May can berate Putin. But Brexit is his dream policy

As the Russian leader tries to diminish Europe, he finds ideologues such as Boris Johnson are doing the job for him


Rafael Behr in The Guardian

With lighter diplomatic baggage, Boris Johnson might have been a hit in Moscow. The foreign secretary’s artfully dishevelled, pseudo-Churchillian kitsch is not to everyone’s taste, but it could work in the bombastic idiom of Russian politics.

But as Theresa May’s emissary to the court of Vladimir Putin later this week, Johnson faces a tough audience. May has accused the Kremlin of aggressively targeting an international order based on law, open economies and free societies. In a speech last month, the prime minister listed offences including territorial theft from Ukraine, cyber-attacks on ministries and parliaments, meddling in elections, and spreading fake news to sow discord.

Russian interference in British democracy is currently being investigated by the Electoral Commission and parliament’s culture, media and sports committee. The latter’s chair, Tory MP Damian Collins, has signalled that he doesn’t believe recent claims by Twitter and Facebook that Kremlin-funded efforts to boost Brexit in 2016 were negligible.

He is right to be sceptical. The tech companies have a record of stonewalling any suggestion that their business model has been co-opted for organised malfeasance. They have commercial incentives to duck moral responsibility for the sinister content shared on their networks. It is beyond doubt that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a hefty Russian boost. Facebook has removed tens of thousands of pages believed to be involved in sabotage of French and German elections. British ballots are unlikely to have escaped dirty money and molestation by troll battalions.

That doesn’t mean Brexit is a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind. Mistrust of the EU was not made in a factory outside St Petersburg. To connect tweets in Murmansk to a leave majority in Merthyr Tydfil misses the point about misinformation. The goal is not always to execute a specific outcome but to stoke existing tensions, nurture rage, exacerbate polarisation and shroud everything in such a fog of lies that truth becomes ungraspable. The purpose of fake news is to debase the currency of all news, and so undermine the foundations of pluralistic politics.

The advantage to Russia is in weakening western governments and their alliances. Putin despises Nato and EU influence in countries that were, until 1991, Soviet territory. He sees their sovereignty as fictions imposed by enemies. Undermining European and US resolve to uphold their borders is his goal.

There is a strain of Brexitism that is complicit in that project, regardless of whether leave campaigns knowingly or unwittingly took laundered roubles. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin is no secret: he has pushed the Kremlin line on Ukraine, preposterously depicting Crimea’s annexation as a defensive answer to EU provocation. He has described Russian military support for Syria’s murderous president Bashar al-Assad as a “brilliant” manoeuvre.

Putinophilia has the same cause as Farage’s Trump fandom. It is the nationalist’s fetish for a strongman, combined with nostalgia for the days when the world was run as a game between big countries using little countries as chips. It is unresolved grief at the UK’s 20th-century relegation from the ranks of imperial pawn-pushers.

That slow-burn trauma is analogous to the more sudden loss of status mourned by Russia, the reversal of which is Putin’s mission in life. During the cold war, British ideologues who swallowed a Kremlin agenda and regurgitated it as their own used to be called “useful idiots”. The difference now is they aren’t confined to the far left. Some of them are in government.


We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there

The Brexit delusion is that enslavement by Brussels inhibits our promotion back to the global power premier league. Boris Johnson is not immune to this fantasy. He would rather be a foreign secretary in the 19th-century style of Lord Castlereagh, carving out spheres of influence at the Congress of Vienna, than yawn through EU council meetings.

It is true that the EU empowers smaller countries. Witness the clout that Ireland has had in Brexit talks. But Britain has also benefited from aggregating its medium-sized might with Germany, France and 25 other nations. That is not a Brussels empire. It is a model of peaceful, collaborative power without historical equal.

May once understood this. In the referendum campaign she made a solid case for EU membership on the grounds that it could “maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world”. When she now promises a “deep and special partnership”, she is not just talking about trade, she is pledging loyalty to European democracy as one of its few significant military underwriters. When the prime minister berates Putin for undermining institutions that uphold the rule of law, she is signalling strategic solidarity, not economic alignment, with the EU.

This is chasing a bolting horse when the stable door hangs off its hinges. We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there. Brexit has already fractured an alliance that will be hard to repair. May will never be a friend of Putin, but he doesn’t need her friendship when she is committed to a policy he would choose for her anyway.

Why the Germans are right about economics

Gideon Rachman in The Financial Times


At the height of the euro crisis, Mario Monti, the former Italian prime minister, liked to remark that part of the problem was that “for Germans, economics is still part of moral philosophy”. The suggestion was that the German instinct was to assign blame rather than to fix the problem — and was followed up with a reminder that the German words for guilt and debt are the same.

But the real punchline is that the Germans are right. Economics is — or should be — part of moral philosophy.

Successful politicians have to do more than just deliver economic growth. They also need to offer voters a vision of the economy that makes moral sense — in which virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. Ever since the financial crisis 10 years ago, mainstream politicians in the west have lost that vital ability. The belief that the economic system is unjust has stoked the rise of rightwing and leftwing populism across the west.

As Mr Monti implied, the idea that economics needs to be rooted in a moral system is nothing new. Adam Smith, arguably the most important economic thinker ever, was a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. His famous observation that individuals working on their own behalf would contribute to the general good, is underpinned by a theory of moral sentiments.

Karl Marx’s followers went to the barricades because they believed that communism was morally superior to capitalism — not because they were inspired by Marxist economics. Friedrich Hayek was a passionate anti-Marxist, who won the Nobel Prize for economics. He was also a moral philosopher, whose The Road to Serfdom made an ethical case against state control of the economy.

When nobody at the apex of a failed system was sent to jail, the door was opened for a politician, such as Donald Trump, who argued that ‘the system is rigged’

Until the shocks of 2008, centrist politicians in the west were able to offer a morally coherent view of the economy that delivered them electoral success. A free-market economy was held to reward effort and success and to spread opportunity. Globalisation — the creation of a global market system — was defended as a moral project, since it involved reducing inequality and poverty across the world.

After the financial crisis, however, the “globalists” (to use a Trumpian term) began to lose the moral arguments. The fact that banks were bailed out as living standards stagnated, offended many voters’ idea of natural justice. When nobody at the apex of a failed system was sent to jail, the door was opened for a politician, such as Donald Trump, who argued that “the system is rigged”.

The success or failure of Mr Trump’s tax reforms, which are likely to go through this week, will depend to a great extent on whether he can convince voters that he is helping to make the system fairer. The Republican argument is that the new taxation system will reward hard work and reduce the burden of the state. The Democrats’ response is that the new tax reforms further rig the system in favour of the rich.

At the moment, a majority of Americans seem to agree with the proposition that the Trump tax reforms largely favour the wealthy. If that interpretation takes hold, voters may drift away from the rightwing populism of Mr Trump, towards the leftwing populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Sanders and Warren campaigns have also capitalised on the sense that America’s economic system is rigged. They have focused in particular on generational injustice — which leaves many young voters burdened with student debt and insecure jobs.

These arguments resonate not just in the US but right across the west. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence party and the Brexiters seized the banner of rightwing populism, while the leftwing populism of Jeremy Corbyn took control of the Labour party. In France, the rightwing and leftwing populism of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon respectively captured more than 40 per cent of the vote in the first round of this year’s presidential election. Add in other fringe parties and some 50 per cent of the French, British and American electorates are now clearly tempted by populist, anti-system politicians.

In Germany, however, the rightwing and leftwing variants of populism are still getting well under 25 per cent of the vote — despite the radicalising effect of the refugee crisis. In part, that is down to the success of the German economy. But it is also because Angela Merkel, the chancellor, realised that, in handling the euro crisis, she had to take account of ordinary voters’ sense of right and wrong. Many economists in the US and southern Europe argued that the crisis could only be solved by formally writing off a lot of Greek debt. They also made the case that German bankers were more to blame for the crisis than Greek pensioners. But Ms Merkel knew that, inside Germany, the argument that hard-working Germans should not be asked to write off the debts of wasteful Greeks was too powerful to tackle head-on. She could only make progress in tackling the euro crisis by respecting basic ideas about effort and reward.

A whole generation of western politicians has grown up with the Clintonian slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid”, ringing in their heads. But in today’s politics, “the economy” is not just about growth. It is also about justice.

Universal basic income is no panacea for us

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian







There aren’t many ideas that unite trade unionists, the libertarian right, the green movement, and the Silicon Valley tech scene . But that’s the rainbow alliance backing a universal basic income, a centuries-old idea posited as the solution to a range of 21st-century problems. Is its surprising coalition of bedfellows a sign of an idea whose time has at last resoundingly come – or a symptom of a catch-all, superficial fix in search of a problem?

Universal basic income, sometimes called a citizens’ income, is the idea that the state should pay every adult citizen a regular, modest income. It is a no-strings payment, so unlike benefits currently available to people of working age, it is not means tested. You get it regardless of whether you have a job, are looking for work, or whether you are even willing to work. 

A basic income has long counted on support from the political fringes. It has appealed to radical feminists and greens frustrated by capitalist failure to properly value non-monetary work, such as care. The libertarian right embraces it as an opportunity to roll back the bureaucracy of the state, replacing public services with a simple, regular cash payment, to be spent as people wish.

But the real reason for basic income’s unlikely elevation to idea of the moment is the growing chorus of thinkers who seem to believe the modern economy can’t function without it. Tech utopians talk up the rise of robots and the development of artificial intelligence, which they say will leave less work to go round. They argue that this is the perfect opportunity to embrace a four-day working week and top everyone up with a basic income payment.

Labour market dystopians, on the other hand, rightly point to growing insecurity in the low-paid labour market and the millennials bouncing from gig to gig, never quite pinning down the security of a permanent contract. For them, a basic income is the poverty backstop that could help people cope with this brave new world. 

Ken Loachian welfare critics, meanwhile, denounce today’s convoluted benefits system, worlds away from the contributory, insurance-based system of the past. It has become overloaded with sanctions as politicians compete to become ever more punitive to demonstrate there’s no such thing as something for nothing. So people who have been laid off find themselves pushed further into hardship after having their benefits docked for reasons outside their control. Wouldn’t it be easier to eradicate that inhumane, overbearing complexity, and replace it with something that gives people more breathing room to find the right job?

But, like so many ideas overstretched to become the answer to all problems, a basic income falls short on all of the above. If we could be bothered, we could fix the caring issue simply by increasing the generosity of the stingy state benefits paid to those who care full-time for older people or adults with disabilities. If we were so inclined, we could get rid of punitive benefit sanctions and replace them with a welfare-to-work system that puts much more emphasis on training and support for people to find the job that is right for them, not the first that comes along.

But it is in its most ambitious and radical incarnations that basic income runs aground. People have been predicting the end of work for a long time. Guess what: whether they count themselves utopian or dystopian, they have always been proved wrong. The wheel, the loom, the washing machine, the PC: as innovation after innovation has replaced some forms of human labour, the steady march of progress has replaced that labour with something else.

It’s tempting to think our inventions are more transformative than those of our ancestors. But it’s much more likely that, as in the past, technology will radically reshape the world of work without reducing its sum total. That’s partly because the idea that there is a set amount of paid work to be done is an error, which economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”. In fact, the richer we get, the more cash we have to spend – creating more demand and more jobs.

None of this should take away from the fact that we have some serious challenges ahead. The idea that the labour market is being reshaped rather than shrunk won’t be very comforting to taxi drivers losing their jobs to self-driving cars and finding they lack the skills for the new ones being created. But paying people a meagre basic income won’t help: we know from deindustrialisation in the past that leaving people who get laid off languishing on long-term benefits wreaks untold damage on working lives curtailed decades too early.

Britain has also always had too many low-skill, low-paid jobs offering poor prospects of progression. That should seriously worry us, particularly in the light of new research that suggests having a low-paid, stressful job is even worse for your mental health than unemployment.

Far from robots stealing jobs, the reality of today’s economy is that many companies are underinvesting in technology, suppressing productivity growth. In some sectors, labour is so cheap and easily exploitable it doesn’t make sense to modernise – for instance, Leicester’s garment industry is still heavily reliant on old-fashioned sweatshop models. In sectors such as parcel delivery and logistics, technology itself is being used to turn workers into quasi-robots. Wrist-based devices measure routes workers take round the warehouse or delivery rounds to check them for speed and efficiency, and track them right down to how long they take for toilet breaks.

The answer cannot be to accept this sorry state of affairs and try to patch things up with a basic income. It must be to address the fundamental power imbalances that allow employers to shift risk on to their employees by forcing them to become self-employed contractors, or refusing to pay them for breaks. And to develop long-term solutions for improving the quality of work. 

You can see the attractions of a basic income for Silicon Valley. Firms such as Uber, whose drivers are classified as self-employed “partners” rely on this risk-shift model. Even as Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, heaps praise on a basic income, the tech giant does all in its legal power to avoid tax and dodge paying its fair share towards the social infrastructure it relies on. The left must not allow itself to be seduced. A basic income is a distraction from these core issues of economic power; a radical-sounding excuse to look the other way from the less glamorous, more complex question of how to ensure labour market rights are properly enforced. Accepting a deterioration in employment rights and working conditions in exchange for a basic income could be dangerously counterproductive.

The tax credits that function as income top-ups for people in low-paid work have steadily been eroded by Conservative chancellors over eight years. Labour rights are more future proof: it’s impossible to imagine the government being able to cut statutory maternity leave, the minimum wage or limits on the working week without a much tougher fight – although if they are not properly enforced these rights can end up meaning little in practice for workers with unscrupulous employers.

The left will have to pick its battles. It must focus on winning the right to a decently paid job for all, not sell out by extolling a basic income as a panacea for the ills of the modern labour market. It must choose the fight for power, not the fight for a dribble of cash.

Howard Zinn on Objectivity

Facts do not matter

Amit Varma in The Hindu

The most surprising thing about these Gujarat elections is that people are so surprised at the Prime Minister’s rhetoric. Narendra Modi has eschewed all talk of development, and has played to the worst impulses of the Gujarati people. His main tool is Hindu-Muslim polarisation, which is reflected in the language he uses for his opponents. The Congress has a “Mughlai” mentality, they are ushering in an “Aurangzeb Raj”, and their top leaders are conspiring with Pakistan to make sure Mr. Modi loses. A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson has also launched a scathing attack on Congress president-elect Rahul Gandhi. None of this is new.

Mr. Modi’s rhetoric in the heat of campaigning has always come from below. From his references to “Mian Musharraf” over a decade ago to the “kabristan-shamshaan” comments of the recent elections in Uttar Pradesh, it has been clear that the otherness of Muslims is central to the BJP playbook. Hate drives more people to the polling booth than warm, fuzzy feelings of pluralism. But, the question is, are the Congress leaders really conspiring with Pakistan to make sure the BJP lose?

Answer: It doesn’t matter.

No care for truth

In 1986, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote an essay named “On Bullshit”, which was published as a book in 2005 and became a surprise bestseller. The book attempts to arrive at “a theoretical understanding of bullshit”. The key difference between a liar and a , ‘bullshitter’, Frankfurt tells us, is that the liar knows the truth and aims to deceive. The ‘bullshitter’, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth. He is “neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false,” in Frankfurt’s words. “His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.”

The ‘bullshitter’ is wise, for he has cottoned on to an important truth that has become more and more glaring in these modern times: that facts don’t matter. And to understand why, I ask you to go back with me in time to another seminal book, this one published in 1922.

The first chapter of “Public Opinion”, by the American journalist, Walter Lippmann, is titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”. In it, Lippmann makes the point that all of us have a version of the world inside our heads that resembles, but is not identical to, the world as it is. “The real environment,” he writes, “is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.”

We construct a version of the world in our heads, and feed that version, for modifying it too much will require too much effort. If facts conflict with it, we ignore those facts, and accept only those that conform to our worldview. (Cognitive psychologists call this the “Confirmation Bias”.)

Lippmann sees this as a challenge for democracy, for how are we to elect our leaders if we cannot comprehend the impact they will have on the world?

Fragmented media

I would argue that this is a far greater problem today than it was in Lippmann’s time. Back then, and until a couple of decades ago, there was a broad consensus on the truth. There were gatekeepers to information and knowledge. Even accounting for biases, the mainstream media agreed on some basic facts. That has changed. The media is fragmented, there are no barriers to entry, and the mainstream media no longer has a monopoly of the dissemination of information. This is a good thing, with one worrying side effect: whatever beliefs or impulses we might have — the earth is flat, the Jews carried out 9/11, India is a Hindu nation — we can find plenty of “evidence” for it online, and connect with like-minded people. Finding others who share our beliefs makes us more strident, and soon we form multiple echo chambers that become more and more extreme. Polarisation increases. The space in the middle disappears. And the world inside our heads, shared by so many other, becomes impervious to facts.

This also means that impulses we would otherwise not express in polite society find validation, and a voice. Here’s another book you should read: in 1997, the sociologist, Timur Kuran, wrote “Private Truths, Public Lies” in which he coined the term “Preference Falsification”. There are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social approbation. But as soon as we realise that others share our views, we are emboldened to express ourselves. This leads to a “Preference Cascade”: Kuran gives the example of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but an equally apt modern illustration is the rise of right-wing populists everywhere. I believe — and I apologise if this is too depressing to contemplate — that the majority of us are bigots, misogynists, racists, and tribal in our thinking. We have always been this way, but because liberal elites ran the media, and a liberal consensus seemed to prevail, we did not express these feelings. Social media showed us that we were not alone, and gave us the courage to express ourselves.

That’s where Donald Trump comes from. That’s where Mr. Modi comes from. Our masses vote for these fine gentlemen not in spite of their bigotry and misogyny, but because of it. Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi provide them a narrative that feeds the world inside their heads. Mexicans are rapists, foreigners are bad, Muslims are stealing our girls, gaumutra cures cancer — and so on. The truth is irrelevant. Facts. Don’t. Matter.

Think about the implication of this. This means that the men and women who wrote the Constitution were an out-of-touch elite, and the values they embedded in it were not shared by most of the nation. (As a libertarian, I think the Constitution was deeply flawed because it did not do enough to protect individual rights, but our society’s consensus would probably be that it did too much.) The “Idea of India” that these elites spoke of was never India’s Idea of India. These “liberal” values were imposed on an unwilling nation — and is such imposition, ironically, not deeply illiberal itself? This is what I call The Liberal Paradox.

All the ugliness in our politics today is the ugliness of the human condition. This is how we are. This is not a perversion of democracy but an expression of it. Those of us who are saddened by it — the liberal elites, libertarians like me — have to stop feeling entitled, and get down to work. The alt-right guru Andrew Breitbart once said something I never get tired of quoting: “Politics is downstream from Culture.” A political victory will now not come until there is a social revolution. Where will it begin?

Words that are emptied of meaning - 'Hinduism is a tolerant religion and 'Islam is a religion of peace'.

Tabish Khair in The Hindu



“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” says Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet’s advice is given to actors rehearsing a play within the play, but it is advice all of us can take. Words not suited to action are considered empty or hollow. We do not trust people whose words have little or nothing to do with their actions.

And yet, as communities, we tend to fall into this trap. We repeat some words, almost as if they were mantras, blithely ignoring the fact that our actions often do not vindicate such words.

The two most common sets of words that I hear these days come from Hindus and Muslims, all of them well meaning. Hindus in India keep telling me that “Hinduism is an inclusive, tolerant religion” and Muslims all over the world keep telling me that “Islam is a religion of peace.” Now, no doubt, they are largely right. There is much in history to suggest that Hinduism is an inclusive and tolerant religion, and that Islam puts a lot of stress on peace: the basic greeting of Islam, salaam-alai-kum, means ‘peace be on you.’

And yet, if we stop with these words, we are either being wilfully blind or displaying a remarkable lack of awareness and self-criticism. Because, very often, these words are not redeemed by action. Anyone who reads the newspapers today can see that not all Hindus are inclusive and not all Muslims are peace-loving.


The religion of Rahul Gandhi

One cannot help noticing that if Hinduism was always inclusive and tolerant, then the recent controversy over Rahul Gandhi’s religious beliefs would not have occurred. One also cannot help noticing that if Islam was equated solely with peace, groups of Muslims would not be shooting at each other in almost every third Muslim country in the world.

Let’s face it: why should the fact of Rahul Gandhi’s religious beliefs — or, for that matter, Jawaharlal Nehru’s agnosticism — become a matter of discussion in an India full of inclusive and tolerant Hindus? Let alone the fact that the oldest community of Christians in India can be dated back to 2,000 years, a truly inclusive and tolerant Hindu would not expect other Indians to obtain a ‘Hindu’ religious certificate in order to run for office. Similarly, surely, such a Hindu would be able to accept not just Indian Muslims, who have contributed to India for about 1,500 years, but also monuments, such as the Taj Mahal, associated with the so-called Muslim period of India. I must say that I was surrounded by really tolerant and inclusive Hindus in the India in which I grew up, and I must add that their numbers seem to be greatly reduced today.


Violence instead of protest

Similarly, the Muslim claim that Islam is a religion of peace seems hollow not just when one looks at what some Muslims are doing to other Muslims, but also when one hears religious discourses about the supposed ‘moral victory’ of Islam over other faiths. I will not even talk of Islamist terrorism, mostly because it is often discussed in excess to its reality, but surely some other people would bring it up, and who can say that their fears are totally unjustified? Islam might be a religion of peace, but too many Muslims seem to take recourse to violence instead of peaceful and democratic modes of protest and action.

Once again, this is a tendency that has increased in Muslim communities — where there is increasing impatience with those Muslims who do not kowtow to fundamentalist prescriptions.

In such a context, when Hindus say that Hinduism is an inclusive and tolerant religion, and Muslims say that Islam is a religion of peace, there can be only two explanations. First, and positively, what they mean is that the essence of Hinduism is inclusive and the essence of Islam is peaceful, and hence intolerant Hindus or violent Muslims are going against the essence of their own religions. If this is the intention, the statements are at least partly justified.

But, often, this is not the intention. The intention is not to critique wrong tendencies within Hinduism or Islam but to dismiss criticisms — from within or outside. Often, Hindus who beat the drum of the inclusiveness of Hinduism do so in order to dismiss contrary evidence, and so do Muslims who beat the drum of the peacefulness of Islam. In such cases, what they utter are empty words. Or worse: inclusiveness becomes a weapon to exclude, peace becomes a justification of violence.

The statements “Hinduism is an inclusive, tolerant religion” and “Islam is a religion of peace” contain much truth — but this truth has to be regularly vindicated by action. There seems to be an increasing failure to do so on the part of many Hindus and Muslims. Each one of us has to face up to this failure. Every time we use such words, we need to ask ourselves: do we really mean it, and does the evidence around us sustain such claims? We have to ask ourselves: are we using these words as ideals or as excuses?

Because, finally, words only mean what we put into them — by our daily acts. And when we use words that are being emptied of meaning, we simultaneously hollow out the rich and wonderful realities of our world.

Is polyamory finally ready to become an open secret in India?

Jayanthi Madhukar in The Hindu

She is 27 and lives in Bengaluru. Let’s call her Radhika. Radhika says she was 18 when she became “conscious” that she wanted to be intimate with multiple partners. In other words, that she was polyamorous. She has come out to a few friends and reactions have been mixed.

“Some are accepting, but some are sceptical, and tell me that I am being foolish and polyamory will never work.” She hasn’t told her parents yet simply because they will not understand. Even more difficult has been to find partners willing to accept polyamory. Radhika says she has been practising polyamory for only two years now, when she finally began to find the first few partners open to the idea.

The dictionary defines polyamory as ‘the practice of engaging in multiple sexual relationships with the consent of all the people involved.’ Its definition is often expanded as ‘consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy’ to differentiate it from what it is often misunderstood for — a committed couple in an open relationship where each is allowed to experiment outside the relationship every now and then. In polyamory, however, there is no single committed couple — the polyamorous group is committed to every one of its members, mentally and physically.

In hushed tones

As definitions of relationships and sexualities morph dramatically across the world, India is no exception. Polyamory India is a Facebook group formed about eight years ago by the San Diego-based Rohit Juneja and has as its background image the words, ‘The capacity for human love is unlimited.’ And about a year ago, Bangalore Polycules was formed, a ‘hush-hush’ community of people who are polyamorous and meet occasionally in private spaces.

Members have come together through an underground network. In a departure from their fool-proof privacy, the group organised a public event, a screening of a French film Lutine on polyamory, in order to educate more people about it. And when earlier this year, they announced the event at the city’s famous art space, 1 Shanthiroad Studio, it led also to their name cropping up on search engines.

That is how I found them. And perhaps that’s how Basit Manham found them. At 24, Manham says he is dealing with depression. Outwardly, his lean frame exudes confidence, showing no signs of the inner turmoil. Manham, a college dropout, moved to Bengaluru from Pune about a year ago as the senior community manager of Stay Abode. He comes from an orthodox Muslim family and in 2014, when he declared himself as ‘agnostic’ on social media, he was immediately disowned by his family and has had to support himself since. A few months later, he used social media again to declare that he was polyamorous.

Two major public declarations in quick succession, and their fallout, have clearly affected him deeply. “Probably,” he says. Alone in a new place, all Manham wanted was to be with people who would not question him or judge his choices. And then he stumbled upon Bangalore Polycules.

Not polygamy

The film screening of Lutine was open to all, polyamorous or otherwise, and it was followed by a Skype Q&A with the film’s director Isabelle Broué. When asked who had organised the screening and Q&A session, the gallery representatives would only say that they got a request for the event via email and that there was a good turnout of people. A city-based filmmaker who attended it says he could not figure out who the founders of the group were.

I spoke to Broué in an email interview, and she recollected her experience of talking to audience members. One of the questions asked of her was a common one that vexes most Polycules members. Is polyamory the same as polygamy? “I gave the usual answer: that polygamy is about being ‘officially’ in an union (from the Greek word gamos) with someone, whereas in polyamory, we’re talking about intimate relationships without social recognition,” says Broué, who is polyamorous herself.

Polyamory is about equity and egality: any person in a relationship has the same rights, no matter her or his gender, sexual orientation or age. But what Broué remembers most is seeing so many women in the audience, mostly “young women”. It reaffirmed her belief that polyamory is a way to assert yourself as a free person. “It is both personal and political,” she says, “a feminist way of living your relationships.”

On the evening of the event, one of the audience members, who had attended out of curiosity, got the feeling that the “whole thing was about kids wanting to have a good time”. Otherwise why wouldn’t they be in a monogamous relationship? Radhika doesn’t agree. “I am polyamorous,” she says. “I don’t think I have a choice in the matter. Whenever I’ve been in monogamous relationships, I have resented the fact that wanting a relationship with someone else is considered taboo (unless it’s within the framework of friendship). And that has been very stifling.”




Coming out as polyamorous in today’s society is obviously still difficult, despite the growing openness. What makes it easier are groups like the Polycules. As one of its members says in an email interview, the “primary purpose of this group is to be a place where people can share and support each other.”

For Manham, it was pure serendipity that he found a local community. He has been to a few of their meet-ups and finds the members are on his wavelength. He cannot give more details — the group has requested him not to volunteer more information about it. He says, “Idea-wise, we are connected and that’s enough for me.”

A polyamorous person can choose to be in a hierarchal or non-hierarchal relationship, which, simply put, means they could have a primary partner or all partners can be of equal relevance. In Manham’s case, his first relationship broke up because his girlfriend was not okay with him seeing others. “Each of my relationships satisfies a different emotional need. I can’t satisfy someone in all ways and vice versa,” he explains.

In a monogamous relationship, one either makes do with the partner, warts and all, or tries to change the partner. “Most poly people do not change anything about a partner,” Manham says. “It is cruel to try and change someone.”

Polyamorous people are also quick to point out that their proclivity for more than one partner does not make them simply promiscuous or disloyal.

A survey conducted of the Bangalore Polycules members found that 72% inform their partners of other relationships. About 85% said they would continue with a satisfying relationship even when sex dwindles or isn’t in the equation. They cite this to indicate that their ethics overrule the assumptions of promiscuity labelled on them. The Polyamory India group says on its Facebook page: ‘It is not about free sex, casual sex, extramarital affairs and nor is it a way to make friends or pick up sex partners. If you are looking for any of these please go elsewhere.’

The Bangalore Polycules community has people of diverse gender identity: male, female and other genders. Their sexual orientations range from heterosexuals at 35%, bisexual 35% and 30% homosexuals and others. But no matter what, all of them listed understanding and communication as the most important aspects in each of their relationships. “Communication is important because there is no standard protocol as there is in monogamy,” says Radhika. “Being receptive to each other’s needs, desires and preferences is crucial.” One of the Polycules members, who identified as demi-sexual, stressed on “honest communication” as being the key to satisfying polyamorous relationships.

Still, jealousy rears its ugly head. Sitting in a crowded restaurant and eating a piping hot vada and sambar, Manham is dealing with a few issues himself. “I still feel uncomfortable when my primary partner tells me about her other relationships,” he confesses. Only uncomfortable? “No, make that jealous,” he says, after a moment of silence. “So, I tell her it is okay if she doesn’t tell me about her relationships.” But omission is not honest communication. And that is a troubling issue.

It is not that polyamorous people do not feel jealousy. “We try to handle it differently,” as Radhika says. Some of it, according to her, is about thinking from a different perspective; people conventionally are not jealous if one friend seeks other friendships. “Often, jealousy stems from unmet needs in a current relationship, so figuring out what those are could be helpful,” she says. For Manham, acknowledging the emotion and reasoning it out is a step forward. As he says, “No matter what, I will support my primary partner, even when she has any issues with her other relationships.”

Questions of fidelity

Most members of Bangalore Polycules said that sex is not the key factor driving them to polyamory. In fact, for Manham, he broke off two relationships when he realised the partners were in it for sex only. “I thought we were in a relationship,” he says. One respondent said that even though he was not in a relationship at the moment, for him, platonic love transcends sex. He calls himself ‘asexual’, and he thinks it is possible to be connected only emotionally.

When questioned about what happens at the meet-ups, Manham retorts, “Just because we resonated idea-wise, doesn’t mean that I was sexually attracted to them.” Orgies are not the point of the meet-ups, a myth most non-poly people conjure. And in sexual relations, it is unwritten convention that the onus of safe sex is on all the partners. As Manham tells me, he and his partners (there are currently three), inform each other if they have had unprotected sex.

The expectations of emotional fidelity, on the other hand, are divided among members. Exactly half the respondents said they expected it, while the other half said they did not.

One issue that has yet to come up for most of them — given that the majority are in the 26-40 years age bracket — is the question of children. Will anything change then? Manham isn’t sure. And neither were some of the others. One of them, a young computer engineer in his early 30s, who guards his privacy ferociously as he is unsure of his workplace’s reactions, says he is now under pressure from his family to get married, settle down, have children.

“They look at my polyamory relationships as a ‘macho’ thing and want me to commit to one girl and have children,” he says. “But none of my partners are ready to be married and, frankly, neither am I. And having children out of wedlock will bring in other issues.”

For now, the issues facing the group are privacy related. As they grow older, there will no doubt be new issues. But the challenge at any age will be getting the right to live their lives the way they want, without society telling them how to live.