'Who says a dog cannot receive better treatment than a servant?': Hinduja family members sentenced to jail for exploiting domestic staff

 Sam Jones in The FT 

Four members of the multi-billionaire Hinduja clan, the UK’s wealthiest family, have been convicted of exploiting their domestic staff and sentenced to lengthy jail terms by a court in Geneva. 

In a ruling on Friday, a panel of three judges found Prakash Hinduja, his wife Kamal, as well as their son Ajay and his wife, Namrata, guilty of serious employment offences related to Indian staff. 

“They spent more on [their] dog than one of their servants,” Genevan public prosecutor Yves Bertossa told the court this week in a case that shed a harsh light on the punishing conditions to which one of the world’s wealthiest families subjected their workers. 

The court cleared the four Hindujas of the more serious charge of human trafficking that had been brought by the authorities. 

The domestic staff at the centre of the case, who were mostly illiterate, had been flown in directly from India to work at the family’s palatial home in Switzerland. 

In a damning verdict, presiding judge Sabina Mascotto said the Hindujas had no excuses for their behaviour. 

“[The workers] were exploited given their situation in India was so precarious and they were exploited as they didn’t know the language, had their passports confiscated and were only ever paid every 3-6 months,” said Mascotto. 

“The four Hindujas knew the vulnerabilities of the staff and knew what the rules were in Switzerland, as they all were Swiss citizens and Ajay was educated in Switzerland,” she added. 

The court nevertheless ruled that the employees had known the terms they were signing up for when they entered the family’s service in India and therefore could not have been said to be trafficked. 

Reflecting the seriousness of the offences the four were convicted of, Prakash and Kamal were sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. Ajay and Namrata received a four-year sentence. 

An appeal process could take years in Switzerland’s often slow-moving justice system, under which a judgment is not considered final until all avenues of appeal have been exhausted. The four Hinduja family members were not present at the court for the verdict. 

Romain Jordan, a lawyer for the family, said his clients were “appalled and disappointed” by the court’s decision. 

“Importantly, the family has been acquitted of human trafficking charges,” he said. 

An appeal has already been filed. “Under Swiss law, the presumption of innocence is paramount until an adverse final judgment by the highest adjudicating authority is enforced,” Jordan emphasised. 

Prakash is the second of three brothers behind the Hinduja Group, a sprawling multinational conglomerate with interests in everything from cars and petrochemicals to banking and armaments. 

His older brothers Gopichand and Srichand settled in London in the 1980s and made it the centre of the group’s affairs. Gopichand, worth an estimated £35bn, is the UK’s richest man. Srichand died last May. 

Prakash settled in Switzerland, from where he runs the family business. He was made a Swiss citizen in 2000. His younger brother, Ashok, runs the Hinduja Group’s Indian interests. 

In a week of explosive revelations, Geneva’s public prosecutor accused Prakash, Kamal, Ajay and Namrata of treating their employees as indentured servants. 

They were accused of keeping the staff trapped at a villa in the ultra-exclusive Geneva lakeside suburb of Cologny, where they slept in substandard conditions in basement rooms. 

The workers were paid less than one-tenth of the salary they were entitled to under Swiss law, according to the prosecutor Bertossa. 

One servant was paid just 7 Swiss francs a day, and worked as many as 18 hours, 7 days a week, Bertossa alleged. The family dog had more than three times as much spent on it, according to documents seized by police and presented to the court. 

As well as attending to the family at Cologny, the retinue of staff travelled with the Hindujas to their ski chalet in the Swiss alps and villa on the Cote d’Azur, but otherwise had almost no personal freedom, Bertossa said. 

Their passports were taken from them. They were paid in rupees into Indian bank accounts, which they did not have access to while in Switzerland, he said. 

Giving testimony, members of the family denied the allegations against them, and said their staff had been like “members of the family.” 

Ajay’s lawyer, Yael Hayat, told the court that the prosecutor’s claims about employees were exaggerated. “When they sit down to watch a movie with the kids, can that be considered work?” she asked the court to consider. 

A civil case brought against the family on behalf of their staff was settled for an undisclosed sum last week.

In Broken Britain, even the statistics don’t work

 Tim Harford in The FT 

From the bone-jarring potholes to the human excrement regularly released into British rivers, the country’s creaking infrastructure is one of the most visceral manifestations of the past 15 years of stagnation. To these examples of the shabby neglect of the essential underpinnings of modern life, let me add another: our statistical infrastructure. 

In her new book, How Infrastructure Works, engineering professor Deb Chachra argues that infrastructure is an extraordinary collective achievement and a triumph of long-term thinking. She adds that a helpful starting point for defining infrastructure is “all of the stuff that you don’t think about”. 

Statistical infrastructure certainly matches those descriptions. The idea that someone needs to decide what information to gather, and how to gather it, rarely crosses our mind — any more than we give much thought to what we flush down the toilet, or the fact that clean water comes from taps and electricity from the flick of a switch. 

As a result the UK’s statistical system, administrative databases, and evidence base for policy are suffering the same depredations as the nation’s roads, prisons and sewers. Easiest to measure are the inputs: the Office for National Statistics faces a 5 per cent cut in real terms to its budget this year, has been losing large numbers of experienced staff, and is hiring dramatically fewer than five years ago. 

But it is more instructive to consider some of the problems. The ONS has struggled to produce accurate estimates of something as fundamental as the unemployment rate, as it tries to divide resources between the traditional-but-foundering Labour Force Survey, and a streamlined-but-delayed new version which has been in the pipeline since 2017. 

That is an embarrassment, but the ONS can’t be held responsible for other gaps in our statistical system. A favourite example of Will Moy, chief executive of the Campbell Collaboration, a non-profit producer of systematic reviews of evidence in social science, is that we know more about the nation’s golfing habits than about trends in robbery or rape. This is because the UK’s survey of sporting participation is larger than the troubled Crime Survey of England and Wales, recently stripped of its status as an official National Statistic because of concerns over data quality. Surely nobody made a deliberate decision to establish those curious statistical priorities, but they are the priorities nonetheless. They exemplify the British state’s haphazard approach in deciding what to measure and what to neglect. 

This is foolishness. The government spends more than £1,200bn a year — nearly £18,000 for each person in the country — and without solid statistics, that money is being spent with eyes shut. 

For an example of the highs and lows of statistical infrastructure, consider the National Tutoring Programme, which was launched in 2020 in an effort to offset the obvious harms caused by the pandemic’s disruption to the school system. When the Department for Education designed the programme, it was able to turn to the Education Endowment Foundation for a solid, practical evidence base for what type of intervention was likely to work well. The answer: high-quality tutoring in small groups. 

This was the statistical system, in its broadest sense, working as it should: the EEF is a charity backed by the Department for Education, and when the crisis hit it had already gathered the evidence base to provide solutions. Yet — as the Centre for Public Data recently lamented — the DfE lacked the most basic data needed to evaluate its own programme: how many disadvantaged pupils were receiving tutoring, the quality of the tutoring, and what difference it made. The National Tutoring Programme could have gathered this information from the start, collecting evidence by design. But it did not. And as a result, we are left guessing about whether or not this was money well spent. 

Good data is not cheap to collect — but it is good value, especially when thoughtfully commissioned or built into policymaking by default. One promising avenue is support for systematic research summaries such as those produced by the Cochrane Collaboration for medicine and the Campbell Collaboration for social science and policy. If you want to understand how to promote literacy in primary schools, or whether neighbourhood policing is effective, a good research synthesis will tell you what the evidence says. Just as important, by revealing the gaps in our knowledge it provides a basis for funding new research. 

Another exciting opportunity is for the government to gather and link the administrative data we all produce as a byproduct of our interactions with officialdom. A well-designed system can safeguard personal privacy while unlocking all manner of insights. 

But fundamentally, policymakers need to take statistics seriously. These numbers are the eyes and ears of the state. If we neglect them, waste and mismanagement are all but inevitable. 

Chachra writes, “We should be seeing [infrastructure systems], celebrating them, and protecting them. Instead, these systems have been invisible and taken for granted.” 

We have taken a lot of invisible systems for granted over the past 20 years. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that in this period, UK public investment has lagged the OECD average by a cumulative half a trillion pounds. That is a lot of catching up to do. The next government will need some quick wins. Investing in better statistical infrastructure might be one of them.

The hounding of Arundhati Roy shows there’s still no room for dissent in India

Salil Tripathi in The Guardian

Some thought the BJP’s reduced majority after recent elections would humble it. Tell that to the Booker prize-winning author

This month, the highest ranking bureaucrat of the state of Delhi, Vinai Kumar Saxena, gave his permission for the Delhi police to prosecute Arundhati Roy and Sheikh Showkat Hussain for remarks they made at a public event 14 years ago. The opposition Aam Aadmi party governs Delhi, but the capital’s police reports to the central government’s home ministry. While the prime minister, Narendra Modi, lost his parliamentary majority in the recently concluded elections, the prosecution of Roy shows that those who expected a chastened government willing to operate differently are likely to be disappointed.

Hussain and Roy are to be tried for making speeches at a conference called Azadi [Urdu for “freedom”]: The Only Way, which questioned Indian rule in the then state of Jammu and Kashmir. Hussain is a Kashmiri academic, author and human rights activist. Roy is among India’s most celebrated authors, with a wide following around the world.

After Roy won the Booker prize in 1997, for The God of Small Things, she became the nation’s darling. It was the year of India, in a sense: the 50th anniversary of India’s independence, and the year Salman Rushdie, the first Indian-born winner of the Booker, published a volume anthologising new Indian literature. Roy was a fresh voice from the still young, post-independence India, reminding us of the multitude of stories from the subcontinent not yet told. She became an idol to be followed and imitated. Indeed, in Mira Nair’s 2001 film Monsoon Wedding, a character who wants to pursue creative writing at an American university is told by an uncle: “Lots of money in writing these days. That girl who won the Booker prize became an overnight millionaire.”

But many of those uncles – powerful and privileged – are no longer happy with Roy. When Saxena announced that Roy could be prosecuted under India’s draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), because she had said at this event that Kashmir had never been an “integral” part of India, there was outrage abroad from intellectuals and writers’ organisations, but responses in India were less spirited. While politicians such as Mahua Moitra of the Trinamool Congress were prompt in criticising the move, others on social media commended the government and gleefully admonished those who defended Roy. Their reasoning: Roy was “anti-national”, unpatriotic, sympathising with terrorists, and needed to face the full force of the law.

The UAPA is a draconian law – being granted bail is extremely difficult, and the accused can be taken into custody before the trial even begins. And the proceedings may not begin for years, as has happened to several leading dissidents during the Modi years. But its use against Roy in this case is puzzling. Lawyers have pointed out procedural gaps: it is not known if the Delhi police has filed a formal report, known as “charge sheet”, after conducting investigations, which is necessary before prosecution can begin. India’s highest court requires the authorities to explain why they wish to use the UAPA, and Saxena’s order offers no explanation. Nor does a 14 June note published on social media that carries his signature. Under UAPA, central government approval is necessary before prosecution can begin, and the authority can grant such permission only after there has been an independent review of evidence gathered. It is not known publicly if any of those steps have been taken, raising profound questions about the legality of the approval itself. Some lawyers believe that the government may have invoked the UAPA to sidestep the legal bar of the statute of limitations.

Despite this travesty, if Roy is not getting an outpouring of public sympathy, it has to do with how India has changed in the past quarter of a century. Its elite are keen to shed the past image of a poor, struggling country. India deserves a seat at the main table, they say; and dissidents and writers who question Indian policies are inconvenient do-gooders whose pessimism interferes with India’s ascent. On significant issues on which much of India’s majoritarian, powerful elite believes there is consensus, Roy is the naysayer.

Consider Roy’s views on Kashmir, the disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have gone to at least three wars, and where Pakistan-supported insurgents have sought independence. The Indian army has stationed tens of thousands of troops there, and human rights groups have accused the Indian state and extremist groups of abuses. Roy has listened to Kashmiri voices and challenged India’s human rights record for more than a decade. She has persistently opposed India’s governing consensus and conduct in Kashmir – her last novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – describes the Kashmir crisis graphically. Triumphalist Indians don’t like to hear such criticism.

Nor do many Indians like her questioning the wisdom of building large dams to produce electricity or irrigate farms. Building dams was the dream of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; he called dams “temples of modern India”. The dams helped farms and generated power, and well-meaning development experts questioned Roy’s stance. But Roy showed how they also displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The dispossessed saw the mandatory land acquisitions as a land grab by the powerful.

Roy has also written critically of Gandhi’s views on the “untouchable” caste Dalits, calling them discriminatory and patronising, and has been a vocal critic of India’s nuclear tests and arsenal. These views offend India’s conservative and liberal opinion. India’s peaceniks admire Gandhi; India’s Hindu nationalists hate Gandhi but love the bomb. The fact that she wins accolades abroad, and prominent western publications give her space to write, rattles and rankles them even more. The powerful in India want to hear only praise; Roy keeps reminding the world of the rot within.

Whether or not Roy gets prosecuted remains to be seen; prosecuting authorities may feel the evidence isn’t enough, or much time has passed, and her lawyers may succeed with their procedural objections. The government too may prefer the ambiguity, hoping that the threat of prosecution might keep her, and other dissidents, silent.

But one thing is certain: it was wrong to assume that Modi has changed. Pursuing someone as high-profile as Roy is the government’s way of warning critics that they must not expect anything different. The sword hangs over the critics; Roy reminds us why the pen must remain mightier than the sword.

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