Prof. Robert Frank
Sunday 19 February 2017
‘From bad to worse’: Greece hurtles towards a final reckoning
Helena Smith in The Guardian
Dimitris Costopoulos stood, worry beads in hand, under brilliant blue skies in front of the Greek parliament. Wearing freshly pressed trousers, polished shoes and a smart winter jacket – “my Sunday best” – he had risen at 5am to get on the bus that would take him to Athens 200 miles away and to the great sandstone edifice on Syntagma Square. By his own admission, protests were not his thing.
At 71, the farmer rarely ventures from Proastio, his village on the fertile plains of Thessaly. “But everything is going wrong,” he lamented on Tuesday, his voice hoarse after hours of chanting anti-government slogans.
---For Background Knowledge read:
“Before there was an order to things, you could build a house, educate your children, spoil your grandchildren. Now the cost of everything has gone up and with taxes you can barely afford to survive. Once I’ve paid for fuel, fertilisers and grains, there is really nothing left.”
Costopoulos is Greece’s Everyman; the human voice in a debt crisis that refuses to go away. Eight years after it first erupted, the drama shows every sign of reigniting, only this time in a new dark age of Trumpian politics, post-Brexit Europe, terror attacks and rise of the populist far right.
“I grow wheat,” said Costopoulos, holding out his wizened hands. “I am not in the building behind me. I don’t make decisions. Honestly, I can’t understand why things are going from bad to worse, why this just can’t be solved.”
As Greece hurtles towards another full-blown confrontation with the creditors keeping it afloat, and as tensions over stalled bailout negotiations mount, it is a question many are asking.
The country’s epic struggle to avert bankruptcy should have been settled when Athens received €110bn in aid – the biggest financial rescue programme in global history – from the EU and International Monetary Fund in May 2010. Instead, three bailouts later, it is still wrangling over the terms of the latest €86bn emergency loan package, with lenders also at loggerheads and diplomats no longer talking of a can, but rather a bomb, being kicked down the road. Default looms if a €7.4bn debt repayment – money owed mostly to the European Central Bank – is not honoured in July.
Farmer Dimitris Costopoulos in front of the Greek parliament in Athens. Photograph: Helena Smith for the Observer
Amid the uncertainty, volatility has returned to the markets. So, too, has fear, with an estimated €2.2bn being withdrawn from banks by panic-stricken depositors since the beginning of the year. With talk of Greece’s exit from the euro being heard again, farmers, trade unions and other sectors enraged by the eviscerating effects of austerity have once more come out in protest.
From his seventh-floor office on Mitropoleos, Makis Balaouras, an MP with the governing Syriza party, has a good view of the goings-on in Syntagma. Demonstrations – what the former trade unionist calls “the movement” – are a fine thing. “I wish people were out there mobilising more,” he sighed. “Protests are in our ideological and political DNA. They are important, they send a message.”
This is the irony of Syriza, the leftwing party catapulted to power on a ticket to “tear up” the hated bailout accords widely blamed for extraordinary levels of Greek unemployment, poverty and emigration. Two years into office it has instead overseen the most punishing austerity measures to date, slashing public-sector salaries and pensions, cutting services, agreeing to the biggest privatisation programme in European history and raising taxes on everything from cars to beer – all of which has been the price of the loans that have kept default at bay and Greece in the euro.
In the maelstrom the economy has improved, with Athens achieving a noticeable primary surplus last year, but the social crisis has intensified.
For men like Balaouras, who suffered appalling torture for his leftwing beliefs at the hands of the 1967-74 colonels’ regime, the policies have been galling. With the IMF and EU arguing over the country’s ability to reach tough fiscal targets when the current bailout expires in August next year, the demand for €3.6bn of more measures has left many in Syriza reeling. Without upfront legislation on the reforms, creditors say, they cannot conclude a compliance review on which the next tranche of bailout aid hangs.
“We had an agreement,” insisted Balaouras, looking despondently down at his desert boots. “We kept to our side of the deal, but the lenders haven’t kept to their side because now they are asking for more. We want the review to end. We want to go forward. This situation is in the interests of no one. But to get there we have to have an honourable compromise. Without that there will be a clash.”
It had been hoped that an agreement would be struck on Monday at what had been billed as a high-stakes meeting of euro area finance ministers. On Friday, EU officials announced that the deadline had been all but missed because there had been little convergence between the two sides.
With the Netherlands holding general elections next month, and France and Germany also heading to the polls in May and September, fears of the dispute becoming increasingly politicised have added to its complexity. Highlighting those concerns, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, attempted to end the rift that has emerged between eurozone lenders and the IMF over the fund’s insistence that Greece can only begin to recover if its €320bn debt pile is reduced substantially.
In talks with Christine Lagarde, the Washington-based IMF’s managing director, Merkel agreed to discuss the issue during a further meeting between the two women to be held on Wednesday. The IMF has steadfastly refused to sign up to the latest bailout, arguing that Greek debt is not only unmanageable but on a trajectory to become explosive by 2030. Berlin, the biggest contributor of the €250bn Greece has so far received, says it will be unable to disburse further funds without the IMF on board.
The assumption is that the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, will cave in, just as he did when the country came closest yet to leaving the euro at the height of the crisis in the summer of 2015. But the 41-year-old leader, like Syriza, has been pummelled in the polls. Persuading disaffected backbenchers to support more measures, and then selling them to a populace exhausted by repeated rounds of austerity, will be extremely difficult. Disappointment has increasingly given way to the death of hope – a sentiment reinforced by the realisation that Cyprus and other bailed-out countries, by contrast, are no longer under international supervision.
In his city centre office, the former finance minister Evangelos Venizelos pondered where Greece’s predicament was now. “[We are] at the same point we were several years ago,” he joked. “The only difference is that anti-European sentiment is growing. What was once a very friendly country towards Europe is becoming increasingly less so, and with that comes a lot of danger, a lot of risk.”
When historians look back they, too, may conclude that Greece has expended a great deal of energy not moving forward at all.
The arc of crisis that has swept the country – coursing like a cancer through its body politic, devastating its public health system, shattering lives – has been an exercise in the absurd. The feat of pulling off the greatest fiscal adjustment in modern times has spawned a slump longer and deeper than the Great Depression, with the Greek economy shrinking more than 25% since the crisis began.
Even if the latest impasse is broken and a deal is reached with creditors soon, few believe that in a country of weak governance and institutions it will be easy to enforce. Political turbulence will almost certainly beckon; the prospect of “Grexit” will grow.
“Grexit is the last thing we want, but we may arrive at a point of serious dilemmas,” said Venizelos. “Whatever deal is reached will be very difficult to implement, but that notwithstanding, it is not the memoranda [the bailout accords] that caused the crisis. The crisis was born in Greece long before.”
Like every crisis government before it, Tsipras’s administration is acutely aware that salvation will come only when Greece can return to the markets and raise funds. What happens in the weeks ahead could determine if that is likely to happen at all.
Back in Syntagma, Costopoulos the good-natured farmer ponders what lies ahead. Like every Greek, he stands to be deeply affected. “All I know is that we are all being pushed,” he said, searching for the right words. “Pushed in the direction of somewhere very explosive, somewhere we do not want to be.”
Dimitris Costopoulos stood, worry beads in hand, under brilliant blue skies in front of the Greek parliament. Wearing freshly pressed trousers, polished shoes and a smart winter jacket – “my Sunday best” – he had risen at 5am to get on the bus that would take him to Athens 200 miles away and to the great sandstone edifice on Syntagma Square. By his own admission, protests were not his thing.
At 71, the farmer rarely ventures from Proastio, his village on the fertile plains of Thessaly. “But everything is going wrong,” he lamented on Tuesday, his voice hoarse after hours of chanting anti-government slogans.
---For Background Knowledge read:
Yanis Varoufakis and the Greek Tragedy
----
“Before there was an order to things, you could build a house, educate your children, spoil your grandchildren. Now the cost of everything has gone up and with taxes you can barely afford to survive. Once I’ve paid for fuel, fertilisers and grains, there is really nothing left.”
Costopoulos is Greece’s Everyman; the human voice in a debt crisis that refuses to go away. Eight years after it first erupted, the drama shows every sign of reigniting, only this time in a new dark age of Trumpian politics, post-Brexit Europe, terror attacks and rise of the populist far right.
“I grow wheat,” said Costopoulos, holding out his wizened hands. “I am not in the building behind me. I don’t make decisions. Honestly, I can’t understand why things are going from bad to worse, why this just can’t be solved.”
As Greece hurtles towards another full-blown confrontation with the creditors keeping it afloat, and as tensions over stalled bailout negotiations mount, it is a question many are asking.
The country’s epic struggle to avert bankruptcy should have been settled when Athens received €110bn in aid – the biggest financial rescue programme in global history – from the EU and International Monetary Fund in May 2010. Instead, three bailouts later, it is still wrangling over the terms of the latest €86bn emergency loan package, with lenders also at loggerheads and diplomats no longer talking of a can, but rather a bomb, being kicked down the road. Default looms if a €7.4bn debt repayment – money owed mostly to the European Central Bank – is not honoured in July.
Farmer Dimitris Costopoulos in front of the Greek parliament in Athens. Photograph: Helena Smith for the Observer
Amid the uncertainty, volatility has returned to the markets. So, too, has fear, with an estimated €2.2bn being withdrawn from banks by panic-stricken depositors since the beginning of the year. With talk of Greece’s exit from the euro being heard again, farmers, trade unions and other sectors enraged by the eviscerating effects of austerity have once more come out in protest.
From his seventh-floor office on Mitropoleos, Makis Balaouras, an MP with the governing Syriza party, has a good view of the goings-on in Syntagma. Demonstrations – what the former trade unionist calls “the movement” – are a fine thing. “I wish people were out there mobilising more,” he sighed. “Protests are in our ideological and political DNA. They are important, they send a message.”
This is the irony of Syriza, the leftwing party catapulted to power on a ticket to “tear up” the hated bailout accords widely blamed for extraordinary levels of Greek unemployment, poverty and emigration. Two years into office it has instead overseen the most punishing austerity measures to date, slashing public-sector salaries and pensions, cutting services, agreeing to the biggest privatisation programme in European history and raising taxes on everything from cars to beer – all of which has been the price of the loans that have kept default at bay and Greece in the euro.
In the maelstrom the economy has improved, with Athens achieving a noticeable primary surplus last year, but the social crisis has intensified.
For men like Balaouras, who suffered appalling torture for his leftwing beliefs at the hands of the 1967-74 colonels’ regime, the policies have been galling. With the IMF and EU arguing over the country’s ability to reach tough fiscal targets when the current bailout expires in August next year, the demand for €3.6bn of more measures has left many in Syriza reeling. Without upfront legislation on the reforms, creditors say, they cannot conclude a compliance review on which the next tranche of bailout aid hangs.
“We had an agreement,” insisted Balaouras, looking despondently down at his desert boots. “We kept to our side of the deal, but the lenders haven’t kept to their side because now they are asking for more. We want the review to end. We want to go forward. This situation is in the interests of no one. But to get there we have to have an honourable compromise. Without that there will be a clash.”
It had been hoped that an agreement would be struck on Monday at what had been billed as a high-stakes meeting of euro area finance ministers. On Friday, EU officials announced that the deadline had been all but missed because there had been little convergence between the two sides.
With the Netherlands holding general elections next month, and France and Germany also heading to the polls in May and September, fears of the dispute becoming increasingly politicised have added to its complexity. Highlighting those concerns, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, attempted to end the rift that has emerged between eurozone lenders and the IMF over the fund’s insistence that Greece can only begin to recover if its €320bn debt pile is reduced substantially.
In talks with Christine Lagarde, the Washington-based IMF’s managing director, Merkel agreed to discuss the issue during a further meeting between the two women to be held on Wednesday. The IMF has steadfastly refused to sign up to the latest bailout, arguing that Greek debt is not only unmanageable but on a trajectory to become explosive by 2030. Berlin, the biggest contributor of the €250bn Greece has so far received, says it will be unable to disburse further funds without the IMF on board.
The assumption is that the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, will cave in, just as he did when the country came closest yet to leaving the euro at the height of the crisis in the summer of 2015. But the 41-year-old leader, like Syriza, has been pummelled in the polls. Persuading disaffected backbenchers to support more measures, and then selling them to a populace exhausted by repeated rounds of austerity, will be extremely difficult. Disappointment has increasingly given way to the death of hope – a sentiment reinforced by the realisation that Cyprus and other bailed-out countries, by contrast, are no longer under international supervision.
In his city centre office, the former finance minister Evangelos Venizelos pondered where Greece’s predicament was now. “[We are] at the same point we were several years ago,” he joked. “The only difference is that anti-European sentiment is growing. What was once a very friendly country towards Europe is becoming increasingly less so, and with that comes a lot of danger, a lot of risk.”
When historians look back they, too, may conclude that Greece has expended a great deal of energy not moving forward at all.
The arc of crisis that has swept the country – coursing like a cancer through its body politic, devastating its public health system, shattering lives – has been an exercise in the absurd. The feat of pulling off the greatest fiscal adjustment in modern times has spawned a slump longer and deeper than the Great Depression, with the Greek economy shrinking more than 25% since the crisis began.
Even if the latest impasse is broken and a deal is reached with creditors soon, few believe that in a country of weak governance and institutions it will be easy to enforce. Political turbulence will almost certainly beckon; the prospect of “Grexit” will grow.
“Grexit is the last thing we want, but we may arrive at a point of serious dilemmas,” said Venizelos. “Whatever deal is reached will be very difficult to implement, but that notwithstanding, it is not the memoranda [the bailout accords] that caused the crisis. The crisis was born in Greece long before.”
Like every crisis government before it, Tsipras’s administration is acutely aware that salvation will come only when Greece can return to the markets and raise funds. What happens in the weeks ahead could determine if that is likely to happen at all.
Back in Syntagma, Costopoulos the good-natured farmer ponders what lies ahead. Like every Greek, he stands to be deeply affected. “All I know is that we are all being pushed,” he said, searching for the right words. “Pushed in the direction of somewhere very explosive, somewhere we do not want to be.”
We need democracy because people can be wrong
It’s the only political system that allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make, bloodlessly, and correct them
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
The people are always right. No? Ah, but then they vote for leaders like Donald Trump and… Oh well, we can add to the list, internationally and nationally!
Does this mean that democracy is a mistake? No, quite the contrary! But we have to hack away at some stubborn centuries-old shrubbery in order to see the foundation of this clearly enough.
One of the greatest myths about democracy — started largely by the Left in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continued with a twist by the Right into the 21st — relates to the most common rationale behind it. The people are always right, claimed the Left in the past. The market, or the consumer, is always right, claims the capitalist Right today, tweaking the Leftist argument cleverly.
Between them, they justify democracy as a form of political organisation based on human beings being basically ‘always right’. Very little in the past — from the picnics at public hangings outside London jails to the genocides of colonisation and Nazism — justifies such confidence in people being always right. Over centuries, people have been horribly wrong at times.
Majority’s mistrust
Way back in 1882, Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, wrote An Enemy of the People (adapted into a film, Ganashatru, by Satyajit Ray in his last years) around one aspect of this perception, arguing that one needs to be morally and intellectually ahead of ‘people’ in order to be right. Ideas and ‘truths’, Ibsen suggests in this play, get dated, habitual and platitudinous, and hence the majority, which lives habitually by grasping on to platitudes, tends to mistrust the truly ethical and intellectual individual. In other words, if you are Jesus, you risk getting crucified.
But even this argument is faulty: a lot of intelligent people can go horribly wrong. Cleverness does not necessarily save you from mistakes, and even ethics can be twisted in painful ways: there are many in the U.S. who claim to be ‘pro-life’ and hence will criminalise abortions, but they spare little thought (and no money) for the plight of women forced into unhappy pregnancies or the future of poor, abandoned and unwanted children.
History is full of brilliant people — ‘great’ leaders, scientists, thinkers, planners — who helped destroy a village, a nation or an age. Sometimes it appears that intelligence, on its own, merely provides a person with an easier ability to make excuses for his or her mistakes, and hoodwink others in the process.
So if people — whether as individual or group, entrepreneur or consumer, tribe or republic, nation or political party, king or voter — seem to make horrible mistakes much of the time, what hope is there for democracy? Why believe in democracy at all?
Actually, one can argue that the main justification of democracy is exactly this: that anyone — ordinary voter or monarch — can be wrong about any given matter. The ability to make mistakes is human — neither power nor riches nor education can eradicate it, though self-awareness might help. A king or dictator can make a mistake as well as the majority of voters in an election who vote in a party or a leader with bad plans. But in a democracy, after a period, during the next elections, such mistakes can be corrected.
A democracy, in other words, allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make — bloodlessly — and correct them when their disastrous consequences become finally clear to us. This is far more difficult, and costly, to do in any other kind of (autocratic) regime, whether justified in worldly or ‘divine’ terms.
Living with one’s opponents
Democracies are not necessary because people are always right: if we were certain of being right all the time, we would not need any political organisation at all, let alone a democracy. We would be gods. Democracy is necessary because people — groups and individuals — can be wrong. Hence, in a democracy one learns to live with one’s opponents, not exile or murder them. This is a political version of the fact that in life we always live with others — or with the Other, the self who is not and cannot be (by definition) entirely yourself.
Democracy is the only political option that allows us to mitigate the effects of our own mistakes, and the mistakes of others. Democracy is necessary not because the people are always right, but because human beings are often wrong. We forget this only at great peril to ourselves and others.
Saturday 18 February 2017
The scandal that rocked Bikram yoga
We’re 15 minutes into the Monday morning class at Hot 8 Yoga in Beverly Hills. Francesca Asumah, one of the most sought-after instructors in California, is putting 48 perspiring humans through a sequence of 26 poses and two breathing exercises popularised by the celebrity yogi Bikram Choudhury. The temperature is a sapping 40C. Sweat slicks over yoga mats. Beautiful bodies melt into shapes that seem beyond the realm of ordinary human geometry.
Asumah’s class, titled A Dance With The Ancients, falls somewhere between gym session and sermon. “You must learn to love yourself, guys!” she encourages us in a northern English accent (she’s half-Ghanaian, half-English, and from Manchester). “If everyone loves themselves, then the whole world will be loved. And beware false gurus! Gurus are middlemen. We are all born in the temple. If anyone claims to be your guru, run a mile, people!”
The message has a special charge in this room. This is the home of what the yogis in my class call “the Bikram community-in-exile”: people who used to be at the heart of the movement, and who say they suffered horrendous abuse in their pursuit of yogic enlightenment. Sweating next to me is Minakshi “Micki” Jafa-Bodden, 48, former legal adviser for the Bikram yoga company. She wants me to appreciate the hold that these poses have before she will talk any further: “You can’t understand me unless you understand Bikram yoga.” And it’s just as well Jafa-Bodden remains devoted to the 26 poses: last month, Los Angeles county court gave her control of the entire global empire.
***
If you’re not up on your chakras and pranayamas, you could be forgiven for thinking that “Bikram” is a term for a kind of hot yoga performed by celebrities and Hollywood types in unsanitary conditions. It is that: Andy Murray credits it with helping his “fitness and mental strength”; Serena Williams and David Beckham are said to be fans. But it is also a sequence of moves that takes its trademarked name from one man. At his early 2010s peak, the pony-tailed, waxed-chested image of Bikram Choudhury adorned the walls of around 650 licensed Bikram yoga studios across the world. For many, he was a spiritual leader as well as the inventor of an exercise class.
Little is known of Choudhury’s early life. Born in Kolkata in 1946, he claimed to have been invited to America by Richard Nixon, and to have taught yoga to the Beatles and Nasa astronauts. He once told a class that he invented the disco ball.
What is certain is that his yoga gave his students something they found life-changing. Asumah first went to a Bikram-affiliated studio in London in 2000. “I immediately saw the benefit of it,” she says. “At a normal yoga class, you do whatever poses the teacher feels like teaching you. Our form of yoga is different. I’m 64. My quality of life is so joyful and I know it’s because of the yoga.” She believes the 26 poses contain a “sacred geometry” that has been handed down from “the ancients”. Choudhury also claimed his form of yoga was more rigorous and authentic than westernised forms preaching peace and love.
Micki Jafa-Bodden: ‘You can’t understand me unless you understand Bikram yoga.’ Photograph: Steve Schofield/The Guardian. Hair and makeup: Ricardo Ferisse
Choudhury first set up a studio in a basement in Beverly Hills. From the mid-1970s onwards, he drew in a celebrity clientele, including Michael Jackson, Jeff Bridges, Shirley MacLaine, Barbra Streisand and Raquel Welch. His classes, heated to a regulation 40C (designed to mimic conditions in Kolkata), offered a combination of constructive hazing, cosmic wisdom and pantomime eccentricity. He would wear Speedos and issue bizarre commands; in 2011, a writer for GQ magazine went to a class and reported him telling a student, “You, Miss Teeny-Weeny Bikini! Spread your legs!” He loathed the colour green and banned people from wearing it. He had never seen carpet until he arrived in America, and believing it represented the height of luxury had all his studios carpeted, hygiene be damned.
Initially, Choudhury asked for donations and slept on the floor of his studio; but as his celebrity grew, so did his material demands. He claimed he had trademarked his sequence and filed aggressive lawsuits to prevent former students from adapting his 26 moves (including a suit accusing Raquel Welch of stealing his sequence for her exercise book). In 2012, a California federal judge dismissed Choudhury’s attempt to trademark his sequence, ruling that a series of yoga poses cannot be copyrighted. As a New York studio owner, Greg Gumucio, whom Choudhury tried to shut down, told ABC news: “It’s kind of like if Arnold Schwarzenegger said, ‘I’m going to do five bench presses, six curls, seven squats, call it Arnold’s Work, and nobody can show that or teach that without my permission.’”
Choudhury’s most reliable stream of revenue was his twice-yearly teacher-training sessions, where up to 400 students would pay around £10,000 to undergo nine weeks of intensive yoga to become certified Bikram instructors. These earned Choudhury a personal fortune estimated at $75m, including a fleet of 43 luxury cars.
I saw it as my forever job. It allowed me to combine my love of yoga with the legal and business side
Benjamin Lorr, who wrote a book-length study of Choudhury called Hell-Bent in 2012, attended a training course in Las Vegas in 2009 and found himself drawn to Choudhury, despite describing him as “clearly a buffoon”. By the third evening, Choudhury had told the class that he launched Michael Jackson’s career, cured Janet Reno’s Parkinson’s disease, was once best friends with Elvis, and had experienced “72 hours of marathon sex, where my partner has 49 orgasms. I count.” (He married his wife Rajashree, herself a certified Bikram instructor, in 1984.)
But for Lorr, Choudhury’s ridiculousness only added to his charisma. He had the quality of being present in the moment. “You see it with Donald Trump, too – it’s this unscripted responsiveness,” Lorr tells me. “Bikram has an incredible ability to zoom in on specific people, combined with an ability to act as if he’s being true to himself.” And then there’s what Lorr calls the “volume game”. “When there are 380 people in a room cheering, you begin to wonder: ‘Why am I the only who’s sitting out of this?’ So you find yourself clapping and cheering, despite the fact that what he just said was moronic, or homophobic, or racist, or offensive.”
It was at these training camps – held in large hotel resorts – that Choudhury’s worst alleged abuses took place; there are now six separate suits working their way through the California courts, ranging from sexual harassment to rape. Jafa-Bodden is so far the only woman who has managed to defeat Choudhury in court: last month, a Los Angeles county jury awarded her a total of $6.8m in damages for a range of charges including unlawful dismissal and sexual harassment.
But recovering her damages has not been easy. Choudhury has since fled to India; his fleet of cars has vanished. When cornered by a TV journalist from HBO’s Real Sports at a teacher-training camp near Mumbai last October, Choudhury insulted his accusers and claimed that 5,000 women a day would line up to have sex with him: “Why do I have to harass women? People spend $1m for one drop of my sperm. Are you that dumb to believe those trash?” he said on camera. He also boasted that “this yoga is worse than cocaine. You can get rid of cocaine, but once you’re used to this yoga, you can’t stop.”
Back in March 2011, when Jafa-Bodden first stepped into Choudhury’s Beverly Hills HQ, she was convinced she had just landed her dream job. She was born in Assam, India, received her legal training in Britain, and had spent her career moving between Europe, India and the Caribbean, working in international litigation. She was introduced to Choudhury by his Indian lawyer, Som Mandal. Choudhury insisted that she start right away, and he and Rajashree helped her with her immigration papers, going so far as to choose (and furnish) a flat for her.
As a single mother with a six-year-old daughter, it seemed the perfect opportunity. “I saw it as my forever job,” Jafa-Bodden recalls. “It allowed me to combine my love of yoga and spirituality with the legal and business side of things. I was ready to take on a bigger role, and I also thought I was coming to work for a family-oriented company.”
Jafa-Bodden has the supple movements and clear complexion that comes from taking three or four hot yoga classes a week. She combines a disarming friendliness with a lawyer’s caution. She insists on meeting me twice before she will answer my questions: once for afternoon tea, once for yoga. When I am finally granted a formal interview at her attorneys’ offices in Santa Monica, she welcomes me wearing a camouflage jacket with the words “TRUST THE UNIVERSE” spelled in diamante on the back.
Her first inkling that something wasn’t right came when Choudhury and Rajashree invited her to their mansion in Beverly Hills a couple of days after she took up her position. “It was like the lair of a Bollywood villain. It was very showy and elaborate, not quite what I was expecting from a yoga guru.” Still, she says, he was on his best behaviour. “I’ve dealt with high-net-worth individuals in all sorts of countries, and my read on Bikram was just that he was eccentric.”
Meanwhile, in her day job, she found “operational dysfunction: a total co-mingling of personal and corporate assets”. Choudhury had a tendency not to settle his hotels bills, so her first task was to fight Marriott hotels over an unpaid sum of $1.8m. Choudhury also liked to use the company account as a personal credit card. But initially Jafa-Bodden saw this as an opportunity; she felt she had the necessary expertise to straighten out the business. It was only when a lawsuit from a former trainee named Pandhora Williams landed on her desk that she realised the extent of her problems.
***
The Bikram teacher-training courses centre on two mass 90-minute hot yoga sessions a day interspersed with anatomy seminars, spiritual lectures and rote learning of 45 pages of copyrighted Bikram dialogue. Choudhury likes to conduct the evening class from a throne with one attendant typically brushing his hair and another massaging his legs. Francesca Asumah attended a course in spring 2002. “He walked in and everybody started jumping around and cheering,” she recalls. “Because I’m English, and we don’t really do cults, I didn’t really understand what was going on. But everybody was worshipping him.”
Choudhury teaching in Beverly Hills, California in 1982. Photograph: Joan Adlen Photography/Getty Images
She was 49, and believes her “difficult” attitude led to her being shunned by Choudhury’s inner circle; the typical attendees were aged 22 to 35 and seemed more impressionable. “There were a lot of really beautiful bodies, all dressed in tight shorts and bikinis.”
In the evenings, Choudhury would invite his favourites to watch Bollywood movies with him. Anyone who fell asleep would be woken up; the ordeal would often go on until 3am. The first yoga session of the next day was 8am, and was often accompanied by vomiting, fainting and weeping. Nonetheless, despite the hardships, most students agreed it was worth it. “There were a few people who would exchange looks and raise their eyebrows,” Asumah says. “But you’d spent your £10,000. And the yoga’s good. And you’d just try to bear what you can.”
The case that landed on Jafa-Bodden’s desk in May 2011, the suit from Pandhora Williams, related to a training session at the Town and Country Resort in San Diego the previous autumn. Williams’ lawyers alleged that Choudhury had invited the class to lie down in savasana (corpse pose) whereupon he launched into a homophobic rant, announcing that all gay people should be put on an island and “left to die of Aids”. After the class, Williams had asked, “Bikram, why are you preaching hate? Yoga is supposed to be about love.” She alleges that he replied, “We don’t sell love here, bitch,” then told an assistant, “Get that black bitch out of here. She’s a cancer.” Williams was ejected from the course – and Choudhury refused to refund her $10,900 fee. So she sued for racial discrimination.
“I realised that if half of this was true, we were facing a very serious situation,” Jafa-Bodden tells me now. She conducted internal investigations and challenged Choudhury on his behaviour. She found him unremorseful. “He would pick on someone in the crowd. If someone got up to go to the toilet, he would say, ‘Where are you going? To change your tampon?’ He uses profanities, he’s antisemitic, he’s homophobic. He’ll say things like, ‘Blacks don’t get my yoga.’ And once he starts on his tirade of profanity, he doesn’t stop. Once he’s picked on you, then you’ve had it for the entire class.”
Why did no one stand up to him? “There’s very little you can do. He’s up there on a podium, he’s miked up, and it’s really hot.” Many trainees feared losing the thousands of dollars they had already spent on the fees. “Their livelihood depends on putting up with it. The problem was that Bikram had set things up in such a way that, without his continued patronage, you can’t teach anywhere else. So some of his victims would come back to his training and just try to take precautions.”
Once people have bought into any cult, there’s no rational way you can change their minds
Further allegations followed. Jafa-Bodden was required to read the manuscript of Lorr’s book Hell-Bent for libel, but found nothing actionable. The book’s allegations of sexual impropriety opened the floodgates. “Once people have bought into any cult, there’s no rational way you can change their minds – it has to be an emotional change,” Lorr tells me. “It was only when people started to see how much hurt he had caused that they began to change their minds.”
In 2013, a series of rape allegations were made. A former student, Sarah Baughn, claimed that Choudhury had sexually assaulted her at a 2008 training camp, pleading, “I am dying. I can feel myself dying. I will not be alive if someone doesn’t save me.” A Canadian student, Jill Lawler, sued Choudhury for a litany of charges, including sexual assault, gender discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual battery; she was 18 when the alleged crimes took place. Another student, Maggie Genthner, alleged that he raped her twice, forcing her legs into yoga postures and laughing at her.
Jafa-Bodden says she repeatedly challenged Choudhury on his behaviour, but he simply expected her to make the allegations go away. “At the outset, he expected me to be submissive,” she says. “He told me he was a god who could do whatever he wanted and that I was ‘stupid and too westernised’.”
Jafa-Bodden claims that, on one occasion, Choudhury held a meeting in his presidential suite and encouraged her to join him in bed. “He would tell me to go and ‘shut up’ the witnesses,” Jafa-Bodden says. “One woman sent a Facebook message saying that Bikram had tried to put his penis in her mouth – a horrific allegation. I went to Bikram and said, ‘What is this?’ And he said, ‘I thought we’d taken care of that bitch in Hawaii.’” After she told him he wasn’t allowed to bring trainees to his bedroom, he mocked her in front of a class: “He stood up on his podium and said: ‘My lawyer tells me I can’t have a girl in my room. So I’m now going to have two!’”
Bikram Choudhury assists actress Carol Lynley at his yoga studio in Beverly Hills, California. Photograph: Joan Adlen Photography/Getty Images
Jafa-Bodden became depressed, which she says has led to ongoing problems with anxiety. “My entire life revolved around Bikram and his yoga. It was like living in a parallel universe,” she says. She considered leaving the country, but was trapped. “I never received my pay cheque on time or for the full amount agreed. I was dependent on Bikram for everything, including my work visa, my apartment, my car. My cellphone was connected to his and my every move was monitored. It would have been very risky to flee without a well-thought-out exit strategy. He would say they’d revoke my green card, so I’d be deported back to India.”
Finally, in February 2013, she was subpoenaed to testify in the Williams case, which sent Choudhury “crazy”. “He said ominously, ‘Well, we’ll just tell them we don’t know where you are.’ I was so frightened.” The next month, he terminated her contract. With no car and little money, she moved with her daughter to a guesthouse until she was able to find a small one-bedroom apartment.
Jafa-Bodden eventually turned to her former adversary, Carla Minnard, the Californian attorney who had subpoenaed her in the Williams lawsuit. “My motto is, where there is darkness let there be light,” Jafa-Bodden says now. “I feel I have to show my daughter that you have to fight through the fear.” She sued Choudhury for unfair dismissal and sexual harassment.
An Irish former employee, Sharon Clerkin (herself allegedly dismissed for becoming pregnant), testified at Jafa-Bodden’s trial that Choudhury continued to demean women at teacher training, calling them “bitches” and boasting about allegations that were then surfacing on social media (“it’s good for business”).
The jury unanimously ruled that Jafa-Bodden had been subject to sexual harassment, nonpayment of wages, wrongful dismissal and a number of further charges. In December, with Choudhury refusing to return to the US, the judge ordered that the income from his studio franchises and his intellectual property be handed over to Jafa-Bodden. Last month, she filed a separate suit against Rajashree, who divorced Choudhury in 2016 and remains in the Beverly Hills mansion. (At the time of the divorce, it was ruled that she wasn’t required to pay damages in any pending or future cases; Jafa-Bodden and her lawyers are challenging that verdict.)
To date, there have been no criminal charges brought against Choudhury; all the women are pursuing civil cases. Choudhury denied all of Pandhora Williams’ claims before they settled out of court in May 2013, and has dismissed the other allegations as “lies lies lies”. However, he has repeatedly refused to return to the US; last month he violated a court order to complete a video deposition in the Clerkin case. A few weeks later, his attorney in that case quit, saying Choudhury was no longer cooperating or paying his bills.
Responding to a Guardian request for comment, Bikram’s Indian lawyer, Som Mandal, last week denied all the allegations. He said that Bikram had hired new lawyers and would be appealing the verdict in the Jafa-Bodden case.
For her part, Jafa-Bodden says she is less interested in the money than in seeing justice done: “It’s about accountability.” Meanwhile, many Bikram studio owners are removing photographs of Choudhury and distancing themselves from their former guru. There are around 30 yoga studios that carry the Bikram name in the UK, and many are rebranding: Bikram Yoga North, West, City and Primrose Hill in London now go under the name Fierce Grace.
Outside the US, Choudhury continues to advertise training camps: his next teacher-training session in Acapulco, Mexico, this April is again priced at about £10,000. “That’s so concerning for us,” Jafa-Bodden says. “Innocent and impressionable young trainees might be going to these camps in jurisdictions where there may not be as many protections.”
You’d understand it if Jafa-Bodden never wanted to step inside another yoga studio again, but she remains devoted to the series of 26 poses. “It must seem mystifying to someone who is not into Bikram yoga,” she laughs, “but I do actually think yoga is the answer.” She credits Asumah with seeing her through her worst moments.
Asumah herself has every reason to leave yoga behind. Her first husband died of a heart attack after taking a yoga class in Ibiza, and she blames Choudhury for the failure of her second marriage. Yet she has forgiven him. “If you spoke to me when I was in the depths of hurt, I’d have spoken differently. But he didn’t make me bitter. The highest form of love is forgiving the unforgivable.”
All of which leaves Jafa-Bodden with a dilemma. She is effectively president of Bikram Inc. But there is a serious issue with the name: in the process of de-Bikramisation, she wants to separate the yoga from the man who created it – not so easy when it’s a brand known the world over (most devotees don’t make the connection with the megalomaniac in Speedos). And she still remains devoted to the Bikram community. Can she rebuild the business as something new? As Asumah says, “Sometimes you get a rotten branch, and you have to cut it off, but it doesn’t mean the whole tree’s gone.”
The fight Pakistan must wage within
Hussain Haqqani in The Hindu
The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan is not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.
Jihadi justification
The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.
Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).
For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.
In all four provinces
Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.
But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.
The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.
For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”
More about image
For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.
In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.
Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.
For ‘strategic advantage’
In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.
In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.
As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.
The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan is not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.
Jihadi justification
The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.
Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).
For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.
In all four provinces
Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.
But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.
The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.
For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”
More about image
For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.
In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.
Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.
For ‘strategic advantage’
In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.
In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.
As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)