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Sunday, 23 November 2014

Arundhati Roy: goddess of big ideas


Arundhati Roy’s fans have been waiting for a follow-up to her Booker-prize winning debut novel since 1997. Meanwhile she has thrown herself into political activism – raising hackles among India’s growing bourgeoisie with fierce polemics against capitalism. A second novel is promised – but will she ever get it finished?
Arundhati Roy: 'Most of what I've written is to do with being in solidarity with resistance movement
Arundhati Roy: ‘Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with resistance movements.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
Like India and Walt Whitman, Arundhati Roy contains multitudes. She is, however, far from large. Small, delicately boned, a beguiling mixture of piercing dark eyes and bright easy smile, she is a warm presence. She turns 53 tomorrow and the grey tint to her curls lends depth to a still strikingly youthful face. Looking at her, it’s not hard to detect the author of the richly empathetic The God of Small Things, her debut, Booker-prize winning novel about family life in Kerala, that John Updike described as a “massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details”.
That was 17 years ago and photos from that period show a captivating figure, at once shy and fiercely proud, wary and utterly self-possessed. The book was a huge international hit and the publishing world readied itself to cash in on a phenomenal new talent, galvanised by the fact that so photogenic an author would be a dream to market.
But the follow-up novel didn’t arrive. Instead Roy directed her considerable energies towards political activism, most especially in India where, despite her success, she has remained. It was a path that has led her to express solidarity with groups – such as Kashmiri separatists and Maoist guerrillas – that are seen by many Indians, with some reason, as terrorists. As a result Roy has become a controversial figure, an outspoken heroine in certain radical quarters, but loathed by large sections of Indian society, not least Hindu nationalists.
She has also become a prolific essayist and polemicist. She currently has two extended, book-length essays out. One, entitled The Doctor and the Saint, is an examination of caste, a subject she explored in The God of Small Things, and it forms the long introduction to a new edition of BR Ambedkar’s classic work The Annihilation of Caste. Roy’s essay traces the difficult relationship between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. She portrays the neglected Ambedkar – born an “untouchable” – as the true hero of India’s poor, while Gandhi is controversially depicted as a self-dramatising defender of the status quo.
The other essay is called Capitalism: A Ghost Story. It’s written in a very different style from The Doctor and the Saint, which, for all its contentious opinions, is a carefully constructed argument. By contrast Capitalism reads like an extended rant, strident, intemperate, conspiratorial, and relentlessly one-eyed in its outlook. The shrill prose is hard to reconcile with the softly spoken middle-aged woman sitting opposite me in the Soho offices of her publishers.
Roy attends a protest in New Delhi, March 2006.
New Delhi, March 2006: Roy attends a protest at the government’s lack of support for hundreds of women whose farmer husbands committed suicide because of failed crops. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Her basic argument is that the reforms that liberated India’s economy in the early 1990s and thrust it into the global marketplace may have created a vibrant new middle class, but have been devastating for the country’s poor. She writes of the “800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us [the 300 million members of the middle class]”.
The poor in India are of course not a recent creation. It’s been said that India’s historic problem was the redistribution of poverty, whereas now the issue is the redistribution of wealth. As Roy makes clear, there are vast and intolerable inequalities in today’s India. But the implication of her words is that to make 300 million Indians richer, 800 million Indians have become poorer in real, rather than relative, terms. As she doesn’t supply any supporting evidence for this claim in the book, I ask her if that’s what she means.
“What happens,” she says, “is that statistically people keep playing games with the poverty line. It’s not that people get richer or poorer but they keep moving the line up and down redefining what poorer means.”
She then goes on to say that you only have to visit the suffering villages of India to see the terrible plight of the poor, in particular the mass suicides of farmers whose land has been destroyed by mineral exploitation and industrialisation. This may be true, but has the rapid growth in India’s middle class caused the poor to become poorer?
She continues talking about access to water, the drying up of land etc, until I push her once again on what seems to me a crucial matter of fact. “Well, I think so,” she says finally. “For example, just things like food grain intake has actually reduced.”
This is true, though there are various arguments put forward to explain the drop, including the increase in the consumption of other foods. But there is also compelling evidence to suggest that, while India has become a much wealthier country over the last couple of decades, a hefty percentage of its population continues to experience low employment, malnutrition and other major social deprivations. It’s just that Roy never really gets to grip with the evidence.
She prefers a scattergun approach in which she attacks everything from philanthropy and the “hegemony of the United States” to NGOs funded by Coca-Cola. You could easily get the idea, for example, that arms dealing was a function of capitalism – yet there is no mention of Russia (the biggest arms exporter) or China (the third biggest). Similarly she quotes Pablo Neruda’s poem attacking the Standard Oil Company but makes no mention that he was an unabashed cheerleader for Stalinism when he wrote it. When I ask her about the omission she says she’s written about Stalinism in another essay and doesn’t want to keep repeating herself.
It’s the sort of screed that will bring head-nodding agreement from her core anti-capitalist audience, but it will do little, or at least not enough, to persuade those who genuinely want to know whether or not the new India, for all its many flaws, is an improvement on the old.
Roy is kissed by supporters in 2002 after being released from Tihar Jail in New Delhi. She had been jailed during a campaign against a new dam.
Roy is kissed by supporters in 2002 after being released from Tihar Jail in New Delhi. She had been jailed during a campaign against a new dam. Photograph: MANISH SWARUP/AP
She’s used to this sort of criticism, and her answer is that it’s not a subject that she can be dispassionate about. Dry, academic analysis doesn’t alter the conditions of the poor, so someone needs to raise the temperature, invoke some much-needed shame and outrage.
But her detractors argue that Roy’s posturings do nothing to help the poor either. Her fellow novelist and essayist Aatish Taseer wrote in 2011 in the online cultural magazine the Nervous Breakdown: “I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty… The people who get her into the streets [ie in protest] are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions.”
Indeed Roy writes of the “aggressive, acquisitive ambition” of the middle class in Capitalism. Is Taseer on to something?
“Well look,” she replies, unflustered, “obviously mine is a very definite point of view and there are many people who disagree with me vehemently. The only thing I will say is that I’m not a lone operator. Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with many resistance movements. I’m not at the front of it. I’m not preaching to the poor what they should be thinking. I’m learning from their arguments.”
Naturally Roy’s wealth exposes her to accusations of hypocrisy. She lives alone in the exclusive Jor Bagh district of New Delhi in a large apartment. Aren’t the acquisitively ambitious simply seeking to gain the material comforts she has in abundance?
“I don’t come from a privileged background, I just happened to write a book that sold a lot. My mother was literally dying. She had nothing. She left her drunk husband. She started a school. I left home at 16, I lived on the streets. I had nothing. Then I wrote a book. I lived for a long time, yes, with a man who had privileged parents but then that had nothing to do with me.”
This seems like a slightly romantic summary of her early life. She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in north-east India to a Syrian Christian, Mary, who is still alive. Her father, a Bengali Hindu, was an alcoholic who managed a tea plantation. The marriage ended when Roy was two years old. Her mother took her and her older brother to Tamil Nadu and then to Kerala, where her mother, who suffered from asthma, set up an independent school.
Roy was sent to boarding school where she gained a reputation as an indefatigable debater. From there she went to secretarial college, which she quit at 16, moving to Delhi to study at the architectural school. She lived with her boyfriend at the time in a slum, then after a spell in Goa, worked for the National Institute of Urban Affairs, where she met her husband, Pradip Krishen, a widowed former history professor and Oxford graduate from a wealthy background.
The couple made several documentaries and films together, in the first of which Roy played the female lead. But eventually she became dispirited with the elitist film world and spent more time writing, leading eventually to the publication of The God of Small Things in 1997. It was a literary sensation that went on to sell more than 6m copies worldwide.
In a vital sense, as Roy says, her background and material circumstances, whatever they are, should not be the means to assess her ideas. “I’ve never understood the logic that if you’re privileged you should take the point of view of the privileged and argue for more privilege.”
Yet in Capitalism she writes of being compromised by connections with the corrupting worlds of corporations: “But which of us sinners was going to cast off the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses.”
What does that mean? She breaks out into a big smile. “Yeah, I’ve also thought about that. I was just thinking, living off royalties from corporate publishing houses? In fact those corporate publishing houses are making money off me, and giving me 5%!”
She laughs at herself and says that perhaps she got that wrong. “The thing is no one is pure. I am certainly not a pure saint who lives in a loincloth and eats goat’s cheese and doesn’t have sex and says ‘I’m poor’”, she says in an obvious dig at Gandhi. “It’s crap.”
Moreover, she is no armchair revolutionary, cooped up in the safe confines of her apartment. She does go to dangerous places and she does make powerful enemies: Hindu nationalists, dam builders, mineral extractors, large corporations and the Indian military. And despite a great many threats, she is not easily intimidated.
But danger runs both ways. The picture Roy paints of India is of a vast military occupation, a colonial suppression enacted by the Indian state on its own people. She speaks of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in secessionist Kashmir and the vicious paramilitary operations in central India against the Maoist or “Naxalite” guerrillas.
In Walking with the Comrades, her book about joining up with the Maoists, she wrote about a Congress politician called Mahendra Karma, whom she said was responsible for orchestrating a campaign of murder, rapes and displacement in the Bastar region. In May 2013 Maoist guerrillas killed Karma, stabbing him 78 times, and 24 other people, including 11 other Congress members, in a truly gruesome attack on a convoy. When asked to comment immediately after the assault, Roy refused to speak.
Incidents such as these have prompted the charge that she is a dilettante, a literary tourist who can beat a retreat whenever it suits her. If that’s true then it’s also a fact that India’s democracy is riven by nepotism and corruption and violence and it suits many who are getting rich to look the other way. The statements Roy makes are often provocative, naive and arguably counterproductive, but the presiding nationalistic silence is perhaps more worthy of condemnation.
And the issue on which India has learned to be most tight-lipped is that of caste. It’s a subject on which Roy has always been refreshingly vocal, quick to remind those who might wish to forget of the immovable social structure that underpins Indian society. InThe Doctor and the Saint she returns to the theme but this time she sets it against two different visions of reform: Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s.
Roy portrays Gandhi as 'a backward-looking egomaniac'.
Roy portrays Gandhi as ‘a backward-looking egomaniac’. Photograph: REX/REX
Gandhi wanted to abolish the designation of “Untouchables”, the lowest caste that is today referred to as Dalit. But Ambedkar wanted to get rid of the caste system in its entirety. Although she had always been suspicious of the Gandhi cult, she was largely ignorant of the dispute between Ambedkar and Gandhi before a publisher asked her to write an introduction to The Annihilation of Caste.
“I thought I’d just write three pages of politeness and give it to him,” she says. “Then I started to read and I was shocked by what I was reading and it turned into a huge thing.”
Gandhi emerges as a backward-looking egomaniac who had to be dragged into modernity by the more ambitious and radical Ambedkar. The respected historian Ramachandra Guha, who is in the middle of a two-part biography of Gandhi, has taken Roy to task for “selectively quoting Gandhi out of context [so] that she can paint him as a slow-moving reactionary”.
Guha, whose earlier work looked at forestry in northern India, has clashed with Roy before over her environmental advocacy, which he described as “self-indulgent” and “self-contradictory”. “Ms Roy’s tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill, hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis,” he wrote back in 2000.
She dismissed his criticism back then as “smug”. She says that she’s quoted Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, “across his adult life. Of course every quote has to be selective. I can’t quote the whole nine volumes.” She says that “it’s dishonest to suggest that Gandhi was an incrementalist or a man of his times”. And in any case, she adds, Guha is a Brahmin, the caste that is at the top of the social hierarchy – if you like, the ruling class.
It has been argued by some that it’s unfettered capitalism that has done most to undermine caste in India, but Roy notes that only a tiny percentage of marriages are cross-caste. She writes that the only way caste can be annihilated is if “those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism”. I quote her a statement from a well-known Indian writer and ask her to guess who it is. The author speaks of his Brahmin identity as being crucial in giving him a sense of “dignity” and through it the ambition not to settle for “some badly paid government job”.
She puts her hands over her face and says “Pankaj?”
Pankaj Mishra, who is now based in London, has built a formidable reputation as radical critic of imperialism, ever vigilant to the incidence of western racism both on a geopolitical and personal level. He was also the first publisher to champion The God of Small Things, when he worked for HarperCollins in India, and thus a longstanding friend of Roy’s. Is he on the revolutionary side of the argument?
“On this one, I don’t think so,” she says. “There are a lot of critiques about many Brahmins who at some point do want to mention that they are Brahmins. The issue is a very vexed one. Look at all the major politburo members, including the Maoists, they are usually Brahmins.”
You sense that one of the reasons Arundhati was drawn to reappraise Gandhi is the consensus he enjoys as an embodiment of decency and tolerance. She has recently caused a stir for downplaying another widely admired figure, Malala Yousafzai. After she gave a TV interview in which she suggested Malala was a pawn in game of global politics, the Pakistan writer Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote an article asking why it was that Malala bothered many on the left, citing Roy as an example.
The success of Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel peace prize winner, has been downplayed by Roy.
Even Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel peace prize winner, has been the subject of criticism from Roy.Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
“I have no doubt she did something wonderful,” she says. “But that was not the point I was trying to make.” She says she wanted to draw attention to the fact that Dalit women are similarly mistreated in India but are never heard about. But that doesn’t make Malala a puppet. She stood up against male oppression. Isn’t that an unambiguously good thing?
“I don’t think you can isolate Malala and say ‘Oh this is wonderful.’” Why not? “I don’t think this world of prizes and awards is an innocent world. It is loaded and it’s precious to suggest it’s not.” She thinks Malala’s Nobel peace prize was an extension of the politically corrupt process that awarded one to Obama, whom she characterises as a warmonger, adding, “I’m not trying to take anything away from Malala.”
But of course she is.
I admire her willingness to confront sacred cows, but can’t help thinking that she sees dark conspiracies where sometimes nobler intentions lie. And in her rush to embrace the oppressed, she can blur the lines between victim and perpetrator.
Enough of the politics. What about fiction? There have been rumours going back to 2007 that she is writing a novel.
“I have been working on it for quite a few years,” she acknowledges. “If those characters are still hanging around in my house, swinging their legs and smoking their cigarette butts, they’re not going to go away, so there must be something there.”
Yet she says she put the novel aside to write The Doctor and the Saint. Writing non-fiction is for her a tense and urgent business. She has to get it out. “It’s like the body doesn’t have room for its organs,” she says, and reading her non-fiction one can see what she means.
She is a different person altogether when writing fiction, which she says she’s able to relax into. “I don’t mean because it’s easy to write but I trust its rhythms and I don’t have to get it out there. There’s no urgency. It’s like cooking, it takes its time. I rather like the idea of just living inside it and not coming out of it.”
That’s an idea that will torment all those millions who have been waiting so many years for her second novel. It may also trouble those critics of her polemical work who hope that she’ll return to fiction at the earliest opportunity. But if there is one thing that is certain about the multifaceted Roy, she will continue to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it.

The Mudgal report on IPL corruption names five players, as top guns resist capitulation for now

Mihir Srivastava in Outlook India

An IPL Game Of Spot, Bet And Fix
How it all started
  • The IPL betting and match-fixing scam became public when the Pune and Kochi teams were disqualified
  • The Kochi team had already seen a controversy involving Shashi Tharoor and the now-deceased Sunanda Pushkar
  • The Tharoor row led to the exit of IPL founder-commissioner Lalit Modi and his row with BCCI chief N. Srinivasan
What we know now
  • The conduct of at least 12 players, including two Australians, invited the scrutiny of Justice Mukul Mudgal
  • Indians include five members of the 2011 World Cup-winning squad, two of whom are from the same IPL team
  • The owners of at least three IPL teams are believed to be involved in the match-fixing racket
  • Nearly 70 per cent of players are believed to be involved in betting on matches indirectly, if not directly
  • Given the high purchase costs, team owners and associates have an added incentive to pre-decide match results
***
Indian cricket finds itself on a barely playable wicket. Justice Mukul Mudgal might indirectly have a say on India’s World Cup 2015 squad if the apex court makes public names of top Indian cricketers mentioned in his report on the alleged betting and spot/match-fixing in season 6 of the Indian Premier League (IPL). Top sources say that the 38-page report (with 5,000 pages of annexures) names around a dozen names of former and current players, Indian and international, with their roles in the multi-billion dollar scandal. Players, administrators, politicians, film stars and corporate czars are all protagonists in this sordid drama. It seems like the first draft of a crime thriller.

Although codewords like ‘Individual 2’ and ‘Individual 3’ have been bandied about, the fact is the report names five Indian players who were part of the World Cup-winning team of 2011. Talented and temperamental, they run cricket academies, invest in the hospitality industry and event management, even advertising firms. Their partners in these ventures are the same set of people who form the link between them and the bookies; some are bookies themselves. Moreover, they are Page 3 regulars.

Take the case of a left-handed all-rou­nder. He broke down when questioned by Justice Mudgal. There wasn’t any dispute about his involvement, he was just begging that he be not named and pleaded for a life of dignity, says an insider, a cop involved in the investigation. Mercy, not justice, was also sought by a close friend of this cricketer, his teammate in the World Cup squad. A bowler known to pick fights on and off the cricket field, who spends more time in Mumbai, outside his home state.

The ‘Individual 3’ mentioned in Justice Mudgal’s report is a Chennai Super Kings player. A prolific run-getter and a god-fearing man, he visits the Sai Baba temple in Shirdi regularly with two bookies by his side, and has the protection and patronage of top cricket administrators. The fourth is a celebrity fast bow­ler with a career punctuated by injuries, who was often too unwell to play for the country, but was always fit for the IPL. He, too, has the backing of powerful team-owners. The most significant name is of a top idol, whose incredibly short saga of rags to riches is as exemplary as his passion for speed.

-----India 2011 World Cup team members:

Dhoni, Sehwag, Gambhir, Tendulkar, Yuvraj, Raina, Kohli, Zaheer, Sreesanth, Harbhajan, Y Pathan, Munaf, Nehra, Chawla and Ashwin

----

The flaw, as pointed out over the years by wise men, is in the IPL itself. It had so much to offer to players, administrators, umpires, even commentators, that the whole venture had an unviable air about it. It wasn’t  charity either, where the glitterati altruistically invested to lose money. Instead, it turned out to be a money-­spinner. With marquee pla­yers being bought for millions of dollars, glitz on the ground and expe­nsive after-match parties, intelligent guesses always pointed to dirty money.

The first confirmation came when the Delhi police arrested three players—Sreesanth, Ajith Chandila and Ankeet Chavan—in 2013 for their role in spot-fixing and betting. Neeraj Kumar, the then Delhi police commissioner, refutes the charges that the cops let off the big fish. He confirms that many players were named by the bookies, but that he couldn’t have acted on mere accusations, without conclusive evidence. Rajasthan Royals owner Raj Kundra, he says, confessed to betting, but there was no corroborative evidence, and territorial jurisdiction was an issue. “The investigation was carried out objectively, was able to nail down large number of bookies and set off a chain reaction, with police in other metropolises also ending up investigating betting,” he says. One such investigator was G. Sampath Kumar of the Tamil Nadu police. He was suspended from his job last week on the charges of rec­e­i­ving Rs 55 lakh from a bookie, Uttam C. Jain alias Kitty.




Yellow fever A match involving Chennai Super Kings, now under a corruption-shaped cloud. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 01 December 2014)

A family member of one of the three players arrested by the Delhi police met Outlook in a coffee shop at Delhi’s Bengali market. The prosecuted three are just the tip of the iceberg, he says, and the submerged iceberg covers nearly the whole system. The IPL is but a gambling festival, he says, giving examples of how his relative was pulled into betting and match-fixing. “No player can escape the bookies. It’s not a choice,” he says.

---- Also Read

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?


----

While the Delhi police couldn’t gather enough incriminating evi­dence against the ‘big fish’, Justice Mudgal is forthright about some of them. N. Sriniv­asan—the man who controls both the BCCI and the IPL—can be accused of blatant conflict of interest, says a senior lawyer and cricket administrator. “He’s both the umpire and the player,” he says.

A left-handed all-rounder broke down before Justice Mudgal. The guilty man begged not to be named.
The Mudgal report clearly says that Srinivasan was aware of betting and match-fixing, and he preferred to be a mute spectator. His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, virtually ran Chennai Super Kings. In the nebulous role of a ‘principal’, he attended team meetings and was a regular companion of players on the ground. It’s clear he was anything but what India and CSK ski­pper Mahendra Singh Dhoni told the Mudgal committee—a “mere cricket enthusiast”. Though lying to an apex court committee is considered perjury, Dhoni, also a vice-president of  Sriniva­san’s India Cements, has consistently bat­ted for his team’s owner. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi was frequently spotted watching IPL matches with former Boll­ywood actor Vindoo Dara Singh, also an acc­used in the 2013 IPL spot-­fixing scandal. In a sting operation by Zee News, Vindoo outlandishly claimed the match-­fixing fiasco was actually the fallout of a fight between  ncp (and former BCCI) chief Sharad Pawar and Srinivasan.


Apart from Meiyappan, the Mud­gal report says IPL chief operating officer Sundar Raman had admitted doing nothing even after knowing that Raj Kundra was involved in bet­ting. Furthermore, a third team (CSK and RR being the other two)—from the renowned stable of good times—is named in the clutch of outfits where the owners/their fam­ily members bet on their own team’s performance.



An eagle eye Justice Mukul Mudgal

Aditya Varma, secretary of the Bihar Cricket Association, treats the battle against corruption in cricket as a personal crusade, and has kept on the warpath in the face of both dire threats and propitiatory wads of cash. He presents a scenario: “If an owner bets, and lets his players, captain and the rest, know that he wants the team to get out on a specific score, say 120 runs, then it’s not betting, it’s match-fixing.”

Varma says there are two categories of culprits—administrators and players. Not bookies, he says, as that’s their job. There are two ways, he says, in which betting/match-fixing takes place: when the match is fixed with the help of owners or administrators, and when players themselves take the initiative for spot-fixing. Bookies are known to live in the same hotel as the players, and interact freely with them during parties. “I will seek an investigation in the conduct of all teams and owners. The story is much murkier than it looks,” says Varma.

As parts of the report have been made public, the government has responded with silence. The top politicians of the country have been, or are, cricket administrators—Arun Jaitley, Amit Shah, Sharad Pawar, Rajiv Shukla and Shashi Tharoor, to name a few. The politics of cricket has little to do with their party affiliations. The Narendra Modi government—seeking a global effort to retrieve billions of dollars of black money stashed in foreign banks—has chosen to ignore the cancer that is eating away Indian cricket. Union finance minister and former Delhi Cricket Association chief Arun Jaitley is mum too. Rajiv Shukla, former IPL chairman and a minister in the UPA cabinet, is anxious about the issue and is actively following the events, says a close friend. Some revered former players have also kept their counsel, perhaps because they are beneficiaries of the system. And Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography, Playing It My Way, is silent about these murky depths in cricket, though some of his close friends are under the scanner.

In April this year, the SC had rejected the BCCI’s proposal to constitute a three-member committee to investig­ate the spot-fixing and betting charges, com­prising ex-CBI director R.K. Rag­­havan, cricketer Ravi Sha­stri and former Cal­cutta High Court chief justice Jai Narain Patel. Raghavan is an affiliated member of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Ass­ociation, headed by Srinivasan, Sha­stri is a salaried BCCI employee and Patel’s bro­­­ther-in-law is Shivlal Yadav, the then interim board president for non-IPL affairs.

The audacious guile that led to the pro­­posal of the panel resurfaced in the belligerence with which the BCCI has made light of the Mudgal committee’s report even before it’s considered by the Supreme Court—belittling it as ‘invalid’, asking the Supreme Court to form another panel and reinstate Srinivasan as BCCI chief (though forced to step down on November 3, he has been effectively in charge through proxy), while the probe is being conducted.

“The ball is now with the apex court, and chances of tampering is less,” says a former cricketer and BCCI office-bearer. With the ball swinging under favourable conditions, wickets might go down in a heap, taking with them reputations and hard-earned records.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Great Power Scorned

John Pilger

The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Even the British government clearly believes it must end. On 28 October, the deputy foreign minister, Hugo Swire, told Parliament he would “actively welcome” the Swedish prosecutor in London and “we would do absolutely everything to facilitate that”. The tone was impatient.

The Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, has refused to come to London to question Assange about allegations of sexual misconduct in Stockholm in 2010—even though Swedish law allows for it and the procedure is routine for Sweden and the UK. The documentary evidence of a threat to Assange’s life and freedom from the United States—should he leave the embassy—is overwhelming. On May 14 this year, US court files revealed that a “multi subject investigation” against Assange was “active and ongoing”.

Ny has never properly explained why she will not come to London, just as the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him on to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In December 2010, the Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US before the European Arrest Warrant was issued.

Perhaps an explanation is that, contrary to its reputation as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret CIA “renditions”—including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and WikiLeaks cables. In the summer of 2010, Assange had been in Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the war in Afghanistan—in which Sweden had forces under US command.

The Americans are pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians, which they covered up; and their contempt for sovereignty and international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic cables.

For his part in disclosing how US soldiers murdered Afghan and Iraqi civilians, the heroic soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning received a sentence of 35 years, having been held for more than a thousand days in conditions which, according to the UN Special Rapporteur, amounted to torture.

Few doubt that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of capture and assassination became the currency of the political extremes in the US following Vice-President Joe Biden’s preposterous slur that Assange was a “cyber-terrorist”. Anyone doubting the kind of US ruthlessness he can expect should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president’s plane last year—wrongly believed to be carrying Edward Snowden.

According to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a “Manhunt target list”. Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature”. In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has spent four years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama lauded whistleblowers as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal”. Under President Obama, more whistleblowers have been prosecuted than under all other US presidents combined. Even before the verdict was announced in the trial of Chelsea Manning, Obama had pronounced the whistleblower guilty.

“Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers facing Assange, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

There are signs that the Swedish public and legal community do not support prosecutor’s Marianne Ny’s intransigence. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: “Go to London, for God’s sake.”

Why won’t she? More to the point, why won’t she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won’t she hand them over to Assange’s Swedish lawyers? She says she is not legally required to do so until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why doesn’t she question him?

This week, the Swedish Court of Appeal will decide whether to order Ny to hand over the SMS messages; or the matter will go to the Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice. In high farce, Assange’s Swedish lawyers have been allowed only to “review” the SMS messages, which they had to memorise.

One of the women’s messages makes clear that she did not want any charges brought against Assange, “but the police were keen on getting a hold on him”. She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV] test”. She “did not want to accuse JA of anything” and “it was the police who made up the charges”. (In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her”.)
Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, “I have not been raped.” That they were manipulated by police and their wishes ignored is evident—whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga worthy of Kafka.

For Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On 20 August 2010, the Swedish police opened a “rape investigation” and immediately—and unlawfully—told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for Assange’s arrest for the “rape of two women”. This was the news that went round the world.

In Washington, a smiling US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the arrest “sounds like good news to me”. Twitter accounts associated with the Pentagon described Assange as a “rapist” and a “fugitive”.

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying, “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.” The file was closed.

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician in the Social Democratic Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden’s imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor’s dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well. She, too, was involved with the Social Democrats.

On 30 August, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, “Ah, but she is not a lawyer.” Assange’s Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded, “This is a laughing stock … it’s as if they make it up as they go along.”

On the day Marianne Ny re-activated the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service (“MUST”) publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers.” Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAP, had been told by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Sweden sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq “War Logs”, based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country. She said he was free to leave.

Inexplicably, as soon as he left Sweden—at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks disclosures—Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert” normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy.

Assange attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent ten days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London, pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard used for that purpose. She refused.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: “The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction… The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

This question remained unanswered as Ny deployed the European Arrest Warrant, a draconian product of the “war on terror” supposedly designed to catch terrorists and organized criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued each month; only a few have anything to do with potential “terror” charges. Most are issued for trivial offences—such as overdue bank charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of justice, of which British judges have been highly critical.

The Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a judgement that upheld the EAW—whose rigid demands had left the courts almost no room for manoeuvre—the judges found that European prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in the UK without any judicial oversight, even though Parliament intended otherwise. They made clear that Parliament had been “misled” by the Blair government. The court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange.

However, the Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice to override the letter of the law. As Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW.

The Supreme Court only recognised this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal against the EAW in November last year. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was too late to go back.

Assange’s choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of prime minister Julia Gillard had even threatened to take away his passport.

Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who represents Assange in London, wrote to the then Australian foreign minister, Kevin Rudd: “Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions… it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian Consul-General, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew “only what I read in the newspapers” about the details of the case.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons Parliament will eventually vote on a reformed EAW. The draconian catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to be brought and “questioning” would be insufficient grounds for extradition. “His case has been won lock, stock and barrel,” Gareth Peirce told me, “these changes in the law mean that the UK now recognises as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit. And the genuineness of Ecuador’s offer of sanctuary is not questioned by the UK or Sweden.”

On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch”. It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of “trust” which is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising this rare source of independent journalism was the aim, smear the method. Hell hath no fury like great power scorned.

Friday, 21 November 2014

Big supermarkets may be dying but they leave a plague on the landscape


Shuttered out-of-town retail stores will languish and become the coalition’s most visible legacy to the British environment
Eva Bee Tesco illustration
Illustration by Eva Bee

I have to admit, the Jenkins household now shops online. On Saturday morning the doorbell rings, and there stands a young man with the weekly supplies in neat recyclable bags. He has replaced the weekly trudge to the supermarket. Something may be lost, but a deal of time and shoe leather is saved.
I am one of millions: it is expected that 90% of the rise in British retail spending by 2016will be online. The age of the big supermarket, like that of the battleship, may limp on, but the glory days are over. One in five supermarkets needs to close, Goldman Sachs said this week, especially the gigantic ones.
Just last year Tesco’s former boss, Sir Terry Leahy, could go on Desert Island Discs andjeer at high streets as “medieval” and hail his superstores as “progress”. How times change. The City pages now call his company “a 1990s relic” and its stock “one notch above junk”. Its patsy accountants, PwC contrived to ignore a quarter-billion-pound hole in its accounts - imagine the outcry if a social worker were guilty of such professional oversight. The company now admits that “over-spacing” is its biggest handicap.
Two years ago Tesco’s rival, Sainsbury’s, dropped plans for 15 inner-city stores in favour of out-of-town ones, steered in that direction by the local government secretary, Eric Pickles. Now it is spending millions trying to write off an excess of 40 stores nationwide.Asda admits a “shockwave”, with its first fall in sales in eight years. They all blame “buyer promiscuity” – code for a free market we don’t like.
Drive anywhere in Britain today and you will see a grim phenomenon. Dotting the roadside, punctuating the high street, scattered through every suburb, are the carcasses of abandoned petrol stations. Once they were the future. To planners they could do no wrong. They broke all planning rules every couple of miles, lest the great god traffic ran out of fuel. Signs and canopies with garish logos defaced every village. Racks of groceries wiped out local stores. Now the ugly sites litter town and country alike. No one has the guts to demand their owners reinstate the land they despoiled.
For petrol station now read hypermarket. Since the disastrous reign of Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary, Lord Ridley, they have bestrode every vista, especially if their name was Tesco. No planner dared stop them. They ring every settlement like siege engines round a medieval city, starving their commerce and undermining their communities. As recently as 2011, the big four supermarkets were planning to expand their trading floors by a staggering 50%. The rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange thought this was just terrific – the free market at full throttle.
Big supermarkets are dying. But if petrol stations left warts behind, supermarkets are leaving bubonic plague. Across the Atlantic, America’s 700 mega-shopping malls are in crisis: some, such as those of Akron, in Ohio, stand derelict, grass growing through their concrete, trees sprouting through defunct escalators. Some supermarkets may become warehouses for online distribution centres. Most will languish as cheap stores and homelessness shelters, like the high streets they ruined. Some will be replaced by bleak, ill-sited housing estates, part of the scarred, blotched landscape that is the coalition’s most visible legacy to the British environment.
Planning was certainly too rigid, but non-planning is far worse. The leads and lags of a free market in land impose huge “external costs” on the community. It was clearly wrong to allow an oversupply of out-of-town sites for competitive retailing, with no thought given to the impact on city centres or on local communities in general. The anti-green waste of energy, building material and infrastructure was never considered. The gods of the market triumphed.
There is no mystery here. If you want to kill a town centre, offer out-of-town sites to Tesco and Sainsbury’s – and build roads to help them. Thatcher, Blair and Cameron did just this. Shoppers had “market choice” for a year or two, then saw their towns “hollow out” and collapse. I watched it happen from rich Chichester in the south to poor Penrith in the north. The surest way of stalling the hopes of Ludlow of becoming a gourmet food centre was to allow the Earl of Plymouth to build an out-of-town “food centre” on the A49. Now watch Ludlow decay. This is not a free market, it is a stupid market.
Land is Britain’s most precious resource. The point of planning is to economise its usefulness. At present, smart planning ought to be thinking ahead of the boom in online shopping. What mistakes might there be in pandering to its gargantuan appetites? What are the implications of every street jammed with home delivery lorries? What of every suburb blighted with distribution centres, supplied by giant hangars littering every motorway?
Markets go in cycles. The job of planning is to even them out, not to exaggerate boom and bust. The out-of-town supermarket era has been brief, barely a quarter century old, but it has done as much damage to the countryside as it has to Britain’s urban cohesion. Its inflexible floor plates and characterless exteriors make even the ghosts of the industrial revolution look picturesque. They will blight the landscape for decades.
I am sure many big supermarkets will survive. The convenience ones in town are booming. The Institute of Grocery Distribution predicts they will grow by a third in the next five years. The law of futurology applies to them as to all once-doomed relics of the past, such as books, newspapers, the church, live theatre and jazz. Booms burn out, but every fashion finds its level and something of it survives.
I believe town and village centres will find a new role in the post-digital economy of “live experience”. Convenience itself has a value. High streets supply such personal services as coffee bars, beauty salons, tattoo parlours and gyms. After them will come market stalls, foodie counters, pop-up shops and junk vendors, the live activities of the new “smart city”.
The high street has no right to eternity but it can supply the framework in which a “small society” flourishes, far below the metropolitan scanner of the coalition’s big society. The high street should embody the ideal of a regulated free market. They tried to kill it, but what a mess we have made of bringing it back.

GDP is a mirror on the markets. It must not rule our lives

By fixating on a snapshot of statistics, we focus on short-termism and lose sight of what the Victorians prized most: value

male office worker looking through binoculars
'What is the point of economic growth if it does not make most people better off?' Photograph: Colorblind/Getty Images

Next month the Office for National Statistics will issue data for the first time on the UK’s wellbeing. In the exercise, the ONS is recognising that GDP, which now includes estimates for the market value of illegal drugs and prostitution, is at best only a partial measure of our economic health. Not that one would draw this conclusion from the political tub-thumping that improved GDP figures bring.
GDP is a measure of economic activity in the market and in the moment. So its key shortcoming is that it collapses time and makes us short-term in focus. It counts investment and consumption in the same way – an extra £100 spent on education is equivalent to the same amount spent on fizzy drinks.

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Economic Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased




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Studies have repeatedly shown that the time horizon of the financial markets in particular is ever more short-term. Shaving about 0.006 seconds off the time it takes computer orders to travel from Chicago to the New Jersey data centre which houses the Nasdaq servers made it worth investing several hundred million dollars in tunnelling through a mountain range to lay the fibre optic cable in a straighter line. More than two-thirds of trades in US equity markets are high-frequency automated orders. How has the search for profit so foreshortened our vision?
It wasn’t always so. The term “Victorian values” now speaks to us of characteristics such as narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy and conformity, but it could also speak of hard work, self-improvement and above all self-sacrifice for the future. The list of the Victorians’ investments in our future is staggering. It includes railways, canals, sewers and roads; town halls and libraries, schools and concert halls, monuments and museums, modern hospitals and the profession of nursing; learned societies, the police, trades unions, mutual insurers and building societies – organisations that have often survived more than a century.
Why the Victorians managed to be so visionary is not entirely clear, but it had something to do with the confidence of an age of discovery both in science and other areas of knowledge, and also in geographical exploration and empire building. They made such strides against ignorance and the unknown, firm in their sense of divine approbation, it seems a belief in progress came naturally to them.
Civic and business leaders in the late 19th century had extraordinary confidence and far-sightedness, even as they too stood at the centre of social and economic upheaval. This Victorian sense of stewardship is something we could usefully remind ourselves of when thinking about how we measure value today. In the late 19th century it was the innovators and the builders of institutions who had standing, and it was the men and women of vision who were understood to be the creators of value.
They still are, even if it is often hard to measure or quantify what they build. Anything of value has its roots in values and vision, as much today as at any time in the past.
Financial markets have their place as a powerful way of harnessing incentives to achieve desirable outcomes. For example, the market in the US for trading permissions to emit sulphur dioxide, which helps cause acid rain, has been a triumphant success in removing what was once a serious environmental harm.
However, there is no sign that the wider public has stopped challenging the ascendancy of markets and money. The bestseller status of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century bears witness to that. It has put the question of the great inequality of wealth in the market economies at the centre of public debate, and it underlines another question: what is the point of economic growth if it does not make most people better off? Or, worse, if growth is actually destroying things that many of us value.
A further problem with GDP is that it obviously includes many things that are value-destroying. Natural disasters are good for GDP growth because of the reconstruction boom afterwards; the destruction of assets and human life is not counted. The metric ignores the depletion of resources, the loss of biodiversity, the impact of congestion, and the loss of social connection in the modern market economy.
People have long proposed alternative measures of progress – recently, environment-adjusted measures, or simply measuring happiness, directly by survey. What could be more straightforward than asking such a direct question? But reported happiness changes very little over time because, whether it’s the joy of a lottery win or the catastrophe of being disabled in an accident, it only takes about two years for people experiencing even a dramatic change in their life to revert to previous levels of happiness.
This takes us back to monetary measures, back to GDP and its inclusion of things that clearly have negative value. It also excludes “informal” activities such as housework and caring, many volunteer activities, and always excludes the full value of innovations. Nathan Mayer Rothschild was the richest man in the world at the time of his death from an infected tooth abscess in 1836. An antibiotic that hadn’t then been invented but now costs just $10 would have saved him. How much would he have paid for that medicine?