Sunday 18 October 2009
The Dragon spews fire at the Elephant
By M K Bhadrakumar
The surprise element was almost completely lacking. The expectation in Delhi for a while has been that sooner or later Beijing would hit out. Verbal affronts from India were becoming a daily occurrence and a nuisance for Being. Not a single day has passed for the past several months when either influential sections of the Indian strategic community or the English-language media, tied by the umbilical cord of financial patronage to the Indian establishment, failed to indulge in some vituperative attack on Chinese policies and conduct towards India.
Yet, when it finally came on Wednesday, the timing of the cumulative Chinese reaction was most curious. Beijing chose a very special day on its diplomatic calendar to make its point. The prime ministers of Russia and Pakistan, Vladimir Putin and Yousuf Raza Gilani, Yousuf Raza Gilani, and the United States Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, were on official visits to Beijing. Indeed, Campbell had come on an important mission to prepare for the visit by US President Barack Obama to China next month.
Beijing made a big point that its current ruckus with Delhi was less bilateral and more geopolitical. Indeed, Wednesday's People's Daily commentary on India resorted to a colloquium that hasn't been heard in the dialogue across the Himalayas for very many years.
On the previous day, in two statements the Chinese Foreign Ministry provided the "curtain raiser" for the People's Daily commentary. The first statement focused attention on the recent Indian media campaign against China and asked Delhi to be "conducive toward promoting mutual understanding", rather than publishing false reports on border tensions.
The second statement was substantive and it conveyed that Beijing was "seriously dissatisfied" by the visit of the Indian prime minister 10 days ago to the state of Arunachal Pradesh (which China claims as its territory). The Chinese spokesman said, "China and India have not reached any formal agreement on the border issue. We demand that the Indian side pay attention to the serious and just concerns of the Chinese side and not to provoke incidents in the disputed region, in order to facilitate the healthy development of China-India relations."
The Indian reaction came within hours and was at the highest level of the foreign-policy establishment. Foreign Minister S M Krishna brushed off the Chinese statement, saying, "Well, regardless of what others say, it is the government of India's stated position that Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India. We rest at that." He added that Delhi was "disappointed and concerned" over China's objection.
The diplomatic backdrop was evidently getting electrified when the People's Daily struck. It literally tore into Indian policies. Leaving aside specifics, it dealt with what Beijing assessed to be the core issue - India's obsession with superpower status born out of its rooted complexes of having "constantly been under foreign rule ... throughout history" and its "recklessness and arrogance" towards its neighbors. "The dream of superpower is mingled with the thought of hegemony, which places the South Asian giant in an awkward situation and results in its repeated failure," the commentary pointed out.
The striking thing about the Chinese commentary was that it echoed a widespread criticism that is quite often voiced by India's neighbors. The commentary sought to establish a commonality of concerns between China and India's neighbors over the rising tide of Indian nationalism in the past decade or so with its disagreeable manifestations for regional cooperation. "To everyone's disappointment, India pursues a foreign policy of 'befriend the far and attack the near' ... India, which vows to be a superpower, needs to have its eyes on relations with neighbors and abandon its recklessness and arrogance as the world is undergoing earthshaking changes," the commentary claimed.
Beijing surely factored in that almost without exception, India's neighbors voice similar concerns and are currently seeking friendly and close ties with China to balance India's perceived overbearing attitude towards them. In effect, the Chinese commentary tapped into the near-total isolation that India faces today in the South Asian region.
Interestingly, the People's Daily followed up by running a sequel on Thursday, this time harshly telling Delhi a couple of things. One, it underlined that Delhi was seriously mistaken if it estimated that China could be hustled into a border settlement with India through pressure tactics. It affirmed categorically that the border dispute could be settled or a substantial step forward approaching a final solution could be taken "only on the condition that both of them [China and India] are ready to shake off the traditional and deep-seated misunderstandings".
Two, the commentary alleged that Delhi was getting "disoriented when making decisions" because it harbored a notion that the US was viewing India as a counterweight to China. Delhi was also becoming susceptible to the US stratagem to "woo India away from Russia and China and, in the meantime, feeding India's ambition to match China force by force by its ever burgeoning arms sales to India".
Most important, the commentary concluded that although China and India "will never pose a mortal foe to each other", if the Indian establishment and a "handful of irresponsible media institutions" didn't restrain themselves, "an accidental slip or go-off at the border would erode into a war", which neither side wanted. It is very obvious that Beijing sees the Indian establishment's hand behind the vituperative media campaign against China in recent months.
How the tensions pan out is another matter. In immediate terms, a flashpoint arises as the Indian government has approved a visit by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in November to Arunachal Pradesh. No doubt, if the visit goes ahead, the Sino-Indian relationship will nosedive into a corridor of deep chill from which it may take a long time for the two countries to emerge.
The curious thing is this will be taking place at a time when the geopolitics of the region and world development as a whole will be passing through a transformative period of far-reaching significance. Given the fact that China's global power is an established reality, India may be painting itself into a corner by opting out of a mutual understanding with Beijing precisely at this juncture when the agenda of global issues and regional security is heavily laden.
On the contrary, if Delhi pays heed to Chinese sensitivities about the Dalai Lama's peregrinations in November, it will be accused by the Indian nationalist camp as buckling under Chinese pressure. An element of grandstanding, unfortunately, is entering into the Sino-Indian relationship, which runs against the grain of its maturing in the recent decade.
Equally, a question mark now envelops the rationale of India hosting the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers in the coming weeks within the framework of the trilateral format. To be sure, the equilibrium within the format has been disturbed. Russia and China have been developing an intense strategic partnership; India's traditional ties with Moscow have significantly weakened under the current pro-US leadership in Delhi; and, now, India's normalization process with China has suffered a severe setback.
At the same time, Russia has begun a serious attempt to choreograph a positive trajectory to its languishing relationship with Pakistan by taking it out of the trough of benign neglect and injecting some dynamism into it. China, of course, enjoys an "all-weather friendship" with Pakistan.
Indian policies are predicated on the assumption that a Sino-US clash of interests is inevitable as China's surge as a world power has become unstoppable, and Washington will have use of Delhi as a counterweight to Beijing sooner than most people would think. Surely, there is disquiet in Delhi about the Barack Obama administration's regional policies, which no longer accord India the status of a pre-eminent power and which place primacy on the US's alliance with India's arch rival, Pakistan.
But Delhi hopes that Obama will ultimately have to pay heed to US business interests and therefore India holds a trump card in the burgeoning market that it offers to the American corporate sector - unlike Pakistan, which is a basket case at best, a can of worms at worst.
Simply put, India is estimated to be the biggest arms buyer in the world and a market estimated to be worth US$100 billion is presenting itself to exploitation by American arms manufacturers - provided Obama has his wits about him and realizes on which side his South Asian bread is buttered. Delhi hopes to incrementally pose an existential choice to Obama through an idiom that the US political establishment understands perfectly well: the business interests of its military-industrial complex.
One thing is clear. Powerful Indian lobbyists have been at work in whipping up a war hysteria and xenophobia over China. The Washington Post recently featured a Delhi-datelined report on the shenanigans of these Indian fat cats who mainly comprise retired Indian defense officials and senior bureaucrats who act as commission agents for big American arms manufacturers. There was a time when the Sandhurst-trained Indian military personnel retired to the cool hill stations and spent the sunset of their lives playing bridge or going for long walks and regaling their visitors with their wartime stories while sipping whisky.
Nowadays, the smart ones among the retired generals and top bureaucrats take up residence in Delhi's suburbs and overnight transform themselves into "strategic thinkers" and begin networking with some American think-tank or the other, while probing a new lease on life as brokers or commission agents for arms manufacturers.
All in all, it is virtually certain that these lobbyists can expect a windfall out of Sino-Indian tensions. After all, a case has been neatly made about the imperatives of a close Indian tie-up with the US. The current Indian political elite doesn't really need any prompting in that direction, but all the same, a degree of public accountability may at times become necessary. Transparency International has bestowed on India the distinction of being one of the most corrupt countries on the planet and it is an open secret that India's arms procurement program provides a vast avenue to siphon off national wealth.
If the Indian market for military hardware is worth $100 billion, it is quite understandable that a gravy train is getting ready for the Indian elites. The People's Daily commentator may have unwittingly waved off the train from the platform. And that was exactly what the Indian elites and fat cats wanted.
Now, all eyes will turn toward the visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington in November. Obama has let it be known that Manmohan will be the first dignitary to be honored with a state banquet during his presidency.
The Americans are vastly experienced with the Indians' Himalayan ego and by now they know well enough where and how to tickle Indian vanities. How they pedal fresh dreams to the Indians and pick up the fruits of their endeavors will be keenly watched not only by the multitude of Indians back at home, but also by the Pakistanis, Chinese and the Russians.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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Friday 16 October 2009
From North Carolina, a model of how to transform education
Johann Hari:
It's proven that schools will succeed if they are genuinely comprehensive
The chief executive of Tesco, Britain's largest private employer, has issued a warning: are kids dont no nuffink. Terry Leahy said this week that our educational standards are "woefully low", and that young recruits to Tesco often have to be taught basic literacy, numeracy and communication skills before they can be unleashed on the aisles or stockrooms.
He's not alone. This warning rumbles across the country. A friend of mine is an academic at a middle-ranking university, and she recently showed me some of her students' essays. "It's quite normal for them not to know how to use paragraphs, or commas, or to be able to spell," she said, shaking her head. Some are barely literate, despite a clutch of A-levels. She found the same at two other universities.
It's not enough to glibly announce that there's no problem, as the Government did this week. Yes, a Chicken Little cry that educational standards are plummeting echoes across every age: one of the oldest tablets ever discovered in an archaeological dig warns that the kids of today aren't what they use to be. Yes, there are still a lot of good schools. Yet there are more children getting into Oxbridge every year from the pool of 300 kids at Eton than from the 300,000 kids on free school meals. Either you believe those Etonians are born smarter - an absurd proposition - or our school system is failing poor children on a vast scale. How many great minds are we allowing to atrophy just because they weren't born to wealth?
It doesn't have to be like this. A far better system is possible; we just need to follow the evidence. And the road-map runs through - of all places - North Carolina. Something extraordinary has been happening in the state's schools over the past few decades, and the best guide to this experiment is an important new book by Professor Gerald Grant called Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.
He looks at two very similar cities - Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level - while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?
Raleigh's governors decided to do something bold and unconventional: they looked to the scientific evidence. In 1966, Professor James Coleman was commissioned by the White House to conduct the largest study, to that time, of what makes good pupils succeed and bad pupils fail. After years of on-the-ground analysis, he came up with something nobody expected. He found that the single biggest factor determining whether you do well at school or not isn't your parents, your teachers, your school buildings or your genes. It was, overwhelmingly, the other kids sitting in the classroom with you. If a critical mass of them are demotivated, pissed off and disobedient, you won't learn much. But if a critical mass of them are hard-working, keen and stick to the rules, you will probably learn. Watch any 10-year-old: they are little machines for snuffling out the sensitivities of their peer group, and conforming to them.
Facing their schools' failure in the 1980s, the Raleigh school board returned to this evidence and tried to puzzle out: how should it change the way we run our schools? Touring the schools, they could see why the research was right. Children from poor families need more help than kids from rich families. They are more likely to have chaotic home lives, less likely to have the importance of education drilled into them from birth, and they have lower expectations for themselves.
In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school's pupils, the teachers can't cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.
So they formulated a bold - and strikingly simple - solution. They wouldn't allow any school, by law, to have more than 40 per cent of its children on free school meals, or more than 25 per cent of children who were a grade below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the children who needed the most help wouldn't be lumped together where their problems would become insurmountable; they would be broken up and fanned out across the educational system. Raleigh merged its school system with white suburban Wake County, so they became one entity, sharing pupils. In order to soothe suburban suspicion at this change, Raleigh turned a third of its inner-city schools into specialist academies, offering excellent music or drama or language specialisms. Soon, children were bussing in both directions every morning, in and out of the suburbs.
Many conservatives savaged the plan as "social engineering" and said it was doomed to fail. Some parents were angry, and a few decamped for the private school system - until the results came in. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.
It's not hard to see why. Each school had a core majority who respected the rules and valued education - and the other kids normalised to their standards. Those who found it tough could now be given special attention, because they weren't any longer surrounded by a mass of equally troubled kids. Today, 94 per cent of parents in Raleigh say they are happy with their child's education. School boards supporting this integration keep getting re-elected.
Raleigh succeeded because it built genuinely comprehensive schools: in which rich, middle-class and poor kids learned together. In Britain, we tell ourselves we have built "comprehensives" - but, except in a few enclaves, we have done nothing of the sort.
We allocate school places according to how close you live to a school. This immediately creates a social apartheid where middle-class children have successful schools in leafy suburbs, while poorer children are ring-fenced in sink schools and end up at Tesco at 16 with few useable skills. (Rich children are creamed off entirely into private schools.) Comprehensivisation didn't fail; it didn't happen.
There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian - and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools in which just one per cent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country.
So we know how to make schools work: integrate them. Occasionally, our politicians take a tiny step that brings us closer to this.
The Labour council in Brighton allocates school places by lottery; the Tories say they will abandon catchment areas, letting a few poor kids slip through. But both only tinker at the extreme social segregation that crowbars apart the educational system.
Integration is a good policy for bleak recession times since it delivers dramatic improvements at little extra cost. Raleigh actually spends less than the US national average on its schools, and 25 per cent less per pupil than failing Syracuse. In the long term, integration actually saves us a fortune in welfare payments and prevented crime.
Yes, the right will scream at first that it is "an attack on the middle class". In fact, it is a great compliment to the middle class: it wants to use their children and their values as the sun around which every child's education revolves. Yes, some parents will scream that they don't want their kids being taught alongside "chavs" and "pikeys". This should be called out bluntly - it is bigotry.
A democracy is based on a bargain: every child gets a chance to succeed, whatever their background. Today, we are breaking our deal. We are leaving millions of children to fail, just because their parents didn't have money. Do we want to be a country where our children are sorted at five into different playgrounds according to Daddy's bank account? Do we want to be an place where rich children only glimpse poor children from the car window as they are driven to their better, plusher school, and their better, plusher lives? Or do we want something better for our kids?
Our politicians insist that "we're all in this together". This will only be true if - at last, and at least - our children go to school together.
He's not alone. This warning rumbles across the country. A friend of mine is an academic at a middle-ranking university, and she recently showed me some of her students' essays. "It's quite normal for them not to know how to use paragraphs, or commas, or to be able to spell," she said, shaking her head. Some are barely literate, despite a clutch of A-levels. She found the same at two other universities.
It's not enough to glibly announce that there's no problem, as the Government did this week. Yes, a Chicken Little cry that educational standards are plummeting echoes across every age: one of the oldest tablets ever discovered in an archaeological dig warns that the kids of today aren't what they use to be. Yes, there are still a lot of good schools. Yet there are more children getting into Oxbridge every year from the pool of 300 kids at Eton than from the 300,000 kids on free school meals. Either you believe those Etonians are born smarter - an absurd proposition - or our school system is failing poor children on a vast scale. How many great minds are we allowing to atrophy just because they weren't born to wealth?
It doesn't have to be like this. A far better system is possible; we just need to follow the evidence. And the road-map runs through - of all places - North Carolina. Something extraordinary has been happening in the state's schools over the past few decades, and the best guide to this experiment is an important new book by Professor Gerald Grant called Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.
He looks at two very similar cities - Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level - while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?
Raleigh's governors decided to do something bold and unconventional: they looked to the scientific evidence. In 1966, Professor James Coleman was commissioned by the White House to conduct the largest study, to that time, of what makes good pupils succeed and bad pupils fail. After years of on-the-ground analysis, he came up with something nobody expected. He found that the single biggest factor determining whether you do well at school or not isn't your parents, your teachers, your school buildings or your genes. It was, overwhelmingly, the other kids sitting in the classroom with you. If a critical mass of them are demotivated, pissed off and disobedient, you won't learn much. But if a critical mass of them are hard-working, keen and stick to the rules, you will probably learn. Watch any 10-year-old: they are little machines for snuffling out the sensitivities of their peer group, and conforming to them.
Facing their schools' failure in the 1980s, the Raleigh school board returned to this evidence and tried to puzzle out: how should it change the way we run our schools? Touring the schools, they could see why the research was right. Children from poor families need more help than kids from rich families. They are more likely to have chaotic home lives, less likely to have the importance of education drilled into them from birth, and they have lower expectations for themselves.
In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school's pupils, the teachers can't cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.
So they formulated a bold - and strikingly simple - solution. They wouldn't allow any school, by law, to have more than 40 per cent of its children on free school meals, or more than 25 per cent of children who were a grade below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the children who needed the most help wouldn't be lumped together where their problems would become insurmountable; they would be broken up and fanned out across the educational system. Raleigh merged its school system with white suburban Wake County, so they became one entity, sharing pupils. In order to soothe suburban suspicion at this change, Raleigh turned a third of its inner-city schools into specialist academies, offering excellent music or drama or language specialisms. Soon, children were bussing in both directions every morning, in and out of the suburbs.
Many conservatives savaged the plan as "social engineering" and said it was doomed to fail. Some parents were angry, and a few decamped for the private school system - until the results came in. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.
It's not hard to see why. Each school had a core majority who respected the rules and valued education - and the other kids normalised to their standards. Those who found it tough could now be given special attention, because they weren't any longer surrounded by a mass of equally troubled kids. Today, 94 per cent of parents in Raleigh say they are happy with their child's education. School boards supporting this integration keep getting re-elected.
Raleigh succeeded because it built genuinely comprehensive schools: in which rich, middle-class and poor kids learned together. In Britain, we tell ourselves we have built "comprehensives" - but, except in a few enclaves, we have done nothing of the sort.
We allocate school places according to how close you live to a school. This immediately creates a social apartheid where middle-class children have successful schools in leafy suburbs, while poorer children are ring-fenced in sink schools and end up at Tesco at 16 with few useable skills. (Rich children are creamed off entirely into private schools.) Comprehensivisation didn't fail; it didn't happen.
There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian - and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools in which just one per cent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country.
So we know how to make schools work: integrate them. Occasionally, our politicians take a tiny step that brings us closer to this.
The Labour council in Brighton allocates school places by lottery; the Tories say they will abandon catchment areas, letting a few poor kids slip through. But both only tinker at the extreme social segregation that crowbars apart the educational system.
Integration is a good policy for bleak recession times since it delivers dramatic improvements at little extra cost. Raleigh actually spends less than the US national average on its schools, and 25 per cent less per pupil than failing Syracuse. In the long term, integration actually saves us a fortune in welfare payments and prevented crime.
Yes, the right will scream at first that it is "an attack on the middle class". In fact, it is a great compliment to the middle class: it wants to use their children and their values as the sun around which every child's education revolves. Yes, some parents will scream that they don't want their kids being taught alongside "chavs" and "pikeys". This should be called out bluntly - it is bigotry.
A democracy is based on a bargain: every child gets a chance to succeed, whatever their background. Today, we are breaking our deal. We are leaving millions of children to fail, just because their parents didn't have money. Do we want to be a country where our children are sorted at five into different playgrounds according to Daddy's bank account? Do we want to be an place where rich children only glimpse poor children from the car window as they are driven to their better, plusher school, and their better, plusher lives? Or do we want something better for our kids?
Our politicians insist that "we're all in this together". This will only be true if - at last, and at least - our children go to school together.
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Wednesday 14 October 2009
We're all in this together (except when times are good)
The idea of shared responsibility only seems to apply during a recession
Mark Steel - The Independent From now on, anyone who wants to make you worse off has a new catchphrase. If a mugger demands your wallet and you refuse to give it to him, he'll say "Haven't you heard? We're all in this together." And as he takes it he'll say: "See, we've all got to make a sacrifice."
It's a shame how it works, because this shared responsibility only seems to apply during a recession. While the banks were making billions, very few politicians were screaming "For God's sake you idiots, share all those bonuses out. Can't you see we're all in this together," which goes to show how complicated economics can be.
Luckily for the richest layer of society, we weren't in it together back then, so from 1997 to 2007 the wealthiest 1 per cent of the country could double its share of the wealth, while the poorest 10 per cent had their share cut in half. Then came the banking crash, after which that top layer took a humble and radical decision to carry on exactly the same.
So in the last year, the average pay of directors of FTSE companies has risen by 10 per cent, to reach £791,000. The first question to these people must be what couldn't they get with only £721,000 that they need the extra for?
If a director was told his salary was staying the same, would he shout: "WHAT? How am I going to pay for the kids' space programme? I've already had a red reminder bill from Nasa, I'll have to do some mini-cabbing in the evening or I'll be having the bailiffs round."
Others have softened the blow of recession in other ways. For example the chief of P&O was awarded, along with his pay rise, £80,000 worth of tickets for top sporting events. Imagine if a union leader called a press conference and said: "While the management have conceded tickets for semi-final day at Wimbledon, there has sadly been no progress on the issue of the Third Test at Trent Bridge, and so the strike is due to begin at midnight tonight."
Or there's Martin Sorrell, Group chief of WPP advertising, who in the last year laid off 7,200 staff and collected a £20m salary. But because we're all in it together maybe he gave them a little jingle as he laid them off, singing "You won't be let back in with a Sorrell sacking, now you're on - the dole."
No one even attempts to justify these raises any more, although they ought to be told to try, so we could see them muttering: "Well, it's imperative I earn more than last year, to compensate for all the suffering of knowing we're all in it together. Yes, that's it." Instead, George Osborne and Peter Mandelson tell us these amounts would make little difference to the overall debt of the country. So they make do with an occasional call on the banking industry to "show restraint". In which case both parties will presumably change their stance towards the slightly smaller amounts claimed illegally by people on benefits, and commission adverts that go "Benefit cheats - we're closing in. And when we do, you'll be asked to show restraint and responsibility in the amount that you fiddle in the future. Thank you."
The cry that we're suddenly together has happened countless times, in every recession. There was probably a Roman emperor who announced "Citizens of Rome. Unfortunately it appears I have used up all the gold of the empire in having a temple built for me and my wives. It's not my fault because no one was regulating me, as I had the last regulator crucified. So the most important thing is for all slaves to work themselves to a wretched death as quickly as possible, as we're all very much in this together. Cheers."
And maybe worst of all, if Labour do try to oppose the absurdity of a pair of multi-millionaires insisting we're all in it together, they'll look even more ridiculous than the Tories themselves. Because when Brown complains about scurrilous bankers he has to explain why he's spent the last 14 years addressing bankers' galas with speeches that go "My lords, ladies and gentlemen. What do you want - less tax? De-regulation? Women? You just say it, I'll sort it."
And Mandelson will struggle to present himself as an opponent of the wealthy, despite claiming "Labour is in my blood". Maybe he'll say next "You know, whenever I'm on a trillionaire's yacht I always drink Brown Ale, because I am at heart a working man."
So the only coherent line they could put would be to say "The Tories are vicious. Whereas we are vicious but incompetent. So you can rest assured that when we try to cut your income in half, you have every chance of getting away with it because we'll leave all the paperwork on the bus. Vote Labour."
It's a shame how it works, because this shared responsibility only seems to apply during a recession. While the banks were making billions, very few politicians were screaming "For God's sake you idiots, share all those bonuses out. Can't you see we're all in this together," which goes to show how complicated economics can be.
Luckily for the richest layer of society, we weren't in it together back then, so from 1997 to 2007 the wealthiest 1 per cent of the country could double its share of the wealth, while the poorest 10 per cent had their share cut in half. Then came the banking crash, after which that top layer took a humble and radical decision to carry on exactly the same.
So in the last year, the average pay of directors of FTSE companies has risen by 10 per cent, to reach £791,000. The first question to these people must be what couldn't they get with only £721,000 that they need the extra for?
If a director was told his salary was staying the same, would he shout: "WHAT? How am I going to pay for the kids' space programme? I've already had a red reminder bill from Nasa, I'll have to do some mini-cabbing in the evening or I'll be having the bailiffs round."
Others have softened the blow of recession in other ways. For example the chief of P&O was awarded, along with his pay rise, £80,000 worth of tickets for top sporting events. Imagine if a union leader called a press conference and said: "While the management have conceded tickets for semi-final day at Wimbledon, there has sadly been no progress on the issue of the Third Test at Trent Bridge, and so the strike is due to begin at midnight tonight."
Or there's Martin Sorrell, Group chief of WPP advertising, who in the last year laid off 7,200 staff and collected a £20m salary. But because we're all in it together maybe he gave them a little jingle as he laid them off, singing "You won't be let back in with a Sorrell sacking, now you're on - the dole."
No one even attempts to justify these raises any more, although they ought to be told to try, so we could see them muttering: "Well, it's imperative I earn more than last year, to compensate for all the suffering of knowing we're all in it together. Yes, that's it." Instead, George Osborne and Peter Mandelson tell us these amounts would make little difference to the overall debt of the country. So they make do with an occasional call on the banking industry to "show restraint". In which case both parties will presumably change their stance towards the slightly smaller amounts claimed illegally by people on benefits, and commission adverts that go "Benefit cheats - we're closing in. And when we do, you'll be asked to show restraint and responsibility in the amount that you fiddle in the future. Thank you."
The cry that we're suddenly together has happened countless times, in every recession. There was probably a Roman emperor who announced "Citizens of Rome. Unfortunately it appears I have used up all the gold of the empire in having a temple built for me and my wives. It's not my fault because no one was regulating me, as I had the last regulator crucified. So the most important thing is for all slaves to work themselves to a wretched death as quickly as possible, as we're all very much in this together. Cheers."
And maybe worst of all, if Labour do try to oppose the absurdity of a pair of multi-millionaires insisting we're all in it together, they'll look even more ridiculous than the Tories themselves. Because when Brown complains about scurrilous bankers he has to explain why he's spent the last 14 years addressing bankers' galas with speeches that go "My lords, ladies and gentlemen. What do you want - less tax? De-regulation? Women? You just say it, I'll sort it."
And Mandelson will struggle to present himself as an opponent of the wealthy, despite claiming "Labour is in my blood". Maybe he'll say next "You know, whenever I'm on a trillionaire's yacht I always drink Brown Ale, because I am at heart a working man."
So the only coherent line they could put would be to say "The Tories are vicious. Whereas we are vicious but incompetent. So you can rest assured that when we try to cut your income in half, you have every chance of getting away with it because we'll leave all the paperwork on the bus. Vote Labour."
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Tuesday 13 October 2009
Vedanta versus the villagers: the fight for the sacred mountain
Tribes say plans by UK-listed mining firm Vedanta to mine on holy land will destroy their way of life
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 October 2009 20.14 BST
Members of the Kutia Kondh tribe in the village of Dangadahal in the foothills of Niyamgiri mountain in Orissa state, India. Stone is being excavated for roads so Vedanta can extract bauxite. Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain
Every day there is more ash, pouring out of the alumina refinery that squats among the steep-sided, jungle-clad hills of western Orissa, India. The dust hangs in the air and clings to the landscape, settling on the huts of the aboriginal Kondh tribes who call this place home, choking those who breathe it in.
Niyamgiri is as remote as any place in the country: 600km from the state capital Bhubaneswar, accessible only by narrow, shattered roads pocked with deep holes, a world away from the economic powerhouse that is 21st-century India.It is a place of quiet beauty, of lush green paddy fields and huge mango trees, where self-sufficient tribes still share the jungle with elephant, tiger and leopard. Yet this most unlikely place is now the frontline in a clash of civilisations that has pitched the indigenous population up against the corporate might of the British mining company Vedanta Resources, intent on dragging Niyamgiri into the modern world.
It is the mineral wealth lying beneath the slopes of the mountain that has drawn Vedanta to Niyamgiri. It wants to turn the hillside into a giant bauxite mine to feed its refinery at the foot of the mountain.The FTSE 100-listed company, which is run by the abrasive billionaire Anil Agarwal, is pressing ahead despite a desperate local rearguard action and an international outcry. Yesterday the British government turned on the company, issuing an unexpectedly damning assessment of its behaviour.
Vedanta hopes the refinery will produce at least one million tonnes of alumina a year. But the Kondh people – the Dongria, Kutia and Jharania – need the bauxite too. It holds water remarkably well and helps feed the perennial streams on which they and the animals that live on the mountain rely. Once the bauxite is gone, they fear, the streams will run dry. And that will be the end of the Kondh.Faced with ferocious local opposition and an international campaign to stop the development, the company has returned time and again to the courts to push its plans through. In July, after numerous setbacks and rulings against it, it was finally given permission by India's supreme court to start mining.
It has wasted no time. Already, the skeleton of an enormous conveyor belt snakes out of the refinery and up to the foot of the mountain. Beyond it, an ugly scar of deep red earth runs up the hillside where hundreds of trees have been felled. Convoys of lorries trundle along the narrow roads, churning them to mud.
There are still legal challenges that the protesters can make and there is also the remote possibility that Vedanta shareholders, which include the Church of England, could bring pressure on the board to reverse its plans.
Although the mining is yet to start in earnest, those who live in the hundreds of small villages that dot the slopes are in no doubt that the effects of Vedanta's presence are already being felt. People and animals are dying, they say: the number of cases of tuberculosis have shot up.Basanti Majhi sits with her hands folded in her lap, in a hut in the centre of the Kutia Kondh village of Rengopali, a couple of hundred metres from where the company has sited the red mud pond that holds the waste slurry from the refining process.
The 12-year-old started coughing hard last year; her family took her to a doctor, who confirmed TB. She complains of constant pains in her hips and joints and of problems from the dust that settles on the village. "The dust gets in my eyes and it makes it hard to breathe," she says.
Salesmen
Her uncle, Lingaraj Majhi, says 12 people have died from TB in the village in the last year, including a nine-year-old girl and two middle-aged women. He blames dust and smoke from the refinery and the presence of the red mud pond.
"We never used to have a problem but the cases started to appear in the last two years," he said. "During the summer the dust comes in to our houses and gets everywhere, even into our food."
Outside the hut where Basanti sits is a plaque announcing the inauguration of the electrification of the village on 25 June 2008 in a scheme sponsored by Vedanta. Similiar signs adorn the walls of buildings all over the district, part of a concerted campaign by the company to win over the local population. It is hard to move without seeing the name Vedanta. But its critics are unconvinced, suggesting that in many instances the company is simply piggy-backing on existing schemes.
No sooner had the electricity arrived than salesmen turned up, hoping to take advantage of the small group of people who had received small packets of compensation for the loss of their land (many did not) to the red mud pond. Some of the villagers were persuaded to blow their cash on television sets and satellite dishes. Some also bought motorbikes. Only later did they stop to consider how they would pay for the electricity and the fuel to keep them going. With their land gone, few can afford it, and the dishes and bikes stand idle.
"The company promised us a developed way of life with electricity and such things, but now we have to pay for the electricity and we don't have any money," says Kuni Majhi, 40.
She used to grow crops on seven hectares of common land; when the pond was built, she lost the land. There was no compensation. Worse, many of the trees in the area were chopped down, so now she has to trek further to reach the jungle to find firewood and to pick whatever produce she can find.
"The way we were living, we were self-sufficient, and we had lived like that for generations," she says. "We could have lived like that for many more generations too. Because of these people, we cannot. But we will still fight to continue the old ways."
To the animist Kondh tribes, the mountain is more than the place where they live: it is their god. It has sustained them for generations, providing everything they need to survive. All over its slopes there are small shrines where they place offerings to the mountain from whatever they have taken from the jungle. When the mining starts, they fear that the mountain will be taken away from them.
High up in the foothills, 13 families live in two rows of huts in the Dongria Kondh village of Devapada. The huts line a central area in which an imposing wooden ceremonial arch marks the place where animal sacrifices are carried out.
The village is only accessible on foot, the path meandering through meadows in which the tribe is growing paddy. Every now and then there is a wooden watchtower, in which they will sit at night to guard against the wild animals which try to get at the crop, beating drums or waving lighted torches to scare them off.
Now they also have to keep watch for the contractors who are trying to build roads up the mountainsides.
"We don't want a road. The company will come and kill us," says Sitaram Kulesika, 23. He is sitting on a charpoy under the shade of a tree, toying with a new Nokia mobile phone, a rare concession to the outside world. Kulesika is involved in the campaign to stop the mining: the phone, he says, is a necessary evil to keep in touch with his fellow activists. "We stopped them coming up here. We went to explain to them that if they came we would have to leave. We don't want to get into clashes, so we are explaining peacefully."
Lost crops
Others have been less peaceful: the Kondh men routinely carry axes which they use for hunting and to work in the forest, and the contractors are wary of them. A number of the company's vehicles have been attacked in recent months.
Kulesika insists they just want to be left to get on with their lives. "We get everything we need from the mountain except salt and kerosene and we can barter for those," he says. But even now, that is becoming harder. "The smoke brings ash here and it is settling in the village. We can see the impact on the mango and the pineapple and the orange and banana. The flowers are falling early and the fruit is falling and we are losing our crops and the quality of the food is declining."
Down on the plain, the heavens have opened, huge drops of rain hammering into the muddy ruts which mark the road around the turn-off to the refinery. There are security guards everywhere, patrolling in vehicles and on motorbikes. A barbed wire fence and a wide ditch protect the growing hill of ash: any attempt to approach brings the guards out in force.
A short distance away, a crowd has gathered in the centre of the road. It is pouring with rain and they huddle under umbrellas to listen to the leaders of the anti-Vedanta campaign telling them that they can still stop the mine from going ahead. There are a few communist party banners and a lot of red bandanas tied around heads. A few men carry spears and bows and arrows; many more have brought their axes, which they wave in the air from time to time.
The police watch warily from behind a barricade, clutching bamboo shields and their long wooden lathis. They fear trouble, though the rain has dampened the enthusiasm of the crowd. The speakers finish and the crowd drifts away. An hour or so later, back in his village of Kundobodi, close to the refinery, Kumati Majhi, one of the protest leaders, is still railing against Vedanta. The company claims it is committed to sustainable development of the area, he says, but their actions tell another story.
"Once they start mining the mountain will be bulldozed and the rivers will dry up and our livelihood will be lost," he says. "We will become fish out of water. We don't know how to adapt and survive and our way of living is not available in the cities. We will be extinct."
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Asda slips up on banana price war
A vicious supermarket price war has broken out over bananas, but the people who really foot the bill are the plantation workers
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 October 2009 17.30 BST
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A third of banana sales are now fair trade. Photograph: Helen Yates/Picture It Now
Bananas down to 38p per kilo in Asda, 35p per kilo in Tesco this week. A supermarket price war over a fruit with as much comic potential as the banana ought to be funny. Asda has said that it will take the cost of slashing the retail price from its own margins and not pass the pain on down the supply chain, so surely consumers can only benefit as the big four rivals slug it out for market share. Except, of course, we know that's not how the script usually runs when UK supermarkets start price wars.
If anyone thinks supermarkets are in the business of simply handing cash back to customers, they are being naive. I've been analysing data on price rises in Asda on some of the biggest-selling brands between 8 July this year and last week – when the banana wars got heavy. There's been a 72% increase in PG Tips tea, a 45% rise on some Colgate top-selling toothpastes, a more than 100% increase on some Pringles crisps, 38% on Rich Tea biscuits, and 85% on single cream. These are steep rises, not on goods that were previously on promotion, but on the usual price.
That looks to me remarkably like a supermarket increasing its margin to build a war chest of cash. Can I be sure? No. Like most shoppers, I find it impossible to keep track of supermarket pricing because it is so variable and opaque. Even the competition authorities have admitted they do not have the resources to monitor what the big picture is. But it's a fair bet that what supermarkets give back to us with one hand, they are taking, or have already taken, with the other. In the short term, cutting the price of bananas and selling them below the cost of production is a game for them, a paper exercise in shifting profits around, designed to grab publicity, pull shoppers in to spend on other highly profitable goods, and squeeze their competitors.
But in the medium and long term, it's no game for the rest of the banana industry. A phony supermarket price war is a real war for them – one in which they tend to suffer the collateral damage. We know from the bitter history of such price wars that the costs have been passed down the chain, if not immediately, then over the subsequent months.
Asda/Wal-Mart was able to fund its early banana war in 2002 on the back of a global deal with Del Monte, which gave the transnational retailer an extraordinarily low price. Fair trade campaign groups have documented the conditions that were behind that price. In 1999, Del Monte sacked all 4,300 of its workers on one of its biggest plantations in Costa Rica, the country that supplies much of UK demand. They re-employed them on wages reduced by 30-50%, on longer hours, with fewer benefits.
This model was subsequently rolled out across the industrial banana sector. Aid organisations say that a deterioration in conditions has accompanied each banana war. That around 50% of workers on these plantations are now migrants within Latin America is a reflection of how poor pay and conditions became. For all their protestations that the cuts are not passed on, the fact remains that the world price of bananas has been driven down relentlessly since the 1970s. On the ground, fair trade campaigners say they still find evidence of poverty wages, excessive hours, poor health and safety standards, intimidation of union members and environmental degradation.Under pressure from bad publicity about these conditions, the big global banana traders – Del Monte, Chiquita and Dole – were actually pushed into working with aid organisations and local unions to do something about them. They have seemed concerned to distance themselves from the trade's banana republic legacy. All that work, however, may be put at risk by Asda's gaming.
Most British shoppers do not want to be part of the exploitation that has historically been associated with the fruit. One third of banana sales are now fair trade, helped by Sainsbury's and Waitrose making the commitment to buy all their bananas from fair trade sources in 2007. But the current race to the bottom will put enormous pressure on them as they subsidise the difference. The smaller farmers, many of them in the Windward Islands, who produce that fair trade fruit fear the downward pressure on their prices the price war will build.
At some point, Asda will decide that the benefit of this particular loss leader has run its course. It will move on. But by then the damage to other people's livelihoods may have been done.
It's a zero-sum game, and if you want to know what happens when they play it, you need only look at the fate of British dairy farmers. Squeezed by the supermarkets over many years, the British dairy sector has been brought to the brink of collapse. We now cannot even meet demand for fresh milk, but have to import millions of litres each day from mainland Europe.
Did consumers benefit from this assault on sustainable farming and our long-term food security? The office of fair trading thought not, finding Asda, among others, guilty two years ago of price-fixing. So, please, don't fall for their bananas.
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Sunday 11 October 2009
Obama, man of peace? No, just a Nobel prize of a mistake
October 11, 2009
Robert Fisk:
The US president received an award in the faint hope that he will succeed in the future. That's how desperate the Middle East situation has become
His Middle East policy is collapsing. The Israelis have taunted him by ignoring his demand for an end to settlement-building and by continuing to build their colonies on Arab land. His special envoy is bluntly told by the Israelis that an Arab-Israel peace will take "many years". Now he wants the Palestinians to talk peace to Israel without conditions. He put pressure on the Palestinian leader to throw away the opportunity of international scrutiny of UN Judge Goldstone's damning indictment of Israeli war crimes in Gaza while his Assistant Secretary of State said that the Goldstone report was "seriously flawed". After breaking his pre-election promise to call the 1915 Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey a genocide, he has urged the Armenians to sign a treaty with Turkey, again "without pre-conditions". His army is still facing an insurgency in Iraq. He cannot decide how to win "his" war in Afghanistan. I shall not mention Iran.
And now President Barack Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. After only eight months in office. Not bad. No wonder he said he was "humbled" when told the news. He should have felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shimon Peres won it, too, and he never won an Israeli election. Yasser Arafat won it. And look what happened to him. For the first time in history, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a man who has achieved nothing - in the faint hope that he will do something good in the future. That's how bad things are. That's how explosive the Middle East has become.
Isn't there anyone in the White House to remind Mr Obama that the Israelis have never obliged a US president who asked for an end to the building of colonies for Jews - and Jews only - on Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this - it was written into the Oslo accords - and the Israelis ignored him. George W Bush demanded an end to the fighting in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis ignored him. Mr Obama demands a total end to all settlement construction. "They just don't get it, do they?" an Israeli minister - apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - was reported to have said when the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her president's words. That's what Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's crackpot foreign minister - he's not as much a crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he's getting close - said again on Thursday. "Whoever says it's possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement," he announced before meeting Mr Obama's benighted and elderly envoy George Mitchell, "... simply doesn't understand the reality."
Across Arabia, needless to say, the Arab potentates continue to shake with fear in their golden minarets. That great Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir - murdered in 2005, quite possibly by Mr Obama's new-found Syrian chums - put it well in one of his last essays. "Undeterred by Egypt since Sadat's peace," he wrote, "convinced of America's unfailing support, guaranteed moral impunity by Europe's bad conscience, and backed by a nuclear arsenal that was acquired with the help of Western powers, and that keeps growing without exciting any comment from the international community, Israel can literally do anything it wants, or is prompted to do by its leaders' fantasies of domination."
So Israel is getting away with it as usual, abusing the distinguished (and Jewish) head of the UN inquiry into Gaza war crimes - which also blamed Hamas - while joining the Americans in further disgracing the craven Palestinian Authority "President" Mahmoud Abbas, who is more interested in maintaining his relations with Washington than with his own Palestinian people. He's even gone back on his word to refuse peace talks until Israel's colonial expansion comes to an end. In a single devastating sentence, that usually mild Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri noted last week that Mr Abbas is "a tragic shell of a man, hollow, politically impotent, backed and respected by nobody". I put "President" Abbas into quotation marks since he now has Mr Ahmadinejad's status in the eyes of his people. Hamas is delighted. Thanks to President Obama.
Oddly, Mr Obama is also humiliating the Armenian president, Serg Sarkisian, by insisting that he talks to his Turkish adversaries without conditions. In the West Bank, you have to forget the Jewish colonies. In Armenia, you have to forget the Turkish murder of one and a half million Armenians in 1915. Mr Obama refused to honour his pre-election promise to recognise the 20th century's first holocaust as a genocide. But if he can't handle the First World War, how can he handle World War Three?
Mr Obama advertised the Afghanistan conflict as the war America had to fight - not that anarchic land of Mesopotamia which Mr Bush rashly invaded. He'd forgotten that Afghanistan was another Bush war; and he even announced that Pakistan was now America's war, too. The White House produced its "Afpak" soundbite. And the drones came in droves over the old Durand Line, to kill the Taliban and a host of innocent civilians. Should Mr Obama concentrate on al-Qa'ida? Or yield to General Stanley McChrystal's Vietnam-style demand for 40,000 more troops? The White House shows the two of them sitting opposite each other, Mr Obama in the smoothie suite, McChrystal in his battledress. The rabbit and the hare.
No way are they going to win. The neocons say that "the graveyard of empire" is a cliché. It is. But it's also true. The Afghan government is totally corrupted; its paid warlords - paid by Karzai and the Americans - ramp up the drugs trade and the fear of Afghan civilians. But it's much bigger than this.
The Indian embassy was bombed again last week. Has Mr Obama any idea why? Does he realise that Washington's decision to support India against Pakistan over Kashmir - symbolised by his appointment of Richard Holbrooke as envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan but with no remit to discuss divided Kashmir - enraged Pakistan. He may want India to balance the power of China (some hope!) but Pakistan's military intelligence realises that the only way of persuading Mr Obama to act fairly over Kashmir - recognising Pakistan's claims as well as India's - is to increase their support for the Taliban. No justice in Kashmir, no security for US troops - or the Indian embassy - in Afghanistan.
Then, after stroking the Iranian pussycat at the Geneva nuclear talks, the US president discovered that the feline was showing its claws again at the end of last week. A Revolutionary Guard commander, an adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned that Iran would "blow up the heart" of Israel if Israel or the US attacked the Islamic Republic. I doubt it. Blow up Israel and you blow up "Palestine". Iranians - who understand the West much better than we understand them - have another policy in the case of the apocalypse. If the Israelis attack, they may leave Israel alone. They have a plan, I'm told, to target instead only US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their bases in the Gulf and their warships cruising through Hormuz. They would leave Israel alone. Americans would then learn the price of kneeling before their Israeli masters.
For the Iranians know that the US has no stomach for a third war in the Middle East. Which is why Mr Obama has been sending his generals thick and fast to the defence ministry in Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis not to strike at Iran. And why Israel's leaders - including Mr Netanyahu - were blowing the peace pipe all week about the need for international negotiations with Iran. But it raises an interesting question. Is Mr Obama more frightened of Iran's retaliation? Or of its nuclear capabilities? Or more terrified of Israel's possible aggression against Iran?
But, please, no attacks on 10 December. That's when Barack Obama turns up in Oslo to pocket his peace prize - for achievements he has not yet achieved and for dreams that will turn into nightmares.
And now President Barack Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. After only eight months in office. Not bad. No wonder he said he was "humbled" when told the news. He should have felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shimon Peres won it, too, and he never won an Israeli election. Yasser Arafat won it. And look what happened to him. For the first time in history, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a man who has achieved nothing - in the faint hope that he will do something good in the future. That's how bad things are. That's how explosive the Middle East has become.
Isn't there anyone in the White House to remind Mr Obama that the Israelis have never obliged a US president who asked for an end to the building of colonies for Jews - and Jews only - on Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this - it was written into the Oslo accords - and the Israelis ignored him. George W Bush demanded an end to the fighting in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis ignored him. Mr Obama demands a total end to all settlement construction. "They just don't get it, do they?" an Israeli minister - apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - was reported to have said when the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her president's words. That's what Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's crackpot foreign minister - he's not as much a crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he's getting close - said again on Thursday. "Whoever says it's possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement," he announced before meeting Mr Obama's benighted and elderly envoy George Mitchell, "... simply doesn't understand the reality."
Across Arabia, needless to say, the Arab potentates continue to shake with fear in their golden minarets. That great Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir - murdered in 2005, quite possibly by Mr Obama's new-found Syrian chums - put it well in one of his last essays. "Undeterred by Egypt since Sadat's peace," he wrote, "convinced of America's unfailing support, guaranteed moral impunity by Europe's bad conscience, and backed by a nuclear arsenal that was acquired with the help of Western powers, and that keeps growing without exciting any comment from the international community, Israel can literally do anything it wants, or is prompted to do by its leaders' fantasies of domination."
So Israel is getting away with it as usual, abusing the distinguished (and Jewish) head of the UN inquiry into Gaza war crimes - which also blamed Hamas - while joining the Americans in further disgracing the craven Palestinian Authority "President" Mahmoud Abbas, who is more interested in maintaining his relations with Washington than with his own Palestinian people. He's even gone back on his word to refuse peace talks until Israel's colonial expansion comes to an end. In a single devastating sentence, that usually mild Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri noted last week that Mr Abbas is "a tragic shell of a man, hollow, politically impotent, backed and respected by nobody". I put "President" Abbas into quotation marks since he now has Mr Ahmadinejad's status in the eyes of his people. Hamas is delighted. Thanks to President Obama.
Oddly, Mr Obama is also humiliating the Armenian president, Serg Sarkisian, by insisting that he talks to his Turkish adversaries without conditions. In the West Bank, you have to forget the Jewish colonies. In Armenia, you have to forget the Turkish murder of one and a half million Armenians in 1915. Mr Obama refused to honour his pre-election promise to recognise the 20th century's first holocaust as a genocide. But if he can't handle the First World War, how can he handle World War Three?
Mr Obama advertised the Afghanistan conflict as the war America had to fight - not that anarchic land of Mesopotamia which Mr Bush rashly invaded. He'd forgotten that Afghanistan was another Bush war; and he even announced that Pakistan was now America's war, too. The White House produced its "Afpak" soundbite. And the drones came in droves over the old Durand Line, to kill the Taliban and a host of innocent civilians. Should Mr Obama concentrate on al-Qa'ida? Or yield to General Stanley McChrystal's Vietnam-style demand for 40,000 more troops? The White House shows the two of them sitting opposite each other, Mr Obama in the smoothie suite, McChrystal in his battledress. The rabbit and the hare.
No way are they going to win. The neocons say that "the graveyard of empire" is a cliché. It is. But it's also true. The Afghan government is totally corrupted; its paid warlords - paid by Karzai and the Americans - ramp up the drugs trade and the fear of Afghan civilians. But it's much bigger than this.
The Indian embassy was bombed again last week. Has Mr Obama any idea why? Does he realise that Washington's decision to support India against Pakistan over Kashmir - symbolised by his appointment of Richard Holbrooke as envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan but with no remit to discuss divided Kashmir - enraged Pakistan. He may want India to balance the power of China (some hope!) but Pakistan's military intelligence realises that the only way of persuading Mr Obama to act fairly over Kashmir - recognising Pakistan's claims as well as India's - is to increase their support for the Taliban. No justice in Kashmir, no security for US troops - or the Indian embassy - in Afghanistan.
Then, after stroking the Iranian pussycat at the Geneva nuclear talks, the US president discovered that the feline was showing its claws again at the end of last week. A Revolutionary Guard commander, an adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned that Iran would "blow up the heart" of Israel if Israel or the US attacked the Islamic Republic. I doubt it. Blow up Israel and you blow up "Palestine". Iranians - who understand the West much better than we understand them - have another policy in the case of the apocalypse. If the Israelis attack, they may leave Israel alone. They have a plan, I'm told, to target instead only US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their bases in the Gulf and their warships cruising through Hormuz. They would leave Israel alone. Americans would then learn the price of kneeling before their Israeli masters.
For the Iranians know that the US has no stomach for a third war in the Middle East. Which is why Mr Obama has been sending his generals thick and fast to the defence ministry in Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis not to strike at Iran. And why Israel's leaders - including Mr Netanyahu - were blowing the peace pipe all week about the need for international negotiations with Iran. But it raises an interesting question. Is Mr Obama more frightened of Iran's retaliation? Or of its nuclear capabilities? Or more terrified of Israel's possible aggression against Iran?
But, please, no attacks on 10 December. That's when Barack Obama turns up in Oslo to pocket his peace prize - for achievements he has not yet achieved and for dreams that will turn into nightmares.
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Friday 9 October 2009
The pressure's all mine
Why and when players feel under the cosh, what it does to them, and how to deal with it
October 8, 2009
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Ever wonder why Chetan Sharma couldn't bowl a last-ball yorker in the Sharjah final against Pakistan all those years ago and instead bowled a low full-toss that Javed Miandad promptly hit for a six to win the match? After all, Sharma was extremely effective with the old ball in the slog overs. He could produce yorkers almost at will, which was why he was entrusted with the job of bowling that crucial final over. Let me try and put you in the shoes of players at such moments.
Scene 1 Imagine you're fielding at long-off in a friendly game at the Eden Gardens. The batsmen stroll a single. You field the ball without fuss and throw it. It's a routine drill for you.
Scene 2 Imagine you're doing the above on your first-class debut. There are senior players, perhaps even selectors, watching you and you want to do it absolutely right. You keep your eyes on the ball and ensure that you don't fumble, and promptly return the ball to the bowler. You feel some nerves but nothing that you can't handle.
Scene 3 Now change the colour of the jersey to India's blue and imagine playing in front of 100,000 people. The noise in the stadium is deafening. You can hear the people in the stands behind you shout as they realise the ball is coming their way. The batsmen are pressing for a non-existent second run to put pressure on you. But you hold your nerve, pick the ball cleanly, throw it back and heave a sigh of relief.
Scene 4 It's the last ball of a final between India and Pakistan. The opposition needs two runs to win the game. The ball is hit in your direction. They're running hard and you need to pounce, collect it cleanly and make a solid and accurate return to ensure a run-out. All of this happens in no more than a few seconds, but they seem to last forever. One slip-up could cost your team the match, and with it the trophy. It may even cost you your place in the side. You could be a veritable pariah to the watching millions.
Nothing is fundamentally different between those four scenarios - except for the degree of pressure involved. The ground remained the same, so did the power with which the shot was hit, and the weight of the ball. But there's a huge difference between fielding in a friendly and in an international match, especially when a match, trophy or career is at stake.
I use fielding as an example because luck plays a smaller role in fielding than it does in other disciplines. You might get a good ball while batting or the batsman might hit a great shot off a good ball you bowl, but with fielding there are few such issues.
| Ricky Ponting says that unless playing a certain shot or bowling a certain ball hasn't become a habit, it's almost impossible to produce it under pressure. For example, if a lofted shot over covers is your get-out-of-jail shot you must perfect the shot in practice | |||
Fear of failure
Cricketers, like everyone else, have an inherent desire to succeed. We are taught the consequences of failure from an early age. If you don't perform, you're dropped from the side and you have to endure criticism from peers, coaches and others. The desire to succeed gives birth to the fear of failure. It's this fear that breeds nervousness, especially at the beginning of an innings. Only a few can remain calm while facing their first ball or running in to bowl their first delivery. There's always the fear of things going awfully wrong. It isn't only public failure that haunts a cricketer but also the knowledge that that failure could mean the end of the road for him at that particular level.
I remember playing for the Board President's XI against New Zealand just before my Test debut. I had had a knee surgery a few months before that, and it was my first competitive game in six months. The only thought that occupied my mind while facing Ian Butler was that I had to survive the first ball somehow and not get out for a duck. Logically there isn't much difference between getting out for 0 and for 1, but the mind seldom follows logic. The obsession with getting off the mark exists at all levels.
The higher the stakes, the bigger the fear. The fear of failure is at its pinnacle when you're playing for your place in the side. Both Dinesh Karthik and Abhishek Nayar found themselves in such a situation against West Indies in the Champions Trophy, and the effect was quite visible. Both would probably have played differently at any other time in their careers, but not on that day. They were circumspect and did everything in their power to avoid failure.
Fear of success
A tennis player committing unforced errors and double faults while serving for the match, a golfer missing a straightforward putt on the 18th hole, and a batsman taking a non-existing single on 99 to reach his hundred are common.
Anticipating success, and the accolades that come with it, coupled with the fear of ruining all the hard work that has been put in, makes a player nervous near the finishing line. The mind is in two places: one part wanders into the future, contemplating the kudos, while the other is scared of stumbling at the last hurdle. As a result, the execution of simple skills becomes difficult and the ability to think rationally deserts the individual. In hindsight, I must have felt the same way when I swept Stuart MacGill on 48 in the Melbourne Test of 2003. I don't usually play the sweep shot, but the eagerness to score a fifty did me in.
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Lance Klusener and Allan Donald did something similar in the 1999 World Cup semi-final against Australia. Klusener could have hit a boundary with ease, and he had two more deliveries to go, but it all ended in a messy run-out.
Pressure from external circumstances
There are times when it's not the match situation that puts pressure on you. Remember Sachin Tendulkar's sleepless nights before the India-Pakistan clash in the 2003 World Cup? He doesn't lose sleep over every international game, but that wasn't any old game - it was an India-Pakistan clash in the biggest tournament of them all. I'm sure English and Australian cricketers face the same situation during the Ashes. In these cases it's not the quality of the opposition that puts you under pressure but the importance of the occasion and the expectations of people back home.
Individuals respond differently to pressure
The pressure that you feel has a lot to do with the form you are in and also the match situation. The pressure you feel while batting on the first day of a Test match is quite different from that which you feel while batting to save a Test in the fourth innings.
Two individuals facing the same opposition react differently thanks to the sort of form they are in. In the third Test match in Chennai against Australia in 2004-05, India had to bat only a few overs at the end of the fourth day. Virender Sehwag, who was in sublime form, saw it as an opportunity to score a quick 20, since the field was attacking, considering it was a short session. On the contrary Yuvraj Singh couldn't wait to get off the park. But it doesn't really tell you anything about the attitude or the mental toughness of either batsman because the same Sehwag wasn't keen to bat against the lesser bowlers of Maharashtra in a less important Ranji Trophy game at a time when he couldn't get the ball off the square.
How does on handle pressure?
Different players have different ways of dealing with pressure.
Brendon McCullum says that one must rein oneself in under pressure. Instead of going for a big heave when you're not seeing the ball well and your feet are not moving, take a single to get the other batsman on strike. Doing that gives you time to settle down and find form.
| The desire to succeed gives birth to the fear of failure. It's this fear that breeds nervousness, especially at the beginning of an innings | |||
Ricky Ponting says that the only way to do well under pressure is to work hard in the nets. While he agrees that quality of practice is very important, he believes the quantity also plays a big role. He adds that unless playing a certain shot or bowling a certain ball hasn't become a habit, it's almost impossible to produce it under pressure. For example, if a lofted shot over covers is your get-out-of-jail shot, you must perfect it in practice to execute it to perfection in a match.
The importance of detachment
Players who are able to detach themselves from the importance of the occasion are better equipped to handle pressure. John Buchanan spoke to us at Kolkata Knight Riders about the need to disconnect from the hype created around the game in order to perform to potential.
We, as players, tend to go with the flow in big matches and at crucial situations. One feels pressured to hit a big shot as soon as the asking-rate goes over seven. Even though the situation is not as alarming as it sounds - because seven an over is achievable with sensible cricket and a few calculated risks - the pressure gets to people.
S Sriram once told me what to do in situations like this: "Postpone the desire to hit a big one by 10 minutes and play percentage cricket till then. But if you still feel the need to go for the jugular after 10 minutes, you should." The idea here is to think rationally instead of going with the flow and hitting a cross-batted slog off a good ball. One must try to play to one's strengths.
Bishan Bedi used to tell us that pressure is something you put on yourself. The scoreboard just shows digits and we get nervous or confident depending on how we read them. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it isn't.
Feeling under pressure is a state of mind, and I think staying in the present and playing on the merit of the ball works for me. Sharma and Miandad were at the opposite ends of the spectrum on that particular ball in that fateful match. One couldn't think or perhaps couldn't execute his plan under pressure, while the other not only thought rationally but also achieved an extremely difficult task. That's what pressure does to people. And how they handle and react to pressure is what separates great players from good ones.
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