Let the new knowledge in
Once a person has been announced as an expert, they lose the impetus to use wisdom wisely
Annalisa Barbieri
Saturday February 9, 2008
The Guardian
The five men boarded the flight from Sardinia to London. They were all members of a steel band, but because the flight was full they had to mostly sit apart. They were ordinary passengers, on their way home to spend New Year's Eve with their families. One was blind, and his colleague, whom he was sitting next to, was reading him the football scores.
However, this perfectly innocent scene held intrigue for a fellow passenger - no normal person but an expert: a psychology professor. He had seen the men in the departure lounge sitting together, now they were dispersed. The man pretending to be blind was now reading the paper. They were clearly terrorists! He alerted the pilot (I can imagine what he said: "I'm a psychology professor; these men are terrorists!") and the men were escorted off, and not allowed back on, even when they proved they were entirely innocent. In the event, the band did not get back to their families until January 2, after travelling to Italy and London, via sleeping rough in a Liverpool bus shelter.
Four years ago, a mother gave birth to a child and died a few hours later. Instead of being given an anaesthetic as an epidural, straight into her spine, she had been given it through a drip into her arm. The midwife who made the error repeatedly denied making the mistake, and because of course she never made the mistake, she could show no remorse. The hospital took more than a year to admit there had been a mix-up. Clearly, experts don't make mistakes.
In Paris, seven senior French doctors and former health officials are standing trial for manslaughter and fraud related to the death of more than 100 people they allegedly caused to be infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Three stories, from just one day in this week's news, of experts getting it very wrong. And what about the famous, entirely tragic case of the recent past? Sally Clark was wrongfully convicted of the death of her sons after one expert asserted that the likelihood of two sudden infant deaths in the same house was "one in 73 million", and another submitted an incorrect pathology report. Later, to add insult to injury, an expert in Munchausen by proxy decided, simply by watching a television programme, that it was actually Sally Clark's husband who did it. God save us from experts.
The problem with being an expert is that once it's been announced you know it all, it almost ceases to matter what you say. Because you're an expert. Some perfectly sane, intelligent people fail to question the questionable, because if a statement is prefixed with "the expert's view is ...", they think it escapes analysis. Even without tipping into real tragedy, who hasn't had the experience of an arrogant doctor who won't listen because he knows best. And don't even get me started on TV doctors, who belong to a whole special world of their own, the TV expert. Or the teacher who won't countenance you having an opinion on your own child because - look, she's the educational expert. Or the priest who actually thinks he's God?
These people don't let new knowledge in, they don't allow for variables, they don't listen. They don't need to, after all. I wonder at which point experts decide they no longer need to learn, because they already know it all?
The people I know with real specialisms and expertise - and yes, I am grateful for all the learned people in the world that use their wisdom wisely - purposely avoid the word expert. In turn, I avoid the opinions of experts; experts are rigid, and the one thing a keen mind must have is flexibility. The cleverest people I've met are also the best listeners. A really intelligent person is humble, and realises that knowledge is never finite.
annalisa.barbieri@guardian.co.uk
Comments
sbgman
February 9, 2008 2:07 AM
The really strange thing to me in reading this column is that I am a scientist...one would assume one of the "experts" (at least within my particular field of study), yet one of the things we scientists learn (or should learn) early on is that even the gurus and giant names can be wrong and their opinions/ideas should be questioned. Somehow, we seem to have mixed up "experts" with expertise. It often comes down to "Show me the data", and if you can't, be quiet!
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RogerINtheUSA
February 9, 2008 2:09 AM
What would happen if the UK's most prestigious Medical Journal's expert reviewers were to decide that the MMR jab causes autism?
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Auric
February 9, 2008 3:09 AM
Clearly applicable to Williams. `Listen to me, I know about gods, religions and things like that.` To borrow from George Orwell - No ordinary person could be such a fool.
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jakebylo
February 9, 2008 3:44 AM
this is an astoundingly ridiculous column - possibly setting a new record for the Guardian website - gave me an extended case of the "dancing eyes", especially the smug Aunty-knows-best last paragraph.
The columnist has absolutely no evidence that the few stories she cites (incidentally, a handful of situations out of the many millions of actions/decisions that designated experts (expertise is typically formally designated by official qualifications and other marks of recognition, and not merely someone declaring themselves an expert) in an enormous number of fields carry out every day) involved people with expertise who were arrogant and conceited and closed to new knowledge... and even if they really were, she has no evidence that this led to the mistake (And if an expert who had been involved in a serious mistake at work were found personally responsible, there are a whole range of possible explanations for their mistake - ranging from say, really bad luck to say, drunkenness due to personal problems at home - many explanations which can't be attributed to the blanket accusation of arrogance )
This article's accusations/character assassinations against these people in the cited cases is purely speculative and groundless, just so another snootily self-satisfied and self-righteous column can be written. (does the columnist really avoid the opinions of all experts? what an impractical way of living life.)
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goldengate
February 9, 2008 4:05 AM
And then there is George W. Bush, the expert decider in chief by virtue of having being installed in the Presidency, overrule all experts, because he alone knows what is best and his like minded other experts , in particular his Cabinet, that servers at his pleasure just tow the same line. The world should be congratulated to have so much wisdom.
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parallaxview
February 9, 2008 4:24 AM
Whoa Annalisa, just checked out your profile: seamstress to the Queen Mother, fashion PR, fishing correspondent, columnist, author, co-founder of the progressive parenting website.
Jack of all trades, master of ...?
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Mujokan
February 9, 2008 5:21 AM
One problem from two years ago, another problem from four years ago, and a third problem from twenty years ago. Luckily the writer isn't an expert on experts, or I wouldn't have found this column so convincing.
Friday 8 February 2008
Meditation is more than flower-power indulgence
Joan Bakewell
They are almost entirely wrong. The world needs meditation more than ever. Just ask Heath Ledger's family. The actor had complained for weeks of insomnia, anxiety and stress before his death last month. He turned for help to prescription drugs, none of which would have harmed him on its own, but taken together had a fatal result. "I can't stop my brain thinking..." he is rumoured to have complained. How much better if he had learned some simple meditation techniques that would have calmed the stress and given him space to rest his overactive mind.
I'm not suggesting the Maharishi's brand of Transcendental Meditation was what Ledger needed. It's hard to understand what the so-called giggling guru's specific teaching amounts to, other than that it requires substantial fees, results in bizarre bouncing activities, and has created a trust worth some £600m. Perhaps the trust's role is to spread the message, whatever the message is.
I understand that the pop star Donovan, a long-time devotee, and film-maker David Lynch are currently proselytising for the cause. I am not sure I want the man who makes spooky films, and created the nightmare vision behind the 1986 shocker Blue Velvet, to be my spiritual guide.
Whether the Maharishi was a genuine inspiration or simply an old fraud is beside the point. Meditation, as part of Eastern philosophy, has an ancient and respectable past, and in bringing it to the attention of young people in the West thrown into confusion by the 1960s drug culture he did something worthwhile. The West already had its tradition of meditation too, of course, but it was falling out of favour. It is known as prayer.
By contrast, I learned what I know of meditation for nothing more than the cost of a book, called Teach Yourself Meditation. I was planning to visit India for a second time and already knew that the density of that country's spiritual life has a strange and disturbing effect. So I took the book along with me just in case. And when the moment came – a calm and beautiful place, a restful time – I sat cross-legged on a cushion and opened its pages.
I learned one thing fast that day: meditation isn't easy. For hectic, busy minds living in a turmoil of thoughts and ideas it is seriously difficult. I persisted throughout my Indian visit and slowly began to have a different sense of things from what I had before. It was entirely rewarding, offering some small sense of the cosmic nature of things and the immediacy of our place in time and space. It could easily be written off by cynics as holiday euphoria. But I didn't believe it was and I have persisted intermittently ever since. I can now manage to meditate properly for as long as five consecutive minutes: after that some sneaky idea, some distracting thought, wriggles its way into my consciousness and spoils that vast canvas of quiet that is what meditation aims for. And I have to start all over again.
Would the world benefit from meditation? Up to a point. The Maharishi believed his movement could bring about world peace, and John Lennon went on to write the beautiful but fanciful "Imagine". They both make the illogical leap from the individual to the community. Meditation is essentially personal, internal and even narcissistic. It aims to overcome the force of the ego but it is primarily self-regarding. It can clear clutter and confusion from the individual mind. But communities don't work like that. That's why saints don't fight each other, but countries have gone to war under holy banners.
Transcendental meditation imagines a world where everyone is so spiritually calm and at peace that wars become redundant. That is to suppose that tyrants and despots will be chilling out too. Whereas, we know full well they would welcome a meek and submissive population as being so much easier to subjugate to their will. The dangers of universal quietism is that it would abandon all the outrage we bring to our sense of injustice. There is a proper place for anger at the state of the world, for resistance to the forces of oppression. But meditation can help temper the anger.
They are almost entirely wrong. The world needs meditation more than ever. Just ask Heath Ledger's family. The actor had complained for weeks of insomnia, anxiety and stress before his death last month. He turned for help to prescription drugs, none of which would have harmed him on its own, but taken together had a fatal result. "I can't stop my brain thinking..." he is rumoured to have complained. How much better if he had learned some simple meditation techniques that would have calmed the stress and given him space to rest his overactive mind.
I'm not suggesting the Maharishi's brand of Transcendental Meditation was what Ledger needed. It's hard to understand what the so-called giggling guru's specific teaching amounts to, other than that it requires substantial fees, results in bizarre bouncing activities, and has created a trust worth some £600m. Perhaps the trust's role is to spread the message, whatever the message is.
I understand that the pop star Donovan, a long-time devotee, and film-maker David Lynch are currently proselytising for the cause. I am not sure I want the man who makes spooky films, and created the nightmare vision behind the 1986 shocker Blue Velvet, to be my spiritual guide.
Whether the Maharishi was a genuine inspiration or simply an old fraud is beside the point. Meditation, as part of Eastern philosophy, has an ancient and respectable past, and in bringing it to the attention of young people in the West thrown into confusion by the 1960s drug culture he did something worthwhile. The West already had its tradition of meditation too, of course, but it was falling out of favour. It is known as prayer.
By contrast, I learned what I know of meditation for nothing more than the cost of a book, called Teach Yourself Meditation. I was planning to visit India for a second time and already knew that the density of that country's spiritual life has a strange and disturbing effect. So I took the book along with me just in case. And when the moment came – a calm and beautiful place, a restful time – I sat cross-legged on a cushion and opened its pages.
I learned one thing fast that day: meditation isn't easy. For hectic, busy minds living in a turmoil of thoughts and ideas it is seriously difficult. I persisted throughout my Indian visit and slowly began to have a different sense of things from what I had before. It was entirely rewarding, offering some small sense of the cosmic nature of things and the immediacy of our place in time and space. It could easily be written off by cynics as holiday euphoria. But I didn't believe it was and I have persisted intermittently ever since. I can now manage to meditate properly for as long as five consecutive minutes: after that some sneaky idea, some distracting thought, wriggles its way into my consciousness and spoils that vast canvas of quiet that is what meditation aims for. And I have to start all over again.
Would the world benefit from meditation? Up to a point. The Maharishi believed his movement could bring about world peace, and John Lennon went on to write the beautiful but fanciful "Imagine". They both make the illogical leap from the individual to the community. Meditation is essentially personal, internal and even narcissistic. It aims to overcome the force of the ego but it is primarily self-regarding. It can clear clutter and confusion from the individual mind. But communities don't work like that. That's why saints don't fight each other, but countries have gone to war under holy banners.
Transcendental meditation imagines a world where everyone is so spiritually calm and at peace that wars become redundant. That is to suppose that tyrants and despots will be chilling out too. Whereas, we know full well they would welcome a meek and submissive population as being so much easier to subjugate to their will. The dangers of universal quietism is that it would abandon all the outrage we bring to our sense of injustice. There is a proper place for anger at the state of the world, for resistance to the forces of oppression. But meditation can help temper the anger.
Thursday 7 February 2008
The best chat-up lines in the world
With Valentine's Day just a week away and Britain's single men honing their (usually drunken) chat-up lines, Times foreign correspondents reveal how bachelors in other countries do it. We can learn something from them all - except, perhaps, Australia . . .
German men see the conquest of German women as an extreme sport, a physical activity that is up there with bungee jumping and paragliding. It boils down to three essentials: stamina, technique and the right kit. The charm thing doesn't really come into it, any more than it does with mountaineering. One chat-up line suggested by the much-visited German site Flirt-mit-mir (Flirt with me) is: "Your eyes are the same colour as my Porsche." Apparently this works quite well, even better than, "Do you want to see my gun collection?"
There is a growing awareness though that this might not be quite enough. The fact that Germany's most celebrated beauties are falling for foreigners (Claudia Schiffer for Matthew Vaughn, Heidi Klum for Seal) is beginning to be seen as a national problem. The columnist, Jochen Siemens, views German men as suffering from Caligynephobia (also known as Venustraphobia) – the fear of chatting up beautiful women. "The fact is that a beautiful woman undermines the illusion that one is leading a happy life," he says, "doubts begin to gnaw at us." And, since there is no chat-up line in the German language that can overcome this kind of brittle masculine self-confidence, the country is now brimming with flirt academies and seminars. Here, German men are taught supposedly romantic lines such as "Life is a big jigsaw puzzle – and you are the missing piece". And that it is not absolutely necessary to line up your mobile phones on the restaurant table, or casually drop your car keyring (with Jaguar symbol), or to flash photographs of your villa in Spain.
Surveys usually find that German women prefer men who listen to them. For all the obvious reasons this message has yet to be taken on board. But part of the problem, of course, is that German women cannot quite distil what they want from a man into a text-book formula. The journalists Stephan and Andreas Lebert recently interviewed women on this subject for their book Instruction on How to be Manly. One typical response: "A man shouldn't be a fretter, someone who is always asking how you are, or who is checking whether the yoghurt in the fridge has passed its sell-by-date. He should be able to show feelings and weaknesses, but not be a wimp, that's the worst, not a gossip, no, no, but he should have the gift of the gab, that's the most important, oh yes, and a sense of humour and, he should be, you know, a bit of a cowboy." That's it, then. Back to the classroom, Hans
Roger Boyes
UNITED STATES
Strategy, planning, opportunism, execution – all feature in the American heterosexual male's pursuit of the opposite sex. Take, for example, my American friend Jim's recent flight to Spain. On the plane was a conspicuously attractive Spanish attendant, who was receiving a great deal of attention from the Brits at the back. The Brits had calculated that if they ordered as much booze as possible from her, then with every repeat order, they would get more confidence and therefore another opportunity to charm her with their self-deprecation.
Jim had also taken a fancy to this stewardess. He was polite, he smiled, he made eye contact. He also made sure to get her name and repeat it often. And then, when the plane landed, he went straight to the newsagents' to buy an envelope, a pen, and some notepaper. At a nearby caf� he composed a letter to the airline congratulating it on its excellent cabin service – in particular the helpfulness and professionalism of a certain Spanish flight attendant, whom he named as a tribute to the values of the organisation. He included his name, number, and e-mail address, and posted the letter right there. Two weeks later the woman called him to say that his letter had earned her a bonus and that could she please go out for a drink with him next time she was flying through LA. "The idea just came to me, as soon as we landed," Jim explainsto me. "I didn't expect it to actually work."
Hogwash. American men know very well that this kind of thing works. The very fact that I have two American male friends who have successfully charmed flight attendants – a career that surely represents the most fortified beachhead of womankind's defence against unwanted romantic advances – suggests that it was no accident. In a culture where the drunk'n'lunge method most definitely doesn't work (although it has been known to happen), it's a necessity.
In terms of romantic pursuit, the American male is simply a more evolved creature than his British counterpart. It's been this way for a while: take the plot of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, in which the quiet American in question arrives in Vietnam and uses a letter-writing campaign to steal the girlfriend of the hero, a foreign correspondent for The Times. The key to the American strategy is deferred gratification: what my Dad still calls "courting" and what the Americans call "dating". Essentially, the American seduction comes in three stages: a conversation, a phone number, and then a date. Strategy, planning and execution.
As for opportunism – look no farther than Jim's letter to the airline.
Chris Ayres
ITALY
It's lunchtime at a high school (Liceo) in Rome's historic centre, and older pupils are milling about discussing plans for the evening. I ask one of the girls, Francesca, if Italian boys are shy about asking her out. She looks at me fairly witheringly. "Nowadays we do the asking," she says.
My friend Fabio agrees. "It's not so much that we have lost the art of seduction as Italian women become more feminist and independent. It's more economic. Italian men tend to be old fashioned and think they should pay for everything. But times are hard, and we sometimes hesitate to make a date because it means asking the girl to go halves, even for a film and a pizza, which is not very romantic. So they take the initiative."
Changes in the law have also had an effect: Italy has caught up with the concept of sexual harassment, with the result, Fabio says, that Italian men have discovered "there is a fine line between making advances and molestation. Making what you think is an innocent gesture can nowadays land you in trouble."
The same evening, Rome's youngsters are gathered on the cobbled piazza of Campo de' Fiori, still in groups, though some will pair off later. In Italian socialising there is often little need to break the ice: going to a disco, club or pub is a group activity involving school or university friends, the extended family, friends of friends. Singles bars are thin on the ground in Rome, and speed-dating never really took off. Nor is there much binge drinking compared with Britain: Campo de' Fiori is lined with bars but the only people getting legless are foreigners.
In the end, though, someone has to make a play for his or her object of desire – and despite economic constraints and fear of harassment allegations, young Italian men can still cut it, according to Daniela, a blonde Alitalia stewardess. "Italian men are pretty forthright. They don't hesitate to compliment you in the street on your beauty, ciao bella and all that. They even whistle." Does she mind? "Don't be silly."
What Italian men do not do, Daniela says, is drink to work up courage. Francesca agrees. "If they did it would be counterproductive," she says, looking appalled. "If a boy came up to me and asked me out smelling of drink, I would tell him he was schifoso (disgusting)." And that would be that? "And that would be that."
Richard Owen
FRANCE
For younger Frenchmen, dalliance with the opposite sex is no longer the elegant dance of their fathers' days. A smile and a flash of wit used to go a long way, even between strangers in the street. "I used to prefer galleries and caf�s," remembers François, a lawyer in his late fifties whose recent divorce has put him back on the market. "Women were playful. There was time. Now everyone is in a rush and they are suspicious and don't flirt with strangers. You have to meet at a dinner party, and even then it can be hard work."
Nicolas, 24, an accountant in Montreuil, Paris, says that he is quite successful with women but the old pickup places such as the street or disco no longer work. "The disco is absolutely out these days. Everyone is with their mates," he says. "I have joined a salsa dance class and that's great. It's a super plan de drague (pickup method)." As for the approach, Nicolas sticks to the age-old one. "I improvise depending on the girl's personality. There's no set line. The thing is to try to make her laugh."
A common complaint from Frenchwomen young and d'un certain âge is that younger men no longer know how to make a delicate approach. "Too many guys come on heavy and they tell lies," says Mireille, a 34-year-old secretary in the posh 16th Arrondissement. Muriel, a recently divorced sales executive in her mid-forties, says: "Men nowadays don't have the old panache. They' re not romantic. They used to know how to make compliments and put you at ease.
Now they just come at you."
Christine, a publishing editor in her fifties, who has lived in London, says that there is still a big difference in the art of flirting on each side of the Channel. "Englishmen do not look at you in the street, perhaps because Englishwomen do not know what to do. Frenchwomen love being looked at. You miss it when you go abroad – those glances exchanged in the street, on public transport, the little smile of admiration," she says.
"Frenchmen still know that an admiring look flatters a woman and gives them pleasure. No more than that. It doesn't mean the man wants to put you in his bed."
Charles Bremner
AUSTRALIA
Six months ago a larrikin Australian mineworker woke after four hours' sleep, following eight at the bar, and saw a man in the mirror with a thousand-yard-glass stare.
Ian Green might finally have caught 40 winks, but none of those he gave to the girls the night before had got him a phone number. Ditto his mate, Brett – but they had a plan.
"We walked up to the shopping centre and we went, 'Righto, let's just approach 25 girls we don't know'," he says. "By the time we left we had phone numbers galore. We actually met up with two of them that night out in a club."
The 30-year-old health and safety adviser, in the macho state of Queensland, explains that the hangover has the same bracing effect as the brews that got him there – giving him that "what the hell" confidence.
Australian blokes may revel in a manly reputation and prefer – in the words of one comedian – to have their shirt ironed while it's on their back. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they would wilt in the presence of a wildflower if not for a little liquid courage.
"If you're sitting there at a barbecue, and you've got a beer, a girl's drinking the exact same drink, well then you've got something in common just to start up with," Ian says.
Jeff Cashen, of Sydney, says that most of his mates need a couple of drinks to up their swagger. But the singer-songwriter and emergency doctor says that now he's 35 years old, girls expect a more mature approach and he has studied the little black books of Neil Strauss, the American seduction artist.
"A couple of my friends have done a lot of reading on strategies. We've tried a lot of those strategies – in fact, more work than don't," he says.
One common strategy is noted by Katherine Feeney, an internet agony aunt. In this game plan, as one fella locks on to a female target, his "wingman" steps in to distract her friends with a little witty banter and, yes, a little more social lubrication. But there are some more redeeming features to the Australian – and British – male.
"There's a whole sort of larrikin spirit that you can't overlook and self-deprecating humour, which is fairly strong in Australian culture and it's accepted that that is a way to open up conversation," Katherine says. "In comparison with Poms, I have met a heap of English guys who are wittier, and that's a bit of a winner with Aussie girls, I think."
Sarah Miller, 22, of Mackay on the central coast of Queensland, agrees that confidence is the key to success in the dating game but that alcohol more often than not encourages a straight-up proposition – small talk not included.
Does she mind? "Not really, if they're hot it doesn't matter."
Paul Larter
Everything in one place… All new Windows Live!
Friday 1 February 2008
Why won't bankers say sorry?
By Martin Vander Weyer
Last Updated: 1:33am GMT 01/02/2008
Have your say Read comments
'Vampires. Assassins. Bankers," shouts a large poster in Bond Street station. On closer examination, this turns out to be an advert for Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Making Money, but I sense from passing commuters' reactions that it strikes a strong chord as a comment on current news stories.
# Robert Peston: Hedge funds are the new global super powers
# Life will get tougher, says Gordon Brown
As headline follows headline of financial catastrophe today and economic doom tomorrow, there are plenty of villains to choose from: America's (and our own) greedy, debt-laden consumers; Chancellor Alistair Darling, with his half-hearted attempt to "strengthen banking regulation" and "ensure financial stability" months after Northern Rock bolted out of the stable; Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with his Downing Street summit of European leaders discussing how to address the next market crisis when none of them have a clue how to address the current one.
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Yet among this gallery of rogues, it is the vampires and assassins of the banking world, and their cousins in the hedge fund community, who surely take the biscuit - with their ability to go so spectacularly astray in markets which they invented; their refusal to accept responsibility for damage wrought to the wider economy; and their appetite, come what may, for gross personal rewards.
I used to be a banker in my youth, and I know many of the people in that profession to be admirable, intelligent individuals. Many, I'm sure, are kind to animals; some even have social consciences. Philip Richards, the hedge fund manager and outspoken Northern Rock shareholder, is a committed Christian who speaks of "righteousness" in his approach to investment. Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, is actually an ordained Church of England minister in his spare time. Yet collectively, financiers seem to have become so punch-drunk with their own power to play God with our money that they have lost sight of the effect of their actions and reactions. Their sense of the proper relationship between risk, responsibility and reward has been overwhelmed, I fear, by their arrogant self-regard.
Take this week's news stories. First came the sad tale of pub-chain operator Mitchell & Butlers, which had been obliged by its bankers - Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland to the fore - to buy £1 billion worth of hedging contracts to protect itself against interest-rate and inflation risks connected with a deal to sell and lease back 1,300 pub properties. No need to go into the details: suffice to say that when the property deal failed to go ahead, the company had no need for the hedge, which turned into a massive one-way bet that lost M?&?B some £274 million and has left the shaken company vulnerable to takeover.
How could banking advisers have allowed a client to get into a pickle like that, and not come up with a way to get the company out of it again? How big a share of the responsibility have they admitted to? Have they volunteered to share the pain, or hand back their fees? I think we can guess the answers: bankers' legal get-out clauses are as impregnable as the vaults they keep their gold in.
Meanwhile, there had been ducking of responsibility on an even grander scale over at Société Générale. The French bank's management has long prided itself on the sophistication of its computer systems and internal controls - yet we learn that rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel claims he had been taking unauthorised trading positions for the past two years, and so had some of his colleagues, and that the Eurex derivatives exchange had been trying to warn SocGen about the extraordinary scale of Kerviel's dealings for two months before the bank finally woke up to what he was doing.
Despite these revelations, SocGen chairman Daniel Bouton remains in post - with the "unanimous" support of his board and despite messages from president Nicholas Sarkozy and finance minister Christine Lagarde that it would look better if Bouton fell on his sword. From everything we know so far, it's a fair guess that SocGen's internal controls were far from robust, that its authorised trading volumes were startlingly large in relation to its capital (hence Kerviel's book did not attract attention until someone realised it included €40 billion worth of unauthorised trades), and that, as when Barings collapsed in 1995, the senior directors really didn't understand what was going on down on the trading floor anyway: they just relished the profits. The early spin from SocGen was that Kerviel must be "a genius of fraud" to have beaten the bank's system, but the real story looks like one of catastrophic management failure. If that's so, Mr Bouton should set an example and walk the plank as soon as his dignity allows.
And no doubt when he does go, his dignity will be well looked after: an office and a limo at his disposal while he sorts out his affairs, a commodious pension package. After all, new benchmarks have just been set for rewards for boardroom failure: Chuck Prince of Citigroup and Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, respectively carrying the can for their firms' multi-billion losses on subprime mortgage debt, suffered no hardship in their recent departures. Their only difficulty will have been the matter of how, in such turbulent markets, to invest their enormous pay-offs - reported to be $42 million for Prince and more than $150 million for O'Neal. Soon another Titan may be joining them on the golf course: Marcel Ospel, chairman of the Swiss bank UBS, which has admitted to £9 billion of subprime losses so far, looks unlikely to survive a shareholders' meeting next month. But if they do defenestrate him, watch for the fluttering of another giant golden parachute.
Bankers individually are just the sort of chaps we'd all be happy to have lunch with at the club. And we should resist the Leftish urge to bash them purely because they're rich - an instinct to which, bizarrely, the celebrity gardener Monty Don gave vent on Radio 4 the other day in an outburst about how glad he was to see bankers losing money they should never have been allowed to make in the first place. No, Monty, let's leave the spirit of '68 out of this.
That said, there is still something peculiarly unattractive about the way financiers have been behaving. Other sickening lurches of the securities markets - such as the dotcom boom and bust - took place in a kind of cocoon, with little impact on ordinary economic life. But this time it's different. The spread of subprime contagion through the derivatives markets led directly to the credit crunch, making life more difficult for borrowers of all kinds; short-selling of bank shares by hedge funds was a direct contributing factor to the panic of Northern Rock depositors; speculative trading was largely responsible for the last spike of the oil price towards $100 a barrel, affecting fuel and heating costs for all of us. This time, it is the traders and financiers, more than the politicians or the central banks, who have put the global economy in peril. The least they can do is admit their responsibility, and start showing some contrition.
Last Updated: 1:33am GMT 01/02/2008
Have your say Read comments
'Vampires. Assassins. Bankers," shouts a large poster in Bond Street station. On closer examination, this turns out to be an advert for Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Making Money, but I sense from passing commuters' reactions that it strikes a strong chord as a comment on current news stories.
# Robert Peston: Hedge funds are the new global super powers
# Life will get tougher, says Gordon Brown
As headline follows headline of financial catastrophe today and economic doom tomorrow, there are plenty of villains to choose from: America's (and our own) greedy, debt-laden consumers; Chancellor Alistair Darling, with his half-hearted attempt to "strengthen banking regulation" and "ensure financial stability" months after Northern Rock bolted out of the stable; Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with his Downing Street summit of European leaders discussing how to address the next market crisis when none of them have a clue how to address the current one.
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Yet among this gallery of rogues, it is the vampires and assassins of the banking world, and their cousins in the hedge fund community, who surely take the biscuit - with their ability to go so spectacularly astray in markets which they invented; their refusal to accept responsibility for damage wrought to the wider economy; and their appetite, come what may, for gross personal rewards.
I used to be a banker in my youth, and I know many of the people in that profession to be admirable, intelligent individuals. Many, I'm sure, are kind to animals; some even have social consciences. Philip Richards, the hedge fund manager and outspoken Northern Rock shareholder, is a committed Christian who speaks of "righteousness" in his approach to investment. Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, is actually an ordained Church of England minister in his spare time. Yet collectively, financiers seem to have become so punch-drunk with their own power to play God with our money that they have lost sight of the effect of their actions and reactions. Their sense of the proper relationship between risk, responsibility and reward has been overwhelmed, I fear, by their arrogant self-regard.
Take this week's news stories. First came the sad tale of pub-chain operator Mitchell & Butlers, which had been obliged by its bankers - Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland to the fore - to buy £1 billion worth of hedging contracts to protect itself against interest-rate and inflation risks connected with a deal to sell and lease back 1,300 pub properties. No need to go into the details: suffice to say that when the property deal failed to go ahead, the company had no need for the hedge, which turned into a massive one-way bet that lost M?&?B some £274 million and has left the shaken company vulnerable to takeover.
How could banking advisers have allowed a client to get into a pickle like that, and not come up with a way to get the company out of it again? How big a share of the responsibility have they admitted to? Have they volunteered to share the pain, or hand back their fees? I think we can guess the answers: bankers' legal get-out clauses are as impregnable as the vaults they keep their gold in.
Meanwhile, there had been ducking of responsibility on an even grander scale over at Société Générale. The French bank's management has long prided itself on the sophistication of its computer systems and internal controls - yet we learn that rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel claims he had been taking unauthorised trading positions for the past two years, and so had some of his colleagues, and that the Eurex derivatives exchange had been trying to warn SocGen about the extraordinary scale of Kerviel's dealings for two months before the bank finally woke up to what he was doing.
Despite these revelations, SocGen chairman Daniel Bouton remains in post - with the "unanimous" support of his board and despite messages from president Nicholas Sarkozy and finance minister Christine Lagarde that it would look better if Bouton fell on his sword. From everything we know so far, it's a fair guess that SocGen's internal controls were far from robust, that its authorised trading volumes were startlingly large in relation to its capital (hence Kerviel's book did not attract attention until someone realised it included €40 billion worth of unauthorised trades), and that, as when Barings collapsed in 1995, the senior directors really didn't understand what was going on down on the trading floor anyway: they just relished the profits. The early spin from SocGen was that Kerviel must be "a genius of fraud" to have beaten the bank's system, but the real story looks like one of catastrophic management failure. If that's so, Mr Bouton should set an example and walk the plank as soon as his dignity allows.
And no doubt when he does go, his dignity will be well looked after: an office and a limo at his disposal while he sorts out his affairs, a commodious pension package. After all, new benchmarks have just been set for rewards for boardroom failure: Chuck Prince of Citigroup and Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, respectively carrying the can for their firms' multi-billion losses on subprime mortgage debt, suffered no hardship in their recent departures. Their only difficulty will have been the matter of how, in such turbulent markets, to invest their enormous pay-offs - reported to be $42 million for Prince and more than $150 million for O'Neal. Soon another Titan may be joining them on the golf course: Marcel Ospel, chairman of the Swiss bank UBS, which has admitted to £9 billion of subprime losses so far, looks unlikely to survive a shareholders' meeting next month. But if they do defenestrate him, watch for the fluttering of another giant golden parachute.
Bankers individually are just the sort of chaps we'd all be happy to have lunch with at the club. And we should resist the Leftish urge to bash them purely because they're rich - an instinct to which, bizarrely, the celebrity gardener Monty Don gave vent on Radio 4 the other day in an outburst about how glad he was to see bankers losing money they should never have been allowed to make in the first place. No, Monty, let's leave the spirit of '68 out of this.
That said, there is still something peculiarly unattractive about the way financiers have been behaving. Other sickening lurches of the securities markets - such as the dotcom boom and bust - took place in a kind of cocoon, with little impact on ordinary economic life. But this time it's different. The spread of subprime contagion through the derivatives markets led directly to the credit crunch, making life more difficult for borrowers of all kinds; short-selling of bank shares by hedge funds was a direct contributing factor to the panic of Northern Rock depositors; speculative trading was largely responsible for the last spike of the oil price towards $100 a barrel, affecting fuel and heating costs for all of us. This time, it is the traders and financiers, more than the politicians or the central banks, who have put the global economy in peril. The least they can do is admit their responsibility, and start showing some contrition.
Thursday 31 January 2008
Shock and Awe
by Mukul Kesavan
Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar put the BCCI on notice after Mike Procter's decision to hand Harbhajan Singh a three-Test ban © GNNphoto
The two greatest Test series India has played in recent times have been against Australia: 2001 at home and 2008, Down Under. There's a curious symmetry to these two contests: India won the first one, 2-1 and lost the second one 1-2. Harbhajan was the pivot on which both turned: as a hero in the first (he took an astonishing 32 wickets in three Tests) and as a villain in the second, after his run-in with Symonds. If the 2001 series saw the beginning of Tendulkar's transformation into an attritional player, the one just ended saw that master-craftsman persona discarded as Tendulkar went back to being the Master. And in both series India stopped a great Australian team's astonishing winning run: Waugh's team and Ponting's, were looking for a seventeenth consecutive victory and both were thwarted by unlikely defeats.
In the seven years between these two 21st century contests, international cricket was dominated by two developing narratives.
One was driven by the strength of the Indian economy, the purchasing power of its consuming middle class and the consequent and massive increase in the television revenues controlled by the BCCI. The Indian board became the paymaster of world cricket and cricket's calendar became India-centric. This made other countries understandably uneasy and when incidents like the Sehwag controversy in South Africa provoked the BCCI to flex its muscles, Anglo-Australian commentators saw not an evolutionary shift in cricket's centre of gravity, but a thuggish take over, while south Asian fans and journalists saw a western unwillingness to acknowledge the end of empire.
The second story was a growing South Asian unease with the successful Australian attempt to claim the moral high ground in world cricket. Australians don't like it but the country's cricketers are widely seen as potty-mouthed bullies who manage to get away with murder partly because they sledge strategically and partly because the Australian definition of 'hard but fair'—filth on the field and a beer off it—seemed to have been swallowed whole by the umpires and match referees who supervise international cricket. Every time Ponting tells television cameras that after 2003 the Australian team cleaned up its act and then cites figures to show that Australian players have been brought before the match referee much less often than any other major Test side, aggrieved Indian supporters put this down to Australian hegemony. They remain convinced that umpires are willing to sanction manly truculence (obscenity, lewdness and intimidation) but not shrill petulance (jack-in-box appeals, visible disappointment) because the former affects players while the latter is directed at umpires. This sense of being hard done by is reinforced by the pattern of bad decisions suffered by touring teams in Australia, Kumar Sangakkara's appalling decision being perhaps the worst in recent times.
Australian cricket is hegemonic for the best possible reasons. Australia has had the best cricket team by miles for more than ten years, its coaches have, at one time or another, have tried to drill Australian skills into other national squads, its sports science and its training methods are cutting edge and Channel 9's cricket telecast has taught the world how to cover cricket. But because its players fetishize a hardnosed take on the game, they, unlike the West Indies in their pomp, are universally unloved and in recent years the Ugly Australian stereotype has been rendered uglier by Ponting's charmless leadership.
Indians don't think much of Ponting for several reasons. His first tour was dogged by rumours of bad behaviour, his second tour was an embarrassment (he scored less than a dozen runs in three Test matches), his onfield aggression struck Indians as offensive, his unlovely habit of spitting into his palms and rubbing them together left desis wondering how he got people to shake hands with him and not only did he look remarkably like George Bush, he behaved like him too.
Bush invaded Iraq and then managed to get the invasion ratified by the United Nations after the fact. Anglo-American rhetoric about the legitimacy of pre-emptive war is similar to Australian cricket's argument that bullying (so long as it wins matches) can be justified as robustness. 'Hard and Fair' in the world defined by Bush, begins to read like 'Shock and Awe'.
It is in this charged context that the just concluded Test series between India and Australia unfolded, and in the second Test at Sydney, the two grand narratives of 21st century cricket, India's growing economic clout and Australia's cricketing hegemony, met like unsheathed live wires. It didn't help that the tension between the two teams had been personified. Sreesanth and Harbhajan Singh took it upon themselves in the recent one-day series between the two countries to answer sledging with fevered aggression. Harbhajan went on record to say that Australian behaviour was 'vulgar' and that they were bad losers. We are now told that he had a run-in with Symonds in Baroda, so when Sreesanth didn't make the squad to Australia, he was, for the Australian team, the Ugly Indian.
From the Indian point of view, the Sydney Test was a textbook illustration of the way in which an Australian series is loaded against the opposition. The Indian team got a slew of awful umpiring decisions, the Australians did their tiresome all-in-the-game-mate routine, Clarke exploited a gentleman's agreement to claim a dodgy catch, Ponting disclaimed a catch and then unsuccessfully appealed for another that he had obviously grounded (and, post-match, barked at an Indian reporter who questioned him about it), then reported Harbhajan for racially abusing Symonds.
The most satisfying part of Hansen's judgment is his characterisation of Michael Clarke as an unreliable witness © Getty Images
When Mike Procter upheld the Australian charge and banned Harbhajan for three matches he brought the two live wires into contact and the lights nearly went out on the game. Indian players have been on the receiving end of the match referee's kangaroo court before and know it to be dysfunctional. Procter is a notably inept match referee who presided over the shambles created by Darrell Hair and the Pakistan cricket team last year. For him to have taken the word of the likes of Michael Clarke, who as a batsman had stood his ground after being caught off a massive edge at slip and who as a fielder had confidently claimed a bump ball catch, over the testimony of Tendulkar who insisted he hadn't heard 'monkey' being said, was the final straw. The most satisfying part of Hansen's judgment is his characterisation of the slippery Clarke as an unreliable witness.
I think it's likely that Harbhajan called Symonds a monkey, but judgment can't be based on what I or anyone else thinks: it rests on what can be proven. There was no corroborative evidence in the Harbhajan affair and the hostilities of the Sydney Test had destroyed any trust between the two sides, leaving the Indian team in a state of thin-skinned rage at being robbed. Procter managed to compound this mess by unequivocally finding for the Australians without explaining how he had come to his conclusions.
This is when India flexed its muscle, but the 'India' in question wasn't the BCCI, it was the Indian team. Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar, the two most senior players in the Indian side, one its best bowler and the other its best batsman for nearly twenty years, put the BCCI on notice. They insisted that the Board stand by Harbhajan and made it clear that the team was unwilling to go on with the tour if Procter's decision wasn't reversed.
Journalists who think the BCCI used the occasion to assert itself are just plain wrong. The Indian board has no interest in cricket as such: witness the absurd schedule it framed for the Indian team. Left to itself, the Board would have hung Harbhajan up to dry (as it had sacrificed Bishan Bedi over the 'Vaseline' affair decades ago) and gone on with the tour: it was Tendulkar's ultimatum that goosed them into action. Press criticism of the BCCI's brinkmanship in chartering a plane to fly the team home from Adelaide if the appeal went against Harbhajan, could just as well be directed at the Indian team, because I'm certain that the old firm, Kumble & Tendulkar, had something to do with the arriving one-day specialists being quartered in Adelaide in solidarity with Harbhajan.
I suspect the reason for this last flourish was the report that Judge Hansen was likely to consider new audio evidence that had not been made available to Procter. The tapes didn't have Harbhajan saying 'monkey' but they had Hayden telling Harbhajan that a word he had used amounted to racism. My guess is that the possibility that the Australians would spin this as clinching evidence, drove Kumble and Tendulkar to circle the wagons in Adelaide. And here's the thing: it worked. The Australians agreed to press the lesser charge. Having set up this eyeballing contest, they blinked.
Is this the end of the rule of law as we know it and the onset of anarchy? No. On the evidence of the third and fourth Tests, it feels more like the dawn of a new age of civility on the ground and a possible end to sledging. There was a time in Test cricket (a very long time) when Australia and England were more equal than the rest and the game survived that asymmetry. It'll survive this one.
Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar put the BCCI on notice after Mike Procter's decision to hand Harbhajan Singh a three-Test ban © GNNphoto
The two greatest Test series India has played in recent times have been against Australia: 2001 at home and 2008, Down Under. There's a curious symmetry to these two contests: India won the first one, 2-1 and lost the second one 1-2. Harbhajan was the pivot on which both turned: as a hero in the first (he took an astonishing 32 wickets in three Tests) and as a villain in the second, after his run-in with Symonds. If the 2001 series saw the beginning of Tendulkar's transformation into an attritional player, the one just ended saw that master-craftsman persona discarded as Tendulkar went back to being the Master. And in both series India stopped a great Australian team's astonishing winning run: Waugh's team and Ponting's, were looking for a seventeenth consecutive victory and both were thwarted by unlikely defeats.
In the seven years between these two 21st century contests, international cricket was dominated by two developing narratives.
One was driven by the strength of the Indian economy, the purchasing power of its consuming middle class and the consequent and massive increase in the television revenues controlled by the BCCI. The Indian board became the paymaster of world cricket and cricket's calendar became India-centric. This made other countries understandably uneasy and when incidents like the Sehwag controversy in South Africa provoked the BCCI to flex its muscles, Anglo-Australian commentators saw not an evolutionary shift in cricket's centre of gravity, but a thuggish take over, while south Asian fans and journalists saw a western unwillingness to acknowledge the end of empire.
The second story was a growing South Asian unease with the successful Australian attempt to claim the moral high ground in world cricket. Australians don't like it but the country's cricketers are widely seen as potty-mouthed bullies who manage to get away with murder partly because they sledge strategically and partly because the Australian definition of 'hard but fair'—filth on the field and a beer off it—seemed to have been swallowed whole by the umpires and match referees who supervise international cricket. Every time Ponting tells television cameras that after 2003 the Australian team cleaned up its act and then cites figures to show that Australian players have been brought before the match referee much less often than any other major Test side, aggrieved Indian supporters put this down to Australian hegemony. They remain convinced that umpires are willing to sanction manly truculence (obscenity, lewdness and intimidation) but not shrill petulance (jack-in-box appeals, visible disappointment) because the former affects players while the latter is directed at umpires. This sense of being hard done by is reinforced by the pattern of bad decisions suffered by touring teams in Australia, Kumar Sangakkara's appalling decision being perhaps the worst in recent times.
Australian cricket is hegemonic for the best possible reasons. Australia has had the best cricket team by miles for more than ten years, its coaches have, at one time or another, have tried to drill Australian skills into other national squads, its sports science and its training methods are cutting edge and Channel 9's cricket telecast has taught the world how to cover cricket. But because its players fetishize a hardnosed take on the game, they, unlike the West Indies in their pomp, are universally unloved and in recent years the Ugly Australian stereotype has been rendered uglier by Ponting's charmless leadership.
Indians don't think much of Ponting for several reasons. His first tour was dogged by rumours of bad behaviour, his second tour was an embarrassment (he scored less than a dozen runs in three Test matches), his onfield aggression struck Indians as offensive, his unlovely habit of spitting into his palms and rubbing them together left desis wondering how he got people to shake hands with him and not only did he look remarkably like George Bush, he behaved like him too.
Bush invaded Iraq and then managed to get the invasion ratified by the United Nations after the fact. Anglo-American rhetoric about the legitimacy of pre-emptive war is similar to Australian cricket's argument that bullying (so long as it wins matches) can be justified as robustness. 'Hard and Fair' in the world defined by Bush, begins to read like 'Shock and Awe'.
It is in this charged context that the just concluded Test series between India and Australia unfolded, and in the second Test at Sydney, the two grand narratives of 21st century cricket, India's growing economic clout and Australia's cricketing hegemony, met like unsheathed live wires. It didn't help that the tension between the two teams had been personified. Sreesanth and Harbhajan Singh took it upon themselves in the recent one-day series between the two countries to answer sledging with fevered aggression. Harbhajan went on record to say that Australian behaviour was 'vulgar' and that they were bad losers. We are now told that he had a run-in with Symonds in Baroda, so when Sreesanth didn't make the squad to Australia, he was, for the Australian team, the Ugly Indian.
From the Indian point of view, the Sydney Test was a textbook illustration of the way in which an Australian series is loaded against the opposition. The Indian team got a slew of awful umpiring decisions, the Australians did their tiresome all-in-the-game-mate routine, Clarke exploited a gentleman's agreement to claim a dodgy catch, Ponting disclaimed a catch and then unsuccessfully appealed for another that he had obviously grounded (and, post-match, barked at an Indian reporter who questioned him about it), then reported Harbhajan for racially abusing Symonds.
The most satisfying part of Hansen's judgment is his characterisation of Michael Clarke as an unreliable witness © Getty Images
When Mike Procter upheld the Australian charge and banned Harbhajan for three matches he brought the two live wires into contact and the lights nearly went out on the game. Indian players have been on the receiving end of the match referee's kangaroo court before and know it to be dysfunctional. Procter is a notably inept match referee who presided over the shambles created by Darrell Hair and the Pakistan cricket team last year. For him to have taken the word of the likes of Michael Clarke, who as a batsman had stood his ground after being caught off a massive edge at slip and who as a fielder had confidently claimed a bump ball catch, over the testimony of Tendulkar who insisted he hadn't heard 'monkey' being said, was the final straw. The most satisfying part of Hansen's judgment is his characterisation of the slippery Clarke as an unreliable witness.
I think it's likely that Harbhajan called Symonds a monkey, but judgment can't be based on what I or anyone else thinks: it rests on what can be proven. There was no corroborative evidence in the Harbhajan affair and the hostilities of the Sydney Test had destroyed any trust between the two sides, leaving the Indian team in a state of thin-skinned rage at being robbed. Procter managed to compound this mess by unequivocally finding for the Australians without explaining how he had come to his conclusions.
This is when India flexed its muscle, but the 'India' in question wasn't the BCCI, it was the Indian team. Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar, the two most senior players in the Indian side, one its best bowler and the other its best batsman for nearly twenty years, put the BCCI on notice. They insisted that the Board stand by Harbhajan and made it clear that the team was unwilling to go on with the tour if Procter's decision wasn't reversed.
Journalists who think the BCCI used the occasion to assert itself are just plain wrong. The Indian board has no interest in cricket as such: witness the absurd schedule it framed for the Indian team. Left to itself, the Board would have hung Harbhajan up to dry (as it had sacrificed Bishan Bedi over the 'Vaseline' affair decades ago) and gone on with the tour: it was Tendulkar's ultimatum that goosed them into action. Press criticism of the BCCI's brinkmanship in chartering a plane to fly the team home from Adelaide if the appeal went against Harbhajan, could just as well be directed at the Indian team, because I'm certain that the old firm, Kumble & Tendulkar, had something to do with the arriving one-day specialists being quartered in Adelaide in solidarity with Harbhajan.
I suspect the reason for this last flourish was the report that Judge Hansen was likely to consider new audio evidence that had not been made available to Procter. The tapes didn't have Harbhajan saying 'monkey' but they had Hayden telling Harbhajan that a word he had used amounted to racism. My guess is that the possibility that the Australians would spin this as clinching evidence, drove Kumble and Tendulkar to circle the wagons in Adelaide. And here's the thing: it worked. The Australians agreed to press the lesser charge. Having set up this eyeballing contest, they blinked.
Is this the end of the rule of law as we know it and the onset of anarchy? No. On the evidence of the third and fourth Tests, it feels more like the dawn of a new age of civility on the ground and a possible end to sledging. There was a time in Test cricket (a very long time) when Australia and England were more equal than the rest and the game survived that asymmetry. It'll survive this one.
Tuesday 29 January 2008
Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich
It's easy to blame the poor for growing pressure on the world's resources. But still the wealthy west takes the lion's share
George Monbiot
Tuesday January 29, 2008
The Guardian
I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is "our number one environmental problem". But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that "people like us are breeding too fast". For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasised, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) cites some shocking figures, produced by the UN. They show that if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300. But this is plainly absurd: no one expects it to happen. In 2005, the UN estimated that the world's population will more or less stabilise in 2200 at 10 billion. But a paper published in Nature last week suggests that there is an 88% chance that global population growth will end during this century.
In other words, if we accept the UN's projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources. But compare this rate of increase with the rate of economic growth.
Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by about 1,600%. As the equations produced by Professor Roderick Smith of Imperial College have shown, this means that in the 21st century we will have used 16 times as many economic resources as human beings have consumed since we came down from the trees.
So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3,200%, by 2138 to 6,400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat.
Those who emphasise the dangers of population growth maintain that times have changed: they are not concerned only with population growth in the poor world, but primarily with growth in the rich world, where people consume much more. The OPT maintains that the "global environmental impact of an inhabitant of Bangladesh ... will increase by a factor of 16 if he or she emigrates to the USA". This is surely not quite true, as recent immigrants tend to be poorer than the native population, but the general point stands: population growth in the rich world, largely driven by immigration, is more environmentally damaging than an increase in population in the poor world. In the US and the UK, their ecological impact has become another stick with which immigrants can be beaten.
But growth rates in the US and UK are atypical; even the OPT concedes that by 2050 "the population of the most developed countries is expected to remain almost unchanged, at 1.2 billion". The population of the EU 25 (the first 25 nations to join the union) is likely to decline by 7 million.
This, I accept, is of little consolation to people in the UK, where the government now expects numbers to rise from 61 million to 77 million by 2050. Eighty per cent of the growth here, according to the OPT, is the direct or indirect result of immigration (recent arrivals tend to produce more children). Migrationwatch UK claims that migrants bear much of the responsibility for Britain's housing crisis. A graph on its website suggests that without them the rate of housebuilding in England between 1997 and 2004 would have exceeded new households by 20,000-40,000 a year.
Is this true? According to the Office for National Statistics, average net immigration to the UK between 1997 and 2004 was 153,000. Let us (generously) assume that 90% of these people settled in England, and that their household size corresponded to the average for 2004, of 2.3. This would mean that new immigrants formed 60,000 households a year. The Barker Review, commissioned by the Treasury, shows that in 2002, the nearest available year, 138,000 houses were built in England, while over the 10 years to 2000, average household formation was 196,000. This rough calculation suggests that Migrationwatch is exaggerating, but that immigration is still an important contributor to housing pressure. But even total population growth in England is responsible for only about 35% of the demand for homes. Most of the rest is the result of the diminishing size of households.
Surely there is one respect in which the growing human population constitutes the primary threat? The amount of food the world eats bears a direct relationship to the number of mouths. After years of glut, the storerooms are suddenly empty and grain prices are rocketing. How will another 3 billion be fed?
Even here, however, population growth is not the most immediate issue: another sector is expanding much faster. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation expects that global meat production will double by 2050 - growing, in other words, at two and a half times the rate of human numbers. The supply of meat has already trebled since 1980: farm animals now take up 70% of all agricultural land and eat one third of the world's grain. In the rich nations we consume three times as much meat and four times as much milk per capita as the people of the poor world. While human population growth is one of the factors that could contribute to a global food deficit, it is not the most urgent.
None of this means that we should forget about it. Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts. But to suggest, as many of my correspondents do, that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.
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Sunday 27 January 2008
Lebensraum and Genocide - by Arundhati Roy
Listening To Grasshoppers
Genocide, Denial And Celebration
It's an old human habit, genocide is. It's a search for lebensraum, project of Union and Progress.
ARUNDHATI ROY I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one".*
[*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]
"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail.
And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."
Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.
This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.
I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.
The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really don't know which is worse.
In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002.I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes.
Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'. To seal the 'normality', in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India's leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital.
The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.
As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India.
It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:
Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).
All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:
And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:
I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial.
Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."
Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United Nations.The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might.
In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).
In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn't intend to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population).
None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts."The question is," says Robert MacNamara—whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank—now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, "the question is, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?"
Could there be a more perfect illustration of Robert Jay Lifton's point that the denial of genocide invites more genocide?
And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation of water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates Palestinian people from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children's schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow motion—meant especially to illustrate that section of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says that genocide is any act that is designed to "deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part".
The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system. It's a habit as old, as persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and agriculture.
Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.
The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.
Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis' racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated in age-old racism, very much in keeping with European tradition of the time.
It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress.'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.
Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.
Advani's chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched
In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun.
It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Government of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often referring to itself as the 'natural ally' of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common—all three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the US in Iraq.)
Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections, they stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The Union project offers Hindu Nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Progress project aims at a 10 per cent annual growth rate. Both these projects are encrypted with genocidal potential.
The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:
Then:
And again:
(How do you combat this kind of organised hatred? Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular love.)
By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva—the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery.
But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level of society, something that no other organisation can claim.
The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch).
Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on...
On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. Its first act in office was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu Bomb. Hindutva had transcended petty party politics.
In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the dock.
Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.India has a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details.
In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply through proper channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder.
Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who had made the mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow Congressman.) In the words of a man who took part in the savagery:
The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place.
The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises, but eventually put the matter into cold storage. The Congress and the Communist parties made a great deal of noise, but did nothing.
In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but suspicion about its timing. Most people believed that the expose would help Modi win the elections again. Some even believed, quite outlandishly, that he had engineered the sting. He did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists. These are the joys of democracy. Who in Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler mask?
The Dehumanised: Dalit massacre, Jehanabad, 1997 Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.
To commit genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar of the Armenian genocide, you have to marginalise a sub-group for a long time. This criterion has been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been systematically marginalised and have now joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have not just been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste Hindu society and its scriptures, for years, for centuries. (There was a time when they were dehumanised in order to be put to work doing things that caste Hindus would not do.Now, with technology, even that labour is becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's work involves setting Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis against Dalits.
While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation.
The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the Supreme Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide—a prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to criticise the court is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment).
Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'
But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum. Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The Sky Citizens look towards the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime land, which really ought to be a chemical hub. They see thousands of acres of farm land, and think, these really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries; they see the rich fields of Singur and know this really ought to be a car factory for the People's Car. They think: that's our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are those people doing on our land? What's our water doing in their rivers? What's our timber doing in their trees?
If you look at a map of India's forests, its mineral wealth and the homelands of the Adivasi people, you'll see that they're stacked up over each other.So, in reality, those who we call poor are the truly wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a phrase for them—überzahligen Essern, superfluous eaters.
The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become Terrorists.) Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off."
The historian Mike Davis says that between 12 million and 29 million people starved to death in India in the great famine between 1876 and 1892, while Britain continued to export food and raw material from India. In a democracy, Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have Famine. So in place of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great Malnutrition. (India hosts 57 million—more than a third—of the world's undernourished children.)
Nandigram 2007: Even the CPI(M) has its own armed militia
With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even the CPI(M) had its own armed militia.) The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.
In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its wealth of iron ore, there's a different technique. In the name of fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved into police camps. The government is arming some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a 'people's militia'. While the poorest fight the poorest, in conditions that approach civil war, the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can we establish a connection? We wouldn't dream of it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a day after the Memorandum of Understanding between the Tata Group and the government was signed.
It's not surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into the version of the New India currently on the market. That's because what is on sale is another form of denial—the creation of what Robert Jay Lifton calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe, systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable to flawed individuals, and a more 'balanced' happier world is presented in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and Progress are set off against each other, a liberal-secular critique of the Union project being used to legitimise the depredations of the Progress project. Those at the top of the food chain, those who have no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to be the manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".Their job is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegitimise anger, and broker a ceasefire.
Consider the response of Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra Modi. "I don't know him personally...I have no opinion...," he says. "Personally they have never been unkind to me." Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, a corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book—as well as in a series of highly publicised interviews—that the Gujarat government is not really fascist, and the genocide was just an aberration that has corrected itself after elections.
Editors and commentators in the 'secular' national press, having got over their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. The editor of The Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass murderer, but he's our mass murderer", and went on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a "good" chief minister.
In this 'counterfeit' version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by ngos.)
Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool room in which four beautiful young girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were lounging, introducing their puppies to one another. One of them turned to me and said, "I was on holiday with my family and I found an old essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he knew about what a bad time these Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced and all.... I mean just being kicked out of their homes 'n stuff like that? And you know, my brother's such a jerk, he said they're the ones who are holding India back. They should be exterminated. Can you imagine?"
The trouble is, I could. I can.
The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine exterminating each other. They're probably not progressive enough.
That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, appearing in a commercial for The Times of India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV anchor introducing the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to leave behind the "constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over pessimism.
"There are two Indias in this country," Amitabh Bachchan said, in his famous baritone.
And finally:
Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare.It tells us that the rich don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'. They're already ghosts.
"Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert Jay Lifton says, "genocide becomes easy, almost natural."
The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world's not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: 'There Is No Alternative.'
They have watched the great Gandhian people's movements being reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they're already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.
Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalise the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists are ogws—overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience, liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help them now. They know no international marches, no globalised dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.
Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of India's democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the government's control. (At last count, it was supposed to be 25 per cent). The battle stinks of death, it's by no means pretty. How can it be when the helmsman of the army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don't know who he is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists fighting for a Better World? Well... anything is better than annihilation.
The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the "single largest internal security threat". There have even been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation.
Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.
"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out".
Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced with extermination, they have the right to fight back.By any means necessary.
Perhaps they've been listening to the grasshoppers.
This is an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.
She said what? About who? Shameful celebrity quotes on Search Star!
Genocide, Denial And Celebration
It's an old human habit, genocide is. It's a search for lebensraum, project of Union and Progress.
ARUNDHATI ROY I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one".*
[*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]
***
In a way, my battle is like yours.
But while in Turkey there's silence,
in India, there is celebration.
***
"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail.
And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."
Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.
This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.
I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.
***
Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards
has been part of Europe's search for lebensraum.
***
The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really don't know which is worse.
In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002.I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes.
Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'. To seal the 'normality', in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India's leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital.
The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.
As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India.
It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:
"Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).
All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:
Those that escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice....
And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:
We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire...hacked, burned, set on fire...we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it.... I have just one last wish...let me be sentenced to death...I don't care if I'm hanged...just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay...I will finish them off...let a few more of them die...at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.
I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial.
Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."
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| Delhi, 1984: Congress contribution to India's genocide history |
In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).
In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn't intend to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population).
None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts."The question is," says Robert MacNamara—whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank—now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, "the question is, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?"
Could there be a more perfect illustration of Robert Jay Lifton's point that the denial of genocide invites more genocide?
And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation of water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates Palestinian people from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children's schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow motion—meant especially to illustrate that section of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says that genocide is any act that is designed to "deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part".
The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system. It's a habit as old, as persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and agriculture.
Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.
The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.
Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis' racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated in age-old racism, very much in keeping with European tradition of the time.
It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress.'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.
Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.
Advani's chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched
In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun.
It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Government of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often referring to itself as the 'natural ally' of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common—all three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the US in Iraq.)
Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections, they stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The Union project offers Hindu Nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Progress project aims at a 10 per cent annual growth rate. Both these projects are encrypted with genocidal potential.
The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:
Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.
Then:
In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation.... All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots....
The foreign races in Hindustan...may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen's rights.
And again:
To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews.Race pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.
(How do you combat this kind of organised hatred? Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular love.)
By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva—the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery.
But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level of society, something that no other organisation can claim.
The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch).
Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on...
On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. Its first act in office was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu Bomb. Hindutva had transcended petty party politics.
In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the dock.
Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.India has a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details.
In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply through proper channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder.
Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who had made the mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow Congressman.) In the words of a man who took part in the savagery:
Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword...chopped off his hand, then his legs...then everything else...after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive.
The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place.
The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises, but eventually put the matter into cold storage. The Congress and the Communist parties made a great deal of noise, but did nothing.
In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but suspicion about its timing. Most people believed that the expose would help Modi win the elections again. Some even believed, quite outlandishly, that he had engineered the sting. He did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists. These are the joys of democracy. Who in Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler mask?
The Dehumanised: Dalit massacre, Jehanabad, 1997 Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.
To commit genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar of the Armenian genocide, you have to marginalise a sub-group for a long time. This criterion has been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been systematically marginalised and have now joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have not just been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste Hindu society and its scriptures, for years, for centuries. (There was a time when they were dehumanised in order to be put to work doing things that caste Hindus would not do.Now, with technology, even that labour is becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's work involves setting Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis against Dalits.
While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation.
The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the Supreme Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide—a prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to criticise the court is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment).
Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'
But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum. Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The Sky Citizens look towards the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime land, which really ought to be a chemical hub. They see thousands of acres of farm land, and think, these really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries; they see the rich fields of Singur and know this really ought to be a car factory for the People's Car. They think: that's our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are those people doing on our land? What's our water doing in their rivers? What's our timber doing in their trees?
If you look at a map of India's forests, its mineral wealth and the homelands of the Adivasi people, you'll see that they're stacked up over each other.So, in reality, those who we call poor are the truly wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a phrase for them—überzahligen Essern, superfluous eaters.
The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become Terrorists.) Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off."
The historian Mike Davis says that between 12 million and 29 million people starved to death in India in the great famine between 1876 and 1892, while Britain continued to export food and raw material from India. In a democracy, Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have Famine. So in place of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great Malnutrition. (India hosts 57 million—more than a third—of the world's undernourished children.)
Nandigram 2007: Even the CPI(M) has its own armed militia
With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even the CPI(M) had its own armed militia.) The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.
In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its wealth of iron ore, there's a different technique. In the name of fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved into police camps. The government is arming some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a 'people's militia'. While the poorest fight the poorest, in conditions that approach civil war, the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can we establish a connection? We wouldn't dream of it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a day after the Memorandum of Understanding between the Tata Group and the government was signed.
It's not surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into the version of the New India currently on the market. That's because what is on sale is another form of denial—the creation of what Robert Jay Lifton calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe, systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable to flawed individuals, and a more 'balanced' happier world is presented in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and Progress are set off against each other, a liberal-secular critique of the Union project being used to legitimise the depredations of the Progress project. Those at the top of the food chain, those who have no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to be the manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".Their job is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegitimise anger, and broker a ceasefire.
Consider the response of Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra Modi. "I don't know him personally...I have no opinion...," he says. "Personally they have never been unkind to me." Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, a corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book—as well as in a series of highly publicised interviews—that the Gujarat government is not really fascist, and the genocide was just an aberration that has corrected itself after elections.
Editors and commentators in the 'secular' national press, having got over their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. The editor of The Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass murderer, but he's our mass murderer", and went on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a "good" chief minister.
In this 'counterfeit' version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by ngos.)
Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool room in which four beautiful young girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were lounging, introducing their puppies to one another. One of them turned to me and said, "I was on holiday with my family and I found an old essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he knew about what a bad time these Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced and all.... I mean just being kicked out of their homes 'n stuff like that? And you know, my brother's such a jerk, he said they're the ones who are holding India back. They should be exterminated. Can you imagine?"
The trouble is, I could. I can.
The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine exterminating each other. They're probably not progressive enough.
That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, appearing in a commercial for The Times of India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV anchor introducing the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to leave behind the "constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over pessimism.
"There are two Indias in this country," Amitabh Bachchan said, in his famous baritone.
One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The Other India is the leash.
One India says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself."
The Other India says, "Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you'll have a chance."
One India lives in the optimism of our hearts; the Other India lurks in the scepticism of our minds.
One India wants, the Other India hopes... One India leads, the Other India follows.
These conversions are on the rise.
With each passing day, more and more people from the Other India are coming over to this side. ...
And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic, new India is emerging.
And finally:
Now in our 60th year as a free nation, the ride has brought us to the edge of time's great precipice....
And one India, a tiny little voice in the back of the head is looking down at the ravine and hesitating. The Other India is looking up at the sky and saying it's time to fly.
Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare.It tells us that the rich don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'. They're already ghosts.
"Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert Jay Lifton says, "genocide becomes easy, almost natural."
The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world's not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: 'There Is No Alternative.'
They have watched the great Gandhian people's movements being reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they're already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.
Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalise the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists are ogws—overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience, liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help them now. They know no international marches, no globalised dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.
Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of India's democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the government's control. (At last count, it was supposed to be 25 per cent). The battle stinks of death, it's by no means pretty. How can it be when the helmsman of the army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don't know who he is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists fighting for a Better World? Well... anything is better than annihilation.
The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the "single largest internal security threat". There have even been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation.
Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.
This government is at last showing some sense in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state governments to "choke" Naxal infrastructure and "cripple" their activities through a dedicated force to eliminate the "virus". It signalled a realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out through enforcement of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.
"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out".
Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced with extermination, they have the right to fight back.By any means necessary.
Perhaps they've been listening to the grasshoppers.
This is an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.
She said what? About who? Shameful celebrity quotes on Search Star!
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