On Batting: Go forward, not back

Why an initial back-foot trigger movement may not be a great idea

Sanjay Manjrekar

December 18, 2013

 

Alastair Cook: too late into position in Perth © Getty Images

A fireman once said, "We are crazy guys, you know. When a house is on fire, people are running out and we are running in." A batsman has to do something similar when a bowler like Mitchell Johnson is steaming in, hurling thunderbolts at 150kph.

Like for the firemen, it is like an inferno approaching a batsman from 22 yards away, and like the fireman, the batsman has a job to do, and it does not include running away. Watching some of the England batsmen in this Ashes series, I have been reminded of this analogy.

When Johnson runs in to bowl, they take a significant step backwards in the crease before the ball is delivered. That is fine when the ball is short, but when it is full - and Johnson bowls a lot of those along with bouncers - they become extremely vulnerable, as we have seen.

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Also Read - Martin Crowe on Gavaskar's technique

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Look at Alastair Cook's dismissal in the first innings in Adelaide and in the second in Perth. Both times, the ball was pitched up, but he was just too late to get into position to defend it solidly, which would not have been the case if they were short deliveries. We talk about how great those deliveries from Johnson and Ryan Harris were, and they were good, especially the Harris one in the second innings in Perth, but if Cook had got forward to them quicker, they would have been just two other pitched-up balls that a batsman defended safely.

I am not a big fan of the big back-foot movement - the one batsmen make with their feet before the ball is delivered - unless it's made in order to propel another movement forward. Both the England openers have that initial back-foot movement and only when are set do they use it to spring forward - until then, they seem to hang back a bit and so become vulnerable to balls pitched up, and miss a few scoring opportunities to balls pitched up.

	A short, quick delivery is best handled by a batsman when he is reacting instinctively to it - whether he is playing an attacking shot or defending

With a big initial back-foot movement, you are committing yourself completely to a delivery of a particular length, short. So when the ball is short you seem to have plenty of time to play it, but when it is full you are invariably late on it, and if your luck as a batsman has run out, as Cook found out, that full, seaming ball will come early in the innings, hit the right spot and get through your defence.

As a batsman you ideally want the smallest trigger movement, so that you are prepared for all kinds of lengths and lines. In this Ashes, Michael Clarke, Steve Smith, Joe Root, and also Ben Stokes, have shown that kind of technique, with no pronounced prior commitment to any length. Because of that they have looked much better positioned to balls that are pitched up. Batsmen make the initial move in the crease because that way they feel they are setting themselves up for the challenge. Very often it's just a matter of "mental preparedness". Some do it to be in a good position to face a particular kind of delivery that they feel they are susceptible to.

My view is that if you have to move your feet before the ball is released, it's better to have a front-foot movement instead of a back-foot one: looking to move forward before the ball is bowled rather than back. That way, you are better prepared to handle the ball that gets most batsmen out in this game - the one that is full in length.

What about the short ball then, you ask? Doesn't the front-foot movement make you a sitting duck against it? Well, there you need to trust the instincts that we have all been gifted with as human beings, born of our evolution over millions of years and our survival instincts against physical threats. That short ball from a fast bowler is a physical threat to a batsman. Look at how batsmen react to a short ball from a spinner as opposed to one from a fast bowler.

	Batsmen like Hashim Amla have shown you can be extremely successful with big initial back-foot movements © AFP  Enlarge

As a batsman you will be amazed at how quickly you get on the back foot - though you are telling yourself to go forward - when the ball is short and quick. This back-foot movement happens automatically; it is a case of natural instinct taking over. My argument is, why deliberately try to do something that is going to happen automatically; instead, why not train yourself to do something that is against your instinct? Like getting forward to a fast bowler, because the ball that is pitched up is the one that's most likely to get you out.

The other great benefit in trying to get forward is, that way you also handle the short ball better. I believe that a short, quick delivery is best handled by a batsman when he is reacting instinctively to it - whether he is playing an attacking shot or defending.

During the course of my batting career I had two distinct phases, one when I handled the short ball well and the other when I didn't. It was quite obvious to me that when I was in good form and in a good frame of mind I would look to go towards the fast bowler, try to get on the front foot, and that was when I handled the short ball comfortably. When you are looking to get forward, the head tends to stay forward, and with it the body weight. That is the perfect kind of balance you want to have as a batsman, whether you are playing off front foot or back.

When you are out of form, with a big back-foot movement, the head tends to stay back that fraction of a second longer, and because you are expecting a short ball, the head also stays quite high, which means you are poorly prepared for the full delivery.

Having said all this, there are still many extremely successful contemporary batsmen, like Hashim Amla, Graeme Smith, and Cook himself, who have big back-foot movements. Their success can be attributed to all the other strengths they have brought into play to succeed, but you will see even they look vulnerable early in the innings to balls that are pitched up and seaming.

As a batsman you should have a technique you can fall back on when you are out of form and low on confidence. Your other strengths will have deserted you by then, and your technique will be the only thing you can count on. You need a technique that can get you back into form from a bad patch, and that's where I have a problem with the big back-foot trigger movement.

Cricket - The Gavaskar lesson on batting

The new breed of Indian batsmen need to carry the flame that Sunny, Sachin, and Rahul kept burning for so long

Martin Crowe in Cricinfo

December 17, 2013

 

	Sunil Gavaskar: Head still, feet at the ready, moving according to the movement of the ball © Getty Images  Enlarge

Wisdom is priceless. When you get on a learning path, it is the best time of your life. Every day means something, every lesson provides the clarity you clamour for. You move forward, evolve, grow, and become more fulfilled as the big picture, the dream even, emerges from the shadows and into the light.

I will never forget the moments when I had the opportunity to acquire a touch of acumen, a piece of pure pansophy (Pansophism, in older usage often pansophy, is a concept of omniscience, meaning "all-knowing". In some monotheistic belief systems, a god is referred as the ultimate knowing spirit.). I was desperate to get a heads-up on life, especially about how to bat at the highest level. And so when I heard or saw that a walking encyclopedia on batting was nearby I went on a mission to trap the great man, whoever and wherever he was.

It started with meeting many fine players during my scholarship year at Lord's at age 17, under the watchful care of coach Don Wilson. I brushed up to Colin Cowdrey, Geoff Boycott, Fred Trueman and more, as Old England toured the land. Among the stories of endeavour they would tell were pearls of wisdom. It was an informal education on how to play the game.

When I returned a year later in 1982 and took up the groundsman-and-overseas-player role at Bradford's Park Avenue in North Yorkshire, I didn't quite realise how lucky I would be. When India played Yorkshire that summer, they did so on my patch and dubiously prepared pitch. This was where I met Sunil Gavaskar, one of the all-time greats and at the time the best player in the world alongside Viv Richards. I had to get inside this man's head, even if for a minute.

Being the groundsman gave me the chance. Over the four-day fixture I picked my moment and swooped like a vulture. "Sir, when playing the Windies, what is the single most important thing you must do to combat their pace and bounce?"

"Son, it's your eyes. Before I go out to bat, I find a wall and position into my stance with my right ear hard up against the wall. By doing this I feel my head and eyes level, my balance perfect, my feet light and ready to move. The wall is ensuring that I stay still. In the middle I pretend the wall is still there. Head position and balance. From there my eyes are in the best position to see the ball and to stay watching it until the shot is played."

Minutes later, back in the dusty shed, I found my wall. I could stand in position forever, my balance perfect. The mind and body got used to the balance, the more I did it. It was a lustrous piece of advice I never ever forgot. When my form dropped I went back to Gavaskar's elementary instruction.

Whenever I watched Sachin Tendulkar I thought he must have spoken to Sunny about the same thing, for Sachin always displayed a still, balanced stance and head position.

Now it's up to others to carry the torch. In the cauldron of South Africa it's up to a new breed of Indian batsmen to carry the baton that Sunny and Sachin did so incredibly, for so long.

These two men are not tall, so bounce was always their greatest enemy. Yet they trusted that if they saw the ball in a balanced position, with feet at the ready, they would move according to the movement of the ball, whatever shape that took. Eyes, then footwork. In that split second, once they saw the trajectory, the feet went to work, allowing the eyes to stay watching.

Dealing with bounce became just another obstacle, another movement to deal with. The key was their mental strength to clear the mind of any doubt, any second- guessing. When I first played West Indies, in Port-of-Spain, I assumed I needed to be ready a split second early, so I started moving before I saw the ball. I got 3 and 2 as Holding and Marshall easily trapped a moving, nervous target. It was a hopeless performance.

I went back to Sunny's sage advice and used the wall technique. A week later, in Georgetown, albeit on a flatter track that gave me a chance to build a more positive mindset, I batted so much better. After that I realised fully what Sunny had meant. It was the start of my international career proper.

	India's top five need to work out what shots are working for them and what shots are too risky. Importantly, they need to get a feel for the occasion

Over the next month, against Steyn, Philander and Morkel, India can counter the home advantage, the pace and bounce, the second-guessing. Firstly, they must have a premise for success, and Sunny and Sachin, their master predecessors, have paved the way. They did it, and therefore it can be done again. They must draw upon that wisdom and apply it to their own game.

It takes courage to stay still with the head and trust the footwork when time is of the essence. You buy time when you see it early and play it late. It is when you see it late and play it early that the wheels fall off. Also, as Sunny, Sachin and Rahul Dravid proved, there are points where you have to be prepared to wear the opposition down, mentally and physically. You have to be patient. This way you can break it down to only the one ball that comes at you, one five-second block of concentration to deal with. Then another, and another.

Obviously, all this has to be done collectively, as a batting unit. The mind can deceive you when wickets are falling at the end, no matter how well you may have a grasp on your own situation. It has to be a combined commitment to fully embracing the challenge and working on the response.

Playing shots is important, as long as they are the right shots. You can't play them all. It's not like a T20 match. India's top five need to work out what shots are working for them and what shots are too risky. Importantly, they need to get a feel for the occasion, the opposition, the pitch, the air in which the ball travels quicker, especially in Johannesburg. They don't have much practice or time to get ready, given the nature of tours these days. So they must prepare in the mind and the imagination is perfectly equipped to provide a sense of calm within, before facing the heat in the middle.

For the top three, Dhawan, Vijay and Pujara, they only need to imagine Dravid in battle mode. He was the wall for a good reason. Rahul backed his eyes and his feet. For Rohit Sharma and Kohli it will be Sachin they can remind themselves of. These two icons showed time and again how it can be done, and those two learnt from Sunny, the master of compiling long innings against the might Windies.

Life is not about doing it alone. It's about learning from those who have already climbed great heights, and adding that history to one's own make up. Combining the love of the game and one's own ability with the wisdom of the ages is the essence of what we are here to do.

South Africa will throw all they have into these next two Tests. They are the No. 1 Test side by a long stretch. They have been messed around recently regarding this tour. They are highly motivated, there is no doubt. And they will steam in.

India need to provide the wall of resilience. Sunny used it, Sachin breathed it, Rahul was it. Kohli and Co can prosper by adding another brick in the wall of Indian batting mastery.

So what if the pope were a Marxist?

By querying the the absolute autonomy of the marketplace, Pope Francis is hardly making a radical critique. But such 'red scares' have long history

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • theguardian.com, Monday 16 December 2013 18.35 GMT

Pope Francis has been denounced as a Marxist by rightwingers for criticising 'unfettered capitalism'. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis

Some of his best friends are Marxists, Pope Francis announced last week. Well, not quite, but he has insisted that he knows some "Marxists who are good people". While making it clear that "Marxist ideology is wrong", the pontiff claimed he wasn't offended by being denounced as a Marxist by the US shock-jock, Rush Limbaugh. The conservative radio host and other rabid free-market ideologues have taken umbrage at the recent "apostolic exhortation" which criticised "unfettered capitalism" and the "globalisation of indifference" it has created.

The use of "Marxist" as a slur – along with kindred terms such as "socialist" and "communist" – is not a uniquely American phenomenon but is most familiar to us from the era of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, established in 1938 and, later, Joseph McCarthy's committee.

In that context, and during the "red scares" which followed it during the cold war, these were appellations used to identify and punish any criticism of capitalism, however sympathetic or merely reformist. Indeed, any dissent from mainstream dogma was "un-American".

America's first "red scare" took place in the wake of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution. To be a dissident from capitalism in any degree was to be a socialist or a "commie" and, therefore, "anti-American": the net of denunciation was cast wide enough to include immigrants, conscientious objectors, blacks and Jews.

American public culture is saturated with stories of "commie plots" and conspiracies and many, like the Hollywood Ten, the playwright Lillian Hellman, the actor Paul Robeson, and the writer Richard Wright were famously blacklisted for alleged communist connections. Even Martin Luther King has been accused of Marxism, as has John Kerry and, more recently, President Barack Obama was denounced as a "socialist" for bringing less well-off Americans into the ambit of corporate, very much capitalist, healthcare provision.

In Britain, while many Victorian liberals and radicals were careful to distance themselves from socialism, engagement with both Marxism and socialism has been historically less hostile than in the US. Nevertheless, the use of Marxist as an insult also indicating a treasonous lack of patriotism has been stepped up in recent years, featuring most prominently in the attacks on Ralph Miliband as "the man who hated Britain".

It is no accident that such terms are deliberately deployed as pejoratives at a time when an unregulated, rampant capitalism and its ideologues are in the dominant position but also fear growing unpopularity and subsequent challenge. In this context, "Marxism" refers not merely to thinking influenced by Karl Marx's magisterial three volumes laying bare the unavoidable exploitation at the heart of capitalism – it becomes a random, ill-conceived slur to stave off any and all criticism of its operations.

For a mainstream and still fundamentally conservative figure, Pope Francis has indeed gone further than many by poking the sacred cow that is trickle-down economics and querying "the absolute autonomy of the marketplace". These are not radical critiques of capitalism and have been made before by many, including Keynesian economists who would not consider themselves at all anti-capitalist but are more concerned with saving the system from its own ravages.

While Francis now appears to boldly advocate a church that is poor and "for the poor", he isn't about to tear up the Vatican's vast investment portfolio. We can welcoming the opening that his exhortation has provided for a discussion of the economic regime under which we labour and from which a few profit much more than others. Yet, it is also important to recognise that such criticism is of the sort which ultimately seeks to inoculate capitalism from disastrous meltdown by feeding it measured doses of healthy caution.

Perhaps it is time to properly revisit Marx's own insights into the workings of capitalism and ask how these remain relevant to understanding how the global economy functions. The pope's denunciation of the way in which "human beings are themselves considered consumer goods" was much more thoroughly anticipated in Marx's brilliant analysis of the commodity form which saw this process as central to capitalism, not merely an unhappy side effect of poor regulation.

"Exclusion" and "inequality" are similarly not happenstance spin-offs from a "new tyranny"; they are fundamental to a now old economic dynamic which seeks to concentrate the wealth in a few palms by extracting the labour from many hands. Of course capitalism is rife with "moral corruption", but we would also do well to look at how inequality is central to its very material workings.

There can be no moral regeneration that is not also a complete rejection of capitalism's essential immorality. It is futile to keep talking of "including the poor" within the ambit of capitalist opportunity: any good capitalist like our chancellor, George Osborne, understands very well that inequality and impoverishment (codename "austerity") is absolutely central to the creation and concentration of wealth. Anything less is simply to further the politics of illusion.

Un-bankable institutions

BILL KIRKMAN

   

 

If the deteriorating faith in banks is to be checked, immediate, and effective, changes in the system are necessary.

What do I expect of my bank? Thirty years ago, my answer to that rhetorical question would have been simple: I expect financial expertise and complete trustworthiness in the provision of a service. My answer to the question today is far less reassuring. I have grave doubts about the bank’s financial expertise. I view the behaviour of the bank’s officials as dubious, to put it mildly — and I would be most reluctant to approach a bank for financial advice.

That may be an over-reaction, but of course it reflects an attitude induced by the latest banking scandal: the behaviour of the Co-operative Bank, and its (now departed) chairman, the Reverend Paul Flowers, a Methodist Minister.

The story of what has happened with the bank, leaving aside the personal scandals of Mr. Flowers, is scarcely credible. It is a story of bad judgments, notably over its merger in 2008 with the Britannia Building Society, and its failed attempt to take over 631 branches from Lloyds Banking Group. Apart from bad financial judgments, it is also a story of weak management. There is a complication because of the links between the bank and the Labour Party, which has benefited from favourable loans from the Bank, which are inevitably now under scrutiny. To put it bluntly and simply, the whole thing is a right mess.

At a certain level, it is easy to apportion blame. For example, it has emerged, as the story has unfolded, that Mr. Flowers had very limited financial knowledge. When one begins to consider that, it quite quickly becomes clear that there are serious failures in regulation to be taken into account. Why, for instance, was the appointment of Mr. Flowers allowed by the Financial Services Authority (replaced now by the Financial Conduct Authority), given his rudimentary financial knowledge? Why did the Co-op Bank not have on its management board people from outside the Co-op, with financial experience?

I wrote early in this article that my expectation of what service will be provided by a bank is inevitably coloured by the fact that there has been a galaxy of banking scandals and crises in recent years. Banks have collapsed, and have had to be rescued by government. Senior bank staff have had to leave their jobs in disgrace. Not surprisingly, all this has led to great public suspicion of banks. No longer are they seen as monuments of financial expertise, led by people with impeccable credentials, and unchallengeable skill.

Negative public attitudes have been exacerbated by the way in which many senior bankers have been demanding vast salaries, and unbelievably high bonuses. The question raised, obviously, is salaries for doing what.

There is another issue which affects public attitudes. One has to recognise, of course, that many of the services that banks provide are not services to “domestic” customers. The fact remains that many of the “domestic” services are becoming less easily accessible except online. Many local bank branches are being shut. The reasons are clear, and probably realistic. The changes, however, do not enhance the respect which ordinary people feel for banks.

It is clearly important to clean up, and effectively regulate, the banks, so as to ensure that another Co-op situation cannot occur. Part of that regulation must include insisting that the board of a bank must include people with full banking skills — and must include also outsiders with such skills. Part of the problem at the Co-op arose from the fact that the Co-operative movement is a partnership — a mutual. So, however, is the highly successful John Lewis trading group, and they took the decision seven years ago, when embarking on a major modernisation, to appoint independent non-executives to the board. It can be done, and in the Co-operative Bank, it clearly should be done.

In my view, something else is necessary for the whole of the banking system. It must be forced to recognise not only what a large part of the national economy it constitutes, but also the duty which that imposes on the system, and on individual banks and those who run them, to provide an honest, and efficient, and trusted service. The personal scepticism which I described at the beginning of this article is just that: personal. I do believe, however, that it reflects something far more important, namely a widespread lack of trust in the contribution which banks are making to the well-being of the country.

On Article 377 and The Supreme Court - The wrongness of deference

ARGHYA SENGUPTA in the HINDU

 

In upholding the constitutionality of Section 377 of the IPC the Supreme Court has made a judgment that is value-laden, based on a particular worldview that many disagree with

The Supreme Court, in its judgment in Suresh Kumar Koushal and another v. NAZ Foundation and others (Civil Appeal No. 10972 of 2013) upholding the constitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, has been widely perceived to have espoused a principle of judicial deference to Parliament. This view has forced a shift of focus amongst gay activists and right-thinking citizens to the legislature, in the hope of corrective reform. In deferring to the will of Parliament in a matter that involves testing a statute against the touchstone of the Constitution, the Supreme Court was legally wrong and disingenuous, and seemingly allowed its personal ideological views to determine the interpretation of statutory law. The only silver lining which this otherwise woeful exercise of judicial decision-making provides is an opportunity to reconceptualise the Court in the public imagination, aligning it more closely to the reality of its present functioning rather than its erstwhile glory.

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Also read

The curious case of convenient liberalism

Why the SC’s 377 verdict is actually a boon for the gay community

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Three main constitutional questions confronted the Court in this case. First, whether Section 377 which criminalises “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” is discriminatory, thereby violating Article 14 of the Constitution; second, whether it violates the right of LGBT people to live with dignity, protected under Article 21 of the Constitution; third, whether criminalising private consensual acts between adults violates their right to privacy, also protected under Article 21 of the Constitution.

The Court summarily dismissed the first constitutional challenge on the ground that those who indulge in carnal intercourse in the order of nature and against the order of nature constitute different classes. This is a wholly insufficient and unreasoned justification. Instead, the key question should have been whether such classification is reasonable, an issue that the Court did not address. Using an analogy, by the Court’s logic, because men and women constitute different classes it is permissible to say that only men will be allowed to be enrolled as advocates who can practise before the Supreme Court, and not women. Such logic is as much absurd as it is incredible, coming from the Supreme Court of India — though not entirely surprising for those who closely follow the Court’s judgments.

Again, with regard to the argument based on dignity of LGBT people under Article 21, the Court holds that the purported harassment faced on account of misuse of this provision by police officials is neither mandated nor condoned by the Section itself. This is sophistry as it conveniently ignores a central facet of leading a life with dignity, that is, not being criminalised for being oneself. As far as privacy is concerned, the Court’s treatment is frankly unintelligible. It merely cites a key Supreme Court precedent laying down a right to privacy but does not even attempt to apply the law to the facts of the case.

A combination of inadequate justification, sophistry and a woeful non-application of mind makes the unfortunate conclusion inescapable that the judgment ultimately rests on a deep-seated prejudice shared by the two judges that has no place in a legal judgment. For a proper legal adjudication of the issues raised, it is imperative that a review petition is filed and taken up by the Court speedily.

Not a case for deference

Despite the questions in this case being squarely matters of constitutional law, an extraordinarily high degree of deference is shown by the Court to Parliament. This takes two forms — presuming constitutionality of the statute and suggesting that reform of the provision is the prerogative of Parliament, one that it has chosen not to exercise thus far. The former is unproblematic, an established principle of constitutional interpretation. The latter, however, is nothing short of judicial abdication of constitutional duty in the guise of deference. Deference as a principle refers to the attaching of different weights by courts to decisions of elected branches of government on grounds of legitimacy and competence. Widely used in common law jurisdictions, cases where courts defer to the government usually involve questions of government policy, or highly technical matters where the Court recognises its own limitations.

Effective legal remedy

Scarcely has it ever been accepted in a case concerning the fundamental rights of citizens. In fact, the European Court of Human Rights in Smith and Grady, a case pertaining to the United Kingdom’s policy of discharge of homosexuals in the armed forces, not only struck down the policy but found the extent of deference shown by the domestic courts to be violative of the legal requirement of providing an “effective legal remedy” under Article 13 of the European Convention of Human Rights. At the same time, never has the fact of non-reform of a law by Parliament been a reason to defer to it. This is natural since the converse would lead to an absurd proposition where the mere existence of a law creates reason to defer to Parliament thereby rendering futile the raison d’être of a Court as a counter-majoritarian institution.

The Supreme Court, by referring to the fact that Parliament has chosen not to reform the law as a factor which must “guide [their] understanding of character, scope, ambit and import” of the provisions that squarely raise purported violations of fundamental rights, has used deference to shy away from performing its own constitutional duty.

Further, such usage is entirely disingenuous. The Court’s parting words in this case, “[n]otwithstanding this verdict, the competent legislature shall be free to consider the desirability and propriety of deleting Section 377 of the IPC from the statute book”, are remarkable. Though in substance a platitude, given that Parliament can legislate on whichever issue it desires without any necessity for a judicial imprimatur, it is phrased as an extraordinary concession on the part of an all-powerful Court as if Parliament were its delegate. It hardly reflects the tone of a genuinely deferential Court.

Re-engaging with the Court

This judgment has understandably caused great dismay amongst LGBT activists and advocacy groups that use judicial intervention to redress grievances against minorities of all stripes in India. Though such dismay is entirely justifiable, the extent of outpouring of rage and grief stems in some measure from the belief that the Supreme Court of India, as a respected judicial institution, would certainly rule in their favour.

Such a view, that the Court will always ‘do the right thing’, is unarguably a testament to the Court itself and its long history of rectitude and progressiveness. But over the last few years such a view has been largely based on a mythical view of the Supreme Court as an apolitical institution, acting when the recalcitrant political class fails to, saying the things that we want to hear. The widespread public support for the Court has thus been built on a combination of support for the result the Court reaches, as well as the nostalgia associated with the heady early days of public interest litigation, enshrined today in popular perception of the Court in mainstream media.

This judgment must lead to deep introspection with regard to this perception. For many years, those who follow the Court have, often privately, rued the abject deterioration of the quality of its judgments. But when a judgment so deficient in its reasoning and so sloppily formulated in a case of such magnitude is delivered, it must serve as a call to arms for all those in a position to critically engage with judicial decisions. Public criticism is the only real accountability device for an otherwise unaccountable institution. It is imperative that the Court is taken to task, not only for this decision, but for all its other decisions whose results we might agree with as citizens, but whose reasoning is inexplicable at best and absurd at worst, using methods that violate every canon of judicial discipline.

At the same time, it is equally imperative to see the Supreme Court of India, not on the basis of what it was meant to be by the framers of the Constitution or what it was in its early history, but what it has become today: an overtly political institution.

On an everyday basis, the Court adjudicates legal and moral questions that affect the lives of millions of people, it makes value judgments, uses its discretion to fill gaps in the law, makes choices in preferring one argument over another. For too long we have refrained from asking the basis on which the Court comes to these conclusions, sanguine in the antiquated and artificial view of the Court comprising a few good, apolitical men. In upholding the constitutionality of Section 377 of the IPC, the Court has made a judgment that is value-laden and based on a particular worldview that many disagree with.

By doing so, it has unarguably exercised a political choice. If it is legitimate for the Court to make such a choice, it is even more legitimate for citizens to ask: who will judge our judges? It is high time the Supreme Court reaps what it sows.

(Arghya Sengupta is founder and research director of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, a New Delhi-based legal think-tank)

Let's rethink the idea of the state: it must be a catalyst for big, bold ideas

As George Osborne envisages a smaller state, economist Mariana Mazzucato argues instead that a programme of forward-thinking public spending is crucial for a creative, prosperous society. We must stop seeing the state as a malign influence or a waste of taxpayers' money

• 
• • Mariana Mazzucato
  • The Observer, Sunday 15 December 2013

Bright spark: a government that ‘thinks big and makes things happen’ will also serrve as a catalyst to the private sector. Photograph: David Burton /Alamy

In his epic book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926), John Maynard Keynes wrote a sentence that should be the guiding light for politicians around the globe. "The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all."

In other words, the point of public policy is to make big things happen that would not have happened anyway. To do this, big budgets are not enough: big thinking and big brains are key.

While economists usually talk about things that are not done at all (or done inadequately) by the private sector as "public goods", investments in "big" public goods like the UK national health service, or the investments that led to new technologies behind putting a "man on the moon", required even more than fixing the "public good" problem. They required the willingness and ability to dream up big "missions". The current narrative we are being sold about the state as a "meddler" in capitalism is putting not only these missions under threat, but even more narrowly defined public goods.

Public goods are goods whose benefits are spread so widely that it is hard for business to profit from them (or stop others profiting from them). So they don't attract private investment. Examples include transport infrastructure, healthcare, research and education.

Even if you're an avid free-marketeer you can't avoid benefiting, directly and indirectly, from such public investments. You gain directly through the roads you drive down, the rules and policing which ensure their safety, the BBC radio you listen to, schools and universities that train the doctors and pilots you depend on, parks, theatre, films and museums that nurture our national identity. You also gain, indirectly, through enormous public subsidies without which private schools, hospitals and utility providers would never be able to deliver affordably and still make a profit. These are conferred as tax breaks, and provision of vital skills and infrastructure at state expense.

While social welfare is relentlessly trimmed and targeted, corporate welfare grows inexorably, as business widens its relief from the taxes that fund public infrastructure (while tax credits top-up its less generous wage packets). And the non-appropriable benefits of knowledge – costly to produce, cheap to acquire and use once published – spread the influence of public goods much wider. Nuclear fusion, fuel cells, asset-pricing formulas and genome maps are discoveries for all, not just one company. But it now seems like the doubters, those who contest the idea of "public goods", have won the contest. The state's provision of many of these goods – notably transport, education, housing and healthcare – is being privatised or outsourced at an increasing rate. Indeed privatisation and outsourcing are happening at such a rapid pace in the UK they are practically being given away – as the sale of Royal Mail at rock bottom prices revealed recently – denying the state a return for its near-century long investment.

Yet because we are told the state is simply a "spender" and meddling "regulator", and not a key investor in valuable goods and services, it is easier to deny the state a return from its investment: risk is socialised, rewards privatised. This not only eliminates any return on public investment but also destroys institutions that have taken decades to build up, and rapidly erodes any idea of public service distinct from private profit.

When public goods are privatised they lose their "public good" nature: it does become possible to profit from distributing mail, running trains, renting out homes and providing education. We're continually promised that, due to efficiency gains and innovations prompted by the profit motive, public goods can be delivered more cheaply and effectively by the private sector. All this while still giving their providers a decent profit, so that more is invested.

Has privatisation of UK rail provided lower prices, more innovation and investment? Has contracting-out prison security to G4S made that system more efficient and high quality? Have outsourced NHS services provided the taxpayer with higher quality healthcare that's still free of charge and assigned on merit? Users' impressions and regulators' performance indicators give at best a mixed signal on service quality. Private firms' commercial confidentiality – often a stark contrast with the right-to-know approach to public enterprise – makes it hard to identify or measure any changes in efficiency.

So the state is robbed of its deserved returns of investment, and public services are worsening – but is the state at least relieved of the associated costs and financial burden? No. What's very clear is that while private profits are now being made, public subsidy has not disappeared. The UK government explicitly subsidises its "privatised" utilities, with net transfers amounting to (among others) more than £2bn annually for train operating companies, and £10bn in investment guarantees alone for new nuclear power station builders (these, ironically, include other countries' state-owned utility firms – willing to advance their capital under the generous long-term price arrangements offered by the government, while their privatised UK counterparts like Centrica dismiss these as too risky and return their cash to shareholders).

Private companies can receive further implicit subsidies through investment guarantees and tax breaks; ad hoc assistance (such as meeting energy firms' decommissioning costs, and taking over pension liabilities to enable privatisation, as with Royal Mail and the remnants of the coal industry); rules that enable the circumvention of corporate taxes that are already below income-tax rates (and falling fast); and the assurance that the state will step back in to repossess (without penalty) any operations the private sector finds too expensive, as with Network Rail and the East Coast train-operating franchise.

But in the US, UK and all across Europe, where it's almost universally argued that today's governments are too big, these subsidies are rarely called into question. The debate focuses on the need for public debt levels to come down. And since taxes are judged to be too high – on the basis of very unclear arguments regarding incentives – debt reduction ends up relying on massive public-spending cuts. Growth will supposedly be stimulated by reducing the size of the public sector though privatisation and outsourcing – alongside the eternally-promised reduction of tax and "red tape", which is seen to be hindering an otherwise dynamic private sector.

Typically, the last UK budget focused on targeted tax reductions which are more fairly termed "tax expenditures", lifting a "burden" from companies that other sectors (mainly public services) will have to absorb. These include a drop in corporation tax to 20% from April 2015 (explicitly designed to undercut the rest of the G20), more reliefs from national insurance, and reductions in regulation – always hailed as reducing cost, despite the financial sector's recent warning on where those short-term savings can later lead.

Is tax too high? In the US, the top marginal income tax rate was close to 90% under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower – widely recognised as reigning over one of the highest growth periods in US history. Today the total US tax bill is the lowest it has ever been. The spending cuts about to hit the US – the infamous "sequester", which will damage institutions ranging from Nasa to social services – would not be needed if the US tax bill (24.8% of GDP) were only four percentage points lower than the OECD average (33.4%), instead of eight points.

Yet tax cuts usually achieve no discernible increase in investment, only a measurable increase in inequality. This is because what actually guides business investment is not the "bottom line" (costs, as affected by tax) but anticipation of where the future big technological and market opportunities are.

In the UK, Pfizer did not move its largest R&D lab in Sandwich, Kent to Boston due to lower tax or regulation but due to the £32bn a year that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends on the bio-medical knowledge base that feeds them. Equally, although it was the National Venture Capital Association that in the mid-1970s negotiated huge reductions in US capital gains tax (from 40% to 20% in just six years), venture capital was actually following the footsteps of strategic public funding. In biotech, it entered the game 15 years after the state did the hard stuff.

And when the UK's Labour government reduced the minimum time for private equity investment to qualify for similar tax breaks from 10 to two years,it made venture capital even more short-termist, increasing golfing time not investing time. For the private sector, opportunities lie not in the creation of major new knowledge and technology but in the returns on investment in "intellectual property" that others have commissioned and not yet commercialised. Profit flows from privately capturing the "external benefits" conferred by public goods, when the public sector continues to underwrite them

The challenge today is to bring back knowledge and expertise into government that can drive the big missions of the future. Yet current de-skilling and de-capacitating government will not allow that. As I discuss in my new book, The Entrepreneurial State:debunking private vs. public sector myths, all the technologies that make the iPhone so smart were indeed pioneered by a well-funded US government: the internet, GPS, touch-screen display, and even the latest Siri voice-activated personal assistant.

All of these came out of agencies that were driven by missions, mainly around security – and funding not only the upstream "public good" research but also applied research and early-stage funding for companies. New missions today should be expanded around problems posed by climate change, ageing, inequality and youth unemployment. But while it's great that Steve Jobs had the genius to put those government technologies into a well-designed gadget, and great, more generally, for entrepreneurs to surf this publicly funded wave, who will fund the next wave with starved public budgets and a financialised and tax-avoiding private sector?

As the late historian Tony Judt used to stress, we should invent and impose a new narrative and new terminology to describe the role of government. The language being used to describe government activity is illuminating. The recent RBS sale was depicted as government retaining the "bad" debt, and selling the "good" debt to the private sector. The contrast could not be starker: bad government, good business – a needless inversion of the public good.

And public investments in long-term areas like R&D are described as government only "de-risking" the private sector, when actually what it is doing is actively and courageously taking on the risk precisely where the private sector – increasingly more concerned with the price of stock options than long-run growth opportunities – is too scared to tread. Once the entrepreneurial and risk-taking role of government is admitted, this should result in a sharing of the rewards – whether through equity of retaining a golden share of the patent rights. By privatising public goods, outsourcing government functions, and the constant state bashing (government as "meddler", at best "de-risker") we are inevitably killing the ability of government to think big and make things happen that otherwise would not have happened. The state starts to lose its capabilities, capacity, knowledge and expertise.

Examples that counter this trend – and language – should be celebrated. When the BBC invested in iPlayer – the world's most innovative platform for online broadcasting – instead of outsourcing it, it went against the grain. It brought brains and knowledge into a public sector institution. When recently the Government Digital Services (GDS) – part of the UK's Cabinet Office – wanted to create its own website, the usual solution was to outsource it to Serco, a private company that has recently won many government contracts (even Obamacare insurance work).

Dissatisfied with the mediocre site that Serco offered, GDS brought in coders and engineers with iPlayer experience, who went on to produce an award-winning websitethat is costing the government a fraction of what Serco was charging. And in so doing also made government smarter – attracting, not haemorrhaging, the knowledge and capabilities required for dreaming up the missions of the future.

To foster growth we must not downsize the state but rethink it. That means developing, not axing, competences and dynamism in the public sector. When evaluating its performance, we must rediscover the point of the public sector: to make things happen that would not have happened anyway.

When the BBC is accused of "crowding out" private broadcasters, the difference in quality of the programmes is considered a subjective issue not worthy of economic analysis. Yet it is only by observing and measuring that difference that we can accurately judge its performance. The same is true for the ability of public sector institutions not only to subsidise pharmaceutical companies but actually to transform the technological and market landscape on which they operate.

The public sector must produce public goods, and through the creation of new missions catalyse investment by the private sector – inspiring and supporting it to enter in high-risk areas it would not normally approach. To do so it requires the ability to attract top expertise – to "pick" broadly defined directions, as IT and internet were picked in the past, and "green" should be picked in the future. Some investments will win, some will fail. Indeed, Obama's recent $500m guaranteed loan to a solar company Solyndra failed, while the same investment in Tesla's electric motor won big time – making Elon Muskricher.

But as long as we admit the state is a risk-taking courageous investor in the areas the private sector avoids, it should increase its courage by earning back a reward for such successes, which can fund not only the (inevitable) losses but also the next round of investments. Instead, calling it names for the losses, ignoring the wins, and outsourcing the competence and capabilities, is ridding it of the courage, ability and brains to create the missions, hence opportunities, of the future. And without brains, all government will be able to do is not make big things happen but simply serve a private sector that is concerned only with serving itself.