Showing posts with label oligarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oligarchy. Show all posts
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Wednesday 11 July 2018
The staggering rise of India’s super-rich
India’s new billionaires have accumulated more money, more quickly, than plutocrats in almost any country in history. By James Crabtree in The Guardian
On 3 May, at around 4.45pm, a short, trim Indian man walked quickly down London’s Old Compton Street, his head bowed as if trying not to be seen. From his seat by the window of a nearby noodle bar, Anuvab Pal recognised him instantly. “He is tiny, and his face had been all over every newspaper in India,” Pal recalled. “I knew it was him.”
Few in Britain would have given the passing figure a second look. And that, in a way, was the point. The man pacing through Soho on that Wednesday night was Nirav Modi: Indian jeweller, billionaire and international fugitive.
In February, Modi had fled his home country after an alleged $1.8bn fraud case in which the tycoon was accused of abusing a system that allowed his business to obtain cash advances illegally from one of India’s largest banks. Since then, his whereabouts had been a mystery. Indian newspapers speculated that he might be holed up in Hong Kong or New York. Indian courts issued warrants for his arrest, and the police tried, ineffectually, to track him down.
It was only by chance that Pal spotted him. A standup comic normally based in Mumbai, he happened to be in London for a run of gigs. “My ritual was to go to the same noodle bar, have a meal, and then head to the theatre,” Pal said. “I always sat by the window. And then suddenly Modi walks past. He was unshaven, and had those Apple earphones, the wireless ones. He looked like he was in a hurry.”
It was another month before the press finally caught up with Modi, as reports of his whereabouts emerged in June, along with the suggestion that he was planning to claim political asylum in the UK. (Modi denies wrongdoing, and did not respond to requests for comment.) In the process, Modi also gained entry into one of London’s more notorious fraternities: the small club of Indian billionaires who seem to end up in the British capital following scandals back at home.
The most prominent among these émigré moguls is India’s “King of Good Times”, Vijay Mallya, the one-time aviation magnate and brewer, who transformed Kingfisher beer into a global brand. A few years ago, Mallya was one of India’s most celebrated industrialists, famous for his mullet haircut and flamboyant lifestyle. But in early 2016, Indian authorities filed charges relating to the collapse of his Kingfisher airline, which went bust in spectacular fashion in 2012, leaving behind mountainous debts and irate, unpaid staff. And so, facing allegations of financial irregularities and of refusing to repay outstanding loans, Mallya quietly boarded a plane for Britain, too.
Like Modi, Mallya denies wrongdoing. Last month he released a long statement accusing India’s government of conducting a witch-hunt against him. And to the extent that this claim has some merit, it is because Indian prime minister Narendra Modi (no relation to Nirav Modi) has of late been under great pressure to bring supposedly errant tycoons such as Mallya to book.
Men like Mallya and Modi were members of India’s expanding billionaire class, of whom there are now 119 members, according to Forbes magazine.Last year their collective worth amounted to $440bn – more than in any other country, bar the US and China. By contrast, the average person in India earns barely $1,700 a year. Given its early stage of economic development, India’s new hyper-wealthy elite have accumulated more money, more quickly, than their plutocratic peers in almost any country in history.
On 3 May, at around 4.45pm, a short, trim Indian man walked quickly down London’s Old Compton Street, his head bowed as if trying not to be seen. From his seat by the window of a nearby noodle bar, Anuvab Pal recognised him instantly. “He is tiny, and his face had been all over every newspaper in India,” Pal recalled. “I knew it was him.”
Few in Britain would have given the passing figure a second look. And that, in a way, was the point. The man pacing through Soho on that Wednesday night was Nirav Modi: Indian jeweller, billionaire and international fugitive.
In February, Modi had fled his home country after an alleged $1.8bn fraud case in which the tycoon was accused of abusing a system that allowed his business to obtain cash advances illegally from one of India’s largest banks. Since then, his whereabouts had been a mystery. Indian newspapers speculated that he might be holed up in Hong Kong or New York. Indian courts issued warrants for his arrest, and the police tried, ineffectually, to track him down.
It was only by chance that Pal spotted him. A standup comic normally based in Mumbai, he happened to be in London for a run of gigs. “My ritual was to go to the same noodle bar, have a meal, and then head to the theatre,” Pal said. “I always sat by the window. And then suddenly Modi walks past. He was unshaven, and had those Apple earphones, the wireless ones. He looked like he was in a hurry.”
It was another month before the press finally caught up with Modi, as reports of his whereabouts emerged in June, along with the suggestion that he was planning to claim political asylum in the UK. (Modi denies wrongdoing, and did not respond to requests for comment.) In the process, Modi also gained entry into one of London’s more notorious fraternities: the small club of Indian billionaires who seem to end up in the British capital following scandals back at home.
The most prominent among these émigré moguls is India’s “King of Good Times”, Vijay Mallya, the one-time aviation magnate and brewer, who transformed Kingfisher beer into a global brand. A few years ago, Mallya was one of India’s most celebrated industrialists, famous for his mullet haircut and flamboyant lifestyle. But in early 2016, Indian authorities filed charges relating to the collapse of his Kingfisher airline, which went bust in spectacular fashion in 2012, leaving behind mountainous debts and irate, unpaid staff. And so, facing allegations of financial irregularities and of refusing to repay outstanding loans, Mallya quietly boarded a plane for Britain, too.
Like Modi, Mallya denies wrongdoing. Last month he released a long statement accusing India’s government of conducting a witch-hunt against him. And to the extent that this claim has some merit, it is because Indian prime minister Narendra Modi (no relation to Nirav Modi) has of late been under great pressure to bring supposedly errant tycoons such as Mallya to book.
Men like Mallya and Modi were members of India’s expanding billionaire class, of whom there are now 119 members, according to Forbes magazine.Last year their collective worth amounted to $440bn – more than in any other country, bar the US and China. By contrast, the average person in India earns barely $1,700 a year. Given its early stage of economic development, India’s new hyper-wealthy elite have accumulated more money, more quickly, than their plutocratic peers in almost any country in history.
A cardboard cut-out of billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi at a protest against him in New Delhi in February. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
Narendra Modi won an overwhelming election victory in 2014, having promised to put a stop to the spate of corruption scandals that had dogged India for much of the previous decade. Many involved prominent industrialists – some directly accused of corruption, while others had simply mismanaged their finances and miraculously managed to escape the consequences. Voters turned to Narendra Modi, the self-described son of a poor tea-seller, hoping he would deliver a new era of clean governance and rapid growth, ridding India of a growing reputation for crony capitalism.
Narendra Modi pledged to end a situation in which the country’s ultra-wealthy – sometimes called “Bollygarchs” – appeared to live by one set of rules, while India’s 1.3 billion people operated by another. Yet as they continue to hide out in cities like London, men like Mallya and Nirav Modi have come to be seen as representing the failure of that pledge; the Indian authorities “have a long road ahead”, as one headline put it in the Hindustan Times last year, referring to a “long and arduous” future extradition process in Mallya’s case.
And as Narendra Modi gears up for a tough re-election battle next year, he is fighting the perception that India is unable to bring such men to heel, and that it has been powerless to respond to the rise of this new moneyed elite and the scandals that have come with them. “This ongoing battle to get India’s big tycoons to play by the rules is one of the biggest challenges we face,” says Reuben Abraham, chief executive of the IDFC Institute, a Mumbai-based thinktank. “Getting it right is central to India’s economic and political future.”
India has long been a stratified society, marked by divisions of caste, race and religion. Prior to the country winning independence in 1947, its people were subjugated by imperial British administrators and myriad maharajas, and the feudal regional monarchies over which they presided. Even afterwards, India remained a grimly poor country, as its socialist leadership fashioned a notably inefficient state-planned economic model, closed off almost entirely from global trade. Over time, India grew more equal, if only in the limited sense that its elite remained poor by the standards of the industrialised west.
But no longer: the last three decades have seen an extraordinary explosion of wealth at the top of Indian society. In the mid-1990s, just two Indians featured in the annual Forbes billionaire list, racking up around $3bn between them. But against a backdrop of the gradual economic re-opening that began in 1991, this has quickly changed. By 2016, India had 84 entries on the Forbes billionaire list. Its economy was then worth around $2.3tn, according to the World Bank. China reached that level of GDP in 2006, but with just 10 billionaires to show for it. At the same stage of development, India had created eight times as many.
In part, this wealth is to be welcomed. This year India will be the world’s fastest-growing major economy. During the last two decades, it has grown more quickly than at any point its history, a record of economic expansion that helped to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Nonetheless, India remains a poor country: in 2016, to be counted among its richest 1% required assets of just $32,892, according to research from Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, the top 10% of earners now take around 55% of all national income – the highest rate for any large country in the world.
Put another way, India has created a model of development in which the proceeds of growth flow unusually quickly to the very top. Yet perhaps because Indian society has long been deeply stratified, this dramatic increase in inequality has not received as much global attention as it deserves. For nearly a century prior to independence, India was governed by the British Raj – a term taken from the Sanskrit rājya, meaning “rule”. For half a century after 1947, a system dominated by pernickety industrial rules emerged, often known as the Licence-Permit-Quota Raj, or Licence Raj for short. Now a system has grown in their place once again: the billionaire Raj.
The rise of India’s super-rich – the first and most obvious manifestation of the billionaire Raj – was propelled by domestic economic reforms. Starting slowly in the 1980s, and then more dramatically against the backdrop of a wrenching financial crisis in 1991, India dismantled the dusty stockade of rules and tariffs that made up the Licence Raj. Companies that had been cosseted under the old regime were cleared out via a mix of deregulation, foreign investment and heightened competition. In sector after sector, from airlines and banks to steel and telecoms, the ranks of India’s tycoons began to swell.
Nothing symbolises the power of this billionaire class more starkly than Antilia, the residential skyscraper built in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. Rising 173 metres above India’s financial capital, the steel-and-glass tower is rumoured to have cost more than $1bn to build, looming over a city in which half the population still live in slums.
Narendra Modi won an overwhelming election victory in 2014, having promised to put a stop to the spate of corruption scandals that had dogged India for much of the previous decade. Many involved prominent industrialists – some directly accused of corruption, while others had simply mismanaged their finances and miraculously managed to escape the consequences. Voters turned to Narendra Modi, the self-described son of a poor tea-seller, hoping he would deliver a new era of clean governance and rapid growth, ridding India of a growing reputation for crony capitalism.
Narendra Modi pledged to end a situation in which the country’s ultra-wealthy – sometimes called “Bollygarchs” – appeared to live by one set of rules, while India’s 1.3 billion people operated by another. Yet as they continue to hide out in cities like London, men like Mallya and Nirav Modi have come to be seen as representing the failure of that pledge; the Indian authorities “have a long road ahead”, as one headline put it in the Hindustan Times last year, referring to a “long and arduous” future extradition process in Mallya’s case.
And as Narendra Modi gears up for a tough re-election battle next year, he is fighting the perception that India is unable to bring such men to heel, and that it has been powerless to respond to the rise of this new moneyed elite and the scandals that have come with them. “This ongoing battle to get India’s big tycoons to play by the rules is one of the biggest challenges we face,” says Reuben Abraham, chief executive of the IDFC Institute, a Mumbai-based thinktank. “Getting it right is central to India’s economic and political future.”
India has long been a stratified society, marked by divisions of caste, race and religion. Prior to the country winning independence in 1947, its people were subjugated by imperial British administrators and myriad maharajas, and the feudal regional monarchies over which they presided. Even afterwards, India remained a grimly poor country, as its socialist leadership fashioned a notably inefficient state-planned economic model, closed off almost entirely from global trade. Over time, India grew more equal, if only in the limited sense that its elite remained poor by the standards of the industrialised west.
But no longer: the last three decades have seen an extraordinary explosion of wealth at the top of Indian society. In the mid-1990s, just two Indians featured in the annual Forbes billionaire list, racking up around $3bn between them. But against a backdrop of the gradual economic re-opening that began in 1991, this has quickly changed. By 2016, India had 84 entries on the Forbes billionaire list. Its economy was then worth around $2.3tn, according to the World Bank. China reached that level of GDP in 2006, but with just 10 billionaires to show for it. At the same stage of development, India had created eight times as many.
In part, this wealth is to be welcomed. This year India will be the world’s fastest-growing major economy. During the last two decades, it has grown more quickly than at any point its history, a record of economic expansion that helped to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Nonetheless, India remains a poor country: in 2016, to be counted among its richest 1% required assets of just $32,892, according to research from Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, the top 10% of earners now take around 55% of all national income – the highest rate for any large country in the world.
Put another way, India has created a model of development in which the proceeds of growth flow unusually quickly to the very top. Yet perhaps because Indian society has long been deeply stratified, this dramatic increase in inequality has not received as much global attention as it deserves. For nearly a century prior to independence, India was governed by the British Raj – a term taken from the Sanskrit rājya, meaning “rule”. For half a century after 1947, a system dominated by pernickety industrial rules emerged, often known as the Licence-Permit-Quota Raj, or Licence Raj for short. Now a system has grown in their place once again: the billionaire Raj.
The rise of India’s super-rich – the first and most obvious manifestation of the billionaire Raj – was propelled by domestic economic reforms. Starting slowly in the 1980s, and then more dramatically against the backdrop of a wrenching financial crisis in 1991, India dismantled the dusty stockade of rules and tariffs that made up the Licence Raj. Companies that had been cosseted under the old regime were cleared out via a mix of deregulation, foreign investment and heightened competition. In sector after sector, from airlines and banks to steel and telecoms, the ranks of India’s tycoons began to swell.
Nothing symbolises the power of this billionaire class more starkly than Antilia, the residential skyscraper built in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. Rising 173 metres above India’s financial capital, the steel-and-glass tower is rumoured to have cost more than $1bn to build, looming over a city in which half the population still live in slums.
The Antilia building, at right of photograph, in Mumbai. Photograph: Alamy
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Ambani owns Reliance Industries, an empire with interests stretching from petrochemicals to telecoms. (His father, Dhirubhai, from whom he inherited his company, was one of the main beneficiaries of the economic reforms of the 1980s.) At Antilia, Ambani entertains guests in a grand, chandeliered ballroom that takes up most of building’s ground floor. There are six storeys of parking for the family’s car collection, while the tower’s higher levels feature opulent apartments and hanging gardens. Further down, in sub-basement 2, the Ambanis keep a recreational floor, which includes an indoor football pitch. Antilia became an instant landmark upon its completion in 2010. The city had long been a place of stark divisions, yet the Ambani’s home almost seemed to magnify this segregation. (A spokesman for Reliance did not respond to a request for comment.)
The emergence of the Indian super-rich was bound up in larger global story. The early 2000s were the heyday of the so-called “great moderation”, when world interest rates stayed low and industrialised nations grew handsomely. This was also when the fortunes of India’s new tycoons began to change. Pumped up by foreign money, domestic bank loans and a surging sense of self-belief, industrialists went on a spending spree. Ambani dumped billions into oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Vijay Mallya spent heavily on new fleets of Airbus jets. Nirav Modi began building a global chain of jewellery stores. Stock markets boomed. From 2004 to 2014, India enjoyed the fastest expansion in its history, averaging growth of more than 8% a year.
The boom years brought benefits, most obviously by reintegrating India into the world economy. Yet this whirlwind growth also proved economically disruptive, socially bruising and environmentally destructive, leaving behind what the writer Rana Dasgupta describes as a sense of national trauma. India’s new wealth has been shared remarkably unevenly, too. Its richest 1% earned about 7% of national income in 1980; that figure rocketed to 22% by 2014, according to the World Inequality Report. Over the same period, the share held by the bottom 50% plunged from 23% to just 15%.
Unsurprisingly, some feel resentful. “You walk around the streets of this city, and the rage at Antilia has to be heard to be believed,” Meera Sanyal, a former international banker turned local anti-corruption campaigner, told me in 2014. Six years before that, in 2008, as the scale of India’s billionaire fortunes were becoming clear, Raghuram Rajan – an economist who would later become the head of India’s central bank – asked an even more pointed question about his country’s tycoon class: “If Russia is an oligarchy, how long can we resist calling India one?”
Back in London, Vijay Mallya feels unjustly targeted by India’s recent attempts to shed its reputation for crony capitalism, the second defining characteristic of the billionaire Raj. “I have been accused by politicians and the media alike of having stolen and run away with Rs 9,000 crores [90bn rupees, or $1.3bn] that was loaned to Kingfisher Airlines,” he wrote in his open letter last month. His case had become, he suggested, a “lightning rod for public anger” over the alleged misbehaviour of his fellow tycoons.
In spring 2017, I met Mallya at his London home, a Grade I-listed town house a short walk from Baker Street tube station. A variety of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys were parked along the mews at the rear, alongside a fat silver Maybach with the number plate VJM 1, which idled outside Mallya’s back door. Inside, he sheltered behind a grand wooden table, a gold lighter and two mobile phones lined up in front of him. At one point I asked to be excused to visit the toilet. A flunky ushered me into a golden bathroom, with a shiny gold seat to match its golden taps and loo-roll holder. The fluffy hand towels were white, but each one came embossed with the letters “VJM” in gold thread.
On the surface, Mallya still seemed every bit the ebullient tycoon of old: a bulky man in a red polo shirt, with gold bracelets on each wrist and a chunky diamond ear stud. But by then he had been stuck in Britain for more than a year, and grew downbeat as the afternoon wound on and our conversation turned to his business troubles and the state of his homeland. “India has corruption running in its veins,” he said with a sigh. “And that’s not something one is going to change overnight.”
With his shoulder-length hair and taste for bling, Mallya had long honed an image as the most piratical of India’s generation of entrepreneurs. A specially kitted-out Boeing 727, its bar well-stocked with his own Kingfisher beer, whisked him between parties and business meetings – a distinction that was, in any case, often hazy. “It was all a bit ridiculous,” one ex-board member at a Mallya company told me.
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Ambani owns Reliance Industries, an empire with interests stretching from petrochemicals to telecoms. (His father, Dhirubhai, from whom he inherited his company, was one of the main beneficiaries of the economic reforms of the 1980s.) At Antilia, Ambani entertains guests in a grand, chandeliered ballroom that takes up most of building’s ground floor. There are six storeys of parking for the family’s car collection, while the tower’s higher levels feature opulent apartments and hanging gardens. Further down, in sub-basement 2, the Ambanis keep a recreational floor, which includes an indoor football pitch. Antilia became an instant landmark upon its completion in 2010. The city had long been a place of stark divisions, yet the Ambani’s home almost seemed to magnify this segregation. (A spokesman for Reliance did not respond to a request for comment.)
The emergence of the Indian super-rich was bound up in larger global story. The early 2000s were the heyday of the so-called “great moderation”, when world interest rates stayed low and industrialised nations grew handsomely. This was also when the fortunes of India’s new tycoons began to change. Pumped up by foreign money, domestic bank loans and a surging sense of self-belief, industrialists went on a spending spree. Ambani dumped billions into oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Vijay Mallya spent heavily on new fleets of Airbus jets. Nirav Modi began building a global chain of jewellery stores. Stock markets boomed. From 2004 to 2014, India enjoyed the fastest expansion in its history, averaging growth of more than 8% a year.
The boom years brought benefits, most obviously by reintegrating India into the world economy. Yet this whirlwind growth also proved economically disruptive, socially bruising and environmentally destructive, leaving behind what the writer Rana Dasgupta describes as a sense of national trauma. India’s new wealth has been shared remarkably unevenly, too. Its richest 1% earned about 7% of national income in 1980; that figure rocketed to 22% by 2014, according to the World Inequality Report. Over the same period, the share held by the bottom 50% plunged from 23% to just 15%.
Unsurprisingly, some feel resentful. “You walk around the streets of this city, and the rage at Antilia has to be heard to be believed,” Meera Sanyal, a former international banker turned local anti-corruption campaigner, told me in 2014. Six years before that, in 2008, as the scale of India’s billionaire fortunes were becoming clear, Raghuram Rajan – an economist who would later become the head of India’s central bank – asked an even more pointed question about his country’s tycoon class: “If Russia is an oligarchy, how long can we resist calling India one?”
Back in London, Vijay Mallya feels unjustly targeted by India’s recent attempts to shed its reputation for crony capitalism, the second defining characteristic of the billionaire Raj. “I have been accused by politicians and the media alike of having stolen and run away with Rs 9,000 crores [90bn rupees, or $1.3bn] that was loaned to Kingfisher Airlines,” he wrote in his open letter last month. His case had become, he suggested, a “lightning rod for public anger” over the alleged misbehaviour of his fellow tycoons.
In spring 2017, I met Mallya at his London home, a Grade I-listed town house a short walk from Baker Street tube station. A variety of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys were parked along the mews at the rear, alongside a fat silver Maybach with the number plate VJM 1, which idled outside Mallya’s back door. Inside, he sheltered behind a grand wooden table, a gold lighter and two mobile phones lined up in front of him. At one point I asked to be excused to visit the toilet. A flunky ushered me into a golden bathroom, with a shiny gold seat to match its golden taps and loo-roll holder. The fluffy hand towels were white, but each one came embossed with the letters “VJM” in gold thread.
On the surface, Mallya still seemed every bit the ebullient tycoon of old: a bulky man in a red polo shirt, with gold bracelets on each wrist and a chunky diamond ear stud. But by then he had been stuck in Britain for more than a year, and grew downbeat as the afternoon wound on and our conversation turned to his business troubles and the state of his homeland. “India has corruption running in its veins,” he said with a sigh. “And that’s not something one is going to change overnight.”
With his shoulder-length hair and taste for bling, Mallya had long honed an image as the most piratical of India’s generation of entrepreneurs. A specially kitted-out Boeing 727, its bar well-stocked with his own Kingfisher beer, whisked him between parties and business meetings – a distinction that was, in any case, often hazy. “It was all a bit ridiculous,” one ex-board member at a Mallya company told me.
Vijay Mallya, who fled India for London in 2016. Photograph: Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Now marooned in London, Mallya had plenty of time to ponder his missteps. Once a member of the Rajya Sabha, the Indian upper house of parliament, his diplomatic passport has been cancelled. As a long-time UK resident, he was permitted to stay in the country, but without travel documents he was unable to travel, curtailing his notorious jetsetting lifestyle almost entirely. Earlier this month, a UK court issued an order allowing authorities trying to recover debts to enter his various British properties.
In his pomp, Mallya seemed to represent a new India. In a country whose old commercial elite had been dominated by cautious, discreet industrialists, Mallya was different: rich, powerful and not inclined to hide it. Not all of India’s pioneers behaved in this way – its software and IT billionaires, for instance, were typically less flamboyant figures. But while Mallya continues to deny that he did anything wrong, he admits that he has become what he calls the “poster boy” for a moment of public anger against India’s rich, as many newly wealthy business figures found themselves mired in allegations of wrongdoing.
India’s old system created fertile ground for corruption, forcing citizens and businesses alike to pay myriad bribes for basic state services. But these humdrum problems were trivial compared with the grand scandals that emerged during the 2000s. Assets worth billions were gifted under the table to big tycoons by senior politicians and bureaucrats in what became known as the “season of scams”. Giant kickbacks helped businesses acquire land, bypass environmental rules and win infrastructure contracts. Headlines filled up with fresh outrages, from fraudulent public housing schemes to dodgy road-building projects.
Many of those who backed India’s economic reforms hoped that a more free-market economy would lead to more honest government. Instead, crony capitalism infiltrated almost every area of national life. Hundreds of billions of dollars were siphoned away, according to some estimates, by a shadowy alliance of colluding politicians and business tycoons. India’s old system of retail corruption went wholesale.
Many politicians also became astoundingly rich, and would have made the Forbes list had their holdings not been hidden carefully in shell companies and foreign banks. Rapid economic growth increased the value of political power, and what could be extracted from it. Political parties had to raise more money, to fight elections and fund the patronage that kept them in office. One estimate suggested that India’s 2014 election cost close to $5bn, a huge increase over the cheap and cheerful polls of the pre-liberalisation era. Election experts believe most of this money is brought in illegally from favoured tycoons, in exchange for unknown future favours.
Politicians spend the money to fund campaigns, but also on handing out favours, jobs and cash to constituents. “It’s sort of an unholy nexus,” as Raghuram Rajan put it to me during his tenure as head of India’s central bank. “Poor public services? Politician fills the gap; politician gets the resources from the businessman; politician gets re-elected by the electorate for whom he’s filling the gap.”
This nexus between business and politics lies at the heart of the third problem of India’s billionaire Raj, namely the boom-and-bust cycle of its industrial economy. In recent decades, China went on the largest infrastructure building spree in history, but almost all of it was delivered by state-backed companies. By contrast, India’s mid-2000s boom was dominated almost exclusively by its private-sector tycoons, giving the industrialists and the conglomerates they run a position of outsized importance in India’s economic development.
Bollygarchs borrowed huge sums from state-backed banks and invested with gleeful abandon, in one of the largest deployments of private capital since America built its railroad network 150 years earlier. But when India’s good times came to an end after the global financial crisis, the tycoons’ hubris was exposed, leaving their businesses over-stretched and struggling to repay their debts. In 2017, 10 years on from the crisis, India’s banks were still left holding at least $150bn of bad assets.
Since taking office, Narendra Modi has tried, often ineffectually, to fix this corporate- and bank-debt crisis, alongside the related problems of cronyism and the super-rich that contributed to it. Watching developments such as these, some argue that the power of India’s tycoon class is fading. Yet India’s ultra-wealthy are still thriving, while its ranks of billionaires keep swelling, and will continue to do so.
There is every reason to believe that on its current course, the country’s the gap between rich and poor will widen, too. Perversely, the closer India comes to its achieving its ambitions of Chinese-style double-digit levels of economic growth, the faster this will happen. On most measures, it should already be ranked alongside South Africa and Brazil as one of the world’s least-equal countries. Even more importantly, poor countries that start off with high levels of inequality often struggle to reverse that trend as they grow richer.
Many experts believe India needs to act. “The main danger with extreme inequality is that if you don’t solve this through peaceful and democratic institutions then it will be solved in other ways … and that’s extremely frightening,” as French economist Thomas Piketty has said of India’s future, pointing to likely rising future tensions between the wealthy and the rest.
Now marooned in London, Mallya had plenty of time to ponder his missteps. Once a member of the Rajya Sabha, the Indian upper house of parliament, his diplomatic passport has been cancelled. As a long-time UK resident, he was permitted to stay in the country, but without travel documents he was unable to travel, curtailing his notorious jetsetting lifestyle almost entirely. Earlier this month, a UK court issued an order allowing authorities trying to recover debts to enter his various British properties.
In his pomp, Mallya seemed to represent a new India. In a country whose old commercial elite had been dominated by cautious, discreet industrialists, Mallya was different: rich, powerful and not inclined to hide it. Not all of India’s pioneers behaved in this way – its software and IT billionaires, for instance, were typically less flamboyant figures. But while Mallya continues to deny that he did anything wrong, he admits that he has become what he calls the “poster boy” for a moment of public anger against India’s rich, as many newly wealthy business figures found themselves mired in allegations of wrongdoing.
India’s old system created fertile ground for corruption, forcing citizens and businesses alike to pay myriad bribes for basic state services. But these humdrum problems were trivial compared with the grand scandals that emerged during the 2000s. Assets worth billions were gifted under the table to big tycoons by senior politicians and bureaucrats in what became known as the “season of scams”. Giant kickbacks helped businesses acquire land, bypass environmental rules and win infrastructure contracts. Headlines filled up with fresh outrages, from fraudulent public housing schemes to dodgy road-building projects.
Many of those who backed India’s economic reforms hoped that a more free-market economy would lead to more honest government. Instead, crony capitalism infiltrated almost every area of national life. Hundreds of billions of dollars were siphoned away, according to some estimates, by a shadowy alliance of colluding politicians and business tycoons. India’s old system of retail corruption went wholesale.
Many politicians also became astoundingly rich, and would have made the Forbes list had their holdings not been hidden carefully in shell companies and foreign banks. Rapid economic growth increased the value of political power, and what could be extracted from it. Political parties had to raise more money, to fight elections and fund the patronage that kept them in office. One estimate suggested that India’s 2014 election cost close to $5bn, a huge increase over the cheap and cheerful polls of the pre-liberalisation era. Election experts believe most of this money is brought in illegally from favoured tycoons, in exchange for unknown future favours.
Politicians spend the money to fund campaigns, but also on handing out favours, jobs and cash to constituents. “It’s sort of an unholy nexus,” as Raghuram Rajan put it to me during his tenure as head of India’s central bank. “Poor public services? Politician fills the gap; politician gets the resources from the businessman; politician gets re-elected by the electorate for whom he’s filling the gap.”
This nexus between business and politics lies at the heart of the third problem of India’s billionaire Raj, namely the boom-and-bust cycle of its industrial economy. In recent decades, China went on the largest infrastructure building spree in history, but almost all of it was delivered by state-backed companies. By contrast, India’s mid-2000s boom was dominated almost exclusively by its private-sector tycoons, giving the industrialists and the conglomerates they run a position of outsized importance in India’s economic development.
Bollygarchs borrowed huge sums from state-backed banks and invested with gleeful abandon, in one of the largest deployments of private capital since America built its railroad network 150 years earlier. But when India’s good times came to an end after the global financial crisis, the tycoons’ hubris was exposed, leaving their businesses over-stretched and struggling to repay their debts. In 2017, 10 years on from the crisis, India’s banks were still left holding at least $150bn of bad assets.
Since taking office, Narendra Modi has tried, often ineffectually, to fix this corporate- and bank-debt crisis, alongside the related problems of cronyism and the super-rich that contributed to it. Watching developments such as these, some argue that the power of India’s tycoon class is fading. Yet India’s ultra-wealthy are still thriving, while its ranks of billionaires keep swelling, and will continue to do so.
There is every reason to believe that on its current course, the country’s the gap between rich and poor will widen, too. Perversely, the closer India comes to its achieving its ambitions of Chinese-style double-digit levels of economic growth, the faster this will happen. On most measures, it should already be ranked alongside South Africa and Brazil as one of the world’s least-equal countries. Even more importantly, poor countries that start off with high levels of inequality often struggle to reverse that trend as they grow richer.
Many experts believe India needs to act. “The main danger with extreme inequality is that if you don’t solve this through peaceful and democratic institutions then it will be solved in other ways … and that’s extremely frightening,” as French economist Thomas Piketty has said of India’s future, pointing to likely rising future tensions between the wealthy and the rest.
Protesters burning an effigy of Nirav Modi in New Delhi in February. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
India is now entering a new phase of development, as it tries to follow Asian economies such as South Korea and Malaysia out of poverty and towards full “middle-income” status. There is no reason this cannot happen. But as we’ve seen in Latin America, the economies with the widest social divides have tended to be the ones that are most likely to get stuck in the “middle-income trap”, achieving moderate prosperity but failing to become rich. The more successful countries of east Asia, by contrast, grew prosperous while managing to stay egalitarian, partly by building basic social safety nets and ensuring that their wealthiest citizens paid their taxes. Of the two models, it seems clear which India should want to follow.
Much the same is true of corruption. India’s old system of cronyism, with its political favours and risk-free bank loans, has came under intense scrutiny, but the battle against corruption is at best half-won. Kickbacks still dominate swathes of public life, from land purchase to municipal contracts. State and city governments are just as venal as ever. Surveys report that India remains Asia’s most bribe-ridden nation. “For any society to lift itself out of absolute poverty, it needs to build three critical state institutions: taxation, law and security,” according to the economist Paul Collier. All three in India – the revenue service, the lower levels of the judiciary and the police – still suffer endemic corruption. Perhaps most importantly, the country’s under-the-table political funding system remains largely untouched.
Progress in fixing India’s problems of corporate and bank debt has also been frustratingly slow. Modi has introduced some important measures, including a new bankruptcy law and a series of bank recapitalisations. But more radical options have been ignored, notably the privatisation of struggling public-sector lenders.
If these struggles sound familiar, that is because they are. India is far from the first country to enjoy a period of rampant cronyism and wild growth, and then grapple with how to respond. In Britain, the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century kicked off such a moment, as captured in the novels of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. But the more obvious parallel is with America, and the era between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the turn of the 20th century: the Gilded Age, or the era of “the great corporation, the crass plutocrat [and] the calculating political boss”, as one historian put it.
India’s own Gilded Age is different in many ways, but it shares at least one characteristic – namely, that such a period of early industrialisation is also a time of rapid political and economic change, in which it should be possible to invoke what the philosopher Richard Rorty once called the “romance of a national future”, the sense of hope that infuses powers on the rise.
India is set to grow in economic might throughout this century, as America did during the 19th. By some accounts, it has already overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation; in others, the baton will pass during the next decade or two. Whatever the case, the fate of a large slice of humanity depends on India getting its economic model right. Meanwhile, as democracy falters in the west, so its future in India has never been more critical. To make this transition, India’s billionaire Raj must become a passing phase, not a permanent condition. India’s ambition to lead the second half of the “Asian century” – and the world’s hopes for a fairer and more democratic future – depend on getting this transition right.
India is now entering a new phase of development, as it tries to follow Asian economies such as South Korea and Malaysia out of poverty and towards full “middle-income” status. There is no reason this cannot happen. But as we’ve seen in Latin America, the economies with the widest social divides have tended to be the ones that are most likely to get stuck in the “middle-income trap”, achieving moderate prosperity but failing to become rich. The more successful countries of east Asia, by contrast, grew prosperous while managing to stay egalitarian, partly by building basic social safety nets and ensuring that their wealthiest citizens paid their taxes. Of the two models, it seems clear which India should want to follow.
Much the same is true of corruption. India’s old system of cronyism, with its political favours and risk-free bank loans, has came under intense scrutiny, but the battle against corruption is at best half-won. Kickbacks still dominate swathes of public life, from land purchase to municipal contracts. State and city governments are just as venal as ever. Surveys report that India remains Asia’s most bribe-ridden nation. “For any society to lift itself out of absolute poverty, it needs to build three critical state institutions: taxation, law and security,” according to the economist Paul Collier. All three in India – the revenue service, the lower levels of the judiciary and the police – still suffer endemic corruption. Perhaps most importantly, the country’s under-the-table political funding system remains largely untouched.
Progress in fixing India’s problems of corporate and bank debt has also been frustratingly slow. Modi has introduced some important measures, including a new bankruptcy law and a series of bank recapitalisations. But more radical options have been ignored, notably the privatisation of struggling public-sector lenders.
If these struggles sound familiar, that is because they are. India is far from the first country to enjoy a period of rampant cronyism and wild growth, and then grapple with how to respond. In Britain, the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century kicked off such a moment, as captured in the novels of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. But the more obvious parallel is with America, and the era between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the turn of the 20th century: the Gilded Age, or the era of “the great corporation, the crass plutocrat [and] the calculating political boss”, as one historian put it.
India’s own Gilded Age is different in many ways, but it shares at least one characteristic – namely, that such a period of early industrialisation is also a time of rapid political and economic change, in which it should be possible to invoke what the philosopher Richard Rorty once called the “romance of a national future”, the sense of hope that infuses powers on the rise.
India is set to grow in economic might throughout this century, as America did during the 19th. By some accounts, it has already overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation; in others, the baton will pass during the next decade or two. Whatever the case, the fate of a large slice of humanity depends on India getting its economic model right. Meanwhile, as democracy falters in the west, so its future in India has never been more critical. To make this transition, India’s billionaire Raj must become a passing phase, not a permanent condition. India’s ambition to lead the second half of the “Asian century” – and the world’s hopes for a fairer and more democratic future – depend on getting this transition right.
Sunday 15 October 2017
How the oligarchy wins
Ganesh Sitaraman in The Guardian
A few years ago, as I was doing research for a book on how economic inequality threatens democracy, a colleague of mine asked if America was really at risk of becoming an oligarchy. Our political system, he said, is a democracy. If the people don’t want to be run by wealthy elites, we can just vote them out.
The system, in other words, can’t really be “rigged” to work for the rich and powerful unless the people are at least willing to accept a government of the rich and powerful. If the general public opposes rule-by-economic-elites, how is it, then, that the wealthy control so much of government?
The question was a good one, and while I had my own explanations, I didn’t have a systematic answer. Luckily, two recent books do. Oligarchy works, in a word, because of institutions.
In his fascinating and insightful book Classical Greek Oligarchy, Matthew Simonton takes us back to the ancient world, where the term oligarchy was coined. One of the primary threats to oligarchy was that the oligarchs would become divided, and that one from their number would defect, take leadership of the people, and overthrow the oligarchy.
To prevent this occurrence, ancient Greek elites developed institutions and practices to keep themselves united. Among other things, they passed sumptuary laws, preventing extravagant displays of their wealth that might spark jealously, and they used the secret ballot and consensus building practices to ensure that decisions didn’t lead to greater conflict within their cadre.
Appropriately for a scholar of the classics, Simonton focuses on these specific ancient practices in detail. But his key insight is that elites in power need solidarity if they are to stay in power. Unity might come from personal relationships, trust, voting practices, or – as is more likely in today’s meritocratic era – homogeneity in culture and values from running in the same limited circles.
While the ruling class must remain united for an oligarchy to remain in power, the people must also be divided so they cannot overthrow their oppressors. Oligarchs in ancient Greece thus used a combination of coercion and co-optation to keep democracy at bay. They gave rewards to informants and found pliable citizens to take positions in the government.
These collaborators legitimized the regime and gave oligarchs beachheads into the people. In addition, oligarchs controlled public spaces and livelihoods to prevent the people from organizing. They would expel people from town squares: a diffuse population in the countryside would be unable to protest and overthrow government as effectively as a concentrated group in the city.
They also tried to keep ordinary people dependent on individual oligarchs for their economic survival, similar to how mob bosses in the movies have paternalistic relationships in their neighborhoods. Reading Simonton’s account, it is hard not to think about how the fragmentation of our media platforms is a modern instantiation of dividing the public sphere, or how employees and workers are sometimes chilled from speaking out.
The most interesting discussion is how ancient oligarchs used information to preserve their regime. They combined secrecy in governance with selective messaging to targeted audiences, not unlike our modern spinmasters and communications consultants. They projected power through rituals and processions.
At the same time, they sought to destroy monuments that were symbols of democratic success. Instead of public works projects, dedicated in the name of the people, they relied on what we can think of as philanthropy to sustain their power. Oligarchs would fund the creation of a new building or the beautification of a public space. The result: the people would appreciate elite spending on those projects and the upper class would get their names memorialized for all time. After all, who could be against oligarchs who show such generosity?
An assistant professor of history at Arizona State University, Simonton draws heavily on insights from social science and applies them well to dissect ancient practices. But while he recognizes that ancient oligarchies were always drawn from the wealthy, a limitation of his work is that he focuses primarily on how oligarchs perpetuated their political power, not their economic power.
To understand that, we can turn to an instant classic from a few years ago, Jeffrey Winters’ Oligarchy. Winters argues that the key to oligarchy is that a set of elites have enough material resources to spend on securing their status and interests. He calls this “wealth defense,” and divides it into two categories. “Property defense” involves protecting existing property – in the old days, this meant building castles and walls, today it involves the rule of law. “Income defense” is about protecting earnings; these days, that means advocating for low taxes.
The challenge in seeing how oligarchy works, Winters says, is that we don’t normally think about the realms of politics and economics as fused together. At its core, oligarchy involves concentrating economic power and using it for political purposes. Democracy is vulnerable to oligarchy because democrats focus so much on guaranteeing political equality that they overlook the indirect threat that emerges from economic inequality.
Winters argues that there are four kinds of oligarchies, each of which pursues wealth defense through different institutions. These oligarchies are categorized based on whether the oligarchs rule is personal or collective, and whether the oligarchs use coercion.
Warring oligarchies, like warlords, are personal and armed. Ruling oligarchies like the mafia are collective and armed. In the category of unarmed oligarchies, sultanistic oligarchies (like Suharto’s Indonesia) are governed through personal connections. In civil oligarchies, governance is collective and enforced through laws, rather than by arms.
Democracy defeated oligarchy in ancient Greece because of 'oligarchic breakdown.'
With this typology behind him, Winters declares that America is already a civil oligarchy. To use the language of recent political campaigns, our oligarchs try to rig the system to defend their wealth. They focus on lowering taxes and on reducing regulations that protect workers and citizens from corporate wrongdoing.
They build a legal system that is skewed to work in their favor, so that their illegal behavior rarely gets punished. And they sustain all of this through a campaign finance and lobbying system that gives them undue influence over policy. In a civil oligarchy, these actions are sustained not at the barrel of the gun or by the word of one man, but through the rule of law.
If oligarchy works because its leaders institutionalize their power through law, media, and political rituals, what is to be done? How can democracy ever gain the upper hand? Winters notes that political power depends on economic power. This suggests that one solution is creating a more economically equal society.
The problem, of course, is that if the oligarchs are in charge, it isn’t clear why they would pass policies that would reduce their wealth and make society more equal. As long as they can keep the people divided, they have little to fear from the occasional pitchfork or protest.
Indeed, some commentators have suggested that the economic equality of the late 20th century was exceptional because two World Wars and a Great Depression largely wiped out the holdings of the extremely wealthy. On this story, there isn’t much we can do without a major global catastrophe.
Simonton offers another solution. He argues that democracy defeated oligarchy in ancient Greece because of “oligarchic breakdown.” Oligarchic institutions are subject to rot and collapse, as are any other kind of institution. As the oligarchs’ solidarity and practices start to break down, there is an opportunity for democracy to bring government back to the people.
In that moment, the people might unite for long enough that their protests lead to power. With all the upheaval in today’s politics, it’s hard not to think that this moment is one in which the future of the political system might be more up for grabs than it has been in generations.
The question is whether democracy will emerge from oligarchic breakdown – or whether the oligarchs will just strengthen their grasp on the levers of government.
A few years ago, as I was doing research for a book on how economic inequality threatens democracy, a colleague of mine asked if America was really at risk of becoming an oligarchy. Our political system, he said, is a democracy. If the people don’t want to be run by wealthy elites, we can just vote them out.
The system, in other words, can’t really be “rigged” to work for the rich and powerful unless the people are at least willing to accept a government of the rich and powerful. If the general public opposes rule-by-economic-elites, how is it, then, that the wealthy control so much of government?
The question was a good one, and while I had my own explanations, I didn’t have a systematic answer. Luckily, two recent books do. Oligarchy works, in a word, because of institutions.
In his fascinating and insightful book Classical Greek Oligarchy, Matthew Simonton takes us back to the ancient world, where the term oligarchy was coined. One of the primary threats to oligarchy was that the oligarchs would become divided, and that one from their number would defect, take leadership of the people, and overthrow the oligarchy.
To prevent this occurrence, ancient Greek elites developed institutions and practices to keep themselves united. Among other things, they passed sumptuary laws, preventing extravagant displays of their wealth that might spark jealously, and they used the secret ballot and consensus building practices to ensure that decisions didn’t lead to greater conflict within their cadre.
Appropriately for a scholar of the classics, Simonton focuses on these specific ancient practices in detail. But his key insight is that elites in power need solidarity if they are to stay in power. Unity might come from personal relationships, trust, voting practices, or – as is more likely in today’s meritocratic era – homogeneity in culture and values from running in the same limited circles.
While the ruling class must remain united for an oligarchy to remain in power, the people must also be divided so they cannot overthrow their oppressors. Oligarchs in ancient Greece thus used a combination of coercion and co-optation to keep democracy at bay. They gave rewards to informants and found pliable citizens to take positions in the government.
These collaborators legitimized the regime and gave oligarchs beachheads into the people. In addition, oligarchs controlled public spaces and livelihoods to prevent the people from organizing. They would expel people from town squares: a diffuse population in the countryside would be unable to protest and overthrow government as effectively as a concentrated group in the city.
They also tried to keep ordinary people dependent on individual oligarchs for their economic survival, similar to how mob bosses in the movies have paternalistic relationships in their neighborhoods. Reading Simonton’s account, it is hard not to think about how the fragmentation of our media platforms is a modern instantiation of dividing the public sphere, or how employees and workers are sometimes chilled from speaking out.
The most interesting discussion is how ancient oligarchs used information to preserve their regime. They combined secrecy in governance with selective messaging to targeted audiences, not unlike our modern spinmasters and communications consultants. They projected power through rituals and processions.
At the same time, they sought to destroy monuments that were symbols of democratic success. Instead of public works projects, dedicated in the name of the people, they relied on what we can think of as philanthropy to sustain their power. Oligarchs would fund the creation of a new building or the beautification of a public space. The result: the people would appreciate elite spending on those projects and the upper class would get their names memorialized for all time. After all, who could be against oligarchs who show such generosity?
An assistant professor of history at Arizona State University, Simonton draws heavily on insights from social science and applies them well to dissect ancient practices. But while he recognizes that ancient oligarchies were always drawn from the wealthy, a limitation of his work is that he focuses primarily on how oligarchs perpetuated their political power, not their economic power.
To understand that, we can turn to an instant classic from a few years ago, Jeffrey Winters’ Oligarchy. Winters argues that the key to oligarchy is that a set of elites have enough material resources to spend on securing their status and interests. He calls this “wealth defense,” and divides it into two categories. “Property defense” involves protecting existing property – in the old days, this meant building castles and walls, today it involves the rule of law. “Income defense” is about protecting earnings; these days, that means advocating for low taxes.
The challenge in seeing how oligarchy works, Winters says, is that we don’t normally think about the realms of politics and economics as fused together. At its core, oligarchy involves concentrating economic power and using it for political purposes. Democracy is vulnerable to oligarchy because democrats focus so much on guaranteeing political equality that they overlook the indirect threat that emerges from economic inequality.
Winters argues that there are four kinds of oligarchies, each of which pursues wealth defense through different institutions. These oligarchies are categorized based on whether the oligarchs rule is personal or collective, and whether the oligarchs use coercion.
Warring oligarchies, like warlords, are personal and armed. Ruling oligarchies like the mafia are collective and armed. In the category of unarmed oligarchies, sultanistic oligarchies (like Suharto’s Indonesia) are governed through personal connections. In civil oligarchies, governance is collective and enforced through laws, rather than by arms.
Democracy defeated oligarchy in ancient Greece because of 'oligarchic breakdown.'
With this typology behind him, Winters declares that America is already a civil oligarchy. To use the language of recent political campaigns, our oligarchs try to rig the system to defend their wealth. They focus on lowering taxes and on reducing regulations that protect workers and citizens from corporate wrongdoing.
They build a legal system that is skewed to work in their favor, so that their illegal behavior rarely gets punished. And they sustain all of this through a campaign finance and lobbying system that gives them undue influence over policy. In a civil oligarchy, these actions are sustained not at the barrel of the gun or by the word of one man, but through the rule of law.
If oligarchy works because its leaders institutionalize their power through law, media, and political rituals, what is to be done? How can democracy ever gain the upper hand? Winters notes that political power depends on economic power. This suggests that one solution is creating a more economically equal society.
The problem, of course, is that if the oligarchs are in charge, it isn’t clear why they would pass policies that would reduce their wealth and make society more equal. As long as they can keep the people divided, they have little to fear from the occasional pitchfork or protest.
Indeed, some commentators have suggested that the economic equality of the late 20th century was exceptional because two World Wars and a Great Depression largely wiped out the holdings of the extremely wealthy. On this story, there isn’t much we can do without a major global catastrophe.
Simonton offers another solution. He argues that democracy defeated oligarchy in ancient Greece because of “oligarchic breakdown.” Oligarchic institutions are subject to rot and collapse, as are any other kind of institution. As the oligarchs’ solidarity and practices start to break down, there is an opportunity for democracy to bring government back to the people.
In that moment, the people might unite for long enough that their protests lead to power. With all the upheaval in today’s politics, it’s hard not to think that this moment is one in which the future of the political system might be more up for grabs than it has been in generations.
The question is whether democracy will emerge from oligarchic breakdown – or whether the oligarchs will just strengthen their grasp on the levers of government.
Saturday 14 March 2015
“Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” A Tribute to Vinod Mehta from Arundhati Roy
When he published the Radia tapes, Vinod Mehta did what a good editor should. By making public the dirty diaries of the ongoing cluster-f..k between politicians, journalists, journalist/lobbyists and their corporate sponsors, he broke the club rules of the cosy oligarchy that runs our country. Not surprisingly, when the curtain went down on the show, for the people who were exposed in the Radia tapes, it turned out to be nothing more than a slightly embarrassing blip in the upward arc of their ambitions. For Vinod Mehta, however, the consequences were serious. I have no doubt they played a role in hastening his end.
Anyway, he’s gone now, and with him perhaps the era of the intractable, unpredictable, idiosyncratic editor. Not because there aren’t idiosyncratic folks around any more, but because we live in a climate where it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to function. The outpouring of grief at his passing by all kinds of people, including those who are professionally his polar opposite, seems to be as much for him as for the end of idea of the independent-minded editor. In some ways it must be seen as a credit to Outlook’s proprietors that they made room for a maverick like Vinod Mehta, despite being targeted and having their offices raided several times. As for the rest of us, while we grieve for Vinod, we cannot give up on the possibility that there can be independent editors in future too.
I will miss Vinod very much. He played such an important part in my life as a writer.
It’s not that we agreed about everything, we certainly had our differences—about the Congress party, about Kashmir (of course), about the politics of caste, about his strange, recently rehashed biography of Meena Kumari. But this time around, the disagreement between us is permanent and irreversible. I maintain that he shouldn’t have left. He could have stuck around with us a little longer. But he’s just bloody well gone. It’s ridiculous. I don’t agree.
After The God of Small Things was published in 1997, I was aware that I ran the risk of turning into a sort of Interpreter of the East for the western media. This I did not wish upon myself. Whatever I wrote, whatever arguments I got into, whatever hooliganism I was involved in, I wanted it to be here. Not for reasons of any great nationalism on my part, nor because this is my country, but simply because this is where I live. Vinod Mehta became my partner in this enterprise. Almost everything I have written since 1998 was first published by him in Outlook.
Very early on in our alliance, regardless of any commentary to the contrary (and of that there was plenty) we both understood that neither was doing the other a favour. That, I believe, is a rare and wonderful thing in any relationship. Over the many years we worked together, we spoke several times on the phone, but we hardly ever met. I’ve never been to his house. He visited me only once, recently, but it was more like an inspection tour than a visit. It was as though he had come just to confirm an idea he had in his head about the way I live. He shuffled in, took a look around and shuffled out. I don’t think either of us knew how to play Guest and Host. At any rate we weren’t very good at it. That’s about it as far as our social life went.
And yet, out of this peculiar, laconic, minimalist relationship came a body of work that amounts to five volumes of collected essays and interviews that have been subsequently republished in several languages in several newspapers and magazines in India as well as the rest of the world. What does all this have to do with Vinod Mehta? Quite a lot actually. I wrote the essays, yes, but the freedom and the urgency with which I wrote had much to do with knowing that Vinod Mehta would publish them—without force-fitting them into some pre-determined magazine format. This was no joke. Outlook was, and is, a major, commercial, mass-circulation newsmagazine. That is its strength. And yet, Vinod had the self-confidence and the flexibility to publish, from time to time, these long, unorthodox, often unpopular essays that almost always created a storm.
The rules were set early on. When I sent him The End of Imagination, the essay I wrote after the 1998 nuclear tests, he called me and said, “Do you really want to say ‘Who the hell is the Prime Minister to have his finger on the nuclear button?’ Can I change it to ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’” I said I’d rather he didn’t. So ‘who the hell’ stayed. Then came my turn to ask him for something. Acutely aware of the mined terrain I was wading into, I asked him whether he could avoid putting a picture of me on the cover. He said he’d see what he could do. It was his delicate way of telling me to take a hike. The issue came out, with a photograph of me on the cover, and the most controversial sentence in the essay splashed across it: I Secede. All hell broke loose.
These then, were our unspoken Rules of Engagement. Vinod would not make any alteration to my text without my consent. In turn, even if my essay was going to be the cover story, I would stay out of any discussions about the content and design of the cover. This went on for fifteen years.
At one point during his funeral, there was a strange, poignant moment that I don’t really know what to make of. I found myself facing L.K. Advani, separated by the length of Vinod’s flower bedecked body. Advani was laying a wreath at his feet. I was standing around trying to say goodbye (or not) to Vinod in my head. I was reminded of the only time he ever cautioned me. It was 2006. The papers had announced that Afzal Guru, convicted for his role in the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack, was going to be hanged in a few days. I was dismayed because I had followed the case closely for several years and had studied the legal papers. I knew that much of the evidence was either extremely flimsy or fabricated. (There was plenty to suggest that it could even have been a false flag attack.) Hanging Afzal would mean putting an end to the possibility of getting answers to some very disturbing questions. Outrageously, the Supreme Court judgement said that though there was no direct evidence against Afzal, it was sentencing him to death “in order to satisfy the collective conscience of society”. Meanwhile, the BJP, with Advani at the forefront (he was the home minister in 2001 when the attack took place), had begun a noisy campaign: “Desh abhi sharminda hai, Afzal abhi bhi zinda hai (The country is ashamed, because Afzal is still alive).” I knew I would not be able to live with myself if I said nothing despite knowing what I knew. I called Vinod and said I wanted to write something. For the first (and only) time he said: “Arundhati, don’t. The mood is ugly. They will turn on us. They will harm you.” It didn’t take long to convince him that we could not keep quiet on this one. I wrote a long essay called And his Life Should be made Extinct—the title was a quote from the Supreme Court judgement.
The Outlook cover said, in bold letters,Don’t Hang Afzal. (Of course, the Congress-led UPA government—and not the BJP—did eventually hang him a few years later, in 2013, in the most cowardly, illegal and shabby way.)
After the issue came out, the floodgates opened and once again Outlook was deluged with insults for weeks. But this was the other part of our Rules of Engagement. Vinod would publish what I wrote, but then would open up the letters pages for abusive responses for weeks at a stretch. (After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Sashi, Vinod’s secretary of 25 years showed me some angry letters-to-the editor that had begun to arrive even before I had written anything.) No other magazine I know publishes insults to itself, its contributors and its editor so gleefully. Vinod seemed to derive endless amusement from those letters. Occasionally, he would call and chuckle about the ones he particularly liked. His favourite letter after the Afzal Guru issue was one that said, “Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” Of course, he published it.
And now, suddenly, here we were, Advani and I, grieving at his funeral. I was unnerved. Perhaps it showed grace on Advani’s part and none on mine. I don’t know. I can’t imagine what Vinod would have thought.
The last essay of mine that Vinod published before he retired as the editor of Outlook was Walking with the Comrades, my account of the weeks I spent inside the forest in Bastar with Maoist guerrillas. B.G. Verghese, who recently passed away too, wrote a response to it. And then extraordinarily, Vinod published a reply to his response by Cherukuri Rajkumar, better known as Comrade Azad, a member of the politburo of the CPI (Maoist). It was a remarkable thing for him to have done. He called me, sounding pleasantly surprised at how calm and reasonable Azad sounded. By the time his reply (A Last Note to a Neo-colonialist) was published, Azad had been kidnapped in Nagpur by plainclothes policemen and summarily executed in the Dandakaranya forest on the Andhra-Chhattisgarh border.
I had a last phone call from Vinod just before he fell ill. He said, “Listen Arundhati, I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking now. Actually I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You have to launch my new book, Editor Unplugged. I know you don’t do these things, but you just have to.” I laughed and said I would. A few days later he called again, naughtily. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but the other person on stage with us will be Arnab Goswami.” I don’t think he told Arnab his plans. The crafty old fox was playing us!
The three of us on stage together. Hilarious. I’d have done it for Vinod Mehta, though. Gladly. But now he’s shuffled off somewhere. He shouldn’t have gone. I really need to talk to him.
Anyway, he’s gone now, and with him perhaps the era of the intractable, unpredictable, idiosyncratic editor. Not because there aren’t idiosyncratic folks around any more, but because we live in a climate where it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to function. The outpouring of grief at his passing by all kinds of people, including those who are professionally his polar opposite, seems to be as much for him as for the end of idea of the independent-minded editor. In some ways it must be seen as a credit to Outlook’s proprietors that they made room for a maverick like Vinod Mehta, despite being targeted and having their offices raided several times. As for the rest of us, while we grieve for Vinod, we cannot give up on the possibility that there can be independent editors in future too.
I will miss Vinod very much. He played such an important part in my life as a writer.
It’s not that we agreed about everything, we certainly had our differences—about the Congress party, about Kashmir (of course), about the politics of caste, about his strange, recently rehashed biography of Meena Kumari. But this time around, the disagreement between us is permanent and irreversible. I maintain that he shouldn’t have left. He could have stuck around with us a little longer. But he’s just bloody well gone. It’s ridiculous. I don’t agree.
After The God of Small Things was published in 1997, I was aware that I ran the risk of turning into a sort of Interpreter of the East for the western media. This I did not wish upon myself. Whatever I wrote, whatever arguments I got into, whatever hooliganism I was involved in, I wanted it to be here. Not for reasons of any great nationalism on my part, nor because this is my country, but simply because this is where I live. Vinod Mehta became my partner in this enterprise. Almost everything I have written since 1998 was first published by him in Outlook.
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Very early on in our alliance, regardless of any commentary to the contrary (and of that there was plenty) we both understood that neither was doing the other a favour. That, I believe, is a rare and wonderful thing in any relationship. Over the many years we worked together, we spoke several times on the phone, but we hardly ever met. I’ve never been to his house. He visited me only once, recently, but it was more like an inspection tour than a visit. It was as though he had come just to confirm an idea he had in his head about the way I live. He shuffled in, took a look around and shuffled out. I don’t think either of us knew how to play Guest and Host. At any rate we weren’t very good at it. That’s about it as far as our social life went.
And yet, out of this peculiar, laconic, minimalist relationship came a body of work that amounts to five volumes of collected essays and interviews that have been subsequently republished in several languages in several newspapers and magazines in India as well as the rest of the world. What does all this have to do with Vinod Mehta? Quite a lot actually. I wrote the essays, yes, but the freedom and the urgency with which I wrote had much to do with knowing that Vinod Mehta would publish them—without force-fitting them into some pre-determined magazine format. This was no joke. Outlook was, and is, a major, commercial, mass-circulation newsmagazine. That is its strength. And yet, Vinod had the self-confidence and the flexibility to publish, from time to time, these long, unorthodox, often unpopular essays that almost always created a storm.
The rules were set early on. When I sent him The End of Imagination, the essay I wrote after the 1998 nuclear tests, he called me and said, “Do you really want to say ‘Who the hell is the Prime Minister to have his finger on the nuclear button?’ Can I change it to ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’” I said I’d rather he didn’t. So ‘who the hell’ stayed. Then came my turn to ask him for something. Acutely aware of the mined terrain I was wading into, I asked him whether he could avoid putting a picture of me on the cover. He said he’d see what he could do. It was his delicate way of telling me to take a hike. The issue came out, with a photograph of me on the cover, and the most controversial sentence in the essay splashed across it: I Secede. All hell broke loose.
These then, were our unspoken Rules of Engagement. Vinod would not make any alteration to my text without my consent. In turn, even if my essay was going to be the cover story, I would stay out of any discussions about the content and design of the cover. This went on for fifteen years.
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The Outlook cover said, in bold letters,Don’t Hang Afzal. (Of course, the Congress-led UPA government—and not the BJP—did eventually hang him a few years later, in 2013, in the most cowardly, illegal and shabby way.)
After the issue came out, the floodgates opened and once again Outlook was deluged with insults for weeks. But this was the other part of our Rules of Engagement. Vinod would publish what I wrote, but then would open up the letters pages for abusive responses for weeks at a stretch. (After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Sashi, Vinod’s secretary of 25 years showed me some angry letters-to-the editor that had begun to arrive even before I had written anything.) No other magazine I know publishes insults to itself, its contributors and its editor so gleefully. Vinod seemed to derive endless amusement from those letters. Occasionally, he would call and chuckle about the ones he particularly liked. His favourite letter after the Afzal Guru issue was one that said, “Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” Of course, he published it.
And now, suddenly, here we were, Advani and I, grieving at his funeral. I was unnerved. Perhaps it showed grace on Advani’s part and none on mine. I don’t know. I can’t imagine what Vinod would have thought.
The last essay of mine that Vinod published before he retired as the editor of Outlook was Walking with the Comrades, my account of the weeks I spent inside the forest in Bastar with Maoist guerrillas. B.G. Verghese, who recently passed away too, wrote a response to it. And then extraordinarily, Vinod published a reply to his response by Cherukuri Rajkumar, better known as Comrade Azad, a member of the politburo of the CPI (Maoist). It was a remarkable thing for him to have done. He called me, sounding pleasantly surprised at how calm and reasonable Azad sounded. By the time his reply (A Last Note to a Neo-colonialist) was published, Azad had been kidnapped in Nagpur by plainclothes policemen and summarily executed in the Dandakaranya forest on the Andhra-Chhattisgarh border.
I had a last phone call from Vinod just before he fell ill. He said, “Listen Arundhati, I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking now. Actually I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You have to launch my new book, Editor Unplugged. I know you don’t do these things, but you just have to.” I laughed and said I would. A few days later he called again, naughtily. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but the other person on stage with us will be Arnab Goswami.” I don’t think he told Arnab his plans. The crafty old fox was playing us!
The three of us on stage together. Hilarious. I’d have done it for Vinod Mehta, though. Gladly. But now he’s shuffled off somewhere. He shouldn’t have gone. I really need to talk to him.
Tuesday 12 August 2014
Crony capitalism a big threat to countries like India, RBI chief Raghuram Rajan says
MUMBAI: Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan has warned against crony capitalism which he said creates oligarchies and slows down growth.
"One of the greatest dangers to the growth of developing countries is the middle income trap, where crony capitalism creates oligarchies that slow down growth. If the debate during the elections is any pointer, this is a very real concern of the public in India today," said Rajan while delivering the Lalit Doshi memorial lecture in Mumbai on Monday.
The last general election was fraught with allegations of the nexus between politicians and business groups.
RBI governor Raghuram Rajan (left) with finance minister Arun Jaitley.
Rajan extolled the virtues of India's democracy before turning to its darker aspects. "An important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians. By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, opportunity, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression. If there is some truth to these perceptions of crony capitalism, a natural question is why people tolerate it. Why do they vote for the venal politician who perpetuates it?"
Rajan continued by saying, "One widely held hypothesis is that our country suffers from want of a 'few good men' in politics. This view is unfair to the many upstanding people in politics. But even assuming it is true, every so often we see the emergence of a group, usually upper middle class professionals, who want to clean up politics. But when these 'good' people stand for election, they tend to lose their deposits. Does the electorate really not want squeaky clean government?
Finance minister Arun Jaitley (left), with RBI governor (second from left in front) during a meeting.
"Apart from the conceit that high morals lie only with the upper middle class, the error in this hypothesis may be in believing that problems stem from individual ethics rather than the system we have. In a speech I made before the Bombay Chamber of Commerce in 2008, I argued that the tolerance for the venal politician is because he is the crutch that helps the poor and underprivileged navigate a system that gives them so little access. This may be why he survives."
The governor's warning against crony capitalism and oligarchies is a reiteration of his statements four days before the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. In a speech at the Bombay Chamber, Rajan had highlighted that India had the highest number of billionaires per trillion dollars of GDP after Russia. While excluding NR Narayana Murthy, Azim Premji, and Ratan Tata as 'deservedly respected', Rajan had said "three factors — land, natural resources, and government contracts or licenses — are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires. And all of these factors come from the government."
"One of the greatest dangers to the growth of developing countries is the middle income trap, where crony capitalism creates oligarchies that slow down growth. If the debate during the elections is any pointer, this is a very real concern of the public in India today," said Rajan while delivering the Lalit Doshi memorial lecture in Mumbai on Monday.
The last general election was fraught with allegations of the nexus between politicians and business groups.
RBI governor Raghuram Rajan (left) with finance minister Arun Jaitley.
Rajan extolled the virtues of India's democracy before turning to its darker aspects. "An important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians. By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, opportunity, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression. If there is some truth to these perceptions of crony capitalism, a natural question is why people tolerate it. Why do they vote for the venal politician who perpetuates it?"
Rajan continued by saying, "One widely held hypothesis is that our country suffers from want of a 'few good men' in politics. This view is unfair to the many upstanding people in politics. But even assuming it is true, every so often we see the emergence of a group, usually upper middle class professionals, who want to clean up politics. But when these 'good' people stand for election, they tend to lose their deposits. Does the electorate really not want squeaky clean government?
Finance minister Arun Jaitley (left), with RBI governor (second from left in front) during a meeting.
"Apart from the conceit that high morals lie only with the upper middle class, the error in this hypothesis may be in believing that problems stem from individual ethics rather than the system we have. In a speech I made before the Bombay Chamber of Commerce in 2008, I argued that the tolerance for the venal politician is because he is the crutch that helps the poor and underprivileged navigate a system that gives them so little access. This may be why he survives."
The governor's warning against crony capitalism and oligarchies is a reiteration of his statements four days before the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. In a speech at the Bombay Chamber, Rajan had highlighted that India had the highest number of billionaires per trillion dollars of GDP after Russia. While excluding NR Narayana Murthy, Azim Premji, and Ratan Tata as 'deservedly respected', Rajan had said "three factors — land, natural resources, and government contracts or licenses — are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires. And all of these factors come from the government."
Saturday 18 January 2014
The hijacking of cricket, once again!
Tell the administrators you're watching them
International cricket's top three seem to be planning a hostile takeover of the game. Do you want to stop them?
Jarrod Kimber
January 18, 2014
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The fact that Australia, England and India have formed a cabal to choke the game of cricket is not exactly new. Like a bum with a sandwich board, myself and others have been walking the streets of cricket shouting this message for a long time. During the Champions Trophy I wrote that only the top threein cricket matter. Before that I started making a documentary on the death of Test cricket. And during this Boxing Day Test at the MCG, I was chatting toABC Grandstand about it.
If you follow cricket politicking at all (and I do, so you don't have too), you could see this coming. So it was nice that Sharda Ugra showed that it was not just a conspiracy theory by a few nut jobs. That it was a real takeover of cricket by the greedy and wealthy.
But what does this leaked draft actually mean, and is the ICC financial and commercial committee actually run by giant lizards? I tried to answer a few questions that people had.
In a word, good or bad for Test cricket?
Bad, not just for Tests, but for all international cricket.
Bad, not just for Tests, but for all international cricket.
If there is promotion and relegation in Test cricket, but Australia, England and India can't be relegated, isn't that cheating?
It's not just cheating, it's organised fixing. Any individual who signs off on a regulation like this is corrupting the game, and should be banned by the ICC for their action. They are ensuring the result of the competition before a game is played. The integrity of the game is corrupted as much as by any huge no-ball. They might as well only let other teams use five batsmen, bowl with beach balls and field with sponsored flippers on. As long as the sponsorship money is split unfairly, favouring the stronger nation.
It's not just cheating, it's organised fixing. Any individual who signs off on a regulation like this is corrupting the game, and should be banned by the ICC for their action. They are ensuring the result of the competition before a game is played. The integrity of the game is corrupted as much as by any huge no-ball. They might as well only let other teams use five batsmen, bowl with beach balls and field with sponsored flippers on. As long as the sponsorship money is split unfairly, favouring the stronger nation.
Who are the people involved in this secret dossier for cricket's potential kidnapping?
The names of the people on the committee that the draft came from are Giles Clarke (chairman, ECB), Alan Isaac (ICC president), Dave Richardson (chief executive), N Srinivasan (BCCI), Neil Speight (Associate and Affiliate member, Bermuda Cricket Board), Wally Edwards (CA), Dave Cameron (WICB), Campbell Jamieson (GM, commercial) and Faisal Hasnain (CFO).
The names of the people on the committee that the draft came from are Giles Clarke (chairman, ECB), Alan Isaac (ICC president), Dave Richardson (chief executive), N Srinivasan (BCCI), Neil Speight (Associate and Affiliate member, Bermuda Cricket Board), Wally Edwards (CA), Dave Cameron (WICB), Campbell Jamieson (GM, commercial) and Faisal Hasnain (CFO).
But the big winners, if the draft was implemented, would be Clarke, Srinivasan and Edwards. It is they who will be taking over cricket officially on behalf of their boards. We don't have the details of who the architects of the plan are, but being that these men and their boards get the best deal, it's not a big stretch to believe they were behind it. I doubt the Bermuda chairman acted alone in this.
What did the FTP do? What does FTP stand for and why does it matter?
The FTP is (was?) the Future Tours Programme. It essentially meant that teams would have to play everyone, and not just who they wanted to play with. It was brought in to ensure that teams had a schedule to play each other and ICC tournaments. It helped sell TV rights and aided smaller nations financially by drawing them up against teams with larger markets and on the cricket field through experience against the best teams. It was a flawed but well-meaning system of sharing the wealth and making cricket fairer.
The FTP is (was?) the Future Tours Programme. It essentially meant that teams would have to play everyone, and not just who they wanted to play with. It was brought in to ensure that teams had a schedule to play each other and ICC tournaments. It helped sell TV rights and aided smaller nations financially by drawing them up against teams with larger markets and on the cricket field through experience against the best teams. It was a flawed but well-meaning system of sharing the wealth and making cricket fairer.
Wasn't the FTP ignored?
Occasionally. It was more a nagging aunty than a scary prison guard. I know Australia have played Bangladesh, I just can't remember when. And Bangladesh have never toured India. Things are moved around on a whim quite often, but it at least meant that if something did happen, like Sri Lanka and West Indies cancelling their Test series, they had to come out and say it, not just silently agree never to play again. No FTP makes it all a bit more covert and easier for board members to ruin things without us noticing.
Occasionally. It was more a nagging aunty than a scary prison guard. I know Australia have played Bangladesh, I just can't remember when. And Bangladesh have never toured India. Things are moved around on a whim quite often, but it at least meant that if something did happen, like Sri Lanka and West Indies cancelling their Test series, they had to come out and say it, not just silently agree never to play again. No FTP makes it all a bit more covert and easier for board members to ruin things without us noticing.
| We have no vote in cricket. All we have is our passion, which is what makes the money that gives these men their power | |||
Why does it matter if the big three countries make more money from ICC tournaments and share the ICC top jobs? Don't they already own and run cricket?
Yes, they do. But it matters because cricket isn't limited to three nations, or even ten. There are 106 member nations of the ICC. If this structural upheaval happens, less money and no power will escape this evil cricket cabal. These dirty three will be able to continue to rule cricket forever for their own good. And they'll have the backing of cricket's governing body, which will essentially be them in all but name.
Yes, they do. But it matters because cricket isn't limited to three nations, or even ten. There are 106 member nations of the ICC. If this structural upheaval happens, less money and no power will escape this evil cricket cabal. These dirty three will be able to continue to rule cricket forever for their own good. And they'll have the backing of cricket's governing body, which will essentially be them in all but name.
Will cricket's best interests really be looked after by these three nations?
One recently got involved with a fraudulent crook; the second stopped players picking who they wanted to represent them at the ICC level; and the final one wanted all the other nations locked out of the World Cup.
One recently got involved with a fraudulent crook; the second stopped players picking who they wanted to represent them at the ICC level; and the final one wanted all the other nations locked out of the World Cup.
Isn't the current ICC set-up terrible anyway?
If by that you mean there are no votes at ICC boardrooms, that it's run by the ten Test-playing boards who are all out for their own good and that India have all the financial muscle, then yes. The Woolf Report, an independent evaluation of the ICC (that the boards never wanted, and of which they ignored all but the bits that helped them keep their stranglehold), suggested that cricket needed to be independently run, instead of by the member boards. But at least the current set-up, as pointless and ignored as it is, gave ten nations a say.
If by that you mean there are no votes at ICC boardrooms, that it's run by the ten Test-playing boards who are all out for their own good and that India have all the financial muscle, then yes. The Woolf Report, an independent evaluation of the ICC (that the boards never wanted, and of which they ignored all but the bits that helped them keep their stranglehold), suggested that cricket needed to be independently run, instead of by the member boards. But at least the current set-up, as pointless and ignored as it is, gave ten nations a say.
Sport is a business, and this is just a business decision, isn't it?
It is a business decision. A bad one. A short-term one. Like most decisions made by cricket officials, it follows the money where it is right now. It doesn't look ahead. It doesn't grow the game or improve it. It picks cricket up by its underwear and takes what is in its pocket.
It is a business decision. A bad one. A short-term one. Like most decisions made by cricket officials, it follows the money where it is right now. It doesn't look ahead. It doesn't grow the game or improve it. It picks cricket up by its underwear and takes what is in its pocket.
Surprisingly, most billion-dollar businesses aren't run by unpaid men who face absolutely no consequence if they completely stuff up the business. Who would have thought a billion-dollar business run by amateurs with no independent management could be taken over so easily?
Should Bangladesh prepare for a five-Test match tour of Australia, England or India shortly?
No.
No.
Which Full Members outside the trio will be playing Test cricket by 2020?
It is impossible to tell. But this is not a move to lock in the future of the current Test-playing nations. It is a move to lock in the future of three of them. The rest can go to hell, and by hell, I mean more Champions Trophy tournaments.
It is impossible to tell. But this is not a move to lock in the future of the current Test-playing nations. It is a move to lock in the future of three of them. The rest can go to hell, and by hell, I mean more Champions Trophy tournaments.
I'm from outside the cricket cabal but don't really like Test cricket. Why should I care?
Because the FTP and ICC restructuring isn't just about Tests. It's about stopping your country from getting money. It's about ensuring through financial means that while three countries will have every single advantage, the others will have to live on far less. Money doesn't guarantee success. But it certainly helps in sport.
Because the FTP and ICC restructuring isn't just about Tests. It's about stopping your country from getting money. It's about ensuring through financial means that while three countries will have every single advantage, the others will have to live on far less. Money doesn't guarantee success. But it certainly helps in sport.
I'm from inside the cabal. Why should I care about the other nations?
Maybe you shouldn't. You'll have all the IPL, Big Bash and Ashes you can eat. But if the other seven teams stop playing Test cricket, or don't play enough to make it relevant, you're going to get pretty damn bored pretty damn quickly. And while you may only watch for your own players, do you really want to live in a world that involves less Sri Lankan mystery spin, New Zealand pluckiness, Misbah-ul-Haq, and the current best Test team on earth?
Maybe you shouldn't. You'll have all the IPL, Big Bash and Ashes you can eat. But if the other seven teams stop playing Test cricket, or don't play enough to make it relevant, you're going to get pretty damn bored pretty damn quickly. And while you may only watch for your own players, do you really want to live in a world that involves less Sri Lankan mystery spin, New Zealand pluckiness, Misbah-ul-Haq, and the current best Test team on earth?
What will happen to the non-Test playing nations?
Not much will actually change for them. Life wasn't exactly free beer and endless casual sexual encounters before. If anything, now they have seven new friends who also have no power.
Not much will actually change for them. Life wasn't exactly free beer and endless casual sexual encounters before. If anything, now they have seven new friends who also have no power.
Can saner people in the future undo this mess?
Yes, probably. Even the old veto was eventually taken away from the ICC. Things can change. If the chairmen of the three cricket boards were to change, it could change very quickly. There is also little doubt that at least one of Clarke, Srinivasan and Edwards wants to eventually run the ICC once the main job there is made more powerful. Which means this reign of bullying and grabbing for power may not end anytime soon.
Yes, probably. Even the old veto was eventually taken away from the ICC. Things can change. If the chairmen of the three cricket boards were to change, it could change very quickly. There is also little doubt that at least one of Clarke, Srinivasan and Edwards wants to eventually run the ICC once the main job there is made more powerful. Which means this reign of bullying and grabbing for power may not end anytime soon.
Should these three men step down?
Yes. Anyone who agreed with this draft, whether it was their idea or not, should leave cricket immediately. They won't, obviously. But they should.
Yes. Anyone who agreed with this draft, whether it was their idea or not, should leave cricket immediately. They won't, obviously. But they should.
Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?
Someone leaked this draft. Someone who saw it realised that cricket fans wouldn't like this, and instead of it being announced through an ICC press release, it was blurted out before they had a chance to lock it in. In fact, there are many good people working in cricket all around the world. They don't like this situation any more than we do. Hopefully more of them will step forward with details. That gives us a chance.
Someone leaked this draft. Someone who saw it realised that cricket fans wouldn't like this, and instead of it being announced through an ICC press release, it was blurted out before they had a chance to lock it in. In fact, there are many good people working in cricket all around the world. They don't like this situation any more than we do. Hopefully more of them will step forward with details. That gives us a chance.
What can I do?
Contact them. Don't be rude, don't abuse the people who are answering the emails, calls or letters, but contact them. Tell them what you think of all this. CA can be contacted here, the ECB here, the BCCI here. We have no vote in cricket. All we have is our passion, which is what makes the money that gives these men their power.
Contact them. Don't be rude, don't abuse the people who are answering the emails, calls or letters, but contact them. Tell them what you think of all this. CA can be contacted here, the ECB here, the BCCI here. We have no vote in cricket. All we have is our passion, which is what makes the money that gives these men their power.
They are banking on you not knowing or caring about any of this. Giles Clarke regularly tells young cricket writers to stop writing about administration because it's boring and fans don't care about it. What this does is allow cricket's most important men to run the game while no one is watching. Show them you're watching.
If you have time to complain about a shocking DRS decision or a terrible cover drive, surely you have time to send an email to the men running the game. Show them you care. Tell them what you think. You have no vote in cricket's future. But you do have the contact pages.
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