratan Tata, the cousin of his predecessor, took over the company in 1991 at the age of 53. He became the group’s fifth chairman. He widened the group’s international presence, acquiring Corus Group, the Anglo-Dutch steel company, in 2007 and the Jaguar and Land Rover brands in 2008.
Mr. Mistry — the first non-Tata family member to lead the nearly 150-year-old company — was elevated in 2012 after a two-year search. However, in India’s tight-knit Parsi community, the ties can be close. Mr. Mistry’s family, which owns a major construction business, was the biggest shareholder in Tata Sons, with 18 percent, and Mr. Mistry had been on the board since 2006. His sister is married to Mr. Tata’s half brother.
According to several people close to Mr. Mistry, the relationship between him and Mr. Tata soured in part because Mr. Mistry had begun reining in some favors that the company had previously extended to Mr. Tata’s personal friends.
In one instance, after Mr. Mistry raised the issue, the Tata board explored starting legal proceedings against C. Sivasankaran, a longtime friend and close business associate of Mr. Tata’s, to try to recover $100 million the company said it was owed from a telecom deal. Mr. Sivasankaran also had been renting a 5,300-square-foot penthouse for $11,000, less than half the market rent, from the company, according to correspondence reviewed by The Times. Mr. Mistry raised his rent to the market rate.
Mr. Sivasankaran, in an interview, said he was indeed a friend of Mr. Tata’s. He said, though, that he had suffered financially from the investment and had no intention of paying back the $100 million he owed.
“I don’t want to pay it because Tata has not managed the company properly,” he said. “Siva is alleging the Tata Group does not have management skills,” Mr. Sivasankaran said, referring to himself in the third person.
He also confirmed that he was ousted from the luxury apartment. Mr. Sivasankaran said he had a long-term contract to stay there, so he could have fought to stay, but decided to go quietly.
Another issue at Tata involved no-bid dredging, shipping and barge contracts granted to companies belonging to another of Mr. Tata’s longtime friends, Mehli Mistry, according to three people who have reviewed company documents. (He and Cyrus Mistry, the ousted Tata executive, are cousins.) Cyrus Mistry allowed the contracts to be put up for bid once they expired, according to the people who have reviewed the documents.Continue reading the main story
Photo
Outside a Tata Motors plant in Pune, India. CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
A Tata Group spokesman referred questions to Tata Power, the unit that made the contracts. Tata Power did not respond to requests for comment.
Mehli Mistry, through a lawyer, said that the contracts were not the result of his friendship with Mr. Tata, and disputed that they were not fairly valued.
The Cellphone Allegations
From a corporate perspective, the most consequential allegations regarding Mr. Tata and the group are those contained in the 33-page report from the Serious Fraud Investigation Office asserting that Mr. Tata’s group was the real applicant behind a telecom license secured by Unitech, the New Delhi real estate company.
A decade ago, India pried open its notoriously dysfunctional telecom market. In the days before deregulation, it could take a customer years just to get a new phone number. People would hang on to their phone lines like family jewels and hand them down to relatives.
Against that backdrop, investors saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build an Indian phone empire. But applicants could seek only one license. And the Tata Group had already applied for a different one.
The report says that Tata, “desperate to acquire the license,” used Unitech as its front in pursuit of a second license.
Unitech was one of the eight companies granted licenses in 2008. But the Supreme Court later ruled all the licenses illegal, in part because government investigations said that the licensing fee paid by the companies was substantially below market rates.
Fourteen people — including India’s former telecom minister and several Unitech officials — have been on trial in a special court on charges of cheating the government by underselling the licenses. A verdict is expected early next year. All have said they are not guilty.
Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, in 2014 submitted to the Supreme Court the government’s fraud investigation report charging that the Tata Group used Unitech as a front for its telecom application. He urged the court to direct the Central Bureau of Investigation to take up the case.
Mr. Bhushan also charges in the court petition that the Tata Group, in “glaring evidence of an apparent quid pro quo” for a telecom license, transferred property valued at tens of millions of dollars to the family at the helm of the political party of the telecommunications minister at the time.
Mr. Bhushan’s actions are still pending before the court.
A. Raja, the former telecom minister, declined to comment. A spokesman for his political party could not be reached.
The bureau of investigation did not respond to requests for comment. Vivek Priyadarshi, the bureau’s investigating officer in the case at that time, declined to discuss its conclusions.
In India, where corruption is a fact of life, the Tata Group — a powerhouse conglomerate that makes Land Rovers, operates the historic Pierre Hotel in New York and sells the world Tetley tea — has been held up as the exception to the rule.
Its patriarch, Ratan Tata, 78, is a revered figure here, a cross between Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates whom even schoolchildren know and look up to as Mr. Clean — the billionaire whose family built its name in part on zero tolerance for corruption.
His company symbolizes the role an ascendant India sees for itself on the global stage. In 2010 Mr. Tata arranged a $50 million donation to the Harvard Business School, the school’s largest gift from an international donor, and its dean sits on the board of the empire’s umbrella organization, Tata Sons. Mr. Tata has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
Now, however, Mr. Tata is caught up in a nasty public fight for control of the business — with the man he had chosen to succeed him as chairman. The company finds itself defending against serious allegations of wrongdoing.
Some of the claims have been raised by his chosen successor, Cyrus Mistry. Mr. Tata ousted Mr. Mistry in late October, saying it was necessary because “the board of Tata Sons lost confidence in him and in his ability to lead the Tata Group in the future.”
Mr. Mistry, 48, told Tata’s board in a letter that an internal audit indicated that its airline joint venture, AirAsia, had made more than $3 million in “fraudulent transactions” with two companies. In recent days, India’s Directorate of Enforcement has started an investigation into the AirAsia payments. The directorate did not respond to requests for comment.
“Never before has the Tata Group, including the philanthropic objectives of the Tata Trusts, been in jeopardy to this extent and scale,” Mr. Mistry said in a public statement this month. He said he was fighting “to protect the Tata Group from capricious decision-making by the interim chairman,” a reference to Mr. Tata.
Separately, on Friday, a crusading member of India’s Parliament, Subramanian Swamy, called in a court complaint for an investigation into allegations from a government report that Mr. Tata in 2008 used a front company to apply for a telecommunications license, potentially circumventing the limits on the number of licenses one investor could hold. This is alleged to have happened at a time of furious maneuvering among companies trying to win the rights to offer cellphone service in India — a battle that resulted in one of India’s biggest corruption scandals ever.
Ultimately the scandal helped sweep India’s founding political party, the Congress party, from power in an epic defeat.
The New York Times has reviewed government documents showing that India’s Serious Fraud Investigation Office recommended prosecuting Mr. Tata in 2013. For reasons that are not clear, the government did not file a case in court.
Ratan Tata, the patriarch of the Tata Group, in Mumbai in 2009. The conglomerate’s many elements include a leading manufacturer of trucks. CreditKunal Patil/Hindustan Times, via Getty Images
The fraud office documents, which Mr. Swamy filed as part of his court complaint, say that the Tata Group invested $250 million in eight subsidiaries of a real estate firm, Unitech — a sum roughly equivalent to the telecom license application fee. Unitech used that money to apply for a license on Tata’s behalf, the report from the government’s fraud office said.
A Tata spokesman said the company made “a bona fide real estate deal” with Unitech unrelated to telecom licenses, adding that “no evidence was found which could be attributed to any criminality.”
The Tata Group was started in 1868, when the British ruled the Indian subcontinent. The founder, Jamsetji Tata, was a descendant of Persian immigrants, known as Parsis, who form a tiny and vibrant community in Mumbai. He began with a trading business, and over the decades the company grew — building India’s first steel mill, its first hydroelectric power station, its first locally made trains and its first airline.
In 1903, Mr. Tata opened India’s first luxury hotel serving Indians, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which is today considered a national landmark. In 2008 the hotel was one of the targets of the dayslong Mumbai terrorist attack by Pakistani infiltrators that shocked India and the world.
The company today has its hand in almost every business imaginable, from consulting to automobiles. Ratan Tata, the cousin of his predecessor, took over the company in 1991 at the age of 53. He became the group’s fifth chairman. He widened the group’s international presence, acquiring Corus Group, the Anglo-Dutch steel company, in 2007 and the Jaguar and Land Rover brands in 2008.
Mr. Mistry — the first non-Tata family member to lead the nearly 150-year-old company — was elevated in 2012 after a two-year search. However, in India’s tight-knit Parsi community, the ties can be close. Mr. Mistry’s family, which owns a major construction business, was the biggest shareholder in Tata Sons, with 18 percent, and Mr. Mistry had been on the board since 2006. His sister is married to Mr. Tata’s half brother.
According to several people close to Mr. Mistry, the relationship between him and Mr. Tata soured in part because Mr. Mistry had begun reining in some favors that the company had previously extended to Mr. Tata’s personal friends.
In one instance, after Mr. Mistry raised the issue, the Tata board explored starting legal proceedings against C. Sivasankaran, a longtime friend and close business associate of Mr. Tata’s, to try to recover $100 million the company said it was owed from a telecom deal. Mr. Sivasankaran also had been renting a 5,300-square-foot penthouse for $11,000, less than half the market rent, from the company, according to correspondence reviewed by The Times. Mr. Mistry raised his rent to the market rate.
Mr. Sivasankaran, in an interview, said he was indeed a friend of Mr. Tata’s. He said, though, that he had suffered financially from the investment and had no intention of paying back the $100 million he owed.
“I don’t want to pay it because Tata has not managed the company properly,” he said. “Siva is alleging the Tata Group does not have management skills,” Mr. Sivasankaran said, referring to himself in the third person.
He also confirmed that he was ousted from the luxury apartment. Mr. Sivasankaran said he had a long-term contract to stay there, so he could have fought to stay, but decided to go quietly.
Another issue at Tata involved no-bid dredging, shipping and barge contracts granted to companies belonging to another of Mr. Tata’s longtime friends, Mehli Mistry, according to three people who have reviewed company documents. (He and Cyrus Mistry, the ousted Tata executive, are cousins.) Cyrus Mistry allowed the contracts to be put up for bid once they expired, according to the people who have reviewed the documents.Continue reading the main story
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Outside a Tata Motors plant in Pune, India. CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
A Tata Group spokesman referred questions to Tata Power, the unit that made the contracts. Tata Power did not respond to requests for comment.
Mehli Mistry, through a lawyer, said that the contracts were not the result of his friendship with Mr. Tata, and disputed that they were not fairly valued.
The Cellphone Allegations
From a corporate perspective, the most consequential allegations regarding Mr. Tata and the group are those contained in the 33-page report from the Serious Fraud Investigation Office asserting that Mr. Tata’s group was the real applicant behind a telecom license secured by Unitech, the New Delhi real estate company.
A decade ago, India pried open its notoriously dysfunctional telecom market. In the days before deregulation, it could take a customer years just to get a new phone number. People would hang on to their phone lines like family jewels and hand them down to relatives.
Against that backdrop, investors saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build an Indian phone empire. But applicants could seek only one license. And the Tata Group had already applied for a different one.
The report says that Tata, “desperate to acquire the license,” used Unitech as its front in pursuit of a second license.
Unitech was one of the eight companies granted licenses in 2008. But the Supreme Court later ruled all the licenses illegal, in part because government investigations said that the licensing fee paid by the companies was substantially below market rates.
Fourteen people — including India’s former telecom minister and several Unitech officials — have been on trial in a special court on charges of cheating the government by underselling the licenses. A verdict is expected early next year. All have said they are not guilty.
Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, in 2014 submitted to the Supreme Court the government’s fraud investigation report charging that the Tata Group used Unitech as a front for its telecom application. He urged the court to direct the Central Bureau of Investigation to take up the case.
Mr. Bhushan also charges in the court petition that the Tata Group, in “glaring evidence of an apparent quid pro quo” for a telecom license, transferred property valued at tens of millions of dollars to the family at the helm of the political party of the telecommunications minister at the time.
Mr. Bhushan’s actions are still pending before the court.
A. Raja, the former telecom minister, declined to comment. A spokesman for his political party could not be reached.
The bureau of investigation did not respond to requests for comment. Vivek Priyadarshi, the bureau’s investigating officer in the case at that time, declined to discuss its conclusions.
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Mr. Tata and, sitting behind him, his chosen successor, Cyrus Mistry, at an auto expo in New Delhi in 2012.CreditJasjeet Plaha/Hindustan Times, via Getty Images
India Opens Its Skies
In 2012, India allowed its cash-starved airlines to accept investments from foreign carriers, as long as an Indian partner retained control. Yet another Indian market — jet travel — suddenly looked sexier. Tata and others raced in.
Tata teamed up with AirAsia Berhad, a budget airline from Malaysia, and set up AirAsia India. This happened during Cyrus Mistry’s tenure — but he has distanced himself from the deal. In a letter to the Tata board after his ouster, he said that he opposed the deal, but that Mr. Tata pressured him to proceed, and that Mr. Tata himself negotiated the terms with AirAsia.
“My pushback was hard but futile,” Mr. Mistry said in the letter, which The Times has reviewed.
The allegations of questionable payments to two companies came after whistle-blower complaints prompted AirAsia’s board to order a forensic audit. That audit, delivered by Deloitte India in September and reviewed by The Times, identified the payment of more than $3 million to two such companies. Neither company appears to have offices, the audit found.
Mr. Mistry had shared the audit summary with the Tata Sons board members before the October meeting when he was fired, a person close to Mr. Mistry said.
A spokesman for Tata referred questions to AirAsia, which did not respond.
Friends in Business
At the time of Mr. Mistry’s ouster, he was also confronting an issue with Mr. Tata’s friend, Mr. Sivasankaran, whose company owed the Tata Group more than $100 million.
Mr. Sivasankaran in 2006 had invested in a Tata telecom start-up that also received a big investment from NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese company. In 2014, DoCoMo exercised its right to sell back its shares to Tata. The money Mr. Sivasankaran refuses to pay back represents his portion of that buyback expense, according to correspondence between the two sides.
Mr. Sivasankaran, in an interview, said he had invested in the company purely out of friendship with Mr. Tata. He said neither he nor anyone else had influenced Mr. Tata’s decision to fire Mr. Mistry.
A spokesman for Tata said it was pursuing “all legal options” to recover the money.
Mr. Tata’s friend Mehli Mistry maintained a lengthy financial relationship with the Tata Group. Over the last two decades, his companies were granted contracts for dredging, barging and shipping by Tata Power, often renewing them without a bidding process.
But after Cyrus Mistry took over, Tata Power put Mehli Mistry’s contracts out to bid. Other companies won those contracts, according to two people familiar with the bidding process.
Mehli Mistry was so disappointed at losing the contracts that he sent a message this year to Cyrus Mistry through a family member, people close to the former executive said. A person familiar with the message said that Mehli Mistry told Cyrus Mistry to stop interfering in his contracts or he would take steps to defend himself.
People close to Cyrus Mistry say he thinks his ouster was, in part, Mehli Mistry’s retaliation. In his letter to the board, Cyrus Mistry wrote, “I had to ease out hangers-on.”
Mehli Mistry, his lawyer said, “emphatically denied” sending any message regarding contracts to Cyrus Mistry and played no role in his ouster.
Mr. Tata and, sitting behind him, his chosen successor, Cyrus Mistry, at an auto expo in New Delhi in 2012.CreditJasjeet Plaha/Hindustan Times, via Getty Images
India Opens Its Skies
In 2012, India allowed its cash-starved airlines to accept investments from foreign carriers, as long as an Indian partner retained control. Yet another Indian market — jet travel — suddenly looked sexier. Tata and others raced in.
Tata teamed up with AirAsia Berhad, a budget airline from Malaysia, and set up AirAsia India. This happened during Cyrus Mistry’s tenure — but he has distanced himself from the deal. In a letter to the Tata board after his ouster, he said that he opposed the deal, but that Mr. Tata pressured him to proceed, and that Mr. Tata himself negotiated the terms with AirAsia.
“My pushback was hard but futile,” Mr. Mistry said in the letter, which The Times has reviewed.
The allegations of questionable payments to two companies came after whistle-blower complaints prompted AirAsia’s board to order a forensic audit. That audit, delivered by Deloitte India in September and reviewed by The Times, identified the payment of more than $3 million to two such companies. Neither company appears to have offices, the audit found.
Mr. Mistry had shared the audit summary with the Tata Sons board members before the October meeting when he was fired, a person close to Mr. Mistry said.
A spokesman for Tata referred questions to AirAsia, which did not respond.
Friends in Business
At the time of Mr. Mistry’s ouster, he was also confronting an issue with Mr. Tata’s friend, Mr. Sivasankaran, whose company owed the Tata Group more than $100 million.
Mr. Sivasankaran in 2006 had invested in a Tata telecom start-up that also received a big investment from NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese company. In 2014, DoCoMo exercised its right to sell back its shares to Tata. The money Mr. Sivasankaran refuses to pay back represents his portion of that buyback expense, according to correspondence between the two sides.
Mr. Sivasankaran, in an interview, said he had invested in the company purely out of friendship with Mr. Tata. He said neither he nor anyone else had influenced Mr. Tata’s decision to fire Mr. Mistry.
A spokesman for Tata said it was pursuing “all legal options” to recover the money.
Mr. Tata’s friend Mehli Mistry maintained a lengthy financial relationship with the Tata Group. Over the last two decades, his companies were granted contracts for dredging, barging and shipping by Tata Power, often renewing them without a bidding process.
But after Cyrus Mistry took over, Tata Power put Mehli Mistry’s contracts out to bid. Other companies won those contracts, according to two people familiar with the bidding process.
Mehli Mistry was so disappointed at losing the contracts that he sent a message this year to Cyrus Mistry through a family member, people close to the former executive said. A person familiar with the message said that Mehli Mistry told Cyrus Mistry to stop interfering in his contracts or he would take steps to defend himself.
People close to Cyrus Mistry say he thinks his ouster was, in part, Mehli Mistry’s retaliation. In his letter to the board, Cyrus Mistry wrote, “I had to ease out hangers-on.”
Mehli Mistry, his lawyer said, “emphatically denied” sending any message regarding contracts to Cyrus Mistry and played no role in his ouster.
Friday 16 December 2016
Thursday 3 October 2013
The Daily Mail may not realise, but Marxists are patriots
The traducing of Ralph Miliband is a reminder of how far we now are from understanding socialism
‘The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years indicates that people are turning again to an analysis of the exploitative logic of capitalism that remains singularly accurate and powerful.' Photograph: PA
Whatever their views of him, most decent people backed Ed Miliband this week as he defended his father against jingoist attacks on him by the Daily Mail. The Labour leader angrily described Ralph Miliband as a British patriot, and correctly noted that he does not share his father's principled commitment to socialism. Labour is right to demand an apology from the Mail, not only for a frankly bigoted attack on a respected Jewish intellectual, but also for claiming that the party's politics bear any resemblance to the socialism it formally abandoned nearly two decades ago.
The defence of Ralph Miliband runs along wearyingly familiar lines – that he unambiguously proved his patriotism by fighting in the anti-Nazi war, which along with "no apology for the empire" has become the principal litmus test for love of Britain. His lifelong commitment to a supple Marxism is noted but quietly skimmed over as an embarrassingly anachronistic aspect of an otherwise decent and loyal man. Yet a defence of Miliband senior which does not also challenge the red-bashing that often goes hand in hand with antisemitism is, at best, equivocal. More perniciously, it accepts the distorted terms set by the rightwing press which defines patriotism narrowly through obedient adulation of monarchy, militarism and elitism.
Ralph Miliband was not a patriot because he served in the navy. He was a lover of this country and its people precisely because he understood that institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords symbolise and perpetuate inequality, and that militarism usually encourages the poor to die defending the interests of the privileged. Hispatriotism has more in common with long progressive patriotic traditions in Britain, from the Diggers and Levellers to the Chartists and anti-privatisation campaigners. It was about claiming land and country for the majority of its labouring denizens rather than the plutocrats and the powerful who live off the fat of the land while spouting an insincere "nationalism" which serves less to create collective wellbeing than to prevent their privileges being questioned.
Even while noting that Ralph criticised Eric Hobsbawm for not repudiating Stalinism, the Daily Mail recyles the false charge that adherence to Marxism is indistinguishable from commitment to a poisonous Sovietism. This is no different from claiming that Christianity is indistinguishable from the bloody crusades and inquisitions conducted by some of its adherents. However, Ralph Miliband would also have found his son's claim that capitalism can be "made to work for working people" incoherent, and wilfully ignorant of how capitalism actually works, constitutively reliant as it is on concentrating wealth among relatively few while extracting the labour of the many.
For years, captains of corporations in the affluent west have been able to peddle the myth that capitalism can be made to work for everyone by outsourcing its most exploitative aspects to other parts of the world, extracting both resources and labour ruthlessly. Now, however – as the centre of capitalist gravity shifts southwards, the western social democratic compact unravels, and the foundations of the welfare state are disastrously undermined – it will be less easy to keep up this pretence of affluence for all.
The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years alone indicate that people are turning once again to an analysis of the fundamentally exploitative logic of capitalism that, for all its relentless bad press, remains singularly accurate and powerful.
It is time to junk the cheap and facile propaganda that socialism is reducible to Stalinist depredations. In Ralph Miliband's own anti-Stalinist understanding, socialism was about "the wholesale transformation of the social order" by giving ordinary people control over the economic system, fully democratising a political system in which ordinary citizens feel disenfranchised and helpless, and ensuring "a drastic levelling out of social inequality". It is the abandonment of these democratic aspirations for the craven pieties of the Daily Mail that must really "disturb everyone who loves this country".
Friday 30 August 2013
Asaram Bapu's moment of reckoning
Dileep Padgaonkar in the Times of India
Every murky controversy that involves a self-appointed dispenser of cures for all physical, psychic and societal ailments sheds a harsh light on two on developments that have surfaced across the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the rise of blind faith at a personal level and of politics rooted in religious radicalism. Both seek to provide an anchor to individuals and communities trapped in a maelstrom of unprecedented change spear-headed by technological innovations and the globalised economy.
Every murky controversy that involves a self-appointed dispenser of cures for all physical, psychic and societal ailments sheds a harsh light on two on developments that have surfaced across the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the rise of blind faith at a personal level and of politics rooted in religious radicalism. Both seek to provide an anchor to individuals and communities trapped in a maelstrom of unprecedented change spear-headed by technological innovations and the globalised economy.
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These are perceived as threats to cultures and ways of life, to deeply-entrenched religious beliefs and to moral certitudes. And the riposte of ordinary folk to such threats is to repose their trust in those who claim to have a privileged access to God. Indeed, even when such individuals are caught with, so to speak, their pants down, the faithful are willing to overlook their trespasses. The yawning gap between what they preach – austerity, abstinence, altruism – and what they practice – an opulent life-style, sexual promiscuity and a no-holds-barred acquisitiveness – is of little concern to them.
The case of Asumal Harpalani aka Asaram Bapu is significant in this regard. Ever since he was accused of molesting a minor girl, the media have unveiled his trajectory from his birth in a family of modest means in the Sindh province of British India to one of the country’s most prosperous and influential ‘spiritual’ gurus. It tells a fascinating story of the transformation of a bootlegger – whose family arrived in Ahmedabad after Partition -into a figure who has built an empire that is conservatively estimated to be worth more than Rs. 10,000 crores and who, according to his official website, has twenty million followers in India and abroad.
These followers have apparently not turned hostile to Asaram despite the contrasts between what he preaches and what he practices. He owns a posse of expensive cars, travels business class, ensures that he isn’t frisked by security at airports and continues to expand his real estate empire. Neither the cases of land-grabbing nor the cases of four youths who ‘disappeared’ in his institutions – the mutilated bodies of two of them were later found on the banks of the Sabarmati – have diminished his appeal.
That explains why most politicians take care not to rub him the wrong way. To take him to task is to alienate a sizeable section of the Hindu vote. Or so they reckon. Congress leaders have yet to pull him up for his alleged sexual assault on a minor girl. But it is the BJP that takes the cake. Leaders like Uma Bharati and Pravin Togadia have rushed to his defence. In videos that have gone viral on Youtube other worthies of the Sangh Parivar have hailed him as a genuine saint. And the ‘saint’ himself has called the latest allegations a political conspiracy to frame him while son and presumptive heir has dubbed the minor girl as ‘mentally deranged.’
Armed with this support, Asaram has been able to defy law enforcers with impunity. On the grounds that he was engaged in meditation, he kept police waiting for several hours before he deigned to receive a summons to appear for questioning. He then grandly declared that he would not appear before the concerned authorities right away since he has a busy schedule until September 18. And he has continued to visit his scores of ashrams and educational institutions, address the faithful, heap scorn of the media and denounce his critics in a language that suits not a spiritual leader but, well, a clandestine seller of adulterated spirits. Such are the methods of the proponents of a Hindu Rashtra – the very ones that are dear to the proponents of a strident, Islamic rule in Muslim-majority countries or to literalist Christian evangelists in many parts of the world.
The only hope in this sordid saga is that the girl who has accused Asaram of molesting her will stick, along with her parents, to her courageous stand to expose him for what he is: a charlatan who tarnishes the uplifting traditions of Hinduism with his questionable conduct. Should the police do their job and arrest him without delay and haul him up before the courts, the victim would be vindicated.
The parties that swear by the rule of law will then fall in line while those who place their religious faith above the law and the Constitution will be shamed to follow suit. By and by, his blind devotees, too, would realise that the ‘saint’ they venerate is a man of straw. Keep your fingers crossed.
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