Offshore secrets revealed: the shadowy side of a booming industry

A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies

• David Leigh, Harold Frayman and James Ball
• The Guardian, Sunday 25 November 2012 20.00 GMT

The existence of an extraordinary global network of sham company directors, most of them British, can be revealed.

The UK government claims such abuses were stamped out long ago, but a worldwide joint investigation by the Guardian, the BBC's Panorama and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has uncovered a booming offshore industry that leaves the way open for both tax avoidance and the concealment of assets.

More than 21,500 companies have been identified using this group of 28 so-called nominee directors. The nominees play a key role in keeping secret hundreds of thousands of commercial transactions. They do so by selling their names for use on official company documents, using addresses in obscure locations all over the world.

This is not illegal under UK law, and sometimes nominee directors have a legitimate role. But our evidence suggests this particular group of directors only pretend to control the companies they put their names to.

The companies themselves are often registered anonymously offshore in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), but also in Ireland, New Zealand, Belize and the UK itself. More than a score of UK agencies sell offshore companies, several of which also help supply sham directors.

One British couple, Sarah and Edward Petre-Mears, who migrated from Sark in the Channel Islands to the Caribbean island of Nevis, have sold their services to more than 2,000 entities, with their names appearing on activities ranging from Russian luxury property purchases to pornography and casino sites.

In 1999, the government claimed Britain's sham director industry had been "effectively outlawed" after a judge, Mr Justice Blackburne, said the court would not tolerate "the situation where someone takes on the directorship of so many companies and then totally abrogates responsibility". But our findings show this has failed to be policed.

These nominee fronts conceal a wide variety of real owners, including those that are perfectly legal, from Russian oligarchs to discreet speculators in the British property market. Their only common factor is the wish for secrecy. Some of the owners we have identified include:

• Vladimir Antonov, the London-based billionaire Russian purchaser of Portsmouth FC, who is currently fighting an extradition request from Lithuania, where he controlled a bank. He denies wrongdoing.

• Yair Spitzer, a north London software engineer who bought and sold London flats. He said: "We were advised by UK accountants that this structure … was perfectly legal."

• The Hackmeys, a wealthy Israeli family, one of whom used a BVI company to buy a £26m London office block. Their spokesman said: "The deal was introduced by a [confidential] joint venture partner who set up the deal and structure."

• Nicholas Joannou, whose Armstrong Group sold shares from an address in Berkeley Square, central London. The Guardian was unable to contact him.

• SP Trading, which was linked in 2009 to a Kazakh businessman and an arms to Iran scandal. The nominee directors in Vanuatu turned out to have no knowledge of the company's true activities. They told us there were "very few cases of misuse by clients".

In a parallel investigation Monday's Panorama on BBC1 is due to show a company formation agent offering to assist its undercover reporter to escape tax. The agent, James Turner, of Turner Little in York, offers nominee directors in Belize and says: "They won't even know that they were a director, they just get paid."

A representative of a second company, Atlas Corporate Services, is asked for maximum confidentiality. He explains that many of its nominees are not even aware of how their names are being used. Jesse Hester, who runs Atlas Corporate Services from Mauritius, is seen assuring a potential client that the UK is unlikely to catch up with him. "Tax authorities don't have the resources to chase everybody down … They reckon it's probably the same rough odds as probably winning the lottery," he says.

The revelations launch a week-long series onthe Guardian site designed to strip away anonymity from offshore companies, the most shadowy aspect of the UK's financial industry. The British Virgin Islands are a particularly successful hideaway, thanks to the exceptional secrecy on offer. This Caribbean territory, which is ultimately controlled by the UK, has sold more than a million anonymously-owned offshore entities since launching itself in 1984 as a tax haven.

The purchasers are often people who, for a variety of reasons, some perfectly legitimate, do not wish to advertise what they are doing with their wealth.

But a worldwide research effort has been launched this year by the ICIJ. It aims to identify, country by country, thousands of the true owners.

The Guardian has collaborated with the ICIJ, a non-profit organisation, to analyse many gigabytes of the British data. This week we intend to reveal the names of more owners. We do not suggest criminal wrongdoing by them. Among those we have contacted, not all go so far as to employ nominee directors. Some insist they have done nothing improper, and are merely taking advantage of legitimate tax breaks or the opportunity for privacy. Critics say, however, that the islands' system can be open to abuse because of its lack of transparency.

Gerard Ryle, the director of the ICIJ, said: "We are applying specialist software to crunch through literally hundreds of thousands of offshore entities to look for patterns. We are marrying our findings with old-fashioned shoe leather and interviews from key insiders who can provide further context on this little known and loosely regulated world. We are satisfied that the information we have is authentic."

Ryle believes the ICIJ's global project, when it is completed next year, will haul into the open a shadowy financial system estimated to conceal the movement around the world of trillions of dollars.

Offshore secrets

Guardian team: David Leigh, Harold Frayman and James Ball.

The project is a collaboration between the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) headed by Gerard Ryle in Washington DC. Guardian investigations editor David Leigh is a member of ICIJ, a global network of reporters in more than 60 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories that cross national boundaries. The ICIJ was founded in 1997 as a project of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington DC-based non-profit.

Good Length and Right Speed

Will Rhodes on Good Length for a bowler

A good length is the shortest length where a batsman is obliged to play forward.

The Right Speed is when a batsman beaten by flight does not have the time to play a second shot.

On the Death Penalty for Kasab

M J Akbar in the Times of India

There is only one way to be born, but many ways to die. Both remain a cosmic mystery despite the best efforts of atheists to reduce them to banality. That is where the similarity ends. 

Birth is a symphony of joy. Death orchestrates a range of atonal emotions. Grief is only one of the many narratives surrounding death, and it is contained. Even those who have lost an anchor of love recognize that food must return to the table of lament. Religion offers its rationale; as in the Quranic verse, from God we come, to God we go, a belief shared by all the Abrahamic faiths. But human beings do not leave all death to the will of God. They kill, singly and collectively. The individual does so for criminal reasons; the state in the pursuit of justice.

The first story in the Bible deals with the complicated morality of knowledge, and its primal consequence, birth and the flowering of earth. The second story is about murder. Cain, son of Adam and Eve, kills his brother Abel out of jealous fury. Murder, in any dimension, has remained a magnetic fact ever since. Societies have invested huge repositories of finance and intellect in weapons; man has split the atom and mobilized the biological germ in his inventive efforts to kill in as many ways as possible. There is a vast literature of death, from warfare disguised as history to the less-than-innocent pleasures of a murder mystery novel. In either case we hope to reach calm through turbulence through the road map of justice. An eye for an eye establishes the balance of fear. Deterrence cuts through the knot that cannot be unraveled. It is not necessarily equal retaliation, but it must be effective retaliation. The dead cannot be resurrected but the killer must be found and punished.

War was kept exempt from the rules of murder. The Romans understood the arbitrary nature of the battlefield and introduced decimation: a victorious general could send a ruthless signal by lining up prisoners of war and dispatching every tenth man in the queue. It was one man playing dice with another man's destiny. The only thing that could be said in its favor was that it was better than the reverse, nine dead to one alive. But as the savagery of even war crossed limits that were inconceivable by the 20th century, war crimes were invented. They were widely advertized as evidence of civilization. Then terrorism came along. We still have not secured rules for this brutality.The progress of civilization is a bundle of questions in search of an ever-elusive ideal. We have left the monarch's absolute authority over life and death behind. Gone are the days when theft of a sheep was a hanging offence. Most of the world has either adopted a rule of law where evidence must be produced and confirmed, or is moving towards it. Reform has even come to religious law: no one cuts off the hands of a thief anymore. If theft can be eliminated by lesser punishment, then the purpose is served.But one area where reform has paused for intense debate is in capital punishment. The argument for abolition is persuasive in the genteel atmosphere of liberal values. Systems of justice are human, and therefore prone to error or bitter degrees of bias. Far better that ten guilty persons are declared innocent at the end of a trial than one innocent person dies.

This begs a question. Should the generosity of civilized behavior extend to those who have deliberately, maliciously chosen to be barbaric? We understand different grades of murder. The crime of passion is even celebrated in high drama or poetry. But the terrorist and the tyrant emerge from the same seed. Both gorge on the blood of innocents. This is all the more reason why we should define both with moral and intellectual rigor. To do less would be to dilute their evil.Abolition of death penalty for them would create an equivalence that cannot be sustained in theory or practice. 

Darkness is the best friend of a terrorist; stealth and deception his preferred strategy for it helps him escape through the fog of theories spun by pseudo-analysts. When, occasionally, a terrorist works in the open he still craves for the mantle of a jurisprudence created for civilians who have abandoned civility. Liberal nations like India do not deny this privilege to their worst enemy. But India cannot withhold justice when a judge has made his call on terrorism. Such complacence would weaken the liberal safety net to the point of disintegration. Ajmal Kasab's mentors are safe, beyond the reach of Indian law. Kasab could not be allowed to escape the rope of Indian justice.

Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre

S A Aiyer in The Times of India

The Gujarat election will revive charges that Narendra Modi killed a thousand Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with the BJP accusing Rajiv Gandhi of killing 3000 Sikhs in the 1984 Delhi riots. To get a sense of perspective, i did some research on communal riots in past decades. I was astounded to find that the greatest communal slaughter occurred under neither Modi nor Rajiv but Nehru. His takeover of Hyderabad in 1948 caused maybe 50,000-200,000 deaths. The Sunderlal report on this massacre has been kept an official secret for over 60 years. While other princes acceded to either India or Pakistan in 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad aimed to remain independent. This was complicated by a Marxist uprising. The Nizam's Islamic militia, the Razakars, killed and raped many Hindus. This incensed Sardar Patel and Nehru, who ordered the Army into Hyderabad. The Army's swift victory led to revenge killings and rapes by Hindus on an unprecedented scale. 

Civil rights activist AG Noorani has cited Prof Cantwell Smith, a critic of Jinnah, in The Middle Eastern Journal, 1950. "The only careful report on what happened in this period was made a few months later by investigators - including a Congress Muslim and a sympathetic and admired Hindu (Professor Sunderlal)- commissioned by the Indian government. The report was submitted but has not been published; presumably it makes unpleasant reading. It is widely held that the figure mentioned therein for the number of Muslims massacred is 50,000. Other estimates by responsible observers run as high as 200,000."      A lower but still horrific estimate comes from UCLA Professor Perry Anderson. "When the Indian Army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out, aided and abetted by its regulars. On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim Congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate. It reported that at a conservative estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover. This was the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian Union, dwarfing the killings by the Pathan raiders en route to Srinagar which India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of Kashmir.  

    
"Nehru, on proclaiming Indian victory in Hyderabad, had announced that 'not a single communal incident' marred the triumph. What action did he take on receiving the report? He suppressed it, and at Patel's urging cancelled the appointment of one of its authors as ambassador in the Middle East. No word about the pogroms, in which his own troops had taken eager part, could be allowed to leak out. Twenty years later, when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter banned the publication of the document as injurious to national interests."

Perry Andersen is accused by some of anti-Indian bias. This cannot be said of author William Dalrymple. In The Age of Kali, Dalrymple says the Sunderlal report has been leaked and published abroad, and "estimates that as many as 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered." 

Our textbooks and TV programmes show Sardar Patel and Nehru as demi-gods who created a unified India. The truth is more sordid. You will not find any mention of the Hyderabad massacre in our standard history books (just as Pakistani textbooks have deleted reference to the East Pakistan massacre of 1971). The air-brushing of Patel and Nehru is complete. My friends ask, why rake up the 1948 horrors now? You sound like an apologist for Modi's killings of 2002.

I can only say that the killings of 1948 cannot possibly justify the killings of 2002, or 1984, or any others. Modi has blood on his hands, whether or not he was directly culpable. But why pretend that others had spotlessly clean hands? There is a macabre logic in the praises Modi has recently heaped on Patel: the two were not entirely dissimilar. Nations need to acknowledge their past errors in order to avoid them in the future. Germany acknowledged the horrors of fascism and militarism, and this helped it build a new anti-war society focused on human rights.

Something is terribly wrong when Indian citizens are kept in dark about the biggest pogrom since Independence, even after foreign sources have lifted the lid. India's jihadi press is fully aware of the 1948 massacre, and projects its censorship as evidence of Hindu oppression   . This is not how a liberal democracy should function. India cannot become a truly unified nation on the basis of suppressed reports and sanitized textbooks. The Sunderlal report must be made public. 

A Time For National Reflection

The secretive and stealthy hanging of Ajmal Kasab is a moment in our nation’s history when we need to pause and ponder, and reflect on the values that we, as a nation, should uphold, particularly relating to crime and punishment, justice and equity

PEOPLES UNION FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES (PUCL)

The secretive and stealthy hanging of Ajmal Kasab in Pune’s Yerwada Prison on  21^stNovember, 2012, brings to an end the legal process involved in trying Kasab for the brutal assault by trained terrorists from across the border on Mumbai, the commercial capital of India which left 166 persons dead.

The Mumbai carnage of November 2008, more popularly abbreviated to a single term `26/11,’ constitutes one of the most heinous and deliberate attempts in recent years to cause mass mayhem and terror in India. Kasab was the only member of the terrorist team sent from Pakistan apprehended alive; he was caught on film diabolically using his modern automatic weapon in a cold blooded fashion, killing numerous people. The hanging, and the trial and legal proceedings which preceded it,  admittedly  complied with existing laws which permit death penalty, and cannot be faulted as such.  While it may be argued, as many do  that the hanging will help in an `emotional closure’ to the families of victims of 26/11, there are others who point out that other key issues still remain to be addressed.  Families of victims in specific, as also other concerned citizens, have pointed out that Kasab was only a foot soldier and not the mastermind, who still remain at large.

We cannot also lose sight of the fact the  reality that the backdrop of the 26/11 incidents is also the festering and unresolved internal conflict inside Kashmir, which provides an easy emotive tool for demagogues to indoctrinate and turn youth to become cold blooded `jihadi’ killers. To them, the execution will not be a deterrence.

The extensive legal process  ending with the hanging of Kasab is pointed out as a triumph of the of `rule of law process’ in India. In the same breath this is also contrasted to the lack of such situation in neighbouring Pakistan.  This discourse is however very worrisome; it borders on `triumphalism’ on the one hand, and on the other, it amounts to an attempt to `avenge’ or seek `vengeance’, and `eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ mentality, which worldview has been rejected as dangerous amongst a majority of 110 countries worldwide which have prohibited death penalty in their countries.

Such triumphalist discourse is also worrying for it hides behind emotive terminology very harsh truths of failure and miscarriage of justice in other incidents of mass killings that have occurred in India. The `cry for justice’ still remains a silent pouring of helpless anger in the hearts and souls of thousands of families of victims  in incidents like planned and cold blooded slaughter of over 3000 Sikhs during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992-93 (which ironically occurred in Mumbai also), the 2002 post-Godhra anti-Muslim carnage in Gujarat which saw over 2,000 Muslims killed and thousands more rendered homeless and more recently in Kokrajhar in Assam. A stark reality is the cynical manipulation and subversion of police investigation by ruling political parties and the executive  to help masterminds and perpetrators escape the clutches of the law.

In the surcharged emotional atmosphere in the wake of Kasab’s hanging,  even raising questions about the usefulness of hanging Kasab is considered to be `traitorous’, unpatriotic and anti-national.  We in the PUCL nevertheless feel that this is a moment in our nation’s history when we need to pause and ponder, and reflect on the values that we, as a nation, should uphold, particularly relating to crime and punishment, justice and equity. We need to be conscious of the fact that a nation consumed by outrage and filled with a sense of retribution easily confuses “punishment and revenge, justice and vendetta”. We, as a nation, need to begin a dispassionate public debate on the death penalty without judgmental, indignant, righteous or moralist overtones.

PUCL has always taken a principled stand against the death sentence as being anti-thetical to the land of ahimsa and non-violence, as constituting an arbitrary, capricious and unreliable punishment and that at the end of the day, the type of sentence that will be awarded depends very much on many factors, apart from the case itself. PUCL and Amnesty International have published a major  study of the entire body of judgments of the Supreme Court of India on death penalty between 1950-2008 which unambiguously shows that there is so much arbitrariness in the application of `rarest of rare’ doctrine in death penalty cases that in the ultimate analysis, death sentence constitutes a `lethal lottery’.

It may not be out of context to highlight that just two days before Kasab was hanged, on 19^thNovember, 2012, the Supreme Court of India pointed out to the fact that in practice, the application of `rarest of rare cases’ doctrine to award death penalty was seriously arbitrary warranting a rethink of the death penalty in India.

It is also well recognised now that there can never ever be a guarantee against legal mistakes and improper application of legal principles while awarding death sentences. Very importantly, the Supreme Court of India in the case of `Santosh Kr. Bariar v. State of Maharashtra’, (2009) has explicitly stated that 6 previous judgments of the Supreme Court between 1996 to 2009 in which death sentences were confirmed on 13 people, were found to be `per incuriam’ meaning thereby, were rendered in ignorance of law. The Supreme court held that the reasoning for confirming death sentences in theses cases conflicted with the 5 judge constitutional bench decision in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980), which upheld the constitutionality of the death sentence in India and laid down the guidelines to be followed before awarding death sentence by any court in India.

It should be pointed out that of the 13 convicts awarded death sentence based on this per incuriam reasoning, 2 persons, Ravji @ Ramchandra was hanged on 4.5.1996 and Surja Ram in 5.4.1997. The fate of the others is pending decision on their mercy petitions. In the meantime a group of 7 – 8 former High Court judges have written to the President of India pointing out to the legal infirmity in the award of death sentences to these convicts and seeking rectification of judicial mistake by commuting their death sentences to life imprisonment. A very troubling question remains: how do we render justice to men who were hanged based on a wrong application of the law?

It is for such reasons, amongst others, that PUCL has long argued that it is extremely unsafe and uncivilised to retain death penalty in our statutes.

It will be useful to refer to the stand on death penalty taken by 3 of India’s foremost leaders of the independence struggle.

Mahatma Gandhi said,

“I do regard death sentence as contrary to ahimsa. Only he takes it who gives it. All punishment is repugnant to ahimsa. Under a State governed according to the principles of ahimsa, therefore, a murderer would be sent to a penitentiary and there be given a chance of reforming himself. All crime is a form of disease and should be treated as such”.

Speaking before the Constituent Assembly of India on 3^rd June, 1949, the architect of India’s constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, pointed out,

“… I would much rather support the abolition of death sentence itself. That I think is the proper course to follow, so that it will end this controversy. After all this country by and large believes in the principles of non-violence, It has been its ancient tradition, and although people may not be following in actual practice, they certainly adhere to the principle of non-violence as a moral mandate which they ought to observe as dar as they possibly can and I think that having regard to this fact, the proper thing for this county to do is to abolish the death sentence altogether”.

Jayaprakash Narayan wrote more poignantly that,

“To my mind, it is ultimately a question for the respect for life and human approach to those who commit grievous hurt to others. Death sentence is no remedy for such crimes. A more humane and constructive remedy is to remove the culprit concerned from the normal milieu and treat him as a mental case … They may be kept in prison houses till they die a natural death. This may cast a heavier economic burden on society than hanging. But I have no doubt that a humane treatment even of a murderer will enhance man’s dignity and make society more humane”. (emphasis ours).

PUCL calls upon all Indians to use the present situation as a moment of national reflection, a period of serious dialogue and discussion on the values and ethics which we as a nation of Buddha and Ashoka, who epitomised humane governance, dharma and ahimsa, should accept and follow. The best tribute we can pay to the 166 persons who lost their lives due to the 26/11 Mumbai carnage is to rebuild the nation in a way that equity and justice, dharma and ahimsa prevails; in which there is no soil for discrimination and prejudice, and in which all Indians irrespective of caste, community, creed, gender or any other diversity, can live peacefully and with dignity.

We firmly believe that mercy and compassion are key values of a humane society, which are also recognised in the Indian Constitution. We also hold that abolishing death penalty is not a sign of weakness. Rather it is a stand which arises from a sense of moral authority. It is when law in tempered with mercy that true justice is done. Bereft of mercy our society would be impoverished and inhuman; mercy is quintessentially a human quality, not found elsewhere in the natural world. Excluding a fellow human being from the entitlement to mercy will make our society more blood thirsty, unforgiving and violent. We owe a duty to leave a better and less vengeful world for our children by curbing our instinct for retribution. That way we become a more humane and compassionate society. Recalling Rabindranath Tagore’s vision in the `Gitanjali’, let us re-make India into a `haven of peace’ in which future generations of Indians will rejoice and flourish.

Sd/-

Prof. Prabhakar Sinha, National President, PUCL
Dr. V. Suresh, National General Secretary (Elect), PUCL

---

Also read The hangman's justice

Thackeray's Historical Record - Lest We Forget

The violent legacy of Thackeray that neither the crowds nor the TV adulation can hide

• October 30, 1966 Thackeray's first Dusshera rally. A mob leaves the rally later to attack and burn south Indian shops and restaurants. The rally was also addressed by Congress leader Ramrao Adik. Attacks on south Indians were with the backing of CM Vasantrao Naik.
• Mumbai 1968 Hindi films brought out by south Indian producers are stopped by Thackeray's Shiv Sainiks.
• February 1969 Thackeray unleashes his goons against Kannadigas. 59 dead, 274 wounded, 151 cops injured in week of riots.
• June 6, 1970 CPI MLA and trade unionist Krishna Desai murdered in first political assassination in the city since 1947.
• January 1974 Dalit Panther leader Bhagwat Jadhav brutally killed by Thackeray's men, sparks off war with Dalits.
• 1975-76 Thackeray shocks colleagues, praises Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency. By 1977, changes tack.
• Jan 1982 Thackeray supports Congress in Great Textile Strike. Breaks ties under duress, goes back three years later.
• From 1984 Shiv Sena carries out attacks on Dalit farmers in Vidarbha and Marathwada, destroying crops, burning huts.
• 1985 Thackeray calls for expulsion of 'outsiders’, proposes 1972 as cut-off date for having moved to Maharashtra.
• 1985 Cong CM Vasantdada Patil connives to help Shiv Sena win BMC polls with ‘Bombay part of Maharashtra’ issue.
• March 1988 The wonderful “saviour of Sikhs” Thackeray calls for a boycott of Sikh businesses in Maharashtra.
• 1988 Thackeray's 'boycott of Sikhs businesses' idea is quietly abandoned after extorting crores from Sikhs in Mumbai.
• Post 1989 + Mandal riots Thackeray finds a more convenient target for his political purposes: Indian Muslims.
• October 1991 Thackeray's thugs attack journalists, fracturing one woman's (Manimala) skull with a crowbar.
• 1991 Thackeray takes it one step further, threatens a local judge who had ruled against his goons with blinding.
• 1991 Thackeray's Dopahar ka Saamna editorial very sweetly compares women journalists to prostitutes.
• 1995 Thackeray: "If they have their Dawood, then we have our Arun Gawli." Because all politicos need a personal mafia.
• July 1996 The Ramesh Kini murder after long term intimidation. SS-BJP state govt tries to bury investigation.
• 1997 Kini's wife accuses Raj Thackeray of his murder. HC asked CBI to investigate but Mumbai police destroys evidence.
• July 11, 1997 Ten Dalits are killed and over 30 wounded at the Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar massacre. None were armed.
• Republic Day, 1997 Two adivasi youths murdered. Adivasi women sexually assaulted by police and SS workers at Talasari.
• Late 1990s SS-BJP goverment summarily withdraws over 1,100 cases of atrocities against Dalits in Marathwada.

-------

The Who-Said-What Nil Nisi Bonum Test

It’s a sight, ‘progressives’ adding to Thackeray’s iconisation

DILEEP PADGAONKAR

The mammoth size of the crowd of mourners who congregated at Shivaji Park in Mumbai last Sunday to bid a final adieu to Bal Thackeray foxed many of his long-time critics. They had assumed that, in his waning years, the Shiv Sena chieftain had become a pale and tragic shadow of his former, feisty self and was therefore a figure of no consequence. The assumption was well founded. A series of political setbacks and personal tragedies, followed by age-related illnesses, had taken their toll.

In his last video address, Thackeray appealed to the Sainiks to “take care” of his anointed heirs—son Uddhav and grandson Aditya—once he exited the scene. It was a pitiable sight: the patriarch, who once held his audience in thrall with his vitriolic oratory, now appeared to be frail and exhausted as he gasped for breath while he searched for the right words. The critics had therefore concluded that he was well and truly a spent force.

But by the time the funeral ended, the critics began to sing a different tune. The presence of lakhs of people, as well as that of political leaders from several parties, corporate heads and leading film stars, they acknowledged, contained a message about Thackeray’s enduring appeal, which had thus far eluded them. It related partly to his great capacity to strike bonds of friendship even with his rivals in the spheres of politics, the media, sports and cinema. He castigated them in the most acerbic terms in his public speeches, but in private, treated them with much warmth and courtesy.

Partly, too, the critics argued, Thackeray’s candour—a marked penchant to always call a spade a bloody shovel—set him apart from politicians who can rarely, if ever, mean what they say or say what they mean. The Sena patriarch’s forthrightness, often expressed in a language that bordered on the obscene, outraged his adversaries, embarrassed his allies and compelled his party leaders to squirm in their seats. But, the neo-converts claimed, it was music to the ears of his followers. They revelled in every sentence he uttered for, in their reckoning, Thackeray dared to articulate their very own sentiments.

Neo-converts to the Thackeray brand failed or refused to see the real reasons why the Marathi manoos was left behind. It was easier to see him as building marathi pride.

These were sentiments of a grievous hurt: after great sacrifices, the Marathi people had got a state of their own, but the state had failed to address their concerns and aspirations. The insecurities of the middle- and lower-middle-class Maharashtrians, who constituted the base of the Shiv Sena along with the lumpen proletariat, hardened to a point where they felt marginalised with no hope of ever catching up with “outsiders”: south Indians, Marwaris and Gujaratis, to begin with, and later Muslims and Biharis. The “outsiders”, they felt, denied them jobs, bought over their properties and forced them to relocate in distant suburbs, engaged in criminal activities, carved a political space for themselves at their expense, disdained their language and culture and, overall, reduced them to the status of second-class citizens on their home turf.

The neo-converts to identity politics went on to assert that throughout his public life Thackeray exploited these insecurities with such consummate skill that an average Maharashtrian readily looked the other way when he promoted his political agenda with a brazen, often callous, disregard for constitutional niceties. They knew that the Sena patriarch’s single obsession was to instil a sense of pride in the Marathi manoos, to seek his social and economic advancement and to give him the confidence to face the dreaded “outsiders” with courage and fortitude.

It is these virtues that Thackeray’s once-strident critics extolled as they witnessed the scenes at Shivaji Park. The thought did not cross their minds that the grouses of the Maharashtrians had little to do with the malignant “outsiders”. If few of them were at the commanding heights of trade and commerce, the all-India civil services, the English media, Bollywood, PSUs, the armed forces, the academic world or even the cultural one at the pan-India level, the reasons had to be sought in their own character and attitude and in the neglect of quality education in the state.

The neo-converts couldn’t summon the nerve to admit that Maharashtrians lacked—or had failed to exhibit—the entrepreneurial skills of the Gujaratis, Marwaris, Kutchis, Jains, Sindhis and Parsis; that they didn’t venture out of their towns and cities to earn a livelihood in distant states as south Indians, Punjabis, north Indian Hindus and Muslims and the bhadralok Bengalis did with gusto; that their innately cautious, understated nature did not allow them to engage in the highly competitive market of arts and ideas.

The neo-converts to identity politics also chose to ignore two other factors. Few, if any, thought it fit to point to the terrible cost Maharashtra had to pay for Thackeray’s brand of politics: a lethal mix of regional chauvinism, communalism and rank opportunism. Its victims weren’t heard in TV studio discussions or in the columns of newspapers. Nor was another, younger breed of Maharashtrians, who are carving a niche for themselves in just about every field, ranging from food and fashion to scholarship, business, media and the arts. They don’t suffer from a sense of victimhood. It is therefore a matter of time before the newly minted admirers of Bal Thackeray—most of them “progressives”—are forced to eat their words.

That time may indeed have come much sooner than any of them would have anticipated. Even as the mammoth crowd had begun to disperse from Shivaji Park, a group of Shiv Sainiks flexed their muscles in Palghar. They forced a 21-year old woman, Shaheen Dhada, to tender an apology for a comment she had posted on her Facebook page. Her crime? She had raised questions about how and why Mumbai had shut down in the wake of Thackeray’s death—without naming him once. This perfectly innocuous comment had riled the Sainiks for, in their eyes, Shaheen, like her friend, Rini Srinivasan, who had endorsed the comment, had insulted their leader. After some reluctance, Shaheen did post an apology on her Facebook page, but that brought her no respite.

The Sainiks vandalised a hospital run by her uncle and roughed up staff and patients alike. Late that night, the police, instead of hunting for the vandals, took the two young women in custody and next morning pressed charges against them for “outraging religious feelings”. The charges were subsequently whittled down and the women were released on bail. Such was the nation-wide outcry against the conduct of both, the Sainiks and the police, that the state government was compelled to order an inquiry.

But their reputation was in tatters: the former, because they had demonstrated how they proposed to uphold the legacy of Thackeray; and the latter, for making it obvious that, faced with the wrath of the Sainiks, their spine was akin to the spine of an eel. They had shown this propensity to kowtow to the Sena time and again in the past. Not once did they seriously press charges against Thackeray for his inflammatory speeches against “Madrasis”, Muslims, Biharis and against artists, writers, film stars and journalists who had questioned his policies and tactics. Will the recent adherents of the Shiv Sena patriarch’s brand of identity politics now run for cover? This is far from certain. No long-time practitioner of a faith—religious or secular—can hope to match the zeal of a neo-convert to sap the foundations of the republic.

-----

Ashis Nandy on Thackeray - 'He may have believed in nothing'

It is not my job to pay tributes to dead politicians, nor is it to do a hatchet job on them. I have learnt to look at human beings without being terribly judgemental, since I still retain something of my clinical training. Therefore, I shall look at Bal Thackeray from a distance. He was a product of a period of Indian politics during which his kind thrived. It was the time when leaders like Datta Samant emerged but, unlike him, Thackeray’s instinct for survival was stronger and he negotiated the world of Indian politics with greater skill despite his—and this is a gross understatement—many angularities.




Actually, Thackeray believed in nothing. Many people think he believed in Hindutva, something that he exploited very successfully to further his career, but it perhaps did not mean anything at all to him. He spewed hatred against Hindus liberally—and frequently. When they were not the south Indians, they were the Gujaratis and the Marwaris and, later in his life, the migrants from UP and Bihar. It would be wrong to presume that Balasaheb spoke for the Hindus; he only spoke up for those who supported him. Chameleon-like, he changed colours and always looked ready for different occasions. It is being said that he cemented Marathi identity, but even that is doubtful. Marathi identity was something already there; it did not have to be reinforced by Thackeray. Balasaheb only took advantage of its existence and rode its crest to political power.



The glowing tributes that have poured in for Thackeray are not easy to explain at short notice. We shall have to wait to assess their resilience. Indians avoid speaking ill of the dead. A careful enumeration might reveal some day that Thackeray’s victims among the Marathi people, for whom he reportedly toiled all his life, were more numerous than Ajmal Kasab’s (whose hanging has prompted not lamentation, but jubilation). It is probable that Thackeray’s legacy of violence has been overlooked as most of his victims have come from the bottom strata of society, whose deaths do not make much of a difference to a media-exposed public.



After saying all this, I must hasten to add that there is in Thackeray another trait that may explain the eulogies he has received from various quarters. One can accuse him of having run a criminal enterprise, but the political culture of it did not seem criminal because there was an element of juvenile delinquency in it. The use of the term juvenile is deliberate; there was something innocent about his project, something that reminded one of the playfulness of a teenager. What would have otherwise looked like a criminal enterprise ended up looking like the forgiveable naughtiness of a teenager. For many, he was always playing a game, he made it clear to his galaxy of friends and followers, in Mario Puzo style.



In him, there was a little bit of playacting. Not surprisingly, his circle of friends included people from different religious, educational and linguistic backgrounds. Not only that, they even included those who opposed every canon of the different ideologies he has espoused in his entire political life. How else can one explain the friendship between R.K. Laxman, a classical liberal (and a south Indian!), and Thackeray? He reportedly even called him up days before he died just so that he could hear his voice once. Their relationship was described as ‘apolitical’, and it endorses what I said.



This is why I say he believed in nothing. There was something iconoclastic about him. He cared two hoots for ideologies. He saw through the hypocrisy of ideologies that political leaders employ on the national scene. For him, politics was just a game and he beat others at it. He didn’t even take himself as seriously as many would like to believe. People who knew him reasonably well probably suspected in their hearts that he never believed in any of what he said publicly. I think their tributes discounted the element of violence, given that there was something juvenile about his political enterprise. They would rather remember it as something slightly naughty.

A Father's email to his adult children

'I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed': retired naval officer's email to children in full

This is the full email that retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews sent to his son and two daughters in February expressing his and his wife's disappointment in them.

Retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews Photo: SWNS

2:31PM GMT 18 Nov 2012

Dear All Three

With last evening's crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don't ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.

Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents. 

So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.

In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn't for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children's underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don't want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it's not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won't do it by simply whingeing and saying you don't like it. You'll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn't possible, or you simply can't be bothered, then I rest my case.

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

Dad

Also read: The Edifice of Marriage is worth Maintaining.