The anomalous rise of Mr Kejriwal

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

YOU would have thought that water alone has the anomalous property of expanding when frozen. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal displays a very nearly similar propensity. He ‘expands’ where others would retreat. The more the media mocks and berates him on behalf of its paymasters, and tries to put Kejriwal in the deep freeze, the fierier he comes out. In this regard he is somewhat like Donald Trump, but the similarity ends here.

Unlike the flashy billionaire who loves the good things of life, Kejriwal is a middle-class family man, happy with his vegetarian meal and cough syrup. As the US preside15 degreent seeks to discard the pro-poor healthcare and moves to auction away public spaces of learning and education, Kejriwal veers closer to the old-fashioned economics that harks back to India’s early quest to become a welfare state. Unlike most of his competitors Kejriwal revels in his hostility to crony capitalism, which he believes has stunted India’s growth.

He was likened to Pakistan’s Imran Khan initially. That was unintelligent. If anything, Imran veers closer to the BJP’s politics of riding religious identity. Would he be able to say, for example, “I will never use religion to win an election even if I have to lose a 100 times”? That’s what Kejriwal said publicly when the BJP won Uttar Pradesh in a polarised election.

Some events more readily set him apart from his rivals. When mobs attacked Muslims in BJP-ruled Haryana, Kejriwal dispatched a fact-finding team to the neighbouring state. In 2015, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar reportedly asked Muslims to leave the country unless they gave up eating beef, a claim he later denied. “Khattar sahib should resign … His statement is not only unfortunate, but shameful,” Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party said. He set up a special investigation team to revisit the Sikh massacre of 1984, which has not attained a satisfactory closure. When Hindutva mobs vandalised churches in Delhi, it was the AAP that led the face-off with the communalists. I’m not sure if any of these events could be associated with the studiously pro-clergy Imran Khan. Recently, Kejriwal was associated with a Jain monk who walks naked, and it’s his business to do that. But the AAP leader has not used religion to canvass support or to attack his opponents. The imam of Jama Masjid, known for meddling in Muslim communalism, offered support to Kejriwal, which he tersely refused. 

The more Kejriwal’s rivals throw muck at him, the cleaner he looks. How many times has the Delhi Police picked up his MLAs for this or that alleged crime only to be rapped on the knuckles by the courts? By a quirk of logic, the Delhi government has no control on the city’s police who fall under federal supervision. Even the chief minister’s offices were not spared from being raided by the agencies. They only got frustration to show for their heavily publicised efforts.

Sample a report in The Hindustan Times last month: “The Delhi Police arrested 13 MLAs of the ruling Aam Aadmi Party in the last two years on charges ranging from rape, extortion, cheating, forgery to rioting. For most of these offences bail is hard to come by, but all the 13 lawmakers are out on bail. In fact, two have been cleared of all charges.”

The anomalous rise of Kejriwal persists with its perverse logic. In 2013, according to The Hindu, the Congress government moved to probe alleged foreign funding to Kejriwal’s party. The following day, the daily donation to the AAP increased six-fold. Kejriwal thanked the BJP and the Congress for the windfall. Like Jerry Mouse thumbing his nose at his quarry, he said: “We are grateful to the BJP and the Congress for raising questions on our funds.”

I have met Kejriwal once for five seconds at a public event where I thought of giving him a book on corporate corruption. He may never have needed it actually, because it turned out that he knew more than the book could reveal. I am told he is allergic to leftists, which is not strange since the left has vainly put up candidates against him. But then, what is a former Maoist doing in his cabinet? There must be some meeting of the minds. It could be much more than that.

Initially, I tended to agree with those who were unsparing in their criticism of Arvind Kejriwal. They were supporters of Congress or the left and believed that he was some kind of an agent for the BJP, if not the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He very nearly was. His early mascot was dubious — a former army truck driver who was projected as a Gandhian activist against corruption, a strange Gandhian though who prescribed public flogging for tipplers.

Easily the single-most important factor shoring up Kejriwal’s pronounced secularism is Ashish Khetan. This journalist-turned-politician carried out the most damaging exposés on Hindutva fanaticism in Gujarat during Prime Minister Modi’s tenure as the state’s chief minister. Khetan’s eerie video interview — a sting operation — with a self-confessed hater of Muslims could only be subverted as evidence of crime and complicity if the state’s key pillars looked the other way.

Last week, the Modi government through the lieutenant governor shut down the AAP party office in Delhi claiming it did not have official clearances. The timing was notable. Elections are scheduled next week to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, currently ruled by the BJP. “A victory in the municipality will fulfil Mr Modi’s dreams for India”, says the radio jingle. Kejriwal was the first to stall the Modi juggernaut in Delhi. In response, the prime minister, that for the first time in Delhi municipality’s history, has staked his reputation to defeat Kejriwal. But in Kejriwal’s case when he loses, he wins.

When it comes to our welfare system, we’ve lost the plot

As Britain follows the US in tearing up its safety net, the story of social security needs to be retold from the very beginning

• 
• • Tom Clark
  • The Guardian, Sunday 27 July 2014 15.07 BST

A protest outside the London offices of Love Productions, which made the TV programme Benefits Street. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The rip-roaringly successful 4’s Benefits Street, on Channel 4, is being followed up by Immigrant Street. This a year after the same station’s Benefits Britain 1949 – to middle England’s delight – subjected contemporary welfare claimants to the social security rules of the ration-book years, as applied by real-life bullying bureaucrats with real jobcentre experience. Meanwhile, Channel 5 has developed its own pauper-baiting programme,On Benefits & Proud, and its cousin, Gypsies On Benefits & Proud.

The boom in poverty porn suggests that the left is getting thrashed on social security, and the polling confirms this. There is still support for the general principle of a safety net and a ladder of opportunity, but turn to the practicalities of particular benefits and suspicions about freeloaders rise as jealousies break out in every direction. Listening to voices from across Britain for my book Hard Times, I found not only workers complaining about the unemployed getting an easy ride, but also jobless people grumbling that the low-paid got more help than them nowadays, not to mention striking mutual antipathy between recipients of different benefits.

To see where this debate could lead, glance across the Atlantic. Four decades after Ronald Reagan invoked the “welfare queen”, the nearest thing America had to income support is long abolished. There is charity, and sometimes state and local relief, but many a chronic health condition goes untreated, and penury abounds. The right, however, still refuses to relent. Paul Ryan, the Republican pick for vice-president in 2012, said about Medicaid and food stamps that year: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency.” It is remarkable that such language is not being used about cash payments that could be misspent but about programmes to provide food and medicine to poor people in the world’s richest economy.

As the coalition freezes, cuts and applies punitive “sanctions”, we’re heading the same way faster than anyone would have thought possible a few years ago. The only chance of arresting the drift is somehow resetting the whole discussion from first principles.

Benefits are paid out on many different bases around the world. In France, there is still a meaningful connection between earnings, social contributions paid in, and benefit paid out. In parts of northern Europe, unions retain a hand in collecting premiums and administering payments, forging a link between benefits and a concrete institution less remote and alien than “the welfare state”. In New Zealand, a flat-rate pension – available to all seniors, on the strength of residency alone – represents an entirely different way of thinking about benefits, more related to universal rights.

No real-world system ever fits any theory perfectly. Even the fondly remembered Beveridge settlement of the 1940s was riddled with compromise. A stern Victorian, William Beveridge himself was serious about social insurance, properly funded by contributions that built up over time. But Attlee was rightly concerned about the pressing needs of the already elderly, who had never had a chance to pay in, so it was operated as pay-as-you-go from the off. There was also – as there almost always has to be – a means-tested safety net to catch those who would otherwise sink, something that compromised the ideal of “earned” benefits.

Underlying the unloved mosaic of contemporary British benefits lurks a mishmash of half-forgotten principles. In the field of disability alone, there are income top-ups that embody poverty relief, allowances based on contribution records, and other benefits contingent on nothing but health, which reflect ideas about economic rights – even if it does not feel that way as the coalition hacks them back. But through the muddle, there are some definite trends. The proportion of non-pensioner benefits linked to contributions in the UK has dropped by around two-thirds since the 1970s, with means-testing filling the gap, turning welfare payment into the sort of residual function Richard Titmuss was thinking of when he warned that services for the poor would become poor services.

There will, then, always be fixes and workarounds. The important thing is that citizens should be able tell a rough story about how the system works. That sense of a story is what we have lost, and must now restore. But how?

The Institute of Public Policy’s Condition of Britain report suggests replacing some ill-understood cash benefits with public services, particularly in childcare, where – it says – state nurseries would not only be more loved, but also more efficient than under today’s morass of subsidies. Building social houses instead of writing cheques to landlords for owning scarce private homes likewise has commonsensical appeal. The IPPR also proposes refreshing the contributory link by turning the national insurance fund into the sort of independent body Beveridge envisaged, while also increasing jobseeker’s allowance for unemployed workers who have previously paid in.

There would need to be adjustments to “credit in” parents and carers who can’t work and also, arguably, the increasing band whose temporary, part-time or zero-hours jobs make for patchy careers. This leads some radical voices, such as left-leaning Compass, to call for a citizen’s income, paid to all and clawed back through taxes from those who don’t need it. A payment for everybody could hardly be painted as the preserve of the scrounger, and the proposal would deal – at root – with the financial anxiety of our times.

I’ve got my doubts about affordability, and also the pitch to voters often none too keen on rights. But what I admire here is Compass’s willingness to pose the big questions. You might prefer the story about rights to social security, or you might prefer a yarn about the duty to contribute to social insurance. Either, I’d say, is preferable to today’s tragic tale of welfare’s decline.

Britain: a nation in decay

The UK's problems go far deeper than the cuts agenda. It simply can't produce enough to revive its ailing economy

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Friday 8 March 2013 21.00 GMT

‘Despite the huge incentive to export created by a devalued pound, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.’ Photograph: Alamy

David Cameron's speech on the economy this week, and the reactions to it, have again confirmed that the British debate on economic policy is getting nowhere. The coalition government keeps repeating that it has to cut spending in order to cut deficits, no matter what. The opposition has been at pains to explain – as a teacher may do to a particularly slow or obstinate child – that trying to cut deficits by cutting spending in a stagnant economy is a largely self-defeating exercise, as it reduces growth and thus tax revenue. And Friday's astonishing letter from Robert Chote, chairman of the non-partisan Office for Budget Responsibility, contradicting the prime minister and reminding him of the ambiguous impact of spending cuts on deficits, has lent further weight to the opposition argument.

In reality, though, the coalition government isn't as stupid or stubborn as it appears. It is sticking to its plan A because spending cuts are not about deficits but about rolling back the welfare state. So no amount of evidence is going to change its position on cuts.

Lost in this cross-wired debate is the issue of the long-term future of the economy. Britain has been finding it difficult to recover from the financial crisis not just because of its austerity policy but also because of its eroding ability to engage in high-productivity activities. This problem is most tellingly manifested in the country's inability to generate a trade surplus despite the huge devaluation of sterling since 2008.

Compared with its height in 2007, the pound has been devalued about 30% against the dollar, 50% against the yen, and 20% against the struggling euro. Yet despite the huge incentive to export created by such devaluation, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.

Despite the devaluation, Britain's service exports have fallen – average annual service exports for 2008-11 were 8% lower than for 2005-07. This may be understandable, given the poor state of its financial sector – rocked by one scandal after another and hemmed in by a slow tightening of global financial regulation.

However, manufacturing exports, which were supposed to make up the shortfall created by the services sector, also fell by 8% after the devaluation. This is highly unusual. For example, back when South Korea had a devaluation of similar scale after its 1997 financial crisis (the won, its currency, was devalued by 35% against the dollar), the country's manufacturing exports were 15% higher (comparing the 1998-2001 average to 1995-97).

The only reason the British balance of payments situation has not been worse is the large increase in primary commodity exports – oil, minerals and food. These were on average 22% higher in 2008-11 than in 2005-07. In other words, since the crisis the British economy has been moving backwards in terms of its sophistication as a producer.

All of this means that, without addressing the underlying decay in productive capabilities, Britain cannot fix its ailing economy. To deal with this problem, it urgently needs to develop a long-term productive strategy through a broad-based public consultation involving not just the government and private sector firms, but trade unions, educational institutions and research institutes.

The strategy should first carefully identify the industries, and the underlying technologies, that will be the future motor of the economy and then provide them with the necessary support. This could be in the form of subsidies for R&D, loan guarantees for small firms, or preferences in government procurement, and should be targeted at "strategic" industries, although they could also be in the form of policies that are apparently not industry-specific.

For example, infrastructural investment needs to be co-ordinated with the broader industrial strategy. Infrastructure is by definition location-specific, so depending on the industries you want to promote, you will have to build different types of it in different places. Similarly with education and skills. Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce, and for potential students to know what professions to study for.

John Maynard Keynes once famously said that in the long run we are all dead. But a lot of us have to live for a while yet. A series of short-run policies, whether based on the coalition policy of spending cuts and loose monetary policy or on the opposition policy of increased government spending, isn't going to address the challenges facing the British economy. It is time to think for the long term.

There is a problem with welfare, but it's not 'shirkers'

This economic model isn't delivering jobs or decent wages. The real scroungers are greedy landlords and employers

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013 22.20 GMT

‘The costs of systemic failure have ­ballooned: long-term ­unemployment has ­increased by 146% since 2010.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The glee and class contempt with which Britain's Tory leaders have set about this week's onslaught on welfare has been an object lesson in the cynical venom at the heart of David Cameron's coalition. To force through cuts in the living standards of the poorest people in the country, demonisation and division have been the order of the day.

The Conservatives back workers not shirkers, the prime minister declared, as George Osborne pictured an honest shift worker passing the closed blinds of a skiver "sleeping off a life on benefits". Tory MP John Redwood insisted betting firms target deprived areas because the poor have too much "time on their hands".

Having softened up their audience with a press campaign of tales of "scroungers" and fraudsters, the Tories couldn't have been clearer about their purpose: to turn the low paid against the unemployed, just as they've tried to set private sector against public sector workers – and the Victorians separated the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Having drawn their toxic dividing line, the game has then been to put Labour on the wrong side, in the scroungers' camp. Hence the Conservative poster campaign in advance of yesterday's Commons vote on the coalition plan to make the first general real terms benefit cuts since the 1930s, declaring: "Today Labour are voting to increase benefits by more than workers' wages."

But the signs are that the skivers versus strivers talk has been backfiring. Even Cameron's dog-whistle spinman, Lynton Crosby, has been getting worried about the tone. So no wonder Nick Clegg, who claims to be on a journey to "the centre ground", wants to dissociate his Lib Dems from the nakedly nasty party.

As the impact of this year's benefit squeeze hits home, the backlash is likely to grow. Far from targeting "shirkers", the three-year benefit and tax credit cap doesn't even mainly target the unemployed. More than 60% of those who will lose out are in work.

Among the "scroungers" Cameron will be clamping down on are 300,000 nurses, 150,000 teachers and 40,000 soldiers. The real terms cut will hit the poorest, lone parents, the disabled and women hardest, according to the government's own assessment. It will increase inequality and help tip hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

Just as 8,000 millionaires are about to get an average tax cut of over £107,000 and food banks are booming, the coalition is driving through a benefit squeeze that swamps the rise in tax allowances and targets the most vulnerable – already subject to a string of other cuts and new charges, from disability allowances to council tax.

Ministers claim the end of child benefit for the better-off in some way balances the attack on means-tested benefits. But not only is child benefit set apart in being paid overwhelmingly to women: like all universal benefits it helps to create a common social interest, can be offset with progressive taxation and becomes far easier to hack away at once restricted to the lower paid.

Of course, these cuts are being made in the name of deficit reduction. In reality, even if the logic of the coalition's austerity programme is accepted, there are plenty of other ways to find the savings made from capping benefit and tax credits (even the Blairite prince over the water, David Miliband, today denounced the cap and floated lower rate pension tax relief instead).

But austerity is failing and the underlying deficit growing. Even the IMF has now admitted it underestimated the disastrous impact of austerity programmes on growth and jobs. And cuts in the incomes of the poorest in any economy will only depress demand when the opposite is urgently needed – including to shrink the deficit.

The Tories feel safe attacking social security because a long-running media campaign has fostered a wildly inaccurate welfare mythology. On average, people think 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, when the government's own estimate is 0.7% – or around £1bn, compared to an estimated £70bn worth of tax evasion. Most payments go to pensioners, and, far from soaring ahead of wages, unemployment benefit has fallen to 11% of average earnings, compared with 22% in 1979.

That's not to say there isn't a problem with welfare. It just isn't the one the political class and media mostly claim it is. Central to the sharp increase in social security costs over the past generation have been rising joblessness and stagnating wages. Since 1980, unemployment has averaged more than three times the postwar rate, while the proportion of those in low-paid jobs has doubled to over 20%.

In other words, welfare has become a prop for the failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver jobs or decent wages. In Britain, the prop has partly taken the form of subsidising poverty pay through New Labour's tax credits, and exorbitant private rents through a massively expanded housing benefit bill.

That model has now crashed and the costs of systemic failure have ballooned: long-term unemployment has increased by 146% since 2010. What Cameron and Osborne are doing is to kick away props, not from bad employers and greedy landlords – the real welfare scroungers – but from the most deprived when they're needed most.

Labour is right to oppose real benefit cuts and support publicly backed work programmes, but wrong to endorse real terms cuts in public sector pay and private minimum wage schemes. If politicians are serious about cutting the welfare bill – instead of driving claimants deeper into poverty – there are obvious alternatives.

A crash council housebuilding programme, backed with northern European-style rent control, would slash the £21bn a year from the housing benefit bill. A living wage across the economy, combined with strengthened workplace rights, would cut the tax credit and other benefit bills. And both, combined with a public bank-driven national investment programme, would boost growth and shrink the dole bill.

Since this government will be doing nothing of the kind, expect instead the social unrest predicted by northern council leaders in response to plans for 30% cuts in local authority budgets. Polling suggests public opposition to the benefit squeeze will also spread as people find out more about who will bear the brunt. Even the Tories may come to regret their war on the poor.

An Obituary to The Welfare State, 1942-2013.

After decades of public illness, Beveridge's most famous offspring has died

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013

For much of its short but celebrated life, the Welfare State was cherished by Britons. Instant public affection greeted its birth and even as it passed away peacefully yesterday morning, government ministers swore they would do all they could to keep it alive.

The Welfare State's huge appeal lay in its combination of simplicity and assurance. A safety net to catch those fallen on hard times, come rain or shine, boom or bust, it would be there for all those who had paid in.

Such universality allowed people to project on to it whatever they wished. Welfare State's father, the Liberal William Beveridge, described his offspring as "an attack on Want", one of the five evil giants that had to be slain in postwar Britain. But for future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, "Social security to us can only mean socialism".

Yet there were critics. Indeed, it is thought that as late as yesterday, an unnamed twentysomething PPE graduate at Policy Exchange was revising a document entitled "What's Wrong with Welfare?" In the end, however, it was not a rightwing think tank that killed Welfare. The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement. That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to Welfare.
It is a testimony to Welfare's powerful charm that few immediately accepted its passing. Hours after its official death, bloggers continued to talk as if it were still alive, albeit under grave threat from the perfidious Tories.

But analysts later confirmed that the change to child benefit did indeed mark the death of the Welfare State as originally envisaged by Beveridge: a "contributory" system, where those who paid in during their working lives could count on financial help from the government when in need.

It expired peacefully on Monday, 7 January, just weeks after marking its 70th birthday.
The system had suffered many attacks over the years, from politicians talking of a "welfare trap", government means-testing, and frothy-mouthed journalists reporting isolated cases of benefit fraud.
For many would-be claimants, Welfare had become a ragged system where, however deserving or needy, they weren't poor enough to qualify for benefits, or the cash involved was too small to bother claiming.

Though David Cameron spoke of a "something for nothing" culture, the opposite was closer to the truth: Welfare had become a "nothing for something" system where taxpayers chipped in but got very little back.

This was very different from the scenes that greeted Welfare's birth in 1942. Then, the BBC broadcast in 22 different languages the details of Beveridge's social insurance scheme and the Manchester Guardian repeatedly acclaimed it as a "great plan" and a "big and fine thing". The public was enthusiastic, buying more than 635,000 copies of what was formally titled the "Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services".

Yet the golden period of Welfare really came in the 60s and 70s as, thanks to the work of Barbara Castle, Jeff Rooker, Audrey Wise and others, pensions and allowances were made more generous and tied to typical earnings.

"If you were poor, you were far less behind than at any other time in contemporary British history," according to Richard Exell, a senior policy officer at the TUC and a campaigner on welfare issues for more than 30 years. "It produced a Britain that was one of the most equal societies in western Europe."

Just before Margaret Thatcher came to power, a single person out of work would get unemployment benefit worth almost 21% of average earnings; last year, jobseeker's allowance was nearly half that, amounting to just over 11%.

Welfare's big decline came in the 1980s, as the Conservatives moved more benefits from available to all to on offer only to the poor. This was justified as making public spending more efficient.

But, according to a famous and much quoted study by Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, such means-testing is far less effective and more expensive than universal benefits. In a study of 18 rich countries, the academics found that targetting benefits at the poorest usually generated resentment among those just above – and led to smaller entitlements.

This "paradox of redistribution" was certainly observable in Britain, where Welfare retained its status as one of the 20th century's most exalted creations, even while those claiming benefits were treated with ever greater contempt.

"If you look at unemployment and sickness benefit as a proportion of average earnings, then Britain has one of the meanest welfare systems in Europe," says Palme. "Worse than Greece, Bulgaria or Romania."

Some of that same meanness can be seen in the way Welfare was discussed as it moved into its sixth and seventh decades. It was no longer about social security but benefits. Those who received them were no longer unfortunate but "slackers", as Iain Duncan Smith referred to them. A recent study by Declan Gaffney, Ben Baumberg and Kate Bell of 6,600 national newspaper articles on Welfare published between 1995 and 2011 found 29% referred to benefit fraud. The government's own estimate of fraud is that it is less than 1% across all benefit cases.

The death of Welfare does not mean an end to all benefit spending. Instead, it is outlived by its predecessor, Poor Relief, in which only the very poorest will receive government cash. Analysts are unsure about the repercussions.

"I'm not aware of any country that's ever had a combination of Victorian-style poor laws and parliamentary democracy," says Gaffney.

Instead of a book of condolences, there will be a special edition of the Guardian's letters page. In separate tributes, BBC4 will air some respectful but little-watched documentaries; there will also be a truly unbearable edition of The Moral Maze.