Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 January 2024
Friday, 22 December 2023
Sunday, 17 September 2023
Thursday, 17 August 2023
Monday, 14 August 2023
A level Economics: Are Universal Values a form of Imperialism?
They argue that universal values are the new imperialism, imposed on people who want security and stability instead. Here is why they are wrong argues The Economist
Universal and valuable
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change, whether from global warming, artificial intelligence or the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. And that is where universal values come into their own. Tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry help harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than fourfold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it. But individual freedom and tolerance evolved differently. Many people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, canvassed almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Some places, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. At the same time, young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are barely more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. Countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is a crime look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this supports the campaign by China’s Communist Party to dismiss universal values as racist neo-imperialism. It argues that white Western elites are imposing their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. Contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety. China is right that people want security. The survey shows that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family and racial or national groups, while tradition and organised religion offer solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Amid lawlessness and upheaval, some people sought safety in their tribe or their sect. Hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar happened in Russia. After economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, gdp per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet that did not dispel their accumulated dread. President Vladimir Putin consistently played on their ethno-nationalist insecurities, especially when growth later faltered. That has culminated in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
Even in established democracies, polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit left-behind voters’ anxieties to mobilise support. So they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side.
Even allowing for this, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples where growing security really does seem to lead to tolerance and greater individual expression. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The real question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning—especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another.
A better answer comes from prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more resources to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than fourfold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it. But individual freedom and tolerance evolved differently. Many people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, canvassed almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Some places, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. At the same time, young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are barely more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. Countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is a crime look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this supports the campaign by China’s Communist Party to dismiss universal values as racist neo-imperialism. It argues that white Western elites are imposing their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. Contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety. China is right that people want security. The survey shows that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family and racial or national groups, while tradition and organised religion offer solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Amid lawlessness and upheaval, some people sought safety in their tribe or their sect. Hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar happened in Russia. After economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, gdp per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet that did not dispel their accumulated dread. President Vladimir Putin consistently played on their ethno-nationalist insecurities, especially when growth later faltered. That has culminated in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
Even in established democracies, polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit left-behind voters’ anxieties to mobilise support. So they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side.
Even allowing for this, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples where growing security really does seem to lead to tolerance and greater individual expression. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The real question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning—especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another.
A better answer comes from prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more resources to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
Universal and valuable
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change, whether from global warming, artificial intelligence or the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. And that is where universal values come into their own. Tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry help harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
Saturday, 5 August 2023
Friday, 4 August 2023
Are Universal Human Rights a form of Imperialism? Is the Chinese Communist Party right?
From The Economist
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that the world was about to enter a virtuous circle. Growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than four-fold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it.
Alas, individual freedom and tolerance evolved quite differently. Large numbers of people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others. The idea that despots and dictators shun the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter should come as no surprise. The shock is that so many of their people seem to think their leaders are right.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, include interviews with almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. One sign that universal values are lagging behind is that countries that were once secular and ethno-nationalist, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. They are increasingly joining an illiberal grouping that contains places like Egypt and Morocco. Another sign is that young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are not much more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. The world is not becoming more similar as it gets richer. Instead, countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is an outrage look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this seems to support the argument made by China’s Communist Party that universal values are bunkum. Under Xi Jinping, it has mounted a campaign to dismiss them as a racist form of neo-imperialism, in which white Western elites impose their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. And this leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety.
The man behind the survey, Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan who died in 2021, would have agreed with the Chinese observation that people want security. He thought the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organised religion offer them solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, GDP per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet, that was not enough to dispel their accumulated sense of dread. As growth has slowed, President Vladimir Putin has played on ethno-nationalist insecurities, culminating in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Economically weakened and insecure, Russia will struggle to escape the trap.
Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear. In the past the World Values Survey recorded that the United States and much of Latin America combined individualism with strong religious conviction. Recently, however, they have become more secular–a change driven by the young. That has created a reaction among older, more conservative voters who reflect the values of decades past and feel bewildered and left behind.
Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support. Accordingly, they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side. Republicans’ sweeping dismissal of this week’s indictment of Mr Trump contains the threat that countries can slip back into intolerance and tribalism.
Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples showing that, when people feel secure, they really do become more tolerant and more eager to express their own individuality. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning–especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. Anybody once deemed safe can suddenly end up in a precarious minority. Only inalienable rights and accountable government guarantee true security.
A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change. The years to come will bring a lot of upheaval, generated by long-term phenomena such as global warming, the spread of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. Those that manage it poorly will find that their people seek refuge in tradition and us-and-them hostility.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that the world was about to enter a virtuous circle. Growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than four-fold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it.
Alas, individual freedom and tolerance evolved quite differently. Large numbers of people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others. The idea that despots and dictators shun the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter should come as no surprise. The shock is that so many of their people seem to think their leaders are right.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, include interviews with almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. One sign that universal values are lagging behind is that countries that were once secular and ethno-nationalist, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. They are increasingly joining an illiberal grouping that contains places like Egypt and Morocco. Another sign is that young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are not much more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. The world is not becoming more similar as it gets richer. Instead, countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is an outrage look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this seems to support the argument made by China’s Communist Party that universal values are bunkum. Under Xi Jinping, it has mounted a campaign to dismiss them as a racist form of neo-imperialism, in which white Western elites impose their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. And this leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety.
The man behind the survey, Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan who died in 2021, would have agreed with the Chinese observation that people want security. He thought the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organised religion offer them solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, GDP per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet, that was not enough to dispel their accumulated sense of dread. As growth has slowed, President Vladimir Putin has played on ethno-nationalist insecurities, culminating in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Economically weakened and insecure, Russia will struggle to escape the trap.
Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear. In the past the World Values Survey recorded that the United States and much of Latin America combined individualism with strong religious conviction. Recently, however, they have become more secular–a change driven by the young. That has created a reaction among older, more conservative voters who reflect the values of decades past and feel bewildered and left behind.
Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support. Accordingly, they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side. Republicans’ sweeping dismissal of this week’s indictment of Mr Trump contains the threat that countries can slip back into intolerance and tribalism.
Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples showing that, when people feel secure, they really do become more tolerant and more eager to express their own individuality. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning–especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. Anybody once deemed safe can suddenly end up in a precarious minority. Only inalienable rights and accountable government guarantee true security.
A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change. The years to come will bring a lot of upheaval, generated by long-term phenomena such as global warming, the spread of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. Those that manage it poorly will find that their people seek refuge in tradition and us-and-them hostility.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
Saturday, 26 February 2022
Why the Buddha would be frowning at Ukraine today
Shekhar Gupta in The Print
Strategic studies quiz: Why was the code to inform Indira Gandhi of the successful Pokhran-1 nuclear test ‘Buddha is smiling’? While you think about it, let’s switch to Ukraine.
By the time you are reading this, Kyiv would have capitulated. The question that’s been asked often in the past few days, and will continue to echo for decades to come is, would it have been so simple for Putin’s Russia to crush Zelenskyy’s Ukraine if it hadn’t given up its nuclear stockpile after the Budapest accord in 1994.
This was done in return for security guarantees by the US, Europe and Russia. One of the guarantors has now invaded Ukraine; one, Europe, is looking for a place to hide and ruing its possible loss of cheap gas; and the third, the US, is doing no more than pour tender love and care. Would Ukraine be such a pushover if it had that stockpile?
Now, let’s turn this question inwards at ourselves. Was India prescient or imprudent to not only build nuclear weapons but to declare itself a nuclear-armed state? Over the decades, this has seen a robust debate among four schools. One, the Homi Bhabha-era hawks who believed India should have built its nukes in the early sixties, even pre-empting China. Former foreign secretary Maharajakrishna Rasgotra had even stated in public interviews and seminars that President John F. Kennedy had offered to help India develop and detonate a device, but that Jawaharlal Nehru turned him down.
The second school is the opposite: Nuclear weapons are ugly, immoral, unusable, unnecessary and an affront to humanity. That school has faded lately, especially after Pokhran-2 in 1998. Some of it has morphed into a new thought process: Now that nuclearisation is a done deal, let’s work to keep it to minimum deterrence and be active and willing members of all global arrangements, including Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of sorts.
The third believes that India was better served by nuclear ambiguity. That Indira Gandhi had already shown the world our capability in 1974 with Pokhran-1. The 1998 tests were unnecessary political chest-thumping that gave Pakistan the opportunity to test as well. As a result, South Asia had two self-declared nuclear weapon states.
The fourth is the team that won. That mere demonstration of capability in 1974 was not enough. It was self-inflicted double defeat. India exposed itself to sanctions, yet did not assert itself as a weapons power. To call this Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) was pure hypocrisy that impressed none. Not even India’s public opinion at a juncture when Mrs Gandhi needed desperately to shore it up. It was essential to weaponise, thump our chests, throw the gauntlet at Pakistan.
The first school did not find much purchase in the fraught 1960s, and the second was rendered irrelevant after 1998. The third and fourth need to be debated, particularly with the Ukraine staring us in the face. Similar questions were also raised when the US invaded Iraq twice, the second time on the pretext that it had nukes. Would Bush senior or junior have risked invading Iraq if it actually had any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?
Never mind that it wouldn’t have the wherewithal to send them to Washington. But just the threat of a nuclear reprisal for the invasion against any of the US’s Middle-Eastern allies would have done. Ukraine now has become an enduring advertisement for the WMD-sovereignty link. It is making many nations, comfortable today in the aura of guarantees, uncomfortable. Surely, no country with the nukes now, or one that’s nearly there — North Korea, Israel, Iran or any other — will ever give these up. They will remember Ukraine.
Did India gain or lose from opening its nuclear cupboard and exposing its wares to the world? The criticism is that it enabled Pakistan to find formal parity. The answer is, nobody had any doubt that Pakistan was already a nuclear weapon state. The Americans had given their last certificate of what was often called “nuclear virginity” to Pakistan in 1989, and refused to renew it.
In the 1990-91 stand-off, Pakistan had also employed the nuclear blackmail against India. It is something books have been written about (Bob Winderm and William Burrows, Critical Mass: The dangerous race for super weapons in a fragmenting world), then-CIA deputy chief Robert Gates has spoken about it, and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has written a detailed piece too. I too have explained it in several of my writings since.
But, the Pakistani threat, which Robert Gates also brought to India from Islamabad on his conflict resolution visit, was that they will use the nukes in the beginning of the war. The reality dawned on V.P. Singh’s government that India did not have an immediately deliverable weapon in retaliation. Over the decades, proven capability had not been developed into a credible weapon and delivery systems.
That crisis passed, but this had ended any doubts across our political spectrum, with all its divisions, that India needed the weapons fast.
Eighteen March 1989 is a significant day in Indian strategic evolution. Intelligence reports were now confirming that Pakistan was indeed a screwdriver’s turn away from a deliverable bomb. On this day, the IAF was holding it customary firepower demonstration, this one involving 129 aircraft, at Tilpat, a firing range not far from Delhi. At the demonstration, Rajiv gestured to top civil servant Naresh Chandra to follow him into a tent. He was so secretive he even shook off a curious Rajesh Pilot, then a minister. There, he told Chandra of his concern and assigned him to head an elite group, mostly of scientists, to take India to full weaponisation. I wrote about it in some detail in these 2006 articles.
The group included top nuclear scientists R. Chidambaram, P.K. Iyengar, Anil Kakodkar, K. ‘Santy’ Santhanam, missile specialist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and then-DRDO chief V.S. Arunachalam. They were to be funded mostly covertly out of a fund for “science and technology” under the Planning Commission. A lot of the operations were undercover and covert. Santhanam, for example, was given a discrete senior posting in RAW. Kakodkar later disclosed to me in this Walk the Talk on NDTV that he had to even travel overseas under assumed names and passports.
That baton passed brilliantly between seven prime ministers across a decade of political instability. And in 1998, Pokhran-2 happened, followed by Pakistan’s tit-for-tat in Chagai. Two decades after that, where did the two new nuclear powers stand? India mostly accepted as a legitimate nuclear weapons power, admitted to most multilateral arrangements, rid of all the sanctions and an American strategic ally. And Pakistan? It wasn’t such a bad idea to open the cupboard then.
Finally, here’s why they said ‘Buddha is smiling’ for Pokhran-1. It seems that some time in the epoch of Buddha, the ancient kingdom of Magadh launched a war of conquest over its neighbour Vaishali. While Magadh was the usual monarchy that built a big army and collected the weapons for the assault, Vaishali was some kind of an anarchic street democracy where people spent all their time arguing over whether to fight, how to fight, who will fight.
Sure enough, Magadh annihilated and massacred poorly armed Vaishali. When the news got to a meditating Buddha, it seems, he frowned in disapproval. Meaning that to keep the peace, a kingdom has to be fully prepared for war, or it will meet Vaishali’s fate. Since 1964, India was the Vaishali to China’s Magadh. Now you know why Buddha would now be smiling? Or why he would be frowning at Ukraine’s fate?
Strategic studies quiz: Why was the code to inform Indira Gandhi of the successful Pokhran-1 nuclear test ‘Buddha is smiling’? While you think about it, let’s switch to Ukraine.
By the time you are reading this, Kyiv would have capitulated. The question that’s been asked often in the past few days, and will continue to echo for decades to come is, would it have been so simple for Putin’s Russia to crush Zelenskyy’s Ukraine if it hadn’t given up its nuclear stockpile after the Budapest accord in 1994.
This was done in return for security guarantees by the US, Europe and Russia. One of the guarantors has now invaded Ukraine; one, Europe, is looking for a place to hide and ruing its possible loss of cheap gas; and the third, the US, is doing no more than pour tender love and care. Would Ukraine be such a pushover if it had that stockpile?
Now, let’s turn this question inwards at ourselves. Was India prescient or imprudent to not only build nuclear weapons but to declare itself a nuclear-armed state? Over the decades, this has seen a robust debate among four schools. One, the Homi Bhabha-era hawks who believed India should have built its nukes in the early sixties, even pre-empting China. Former foreign secretary Maharajakrishna Rasgotra had even stated in public interviews and seminars that President John F. Kennedy had offered to help India develop and detonate a device, but that Jawaharlal Nehru turned him down.
The second school is the opposite: Nuclear weapons are ugly, immoral, unusable, unnecessary and an affront to humanity. That school has faded lately, especially after Pokhran-2 in 1998. Some of it has morphed into a new thought process: Now that nuclearisation is a done deal, let’s work to keep it to minimum deterrence and be active and willing members of all global arrangements, including Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of sorts.
The third believes that India was better served by nuclear ambiguity. That Indira Gandhi had already shown the world our capability in 1974 with Pokhran-1. The 1998 tests were unnecessary political chest-thumping that gave Pakistan the opportunity to test as well. As a result, South Asia had two self-declared nuclear weapon states.
The fourth is the team that won. That mere demonstration of capability in 1974 was not enough. It was self-inflicted double defeat. India exposed itself to sanctions, yet did not assert itself as a weapons power. To call this Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) was pure hypocrisy that impressed none. Not even India’s public opinion at a juncture when Mrs Gandhi needed desperately to shore it up. It was essential to weaponise, thump our chests, throw the gauntlet at Pakistan.
The first school did not find much purchase in the fraught 1960s, and the second was rendered irrelevant after 1998. The third and fourth need to be debated, particularly with the Ukraine staring us in the face. Similar questions were also raised when the US invaded Iraq twice, the second time on the pretext that it had nukes. Would Bush senior or junior have risked invading Iraq if it actually had any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?
Never mind that it wouldn’t have the wherewithal to send them to Washington. But just the threat of a nuclear reprisal for the invasion against any of the US’s Middle-Eastern allies would have done. Ukraine now has become an enduring advertisement for the WMD-sovereignty link. It is making many nations, comfortable today in the aura of guarantees, uncomfortable. Surely, no country with the nukes now, or one that’s nearly there — North Korea, Israel, Iran or any other — will ever give these up. They will remember Ukraine.
Did India gain or lose from opening its nuclear cupboard and exposing its wares to the world? The criticism is that it enabled Pakistan to find formal parity. The answer is, nobody had any doubt that Pakistan was already a nuclear weapon state. The Americans had given their last certificate of what was often called “nuclear virginity” to Pakistan in 1989, and refused to renew it.
In the 1990-91 stand-off, Pakistan had also employed the nuclear blackmail against India. It is something books have been written about (Bob Winderm and William Burrows, Critical Mass: The dangerous race for super weapons in a fragmenting world), then-CIA deputy chief Robert Gates has spoken about it, and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has written a detailed piece too. I too have explained it in several of my writings since.
But, the Pakistani threat, which Robert Gates also brought to India from Islamabad on his conflict resolution visit, was that they will use the nukes in the beginning of the war. The reality dawned on V.P. Singh’s government that India did not have an immediately deliverable weapon in retaliation. Over the decades, proven capability had not been developed into a credible weapon and delivery systems.
That crisis passed, but this had ended any doubts across our political spectrum, with all its divisions, that India needed the weapons fast.
Eighteen March 1989 is a significant day in Indian strategic evolution. Intelligence reports were now confirming that Pakistan was indeed a screwdriver’s turn away from a deliverable bomb. On this day, the IAF was holding it customary firepower demonstration, this one involving 129 aircraft, at Tilpat, a firing range not far from Delhi. At the demonstration, Rajiv gestured to top civil servant Naresh Chandra to follow him into a tent. He was so secretive he even shook off a curious Rajesh Pilot, then a minister. There, he told Chandra of his concern and assigned him to head an elite group, mostly of scientists, to take India to full weaponisation. I wrote about it in some detail in these 2006 articles.
The group included top nuclear scientists R. Chidambaram, P.K. Iyengar, Anil Kakodkar, K. ‘Santy’ Santhanam, missile specialist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and then-DRDO chief V.S. Arunachalam. They were to be funded mostly covertly out of a fund for “science and technology” under the Planning Commission. A lot of the operations were undercover and covert. Santhanam, for example, was given a discrete senior posting in RAW. Kakodkar later disclosed to me in this Walk the Talk on NDTV that he had to even travel overseas under assumed names and passports.
That baton passed brilliantly between seven prime ministers across a decade of political instability. And in 1998, Pokhran-2 happened, followed by Pakistan’s tit-for-tat in Chagai. Two decades after that, where did the two new nuclear powers stand? India mostly accepted as a legitimate nuclear weapons power, admitted to most multilateral arrangements, rid of all the sanctions and an American strategic ally. And Pakistan? It wasn’t such a bad idea to open the cupboard then.
Finally, here’s why they said ‘Buddha is smiling’ for Pokhran-1. It seems that some time in the epoch of Buddha, the ancient kingdom of Magadh launched a war of conquest over its neighbour Vaishali. While Magadh was the usual monarchy that built a big army and collected the weapons for the assault, Vaishali was some kind of an anarchic street democracy where people spent all their time arguing over whether to fight, how to fight, who will fight.
Sure enough, Magadh annihilated and massacred poorly armed Vaishali. When the news got to a meditating Buddha, it seems, he frowned in disapproval. Meaning that to keep the peace, a kingdom has to be fully prepared for war, or it will meet Vaishali’s fate. Since 1964, India was the Vaishali to China’s Magadh. Now you know why Buddha would now be smiling? Or why he would be frowning at Ukraine’s fate?
Friday, 21 January 2022
Pakistan's Secretive National Security Policy
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
The PTI government claims to have formulated a National Security Policy after consulting key stakeholders, including hundreds of intellectuals, experts, businessmen, teachers and students. Unfortunately, however, opposition political parties and leaders were kept out of the loop and parliamentarians, even on the treasury benches, were all but ignored. To top it, the policy is classified as “Secret”. We have only been told that “traditional security” is to buttressed by “human security” by increasing the size of the pie that is to be distributed among these two categories. But not to worry. We already know what our National Security Policy has been for over seven decades and we are not shy of asking how and why the new policy should deviate from established wisdom.
Pakistan’s birth is rooted in the biggest mass migration in world history, unprecedented communal violence, and war over Kashmir. In fact, India’s political leaders wasted no time in loudly proclaiming that the new state of Pakistan would be reabsorbed into India before long. Thus insecurity was built into the genetic structure of the new nation and state and over 70% of the country’s first budget was immediately earmarked for military defense and security. The inherited colonial civil-military bureaucracy – that was more developed, organised and cohesive than the indigenous politicians and political parties – now seized the commanding heights of state and society, centralizing power in Governors-General (Ghulam Mohammad, Khjwaja Nazimuddin) and Presidents (Generals Sikander Mirza and Ayub Khan) and signing strategic defense pacts (CENTO, SEATO, BAGHDAD PACT) with the US (ostensibly against communism but in reality to bolster military defenses against India). Thus was born a National Security State based on three national security pillars: Distrust of, and enmity with, India (“unfinished business of partition” pegged to Kashmir); centralization of power via guided “basic democrats” under General Ayub; and dependence on the US for military and economic aid.
This centralized national security state system broke down in 1971 after the break-up of Pakistan following military defeat, leading to civilian assertion under Z A Bhutto and the first democratic constitution of 1973. But the Empire hit back in 1977 with the imposition of martial law, a presidential non-party system under General Zia ul Haq and return to the American camp in the 1980s. The system received a jolt in 1988 with the unexpected exit of General Zia ul Haq but recouped under President Ghluam Ishaq Khan and General Aslam Beg into a hybrid-constitutional system that enabled a strong military nominee or ally as President with the power to dismiss an elected prime minister and parliament (three times in the 1990s). Benazir Bhutto tried to build peace with Rajiv Gandhi but was declared a national security risk and booted out in 1990. The civilian impulse was restrained throughout the 1990s by periodic sackings and rigged elections. It was finally thwarted in 1999 when Nawaz Sharif clutched at bus diplomacy to build “peace” with India and General Musharraf put paid to it by adventuring in Kargil, overthrowing and exiling him, and ruling like a dictator for eight years on the back of billions of dollars in American military and economic aid for abetting its war in Afghanistan. An unexpected mass resistance sparked by a maverick judge, Iftikhar Chaudhry, ended his rule and ushered in the civilians again, but not before they paid the price of Benazir Bhutto’s life. Asif Zardari’s term was blackballed by Mumbai and Memogate, including the sacking of his prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani; Nawaz’s rule was undermined by surrogate Dharnas, export of jihadis to India and accusations of sleeping with the enemy, finally coming to an end on the basis of a Joint Investigation Team answering to the brass.
This National Security paradigm was revived with the installation of Imran Khan in 2018 and the incarceration and victimisation of Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. But the loss of American goodwill and aid, coupled with the failure of Imran Khan to provide a modicum of governance, has eroded the prospects of economic revival and legitimacy of the hybrid system, discrediting its manufacturers. Meanwhile, the conventional military balance with the old enemy India has fast deteriorated and, faced with the challenge of both legitimacy and feasibility of the hybrid system, the National Security Establishment has been compelled to return to the drawing board and review its National Security Policy.
Perforce, a new National Security Policy has to be fashioned to withstand the loss of American aid and goodwill; to restore representative and credible legitimacy to the political system; and to step back from perennial conflict with India over Kashmir. The trillion dollar question is how. Only a massive transfer of wealth from the super-rich rentier classes to the poor, and a return to a representative civilian system of governance, will stem the rising economic and political discontent and religious militancy that threatens to overwhelm the state; only a prolonged period of peace with India and a profound retreat from militarism will yield the required space in which to accomplish this task. But any overnight attempt to stand the old National Security Policy on its head may unleash a formidable backlash from vested stakeholders among the institutions, groups and classes that have benefited from it for seven decades.
That is why the new National Security Policy is top secret, and jargon and generalities have been profusely sprinkled on its public version to obscure its true content and challenge.
The PTI government claims to have formulated a National Security Policy after consulting key stakeholders, including hundreds of intellectuals, experts, businessmen, teachers and students. Unfortunately, however, opposition political parties and leaders were kept out of the loop and parliamentarians, even on the treasury benches, were all but ignored. To top it, the policy is classified as “Secret”. We have only been told that “traditional security” is to buttressed by “human security” by increasing the size of the pie that is to be distributed among these two categories. But not to worry. We already know what our National Security Policy has been for over seven decades and we are not shy of asking how and why the new policy should deviate from established wisdom.
Pakistan’s birth is rooted in the biggest mass migration in world history, unprecedented communal violence, and war over Kashmir. In fact, India’s political leaders wasted no time in loudly proclaiming that the new state of Pakistan would be reabsorbed into India before long. Thus insecurity was built into the genetic structure of the new nation and state and over 70% of the country’s first budget was immediately earmarked for military defense and security. The inherited colonial civil-military bureaucracy – that was more developed, organised and cohesive than the indigenous politicians and political parties – now seized the commanding heights of state and society, centralizing power in Governors-General (Ghulam Mohammad, Khjwaja Nazimuddin) and Presidents (Generals Sikander Mirza and Ayub Khan) and signing strategic defense pacts (CENTO, SEATO, BAGHDAD PACT) with the US (ostensibly against communism but in reality to bolster military defenses against India). Thus was born a National Security State based on three national security pillars: Distrust of, and enmity with, India (“unfinished business of partition” pegged to Kashmir); centralization of power via guided “basic democrats” under General Ayub; and dependence on the US for military and economic aid.
This centralized national security state system broke down in 1971 after the break-up of Pakistan following military defeat, leading to civilian assertion under Z A Bhutto and the first democratic constitution of 1973. But the Empire hit back in 1977 with the imposition of martial law, a presidential non-party system under General Zia ul Haq and return to the American camp in the 1980s. The system received a jolt in 1988 with the unexpected exit of General Zia ul Haq but recouped under President Ghluam Ishaq Khan and General Aslam Beg into a hybrid-constitutional system that enabled a strong military nominee or ally as President with the power to dismiss an elected prime minister and parliament (three times in the 1990s). Benazir Bhutto tried to build peace with Rajiv Gandhi but was declared a national security risk and booted out in 1990. The civilian impulse was restrained throughout the 1990s by periodic sackings and rigged elections. It was finally thwarted in 1999 when Nawaz Sharif clutched at bus diplomacy to build “peace” with India and General Musharraf put paid to it by adventuring in Kargil, overthrowing and exiling him, and ruling like a dictator for eight years on the back of billions of dollars in American military and economic aid for abetting its war in Afghanistan. An unexpected mass resistance sparked by a maverick judge, Iftikhar Chaudhry, ended his rule and ushered in the civilians again, but not before they paid the price of Benazir Bhutto’s life. Asif Zardari’s term was blackballed by Mumbai and Memogate, including the sacking of his prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani; Nawaz’s rule was undermined by surrogate Dharnas, export of jihadis to India and accusations of sleeping with the enemy, finally coming to an end on the basis of a Joint Investigation Team answering to the brass.
This National Security paradigm was revived with the installation of Imran Khan in 2018 and the incarceration and victimisation of Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. But the loss of American goodwill and aid, coupled with the failure of Imran Khan to provide a modicum of governance, has eroded the prospects of economic revival and legitimacy of the hybrid system, discrediting its manufacturers. Meanwhile, the conventional military balance with the old enemy India has fast deteriorated and, faced with the challenge of both legitimacy and feasibility of the hybrid system, the National Security Establishment has been compelled to return to the drawing board and review its National Security Policy.
Perforce, a new National Security Policy has to be fashioned to withstand the loss of American aid and goodwill; to restore representative and credible legitimacy to the political system; and to step back from perennial conflict with India over Kashmir. The trillion dollar question is how. Only a massive transfer of wealth from the super-rich rentier classes to the poor, and a return to a representative civilian system of governance, will stem the rising economic and political discontent and religious militancy that threatens to overwhelm the state; only a prolonged period of peace with India and a profound retreat from militarism will yield the required space in which to accomplish this task. But any overnight attempt to stand the old National Security Policy on its head may unleash a formidable backlash from vested stakeholders among the institutions, groups and classes that have benefited from it for seven decades.
That is why the new National Security Policy is top secret, and jargon and generalities have been profusely sprinkled on its public version to obscure its true content and challenge.
Sunday, 16 January 2022
Wednesday, 27 October 2021
Wednesday, 18 August 2021
Thursday, 4 June 2020
Monday, 2 March 2020
Thursday, 15 November 2018
A question of writ - Asiya Bibi and Sabarimala
The Sabarimala and Asia Bibi cases put the spotlight on how institutions adhere to constitutional principles writes Sanjay Hegde in The Hindu
On the streets of India and Pakistan, a frightening message is being sent out: that courts must not rush in where politicians fear to tread. In matters of faith, courts must simply sit on their hands and pray for divine intervention to resolve the petition before them. The public and political responses to Supreme Court judgments in two instances — Sabarimala in India and the Asia Bibi case in Pakistan — bear striking similarities. What is different, however, is the ability of the two states to enforce their writ.
Sabarimala is considered to be one of the holiest temples in Hinduism, with one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the world. The faithful believe that the deity’s powers derive from his asceticism, and in particular from his being celibate. Women between the ages of 10 and 50 are barred from participating in the rituals.
The exclusion was given legal sanction by Rule 3(b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965. The validity of the rule and other provisions restricting the entry of women was decided by the Supreme Court last month. The Court, by a majority of 4:1, held that the exclusion of women between these ages was violative of the Constitution.
The Sabarimala judgment
Then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justice A.M. Khanwilkar held that the practice of excluding women did not constitute an “essential religious practice”. Crucially, the judges also relied on Section 3 of the Act mentioned above which stipulates that places of public worship must be open to all sections and classes of Hindus, notwithstanding any custom or usage to the contrary. It was held that Rule 3(b) prohibiting the entry of women was directly contrary to this. A concurring judge, Justice R.F. Nariman, further held that the right of women (in the age bracket in question) to enter Sabarimala was guaranteed under Article 25(1). This provision states that all persons are “equally entitled” to practise religion. According to him, Rule 3 prohibiting the entry of women, was violative of Article 15(1) of the Constitution.
Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, also concurring, emphasised the transformative nature of the Constitution which was designed to bring about a quantum change in the structure of governance. More crucially, it was a founding document, designed to “transform Indian society by remedying centuries of discrimination against Dalits, women and the marginalised”. ‘Morality’ used in Articles 25 and 26, the judge held, referred to constitutional morality which includes the values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.
Asia Bibi case
In 1929, the funeral of a killer, Ilmuddin, took place in Lahore, executed for the murder of Rampal, a publisher, who had published an allegedly unsavoury reference to the life of Prophet Muhammad. Ilmuddin had been buried without funeral prayers as the authorities anticipated further trouble. But some eminent personalities, who included M.D. Taseer, assured the British authorities that there would be no trouble if there was a proper burial with a procession and Islamic prayers. The British relented and at the public mourning, the funeral prayer had to be read thrice before the surging crowds. The upshot of these events was that Section 295A was introduced into the Indian Penal Code to punish a deliberate insult to religious feelings.
Years later, in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan, Sections 295B and 295C were added to the Pakistan Penal Code which criminalised blasphemy against Islam and even made it punishable with death. In 2009, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was accused of blasphemy by her neighbours and jailed pending trial. She was sentenced to death in 2010 by a trial court.
Her case became a cause célèbre and Salman Taseer, the Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, visited her in prison to express support. This act by Taseer, who was the son of M.D. Taseer who had negotiated Ilmuddin’s burial, did not go down well. So enraged was his bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, that he assassinated Taseer in 2011. When Qadri was produced in court for trial, he was showered with rose petals by lawyers. He was tried and hanged in 2016, and his funeral attracted a crowd that rivalled the one at Ilmuddin’s.
Last month, the Supreme Court of Pakistan allowed Asia Bibi’s appeal and declared her innocent of the charges. She has now been released and expected to be granted asylum in Europe. Her lawyer has fled Pakistan and the judges now fear for their lives. Pakistan faced the threat of mob violence led by the radical Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party. Despite Prime Minister Imran Khan’s initial bluster, an agreement has been signed with mob leaders to end the violence.
The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Saqib Nisar, has reportedly defended himself by saying, “No one should have the doubt that the Supreme Court judges are not lovers of Prophet Muhammad... How can we punish someone in the absence of evidence?”
The thread
It is easy to dismiss the Sabarimala and Asia Bibi cases as being unconnected and belonging to different jurisdictions and contexts. But both belong to the same region and trajectory of history. India was built on a secular foundation while Pakistan was built on a majoritarian Muslim agenda. However, both countries profess at least lip service to the rule of law. Years of majoritarianism have brought Pakistan to the point where its institutions have had to defend themselves before doing justice to minorities. India is at a stage, where its majority is seeking to bring its institutions to acquiesce in majoritarian instincts. A majority whose forebears had committed themselves to a magnificent constitutional compact now has elements who seek to regress from those values.
The question is whether the people and the institutions succumb to pressure or adhere to principle. Each individual, regardless of birth ascribed identity, is a minority of one entitled to an individual guarantee of rights protected by the Constitution. It is in the adherence to individual rights that the greater public good rests. Those who sacrifice a little man or woman’s liberty for the security of the many will find neither liberty, nor security.
Let us keep this in mind, as the Supreme Court agrees to hear in open court a review petition against its Sabarima judgment.
On the streets of India and Pakistan, a frightening message is being sent out: that courts must not rush in where politicians fear to tread. In matters of faith, courts must simply sit on their hands and pray for divine intervention to resolve the petition before them. The public and political responses to Supreme Court judgments in two instances — Sabarimala in India and the Asia Bibi case in Pakistan — bear striking similarities. What is different, however, is the ability of the two states to enforce their writ.
Sabarimala is considered to be one of the holiest temples in Hinduism, with one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the world. The faithful believe that the deity’s powers derive from his asceticism, and in particular from his being celibate. Women between the ages of 10 and 50 are barred from participating in the rituals.
The exclusion was given legal sanction by Rule 3(b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965. The validity of the rule and other provisions restricting the entry of women was decided by the Supreme Court last month. The Court, by a majority of 4:1, held that the exclusion of women between these ages was violative of the Constitution.
The Sabarimala judgment
Then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justice A.M. Khanwilkar held that the practice of excluding women did not constitute an “essential religious practice”. Crucially, the judges also relied on Section 3 of the Act mentioned above which stipulates that places of public worship must be open to all sections and classes of Hindus, notwithstanding any custom or usage to the contrary. It was held that Rule 3(b) prohibiting the entry of women was directly contrary to this. A concurring judge, Justice R.F. Nariman, further held that the right of women (in the age bracket in question) to enter Sabarimala was guaranteed under Article 25(1). This provision states that all persons are “equally entitled” to practise religion. According to him, Rule 3 prohibiting the entry of women, was violative of Article 15(1) of the Constitution.
Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, also concurring, emphasised the transformative nature of the Constitution which was designed to bring about a quantum change in the structure of governance. More crucially, it was a founding document, designed to “transform Indian society by remedying centuries of discrimination against Dalits, women and the marginalised”. ‘Morality’ used in Articles 25 and 26, the judge held, referred to constitutional morality which includes the values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.
Holy communion: It’s just the forests, the mountains and the Sabarimala temple on most days of the year. The place of worship comes alive only during the five-day monthly puja and the 41-day annual pilgrimage season beginning mid-November.
He also held that barring menstruating women from entering the shrine is violative of Article 17 (the constitutional provision prohibiting untouchability). The judge held that the concept of untouchability is grounded in the ideas of ‘purity and pollution’. These same notions form the basis for excluding the entry of menstruating women into religious shrines.
The sole woman judge, Justice Indu Malhotra, who dissented, reasoned, “Issues of deep religious sentiments should not be ordinarily be interfered by the court. The Sabarimala shrine and the deity is protected by Article 25 of the Constitution of India and the religious practices cannot be solely tested on the basis of Article 14... Notions of rationality cannot be invoked in matters of religion... What constitutes essential religious practice is for the religious community to decide, not for the court. India is a diverse country. Constitutional morality would allow all to practise their beliefs. The court should not interfere unless if there is any aggrieved person from that section or religion.”
While the Bharatiya Janata Party has seen the judgment as an attack on the Hindu religion, the Congress too has not lagged behind. Even an “instinctive liberal” such as Shashi Tharoor has said, “abstract notions of constitutional principle also have to pass the test of societal acceptance — all the more so when they are applied to matters of faith... In religious matters, beliefs must prevail; in a pluralistic democracy, legal principles and cultural autonomy must both be respected…”
He also held that barring menstruating women from entering the shrine is violative of Article 17 (the constitutional provision prohibiting untouchability). The judge held that the concept of untouchability is grounded in the ideas of ‘purity and pollution’. These same notions form the basis for excluding the entry of menstruating women into religious shrines.
The sole woman judge, Justice Indu Malhotra, who dissented, reasoned, “Issues of deep religious sentiments should not be ordinarily be interfered by the court. The Sabarimala shrine and the deity is protected by Article 25 of the Constitution of India and the religious practices cannot be solely tested on the basis of Article 14... Notions of rationality cannot be invoked in matters of religion... What constitutes essential religious practice is for the religious community to decide, not for the court. India is a diverse country. Constitutional morality would allow all to practise their beliefs. The court should not interfere unless if there is any aggrieved person from that section or religion.”
While the Bharatiya Janata Party has seen the judgment as an attack on the Hindu religion, the Congress too has not lagged behind. Even an “instinctive liberal” such as Shashi Tharoor has said, “abstract notions of constitutional principle also have to pass the test of societal acceptance — all the more so when they are applied to matters of faith... In religious matters, beliefs must prevail; in a pluralistic democracy, legal principles and cultural autonomy must both be respected…”
Asia Bibi case
In 1929, the funeral of a killer, Ilmuddin, took place in Lahore, executed for the murder of Rampal, a publisher, who had published an allegedly unsavoury reference to the life of Prophet Muhammad. Ilmuddin had been buried without funeral prayers as the authorities anticipated further trouble. But some eminent personalities, who included M.D. Taseer, assured the British authorities that there would be no trouble if there was a proper burial with a procession and Islamic prayers. The British relented and at the public mourning, the funeral prayer had to be read thrice before the surging crowds. The upshot of these events was that Section 295A was introduced into the Indian Penal Code to punish a deliberate insult to religious feelings.
Years later, in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan, Sections 295B and 295C were added to the Pakistan Penal Code which criminalised blasphemy against Islam and even made it punishable with death. In 2009, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was accused of blasphemy by her neighbours and jailed pending trial. She was sentenced to death in 2010 by a trial court.
Her case became a cause célèbre and Salman Taseer, the Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, visited her in prison to express support. This act by Taseer, who was the son of M.D. Taseer who had negotiated Ilmuddin’s burial, did not go down well. So enraged was his bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, that he assassinated Taseer in 2011. When Qadri was produced in court for trial, he was showered with rose petals by lawyers. He was tried and hanged in 2016, and his funeral attracted a crowd that rivalled the one at Ilmuddin’s.
Last month, the Supreme Court of Pakistan allowed Asia Bibi’s appeal and declared her innocent of the charges. She has now been released and expected to be granted asylum in Europe. Her lawyer has fled Pakistan and the judges now fear for their lives. Pakistan faced the threat of mob violence led by the radical Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party. Despite Prime Minister Imran Khan’s initial bluster, an agreement has been signed with mob leaders to end the violence.
The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Saqib Nisar, has reportedly defended himself by saying, “No one should have the doubt that the Supreme Court judges are not lovers of Prophet Muhammad... How can we punish someone in the absence of evidence?”
The thread
It is easy to dismiss the Sabarimala and Asia Bibi cases as being unconnected and belonging to different jurisdictions and contexts. But both belong to the same region and trajectory of history. India was built on a secular foundation while Pakistan was built on a majoritarian Muslim agenda. However, both countries profess at least lip service to the rule of law. Years of majoritarianism have brought Pakistan to the point where its institutions have had to defend themselves before doing justice to minorities. India is at a stage, where its majority is seeking to bring its institutions to acquiesce in majoritarian instincts. A majority whose forebears had committed themselves to a magnificent constitutional compact now has elements who seek to regress from those values.
The question is whether the people and the institutions succumb to pressure or adhere to principle. Each individual, regardless of birth ascribed identity, is a minority of one entitled to an individual guarantee of rights protected by the Constitution. It is in the adherence to individual rights that the greater public good rests. Those who sacrifice a little man or woman’s liberty for the security of the many will find neither liberty, nor security.
Let us keep this in mind, as the Supreme Court agrees to hear in open court a review petition against its Sabarima judgment.
Sunday, 15 October 2017
Why religion is here to stay and science won’t destroy it
Peter Harrison in The Wire.In
In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.
Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.
To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief.
The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.
Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’
The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.
Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic.
As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.
The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.
In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?
Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.
The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.
Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.
The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.
So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.
Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.
In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.
Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.
To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief.
The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.
Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’
The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.
Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic.
As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.
The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.
In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?
Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.
The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.
Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.
The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.
So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.
Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.
Monday, 20 February 2017
The supermarket food gamble may be up
Illustration by Nathalie Lees
Felicity Lawrence in The Guardian
The UK’s clock has been set to Permanent Global Summer Time once more after a temporary blip. Courgettes, spinach and iceberg lettuce are back on the shelves, and the panic over the lack of imported fruit and vegetables has been contained. “As you were, everyone,” appears to be the message.
But why would supermarkets – which are said to have lost sales worth as much as £8m in January thanks to record-breaking, crop-wrecking snow and rainfall in the usually mild winter regions of Spain and Italy – be so keen to fly in substitutes from the US at exorbitant cost?
Why would they sell at a loss rather than let us go without, or put up prices to reflect the changing market? Why indeed would anyone air-freight watery lettuce across the whole of the American continent and the Atlantic when it takes 127 calories of fuel energy to fly just 1 food calorie of that lettuce to the UK from California?
The answer is that, in the past 40 years, a whole supermarket system has been built on the seductive illusion of this Permanent Global Summer Time. As a result, a cornucopia of perpetual harvest is one of the key selling points that big stores have over rival retailers. If the enticing fresh produce section placed near the front of each store to draw you in starts looking a bit empty, we might not bother to shop there at all.
But when you take into account climate change, the shortages of early 2017 look more like a taste of things to come than just a blip, and that is almost impossible for supermarkets to admit.
Add the impact of this winter’s weather on Mediterranean production, the inflationary pressures from a post-Brexit fall in the value of sterling against the euro, and the threat of tariffs as we exit the single market, and suddenly the model begins to look extraordinarily vulnerable.
I can remember the precise moment I first understood that we had been taken into this fantastical, nature-defying system without most of us really noticing. It was 1990 and I had been living and working with Afghan refugees in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province for a long period. The bazaars where we bought our food were seasonal, and stocked from the immediate region. Back home on leave in the UK, I had that sense of dislocation that enables you to see your own culture as if from the outside. It was winter, but the supermarkets were full of fresh fruits and vegetables from around the world. The shelves looked wonderful, perfect, almost clinical, as though invented in a lab in my absence; but there was no smell. It was vaguely troubling in a way I couldn’t identify at the time.
Felicity Lawrence in The Guardian
The UK’s clock has been set to Permanent Global Summer Time once more after a temporary blip. Courgettes, spinach and iceberg lettuce are back on the shelves, and the panic over the lack of imported fruit and vegetables has been contained. “As you were, everyone,” appears to be the message.
But why would supermarkets – which are said to have lost sales worth as much as £8m in January thanks to record-breaking, crop-wrecking snow and rainfall in the usually mild winter regions of Spain and Italy – be so keen to fly in substitutes from the US at exorbitant cost?
Why would they sell at a loss rather than let us go without, or put up prices to reflect the changing market? Why indeed would anyone air-freight watery lettuce across the whole of the American continent and the Atlantic when it takes 127 calories of fuel energy to fly just 1 food calorie of that lettuce to the UK from California?
The answer is that, in the past 40 years, a whole supermarket system has been built on the seductive illusion of this Permanent Global Summer Time. As a result, a cornucopia of perpetual harvest is one of the key selling points that big stores have over rival retailers. If the enticing fresh produce section placed near the front of each store to draw you in starts looking a bit empty, we might not bother to shop there at all.
But when you take into account climate change, the shortages of early 2017 look more like a taste of things to come than just a blip, and that is almost impossible for supermarkets to admit.
Add the impact of this winter’s weather on Mediterranean production, the inflationary pressures from a post-Brexit fall in the value of sterling against the euro, and the threat of tariffs as we exit the single market, and suddenly the model begins to look extraordinarily vulnerable.
I can remember the precise moment I first understood that we had been taken into this fantastical, nature-defying system without most of us really noticing. It was 1990 and I had been living and working with Afghan refugees in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province for a long period. The bazaars where we bought our food were seasonal, and stocked from the immediate region. Back home on leave in the UK, I had that sense of dislocation that enables you to see your own culture as if from the outside. It was winter, but the supermarkets were full of fresh fruits and vegetables from around the world. The shelves looked wonderful, perfect, almost clinical, as though invented in a lab in my absence; but there was no smell. It was vaguely troubling in a way I couldn’t identify at the time.
‘The shelves looked wonderful, perfect, almost clinical, as though invented in a lab in my absence; but there was no smell.’ Photograph: Alexander Britton/PA
Our food was not like this before the 1980s. The transformation was made possible by the third industrial revolution – the great leap in information technology and logistics that enabled retailers to dispense with keeping stock at the back of stores. Instead they were able to switch to minutely tuned, just-in-time electronic ordering from centralised distribution centres and to use the space freed up to extend their ranges from a typical 8,000 lines to 40,000, knocking out competition from all sorts of independent specialist shops as they did so.
The precursor to these new constantly replenished supply lines was our joining the European common market. Then with Spain, Portugal and Greece also joining in 1986, fresh territories from which to source opened up. European funds paid for fast new road networks across the Mediterranean, building the infrastructure for 44-tonne refrigerated trucks to whisk southern produce to northern Europe in the winter months, not just to the UK but to Germany and Scandinavia too. During the 90s there was a 90% increase in the movement of agricultural and food products between the UK and Europe.
Food writer Joanna Blythman coined the term Permanent Global Summer Time in an article for the Guardian in 2002. By then the astonishing shift in supply chains had come into sharp focus. Although the new supply system is miraculous in its scale, speed and efficiency, it has two fatal flaws.
First, it depends on the profligate use of finite resources – water, soil, and fossil fuels (with all their greenhouse gas emissions). Depending on whose figures you take, between a fifth and a third of UK emissions relate to food. More and more, we eat by exploiting the often fragile ecosystems of other countries. The UK is the sixth largest importer in the world of virtual water – the water needed to produce our food elsewhere.
Second, the system is built on the exploitation of cheap labour, mostly migrant, that has been socially disruptive and politically fraught. Migrant labour is not coincidental but structural to the just-in-time model, which needs the extreme flexibility of a class of desperate workers to function. Undocumented, underpaid migrants from Africa have provided the labour to harvest Italian and Spanish crops. Low-paid migrants, predominantly from eastern Europe, have become the backbone of the UK’s centralised distribution centres, providing 35% of food manufacturing labour, and 70-80% of harvesting labour.
‘Migrant labour is structural to the just-in-time model, which needs the extreme flexibility of a class of desperate workers to function.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
The brief disappearance of a few green and salad vegetables was hardly a great deprivation, but we should take it seriously as an early warning sign. Like the banking system, our food system seems too big, too sophisticated and too embedded in everyday life to fail. Yet privately, supermarket buyers have been talking for at least five years about “choice editing” – that is, editing out some of the fresh foods we have come to take for granted because importing them is unsustainable. Examples might include asparagus from Peru, 95% of which comes from the Ica valley where wells are running dry, and Moroccan tomatoes sourced from areas suffering severe water stress and aquifer depletion.
Supermarkets expected water shortages to bring the first jolts to the system. Brexit and climate change have brought other potential shocks to the fore.
The UK only produces a little over half of what its people consume; over a quarterof what we eat and drink comes from the EU. Reverting to more local ways of meeting our needs has become harder as the old infrastructure of regional wholesale markets has disappeared, and as farmers continue to exit the food business because they cannot make a living.
The government view, under the current Conservative administration and previous coalition and Labour ones, has been that the market will provide. In a new era of protectionism and with the UK heading out of the EU, that looks increasingly complacent. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence predicted that changes to the climate, globalisation and global inequality would “touch the lives of everyone on the planet” within the next 20 years. “Food and water insecurity will drive mass migrations in the worst areas, but may also be possible in more affluent areas because of distribution problems, specialised agriculture and aggressive pricing … a succession of poor harvests may cause major price spikes resulting in significant economic and political turbulence,” a document warned.
Leaving the EU could be an opportunity for a radical rethink of the food system, but the government shows little sign of grasping it. So when I see glossy magazine pictures and Instagram snaps of summer dishes conjured up in the middle of winter of ingredients flown in from distant climes, I wonder if, a couple of decades from now, we will look to ourselves like the late Victorian colonials photographed proudly next to dead lions and other game in Africa. They could hardly have imagined they were consuming their world out of existence.
Wednesday, 1 February 2017
The hidden agenda behind Benevolence - An Indian critique of Universal Basic Income
G Sampath in The Hindu
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining ground globally. While Switzerland held a referendum on it last year (it was voted down), Finland introduced it earlier this month. Media reports suggest that the government of India’s flagship Economic Survey this year is likely to endorse the UBI, setting the stage for its introduction.
On the face of it, an unconditional basic income for everyone seems a great idea. In the West, the UBI is being discussed as a solution to two problems: unemployment due to automation; and growing social unrest caused by extreme inequality and precarity. It is expected to solve the unemployment problem by decoupling subsistence from jobs, freeing human beings to realise their true potential, preferably through entrepreneurship. It would address the second by supplying monetary resources to access the necessities of life. This, in a nutshell, is the popular understanding of the UBI. The reality, however, is not so rosy.
The UBI debate in India has been a narrow one — restricted, for the most part, to financial viability. Its advocates argue that it is a more efficient way of delivering welfare, while its opponents hold that the fiscal burden would be too much. What hasn’t received adequate attention is the politics behind the UBI: who is pushing the idea? To what end? And why?
The UBI evangelists
The most eloquent advocates of UBI today are free-market enthusiasts — the same lot branded as neo-liberals for their advocacy of deregulation, privatisation, and cuts in welfare spending. Their guru, Milton Friedman, was an early advocate of basic income. Outside the academic realm, the biggest champion of UBI is the global tech sector. Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have publicly backed the idea.
Could it be possible that the global financial elite have finally sprouted a conscience? The reports of the UBI pilot projects conducted so far offer a clue. Invariably, they all present the same conclusion: giving cash to the poor is better than traditional welfare.
Of course, it would be wonderful if the problem of inequality and poverty were solved for us by a sudden moral awakening of the rich. Unfortunately, the current enthusiasm for the UBI is not the product of such a momentous development.
Not an add-on benefit
The biggest myth about the UBI, partly responsible for sections of the Left endorsing it, is that it is a redistributive policy that would reduce inequality. It is indeed possible to have a redistributive UBI. But it would need to fulfil two conditions: it must be funded by taxing the wealthy; and the existing entitlements to the poor must not be taken away. Such a UBI would actually be a socialist measure that would increase the bargaining power of the working classes by giving them an income cushion.
But neither of these conditions is met by any of the UBI designs being promoted today, either globally or in India. The much-touted Finnish experiment is restricted to the unemployed. It does not cover all working individuals. And it only replaces the already existing basic unemployment allowance and labour market subsidy — it is not an add-on benefit.
In India, too, the UBI is not an add-on. On the contrary, it is about giving in a different form (cash), and under one umbrella, what is already being given (in-kind and cash benefits) via different channels.
Back in 2008, in an influential paper in the Economic and Political Weekly titled ‘The case for direct cash transfers to the poor’, Arvind Subramanian, the present Chief Economic Adviser of the government, along with economists Devesh Kapur and Partha Mukhopadhyay, argued that the ₹1,80,000 crore spent annually on centrally sponsored schemes and assorted subsidies should instead be distributed as cash directly to 70 million households below the poverty line. Put simply, the UBI in India is nothing but the old wine of direct cash transfer in a fancy new bottle.
Its objective remains the same: to eliminate the public distribution system (PDS) and with it, the food, fuel, and fertiliser subsidies. The same old arguments for replacing the PDS with cash transfers are now being trotted out in favour of the UBI. The addition of the word ‘universal’ signals greater ambition but alters neither the substance nor the motive.
But let us take the arguments in favour at face value. What constitutes a basic income? Common sense dictates that it should be whatever is required to take care of basic life needs. A logical equivalent for this figure would be the minimum wage. The central government’s move last year to raise the minimum wage for non-skilled, non-agricultural workers to ₹9,100 per month was set aside following opposition from industry. Perhaps ₹9,100 per month is too luxurious an income to qualify as ‘basic’. The actual minimum wage in India is around ₹4,800 per month. Could we then expect at least this amount from our UBI?
While different numbers have been bandied about, there seems to be a broad consensus around the Tendulkar committee poverty line of ₹33 a day. This works out to a basic income of ₹1,000-₹1,250 a month or ₹12,000-₹15,000 a year. But even this modest figure is estimated to cost 11-12% of the GDP. In contrast, all the government’s subsidies put together account for only 4-4.5% of the GDP. This presents three options: one, the government makes up the deficit through additional tax revenue; two, it limits the fiscal burden by shrinking the UBI coverage from ‘universal’ to those below the poverty line; and three, it further shrinks the amount being doled out.
Given India’s narrow tax base, and a policy mindset hostile to the idea of extracting more tax revenue from the wealthy, we can rule out option one. So the UBI we get, if we get one, would be derived from a combination of the second and third options, which means both ‘U’ and ‘B’ are out of UBI, leaving us effectively with what we already have: cash transfers.
Most critically, one aspect is taken for granted by all the three options: the UBI will be funded primarily by the money allocated for CSS and subsidies. In other words, a basic income, however paltry, would help strengthen the case for the elimination or a significant roll-back of programmes such as the PDS, midday meal schemes, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
Why a UBI now?
There is no point reprising here the case against direct cash transfers, which economists such as Jean Dreze have made convincingly. It is nonetheless fascinating to see the emerging contours of a distinctive political project.
The Jan-Dhan Yojana set out to make every Indian accessible to global finance. The Aadhaar card set out to make every Indian identifiable and enumerable as data — the currency of global tech. The high mobile penetration has connected every Indian to the global digital network. An element that was missing was consumer behaviour, which the recent demonetisation sought to address, by force-feeding ‘cashless’ to a cash-dependent population. The UBI fits perfectly in this scheme of things, as it seeks to compress the whole gamut of welfare benefits into one, and mount it on a singular JAM (Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) platform.
But why a UBI now? One explanation could be the immense pressure on India in secretive free trade negotiations. The developed nations have for long wanted India to wind up its food security-related provisions — both state procurement of foodgrains, and their subsidised distribution via PDS. A UBI would pave the way for the elimination of these measures, dealing a death blow to food security and deepening farm distress.
Another is that the Indian state is stuck with welfare commitments it cannot renege on without political and legal consequences. The efficiency/inefficiency argument for scraping PDS and MGNREGS never acknowledges that these are rights-based social entitlements with specified outcomes — and that is not accidental. Shifting the welfare paradigm to UBI would loosen the bonds of legal and social accountability. Under the PDS, for instance, the state must provide a specified quantity of foodgrains to the poor no matter what. With UBI, it has the option letting the payout slide behind inflation, as has already happened with the old age and widow pensions.
In the final analysis, we need to answer a simple question: is the UBI about reducing inequality and poverty? If the answer is yes, then there are many things the state could do at a fraction of what the UBI would cost — from enforcing the minimum wage law, to releasing funds on time for MGNREGS. But if a dispensation hostile to these tried and tested anti-poverty measures develops a sudden zeal to eliminate poverty through UBI, a measure of scepticism is in order.
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining ground globally. While Switzerland held a referendum on it last year (it was voted down), Finland introduced it earlier this month. Media reports suggest that the government of India’s flagship Economic Survey this year is likely to endorse the UBI, setting the stage for its introduction.
On the face of it, an unconditional basic income for everyone seems a great idea. In the West, the UBI is being discussed as a solution to two problems: unemployment due to automation; and growing social unrest caused by extreme inequality and precarity. It is expected to solve the unemployment problem by decoupling subsistence from jobs, freeing human beings to realise their true potential, preferably through entrepreneurship. It would address the second by supplying monetary resources to access the necessities of life. This, in a nutshell, is the popular understanding of the UBI. The reality, however, is not so rosy.
The UBI debate in India has been a narrow one — restricted, for the most part, to financial viability. Its advocates argue that it is a more efficient way of delivering welfare, while its opponents hold that the fiscal burden would be too much. What hasn’t received adequate attention is the politics behind the UBI: who is pushing the idea? To what end? And why?
The UBI evangelists
The most eloquent advocates of UBI today are free-market enthusiasts — the same lot branded as neo-liberals for their advocacy of deregulation, privatisation, and cuts in welfare spending. Their guru, Milton Friedman, was an early advocate of basic income. Outside the academic realm, the biggest champion of UBI is the global tech sector. Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have publicly backed the idea.
Could it be possible that the global financial elite have finally sprouted a conscience? The reports of the UBI pilot projects conducted so far offer a clue. Invariably, they all present the same conclusion: giving cash to the poor is better than traditional welfare.
Of course, it would be wonderful if the problem of inequality and poverty were solved for us by a sudden moral awakening of the rich. Unfortunately, the current enthusiasm for the UBI is not the product of such a momentous development.
Not an add-on benefit
The biggest myth about the UBI, partly responsible for sections of the Left endorsing it, is that it is a redistributive policy that would reduce inequality. It is indeed possible to have a redistributive UBI. But it would need to fulfil two conditions: it must be funded by taxing the wealthy; and the existing entitlements to the poor must not be taken away. Such a UBI would actually be a socialist measure that would increase the bargaining power of the working classes by giving them an income cushion.
But neither of these conditions is met by any of the UBI designs being promoted today, either globally or in India. The much-touted Finnish experiment is restricted to the unemployed. It does not cover all working individuals. And it only replaces the already existing basic unemployment allowance and labour market subsidy — it is not an add-on benefit.
In India, too, the UBI is not an add-on. On the contrary, it is about giving in a different form (cash), and under one umbrella, what is already being given (in-kind and cash benefits) via different channels.
Back in 2008, in an influential paper in the Economic and Political Weekly titled ‘The case for direct cash transfers to the poor’, Arvind Subramanian, the present Chief Economic Adviser of the government, along with economists Devesh Kapur and Partha Mukhopadhyay, argued that the ₹1,80,000 crore spent annually on centrally sponsored schemes and assorted subsidies should instead be distributed as cash directly to 70 million households below the poverty line. Put simply, the UBI in India is nothing but the old wine of direct cash transfer in a fancy new bottle.
Its objective remains the same: to eliminate the public distribution system (PDS) and with it, the food, fuel, and fertiliser subsidies. The same old arguments for replacing the PDS with cash transfers are now being trotted out in favour of the UBI. The addition of the word ‘universal’ signals greater ambition but alters neither the substance nor the motive.
But let us take the arguments in favour at face value. What constitutes a basic income? Common sense dictates that it should be whatever is required to take care of basic life needs. A logical equivalent for this figure would be the minimum wage. The central government’s move last year to raise the minimum wage for non-skilled, non-agricultural workers to ₹9,100 per month was set aside following opposition from industry. Perhaps ₹9,100 per month is too luxurious an income to qualify as ‘basic’. The actual minimum wage in India is around ₹4,800 per month. Could we then expect at least this amount from our UBI?
While different numbers have been bandied about, there seems to be a broad consensus around the Tendulkar committee poverty line of ₹33 a day. This works out to a basic income of ₹1,000-₹1,250 a month or ₹12,000-₹15,000 a year. But even this modest figure is estimated to cost 11-12% of the GDP. In contrast, all the government’s subsidies put together account for only 4-4.5% of the GDP. This presents three options: one, the government makes up the deficit through additional tax revenue; two, it limits the fiscal burden by shrinking the UBI coverage from ‘universal’ to those below the poverty line; and three, it further shrinks the amount being doled out.
Given India’s narrow tax base, and a policy mindset hostile to the idea of extracting more tax revenue from the wealthy, we can rule out option one. So the UBI we get, if we get one, would be derived from a combination of the second and third options, which means both ‘U’ and ‘B’ are out of UBI, leaving us effectively with what we already have: cash transfers.
Most critically, one aspect is taken for granted by all the three options: the UBI will be funded primarily by the money allocated for CSS and subsidies. In other words, a basic income, however paltry, would help strengthen the case for the elimination or a significant roll-back of programmes such as the PDS, midday meal schemes, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
Why a UBI now?
There is no point reprising here the case against direct cash transfers, which economists such as Jean Dreze have made convincingly. It is nonetheless fascinating to see the emerging contours of a distinctive political project.
The Jan-Dhan Yojana set out to make every Indian accessible to global finance. The Aadhaar card set out to make every Indian identifiable and enumerable as data — the currency of global tech. The high mobile penetration has connected every Indian to the global digital network. An element that was missing was consumer behaviour, which the recent demonetisation sought to address, by force-feeding ‘cashless’ to a cash-dependent population. The UBI fits perfectly in this scheme of things, as it seeks to compress the whole gamut of welfare benefits into one, and mount it on a singular JAM (Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) platform.
But why a UBI now? One explanation could be the immense pressure on India in secretive free trade negotiations. The developed nations have for long wanted India to wind up its food security-related provisions — both state procurement of foodgrains, and their subsidised distribution via PDS. A UBI would pave the way for the elimination of these measures, dealing a death blow to food security and deepening farm distress.
Another is that the Indian state is stuck with welfare commitments it cannot renege on without political and legal consequences. The efficiency/inefficiency argument for scraping PDS and MGNREGS never acknowledges that these are rights-based social entitlements with specified outcomes — and that is not accidental. Shifting the welfare paradigm to UBI would loosen the bonds of legal and social accountability. Under the PDS, for instance, the state must provide a specified quantity of foodgrains to the poor no matter what. With UBI, it has the option letting the payout slide behind inflation, as has already happened with the old age and widow pensions.
In the final analysis, we need to answer a simple question: is the UBI about reducing inequality and poverty? If the answer is yes, then there are many things the state could do at a fraction of what the UBI would cost — from enforcing the minimum wage law, to releasing funds on time for MGNREGS. But if a dispensation hostile to these tried and tested anti-poverty measures develops a sudden zeal to eliminate poverty through UBI, a measure of scepticism is in order.
Tuesday, 27 December 2016
Fans of Jet Airways, BJP, Congress and Dawood Ibrahim - Please look away now!
A Feast of Vultures - Josy Joseph
At Manthan 2016
Interview in Malayalam
Monday, 23 June 2014
Cricket to become a private club
Daniel Brettig in Cricinfo
Melbourne is something of a Mecca for private members clubs. From the Melbourne Club and the Australian Club to the Kelvin Club and the Melbourne Cricket Club itself, the private meetings of well-heeled businessmen in wood-panelled dining rooms by open fires, all members by invitation only, are part of the fabric of the city. On Albert Street in East Melbourne the United Grand Lodge of Victoria stares forbiddingly down towards the MCG - who can forget that Sir Donald Bradman was himself a Freemason?
So it is entirely fitting that international cricket's redefinition as a private club, with the BCCI's banned board president N Srinivasan crowned as its omnipotent chairman, will take place in the MCC Members Dining Room this week. Since 1877 the MCG has hosted all manner of cricketing feats, but not since that first Test match between Australia and England has it been the scene of a more significant moment than this.
A re-shaping of the international game that began more or less in secret, during meetings between Srinivasan, the ECB chairman Giles Clarke and the Cricket Australia chairman Wally Edwards over the past two years, will reach fruition at the ICC's annual conference. While the broad resolutions for the new landscape have been known since January, their inking into law will be the point of completion, and some contemplation. There can be no going back from here.
After Thursday's centrepiece conference meeting the ICC's constitution will be changed drastically, setting up the boards of the "big three" nations as commercially-motivated navigators for cricket, and abandoning much of the expansionist vision favoured by ICC management in recent years. Instead the game's current balance of power will be definitively entrenched, as India, England and Australia take a larger slice of revenue from ICC events in addition to their existing windfalls from bilateral tours.
The game's most influential decision-making will no longer take place at the executive board table but at the more exclusive meetings of ExCo, the five-member working group that will have UN security council-styled permanent membership for the BCCI, ECB and CA. Edwards will chair ExCo for one year and his CA successor David Peever, the next. Clarke is already head of the ICC's finance committee, and Srinivasan's coronation will complete the triumvirate.
Srinivasan's ascension will take place despite the reservations of many. The Supreme Court of India has barred Srinivasan from his duties as BCCI president while the investigation into corrupt activities around the IPL and Chennai Super Kings is ongoing: members of the ICC's executive board have personally expressed to him their preference for Srinivasan to refrain from taking the international post until it has concluded. The conflict of interest inherent in Srinivasan's ownership of Super Kings alongside his cricket administration has also been mentioned, but always excused by the fact the BCCI allowed it.
Chief among those expressing caution has been Edwards, an architect of vast governance change at CA but compelled to work more pragmatically at the ICC. Earlier this month he reportedly called Srinivasan to discuss the implications of his appointment as chairman while still under investigation, and to seek reassurance that there would be no surprises later on if he did take up the post this week. The image of President Nixon's second inauguration playing on a newsroom television at the Washington Post while Woodward and Bernstein tap out the stories that will lead to his resignation spring to mind.
"We respect the right of each nation to nominate their representative on the ICC," Edwards said ahead of the conference. "With that comes great responsibility to ensure representatives comply with the standards required to govern the game. I have been assured by Mr Srinivasan, legally and by ICC management that there is nothing preventing the BCCI putting him forward as a candidate for chairman. I accept that and am confident that Mr Srinivasan can play an important role in strengthening world cricket."
Edwards is well aware of said standards as the primary author of a new ethics code for the ICC board and administration, a document broader in some senses but more restrictive in others. Accusations against members can now only be made by fellow signatories of the code, a change that underlines the shift to private membership values as much as anything else. The responsibilities of members to act in the best interests of the ICC itself have been stripped away, instead they will be freed up to do whatever their own countries would best prefer, formalising a mindset of self-interest that has long existed. Should Srinivasan be removed in the future, it will be under the terms of this code.
But Srinivasan is nothing if not determined, and in repeatedly asserting his innocence of any wrongdoing has persuaded the executive board, the BCCI and the Supreme Court that allegations of major impropriety should not stop him from taking the role. India's administrators seem largely content to allow Srinivasan to represent them overseas, while there appears to be little will to prevent his coronation in Melbourne - a repeat of the John Howard coup de'tat at the 2010 conference in Singapore looks unlikely.
As significant as the unveiling of the new chairman will be the long-delayed and much debated signing of the Members Participation Agreement for ICC events. This document, and the BCCI's refusal to sign it until the shape of the game was changed to reflect its view of the world and financial contribution to it, was the catalyst for cricket's current direction. There will be little fanfare around the boards putting pen to paper, but the gravity of the moment will not be lost on those in the room.
Elsewhere the game's Associate and Affiliate members will be forced to swallow numerous changes, including a raising of the bar in terms of membership criteria, and the loss of the revenue they will gain from ICC events relative to the old structure. The carrot of Test match participation will be dangled, but only over the course of an eight-year cycle. World Cup participation is also set to be restricted, as the tournament reverts to a 10-team model after next year's edition in Australia and New Zealand.
Other vestiges of earlier attempts by ICC management to broaden the game will be removed. A report into the possibility of cricket at the Olympics will be tabled, confirming why it will never happen so long as India and England have anything to do with the decision. The ACSU, cricket's independent watchdog for corruption, will soon be asked to report not to the ICC chief executive but to ExCo and the executive board. Whatever the current chairman Sir Ronnie Flanagan has said about preserving the unit's independence, the new model cannot be said to have done so.
Finally, after the conference concludes, members will sit down to the serious business of their first committee and board meetings under the new structure. Friday and Saturday will be taken up by the first acts of the new order, as Srinivasan, Edwards and Clarke chair the meetings of the private members club they have created. There will be no funny hats or ancient robes, but the tone, form and function of cricket's governance will reflect nothing so much as the clubs of Melbourne and beyond. The words of the Stonecutters' anthem immortalised by The Simpsons will seem a fitting accompaniment:
Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do, we do!
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps? We do, we do!
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