India's 'cheating mafia' gets to work as school exam season hits

Vast network profits from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where university places and jobs are limited


Michael Safi in The Guardian
 

Men at stalls selling schoolbooks on College Road in Kolkata at the height of India’s annual exam season Photograph: Michael Safi


Afew minutes into the final year maths exam at his Delhi high school, Raghav asked to use the bathroom. Inside, he texted pictures of the test paper he had secretly photographed to a phone number he was sent days before. Minutes later, answers materialised on the screen.

“It isn’t cheating,” insists his mother Sunita, who paid 16,000 rupees (£175) for her son to obtain the phone number. “It’s a way out.”

India’s annual exam season has gripped the country in the last month, with tens of millions of students undertaking gruelling tests to qualify for the limited slots available at Indian universities – the best of them with admission rates about one-tenth those of Oxford and Cambridge.

Also hard at work is the country’s so-called “cheating mafia”, the vast network aimed at profiting from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where, each year, an estimated 17 million people join a workforce adding only 5.5m jobs.

Last week, in the latest high-profile breach, the papers for two secondary exams were found to have been leaked on WhatsApp about 90 minutes before the tests. More than 2.8 million students in Delhi and the surrounding areas have been ordered to resit the exams later in April.

“It is mental torture,” said Kirath Kaul, 15, an east Delhi student who will be forced to sit a new maths exam this month. “I was spending all day study [for the last one] and even getting up at night to prepare.”

‘A broken education system’

Cheating on exams in India is endemic, organised and elaborate. In Bihar, one of the poorest states in the country, more than 1,000 students were expelled for cheating in February.

Last year, the student who topped the state in one subject, arts, turned out to be a 42-year-old man. The student with the highest arts score in 2016 was stripped of her certificate after arousing suspicions, including by telling a TV interviewer she believed political science was the study of cooking.

In 2015, Bihar made global headlines when videos emerged showing parents literally scaling a five-storey building to pass answers to their children taking exams inside. This year, to ensure probity, the state installed CCTV cameras in exam halls and made every student leave their shoes and socks at the door.

“This is very much the sign of a broken education system,” says Yamini Aiyar, the chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research.

She blames the widespread fraud on a cocktail of intense pressure to earn a university qualification and a system that has been focused on building new schools, but unconcerned about what happens inside them.

“Studies tell us that on average about half of students that get to Standard 5 can read a Standard 2 text,” she says.

Incentives for teachers and administrators are also askew, she adds, measuring success and doling out promotions based on what percentage of children in a school or district are passing their exams. Officials are incentivised either to assist in the cheating or overlook it.

Sunita, who asked for her name to be changed for legal reasons, came into contact with India’s “cheating mafia” through the exam coaching centre Raghav have been attending before his final exams last year.

“The teacher said, your son is very weak ma’am,” she recalls. “My son was not interested in studying and I didn’t want him to repeat the year.”

The private tutor offered to connect with someone who could send Raghav the answers for his economics and mathematics papers. Nobody on either end of the phone would know each others’ identity. She signed up with four or five other families.

“It is totally common,” she says. And lucrative. “All of us probably paid this man about 60,000 rupees.”

India’s cheating industry has proliferated alongside others kinds of organised fraud such as call-centre scams, and is driven by a similar mentality, says Snigdha Poonam, author of a new book about the ambition and guile of Indian youth.

Social mobility in India is improving, according to surveys. But not fast enough to match the expectations of a generation reared on social media, western pop culture, and promises that India’s time has finally come. “The same forces drive young Indians into entering these economies built on fraud,” she says.

“[It is] the lack of legitimate options in the formal job market, a blurring of lines between honest and dishonest work, an ability to identify market gaps for services, and the resourcefulness to turn them into avenues for easy money.”

With the aid of his cheating hotline, Raghav passed all his subjects. He is now taking private photography classes and aims to make a career with his camera. Kaul, meanwhile, is studying hard, preparing to take her maths exam again on 25 April.

“But I’m worried the cheaters will perform better [than me],” she says. “I work very hard, but people only see the result – not that someone has cheated.”

Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community

Kenan Malik in The Guardian

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. So runs the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Through those gates walks Dante with his guide Virgil:

Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation
Resounded through the starless air,
So that I too began to weep.
Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents,
Words of suffering, cries of rage, voices
Loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands…


Inferno is the first part, or canticle, of the Divine Comedy, Dante’s great triptych of journeys through hell, purgatory and heaven. Today, we read it as poetry, even if it is poetry that seems to have been touched by the divine. Seven hundred years ago, it was read as a glimpse of something far more real. Dante’s imaginative recreation of both the physical and the moral universe, and of the interlacing of the two, infused medieval culture and allowed Europeans to understand both their place in the physical architecture of the cosmos and their duties in the moral architecture of Christian society.

So far have we moved today from Dante’s reality that even the pope, if we are to believe the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, no longer acknowledges the existence of hell. Scalfari asked Pope Francis where “bad souls” go after death. Hell, Francis supposedly replied, “doesn’t exist”. “Sinning souls” simply “disappear”.

The Vatican has condemned the article, published in La Repubblica, insisting that the pope was misquoted. Whatever the truth, the controversy nevertheless points up the dilemma in which religion finds itself in the modern world. Religious values are immensely flexible over time. Christian beliefs on many issues have changed enormously in the past two millennia. Yet an institution like the Catholic church can never be truly “modern”.

Christianity, like all monotheistic religions, views human desires and beliefs as unreliable guides to notions of good and bad. Values derive primarily from God, and the authority of the church rests on its claim to be able to interpret the Bible and God’s word. Were the church to modify its teaching to meet the wishes of its flock, the authority of the institution would inevitably weaken. But were it not to do so, a chasm would emerge between official teaching and actual practice. Dante’s hell may be difficult to believe in, but to jettison difficult beliefs is to question the need for religion itself.

A recent pan-European survey by Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology at St Mary’s University in London, showed that in a dozen countries, including Britain, a majority of young people are irreligious. And even those who identify as religious have attitudes increasingly like those of their irreligious neighbours.

A survey of the social attitudes of British believers published in 2013 by Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University, suggested that two thirds of Catholics accepted abortion of some kind. Half said that they are primarily guided by their own reason, intuition or feelings. Fewer than one in 10 sought guidance from the church or Bible.


Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community

Meanwhile, Woodward observes,, a minority of believers have marched in the opposite direction. They possess an absolute belief in God, make moral decisions primarily on the basis of religious sources, and are deeply conservative on issues of social morality. The literalism of fundamentalist Muslims and evangelical Christians speaks to a yearning for the restoration of strong identities and moral lines. The sectarianism of fundamentalist religion is reflected also in the political sphere. Witness the rise of tribal politics and of social movements built around excluding the Other.

All this poses a challenge, not just for believers, but for non-believers, too. Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community, identity and meaning. One reason for the growth of fundamentalism is that all these seem in short supply today. The world appears increasingly trapped between an atomised liberalism, on the one hand, and a sense of community created by fundamentalist religion or reactionary politics, on the other.

In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who spent three years incarcerated in German concentration camps, meditates on that experience; a meditation on surviving hell.

“This is a profoundly religious book,” suggested the rabbi Howard Kushner in the foreword to the second edition. Frankl’s faith is, however, very different to that embodied in religion. It is a hymn not to a transcendent deity but to the human spirit that, through its own efforts, can transcend the immediacy of its being in the world. Humans, he suggests, find themselves only through creating meaning in the world. Meaning is not something to be discovered through God. It is something that humans create. “Man is ultimately self-determining,” Frankl wrote. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be.”

Today, it is that very capacity to “decide what our existence will be” that seems to have ebbed away. For all the material improvements in the world, life feels more precarious for millions of people. They seem to have less control in shaping the direction of their world.

Liberals often laud the Enlightenment as the moment when faith was replaced by reason. The new moral vision was, however, also rooted in faith, though of a different kind – faith that humans were capable of acting rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. It was that faith upon which Frankl drew. It was expressed not just through science and technology but also through politics that helped overthrow tyranny and bring about democracy. That faith, too, has eroded, as have the movements in which it was embodied.

Religion once helped provide meaning and identity through sublimating human agency to God’s will. Not only is it less capable of doing so these days, but when it does so, it often takes sectarian or bigoted forms. Equally, as the optimism that once suffused the humanist impulse has ebbed away, politics, too, is less capable of providing a means through which people can express agency. The politics that today seeks to do this is also often sectarian or bigoted.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote, before adding: “Yet his shadow still looms.” That shadow is in reality our failure to create movements and institutions that can nurture a sense of meaning and belongingness and dignity. Disbelief in God carries little weight without also a faith in ourselves as human beings. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a different kind of hell.

Columbus shows Trump how to thrive in the new world order

Rana Foroohar in The Financial Times


A day or two after Donald Trump announced tariffs on a spate of Chinese goods, the world was gripped by fears of a trade war. More than a week later, there is a storyline building that perhaps the US president had the right idea. China is negotiating with the US; the US and South Korea will probably cut a new trade deal. While the administration is right to call China out over unfair trade practices, however, there is also a risk of taking away the wrong message, which is that tariffs are the best way to protect the US Rust Belt. 

China may not play fair, but it plays the long game. This is the crucial point. While Mr Trump rails mostly against the trade deficit, China has an industrial policy designed to win the jobs of the future in strategic high-tech industries. This is the better strategy, as evidenced not only by what is happening in the Middle Kingdom, but also in the US. 

Consider the success of Columbus, Ohio, a city whose fortunes I have followed closely for many years because it is an economic and political bellwether for the country. Politicos come here to take the pre-election temperature of the nation and companies to test drive new products. Columbus is in the heart of the Rust Belt territory that helped elect the president. Mr Trump has visited Ohio in recent days, offering modest federal incentives with the aim of creating a boom in local infrastructure spending (unlikely, given the dismal fiscal picture in many US states and cities). 

Columbus is the third-biggest national market for employment in the manufacture of motor vehicles. Yet the city fathers are not too bothered either way about what the president does or does not do around tariffs. 

“Some industries will win, some will lose,” says Kenny McDonald, the head of Columbus 2020, the regional economic development strategy. “But there’s plenty of people at JPMorgan, Honda and Nationwide [all large local employers] that are right now working on algorithms that may replace their jobs.” 

This statement reflects important truths. During the past four decades, technology has created just as much job disruption, if not more, in the Rust Belt as has trade. After the global financial crisis, Columbus was one of the US cities that suffered most. While it didn’t fall quite as far as the rest of the state thanks to a diversified economy (Columbus is the state capital and also has a strong education sector), it was faced with chopping $100m in municipal spending — more than 15 per cent of its total operating budget — in 2009. 

The city did all the usual back-end trimming of public services. But then, rather than become Detroit, which for a period of time literally couldn’t keep the lights or water on, Columbus also did something else: it thought ahead. 

The Democratic mayor went to the Republican city fathers and persuaded them to support a tax rise, the first in nearly four decades. They agreed, on condition that a chunk of that money would go into a public-private economic development partnership that focused on how to cultivate human capital for an era in which all value will reside in intellectual property, data and ideas. 

They connected community colleges with local companies, domestic and global (L Brands, JPMorgan, Worthington Industries, Honda) to train up a digitally savvy technical workforce. They renovated the crumbling downtown and created new housing stock to appeal to the millennials who had been leaving for greener pastures after their studies. 

Columbus is now one of the top 10 areas that young workers are pouring into (it ranks number three as a city of choice for fashion designers, after Los Angeles and New York). In an effort to move from making bumpers and hubcaps to being part of the internet of things, Columbus bid for, and won, a $40m Department of Transportation grant to become a “smart city” focused on electric vehicles. About $500m of additional investment has followed. 

“This isn’t a five-year plan for economic development, it’s a 100-year plan,” says Alex Fischer, head of the chief executives group the Columbus Partnership. 

The city is part of Elon Musk’s “hyper-loop” plan to create a train that can connect Chicago, Columbus and Pittsburgh in minutes. Ohio State and Columbus State Community College have started some of the first degree programmes in data analytics. Tesla, AWS and Apple have moved into town. Accenture now has an innovation lab on what used to be the site of a large buggy manufacturer. 

It is hard to imagine a greater symbol of change. The Columbus region has, since 2010, created roughly half of all the new jobs in Ohio. Harvard Business School recently wrote a case study about the city’s accomplishments. 

The city’s success is a great example of what American industrial policy can yield. Many countries — not just China, but also a number of European nations — create multiyear plans for economic development. The US does not, of course. Industrial policy have always been dirty words here. 

Mr Trump, and many others, rail against Chinese state-run capitalism. But by demonising the outsider, rather than creating a real national economic development strategy at home, the US is missing the point. Columbus is, in a way, showing how to do Chinese economic development with American characteristics. It’s a strategy worth copying.

GKN will be stripped and sold for parts by ghouls who have no interest in making things

Will Hutton in The Guardian

 

A GKN engineer at work. The £8bn battle for control of Britain’s third largest engineering group has been won by Melrose. Photograph: GKN


The past is never dead. When the wheeling, dealing, asset-stripping Hanson Trust finally collapsed in 2007, having played a major part in the deindustrialisation of Britain – but having greatly enriched its Thatcherite founder Lord Hanson – I thought a stake had finally being driven through the heart of a particular ghoul.

Never again would our Westminster, Whitehall and City establishments indulge a glorified super-accountant who knew the price of everything but the value of nothing. And, in the name of “culture change” and rigorous “management”, had laid waste to industrial Britain. I was wrong.

The ghoul lives on, reincarnated as Chris Miller, the executive chair of Melrose, a company self-consciously cast in Hanson Trust’s image, and now the victor in the £8bn battle for control of Britain’s third largest engineering group, GKN. Miller is in fact a Hanson protege and, like his former boss James Hanson, he trained as an accountant – the perfect professional background for asset stripping.

For what glory days were those! The young Miller will have been part of the finance team working to Hanson and his chief accomplice, Gordon White, at their headquarters overlooking Buckingham Palace. It was a company wholly controlled by the two men, insisting on approving every expenditure above £500 by the companies they acquired – even while they pioneered stowing profits in tax havens and raiding pension funds of the companies they took over.

Crucially, Miller will have seen firsthand how Hanson and White stalked their takeover targets, set about winning the battles and then made a fortune from breaking up the victim company while running its core businesses to incredibly stringent financial targets. I have no doubt that, like Hanson and White, both ennobled by Margaret Thatcher who admired them uncritically, he believes in the virtue of what he does. Since founding Melrose, the financial returns have been stratospheric. Miller has yet to be named capitalist of the year by the Times as Hanson was in 1986 – but he is on his way.

But, like Hanson’s, Miller’s is a capitalism organised entirely around extracting rather than creating value. Hanson’s model was brutally simple, exemplified by the 1982 takeover of Berec, the manufacturer of Eveready batteries, and its subsequent breakup – Miller will have had a ringside seat.

Like GKN, it was a proud Midlands-based British engineering company setting about the hazardous business of becoming the international brand leader in batteries, based on high investment in research and development. Who knows? In a different business culture, Berec might now be the world’s leading battery manufacturer, set to exploit the electrification of cars. Instead, it does not exist.

For, like GKN, it made a mis-step – the share price dipped and Hanson launched his bid. The European division was sold off to its chief competitor, Duracell, thus recouping most of the cost of the takeover. Battery prices were increased across the board, so that Eveready quickly lost market share. All new investment could only be justified if the cash was returned in four years while making a 20% return. Ten years later, Eveready had been milked dry, and Hanson sold out to Ralston Purina. Its verdict on Eveready as it assessed its purchase: a company “a number of years behind the times… a business in decline… the whole infrastructure was pretty thin”.

Hanson had made a fortune – but Britain had lost another pivotal company. So it continued. Two years before he left Hanson to found his own Hanson-like shell company, Miller would have been in the thick of the 1986 bid for Imperial Tobacco – then dismembered like Eveready. But the Hanson business model was inherently unstable. To grow and maintain his own share price, he had to go for ever bigger targets to feed the beast. Hanson had an unsuccessful shot at ICI, which saw him off – but only at the price of ICI changing its declared business purpose from bettering society through science to maximising the share price. ICI then broke itself up – but so did Hanson, with the company ignominiously being sold to a German cement company.

We can foretell what will happen to GKN. Businesses will be sold to repay the £8bn. Prices will increase, and market share will be foregone: there is no other option given the millstone of debt around Melrose’s neck. R&D will be frozen at the current levels, already running at half to two thirds the rate of its chief competitors, rendering virtually valueless the promise to the business secretary, Greg Clark, to maintain it. Investment will only be allowed on Hanson-type terms – four-year paybacks and 20% returns. Yes, the company headquarters will remain in Britain – but in Mayfair, not in Redditch. In 10 years’ time, some company will buy the rump of GKN, only to find it in the same condition as Ralston Purina found Eveready.

Melrose’s future is also foretold. For all the hundreds of millions it is making, it will wind up like Hanson. Britain, which already has no major indigenous company in an array of sectors, will have them in even fewer – with all the implications for work, wages, careers and skills. For most of the young analysts at the asset management groups who took the decision to accept Melrose’s offer for GKN, the events I describe will seem like ancient history.

But the same mistakes keep being repeated. To prevent them, the government simply has to rule that only shareholders who own shares at the time of the bid can vote, so disenfranchising the arbitrageurs and hedge funds who swung the decision. But the City establishment lobbies ferociously against this move. For the City is wedded to the value extraction on which its fees depend.

Annu Kapoor - Interview

What's with the sanctimony, Mr Waugh?

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo


Bless our stars, Steve Waugh has weighed in. From his pedestal, perched atop a great moral altitude, he spoke down to us.

"Like many, I'm deeply troubled by the events in Cape Town this last week, and acknowledge the thousands of messages I have received, mostly from heartbroken cricket followers worldwide.

"The Australian Cricket team has always believed it could win in any situation against any opposition, by playing combative, skillful and fair cricket, driven by our pride in the fabled Baggy Green.

"I have no doubt the current Australian team continues to believe in this mantra, however some have now failed our culture, making a serious error of judgement in the Cape Town Test match."

You'll have picked up by now that this was not going to be what it should have been: a mea culpa. "Sorry folks, Cape Town - my bad." One can hope for the tone, but one can't ever imagine such economy with the words.

Waugh's statement was a bid to recalibrate the Australian cricket's team moral compass, and you know, it would have been nice if he acknowledged his role in setting it awry in the first place. Because there can't be any doubt that a clean, straight line runs from the explosion-implosion of Cape Town back to that "culture" that Waugh created for his team, the one cricket gets so reverential about.

First, though, a little pre-reading prep, or YouTube wormholing, just to establish the moral frame within which we are operating. Start with this early in Waugh's international career - claiming a catch at point he clearly dropped off Kris Srikkanth. This was the 1985-86 season and he was young and the umpire spotted it and refused to give it out. So go here. This was ten years later, also at point, and he dropped Brian Lara, though he made as if he juggled and caught it. The umpire duped, Lara gone.Steve Waugh: sanctimonious or statesman-like? Depends on which side of the "line" you stand on Getty Images

A man is not merely the sum of his incidents, and neither does he go through life unchanged. Waugh must have gone on to evolve, right? He became captain of Australia and soon it became clear that he had - all together now, in Morgan Freeman's voice - A Vision. There was a way he wanted his team to play the game.

He spelt it out in 2003, though all it was was a modification of the MCC's existing Spirit of Cricket doctrine. There were commitments to upholding player behaviour, and to how they treated the opposition and umpires, whose decisions they vowed to accept "as a mark of respect for our opponents, the umpires, ourselves and the game".

They would "value honesty and accept that every member of the team has a role to play in shaping and abiding by our shared standards and expectations".

Sledging or abuse would not be condoned. It wasn't enough that Australia played this way - Waugh expected others to do so as well. Here's Nasser Hussain, straight-talking in his memoir on the 2002-03 Ashes in Australia:

"I just think that about this time, he [Waugh] had lost touch with reality a bit he gave me the impression that he had forgotten what playing cricket was like for everyone other than Australia. He became a bit of a preacher. A bit righteous. It was like he expected everyone to do it the Aussie way because their way was the only way."

It was also duplicitous because the Aussie way Waugh was preaching was rarely practised on field by him or his team. So if Hussain refused to walk in the Boxing Day Test in 2002 after Jason Gillespie claimed a catch - with unanimous support from his team - well, you could hardly blame him, right, given Waugh was captain? YouTube wasn't around then, but not much got past Hussain on the field and the chances of those two "catches" having done so are low.


"Waugh created a case for Australian exceptionalism that has become every bit as distasteful, nauseating and divisive as that of American foreign policy"

As for the sledging that Waugh and his men agreed to not condone, revisit Graeme Smith's comments from the first time he played Australia, in 2001-02, with Waugh as captain. There's no need to republish it here but you can read about it (and keep kids away from the screen). It's not clever.

No, Waugh's sides didn't really show that much respect to opponents, unless their version of respect was Glenn McGrath asking Ramnaresh Sarwan - who was getting on top of Australia - what a specific part of Brian Lara's anatomy (no prizes for guessing which one) tasted like.

That incident, in Antigua, is especially instructive today because David Warner v Quinton de Kock is an exact replica. Sarwan's response, referencing McGrath's wife, was reprehensible, just as de Kock's was. But there was zilch recognition from either Warner or McGrath that they had initiated, or gotten involved in, something that could lead to such a comeback, or that their definition of "personal" was, frankly, too fluid and ill-defined for anyone's else's liking.

Waugh wasn't the ODI captain at the time of Darren Lehmann's racist outburstagainst Sri Lanka. Lehmann's captain, however, was Ricky Ponting, Waugh protege and torchbearer of values (and co-creator of the modified Spirit document), and so, historically, this was very much the Waugh era. As an aside, Lehmann's punishment was a five-ODI ban, imposed on him eventually by the ICC; no further sanctions from CA.

It's clear now that this modified code was the Australians drawing their "line", except the contents of the paper were - and continued to be - rendered irrelevant by their actions. The mere existence of it, in Australia's heads, has been enough.

You've got to marvel at the conceit of them taking a universal code and unilaterally modifying it primarily for themselves, not in discussion with, you know, the many other non-Australian stakeholders in cricket - who might view the spirit of the game differently, if at all they give any importance to it - and expecting them to adhere to it.They won trophies, but not hearts Getty Images

It's why Warner and McGrath not only could not take it being dished back, but that they saw something intrinsically wrong in receiving it and not dishing it out. It's why it was fine to sledge Sourav Ganguly on rumours about his private life, but Ganguly turning up to the toss late was, in Waugh's words, "disrespectful" - to the game, of course, not him.

Waugh created a case for Australian exceptionalism, which has become every bit as distasteful, nauseating and divisive as that of American foreign policy. Look at the varnish of formality in dousing the true implication of "mental disintegration"; does "illegal combatants" ring a bell?

What took hold after Waugh was not what he preached but what he practised. One of my favourite examples is this lesser-remembered moment involving Justin Langer, a Waugh acolyte through and through, and his surreptitious knocking-off of a bail in Sri Lanka. Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn't valuing honesty as Waugh's code wanted.

Naturally the mind is drawn to the bigger, more infamous occasions, such as the behaviour of Ponting and his side that prompted a brave and stirring calling outby Peter Roebuck. That was two years before Ponting's virtual bullying of Aleem Dar after a decision went against Australia in the Ashes. It sure was a funny way to accept the umpire's decision. Ponting loved pushing another virtuous ploy that could so easily have been a Waugh tenet: of entering into gentlemen's agreements with opposing captains and taking the fielder's word for a disputed catch. Not many opposition captains did, which was telling of the virtuousness sides ascribed to Australia.

That this happened a decade or so ago should, if nothing else, confirm that Cape Town isn't just about the culture within this side - this is a legacy, passed on from the High Priest of Righteousness, Steve Waugh, to Ponting to Michael Clarke to Steve Smith, leaders of a long list of Australian sides that may have been good, bad and great but have been consistently unloved.

It's fair to be sceptical of real change. The severity of CA's sanctions - in response to public outrage and not the misdemeanour itself - amount to another bit of righteous oneupmanship. We remove captains for ball-tampering, what do you do? We, the rest of the world, let the ICC deal with them as per the global code for such things, and in that time the sky didn't fall. Now, on the back of CA's actions, David Richardson wants tougher punishments, thus continuing the ICC's strategy of policy-making based solely on incidents from series involving the Big Three.

Waugh was a great batsman. He was the captain of a great side. The only fact to add to this is that he played the game with great sanctimony. That helps explains why Australia now are where they are.

The Indian Muslim is dealing with a silent, undeclared psychological war that the State has unleashed on it.

Irena Akbar in The Indian Express

This year, I did not want to serve ‘them’ biryani on Eid. But that is not our ‘tehzeeb’, our culture, my father insisted. So, on June 26, one guest after another – some among them likely BJP voters – visited us and relished the biryani, the qorma, and the kebabs. This, as the image of Junaid haunted me – his body soaked with blood, after he was lynched in front of a silent, complicit crowd of 200 in a train in Delhi.

Our guests on the day of Eid had absolutely nothing to do with what Junaid suffered, and I hate and condemn myself for resenting them. This wasn’t me. This isn’t me. And I wonder at the distance my heart has travelled from exactly a year ago, when I would be filled with excitement at our whole family preparing dishes for our Hindu guests (we have no Muslim guests for Eid as they are busy in their homes). Not too long ago, when I used to work in Delhi, I would sometimes carry a pot of biryani from Lucknow after Eid for my non-Muslim colleagues and friends. The sight of Hindus enjoying Mughlai/Awadhi cuisine at Karim’s in Delhi or Tunday Kababi in Lucknow swelled me with pride at our Ganga-Jamuni culture.

So, why did I now begin to resent a woman with a bindi on her forehead or a man with a kalava tied to his wrist enjoying a kebab at Tunday Kababi? Because I suspect he/she hates me. Hates my people. Hates the Muslim owners and cooks of Tunday even though he/she loves their food. Loves it that they had to shut shop during the crackdown on meat suppliers in UP. Loves it when the business of Muslim butchers is stifled even though he/she buys meat from them. Hates my co-religionists who wear topis and grow beards. Loves it when they are lynched in trains, in the fields, on the highway, inside their homes. Hates women who wear burkhas but pretends to support them on triple talaq. Shares fake videos about ‘evil’ Muslims on WhatsApp. Rejoices at the arrest of 15 Muslims after India’s loss to Pakistan in a cricket match on the basis of a false complaint.

No, I don’t hate them. They hate me. I am only angry they hate me. And I resent them for their hatred towards me. They pretend to fear me and my people, but in reality, it is I, and my people, who fear them. We are 14 per cent, they are close to 80, so we are the ones surrounded by the mob. And I fear that in their hatred, they will support the mob if it lynches yet another Muslim. Or, they will vote for a party that felicitates the killers or those who incite them to such murders by giving them Z-Security or a ticket to contest elections. I dread the plans that such parties may have already drafted for late 2018 or early 2019, a few months before the next general elections. 

These fears are not exaggerated or unfounded. Between Akhlaque in 2015 and Junaid in 2017, each time a Muslim has been lynched in this country, every other Indian Muslim has died a slow death. The death of her confidence in the State which is supposed to protect her but doesn’t, the death of her trust in fellow countrymen who keep voting for the unabashedly anti-Muslim BJP, the death of her will to dispel the fears of the majority, and assure them that she is not the ‘other’, the ‘enemy’, but as Indian or even as human as they are.

I am acutely aware that not every Hindu is a supporter of Hindutva. His vote for the BJP could be based on promises of vikas, or the incompetence of other parties. As a Muslim, I am painfully aware of the pressure of stereotyping. I have lost count of the number of times I have asked non-Muslims to look at me, at their Muslim neighbours, friends and co-workers, at their Muslim tailors, at Muslim actors and filmmakers to clear their misconceptions about us being terror sympathisers.

So, when my mind slips into the realm of stereotyping, I pull it back and look at my Hindu neighbour whose NGO employs underprivileged Muslim women, at my Hindu cook who did not take a single day off during Ramzan and would prepare iftaar for us, at the Hindus who helped me put together an art exhibition I recently curated, at my former Hindu colleagues who supported me when I was going through a rough patch, at my Facebook newsfeed filled with posts by liberal Hindus denouncing cow terrorism, at the writers who returned their awards to protest against Akhlaque’s killing in 2015, at the recent Not In My Name protests triggered by Junaid’s murder.

Citizens hold placards during a silent protest ” Not in My Name ” against the targeted lynching, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. (Source: PTI Photo)

The mind of an ordinary Indian Muslim like me is caught in a constant tug-of-war – pulled by fear on one end, and by hope on the other. When my heart sank at the killing of Junaid, a faint glimmer of hope also emerged. The outraged liberal, secular Hindu got out of his social media mode and onto the streets to protest the lynching of Muslims being carried out in his name, under the banner ‘Not In My Name’. It was a reassuring moment for the besieged Indian Muslim, and she wholeheartedly supported it, joining in the protests, much like American Muslims who joined the Whites in the ‘IamMuslim’ protests in the US following Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’.

The next day, the Prime Minister disapproved of killing in the name of the cow. But a few hours later, another Muslim, Alimuddin Ansari, was lynched in the name of the cow in Jharkhand. He was violently thrashed and his face held up in front of the camera — as if it were a trophy — before his killers dealt him the final deathblows. The incident has strengthened the pull of fear against the pull of hope in the mental tug of war for the Muslim.

When a community is alienated and demonised consistently, its members often just retract to their shells. Most Muslims fear expressing themselves freely on social media, and avoid political discussions in offices, RWA meetings and kitty parties, and some are even wary of carrying non-vegetarian food on trains. When we drive past cows roaming the streets of Lucknow, we are careful not to get too close. No, we are not a paranoid family. Other Muslims have expressed similar caution. A Hindu can afford to slouch in his seat if the National Anthem is being played in a cinema hall, but remember how a Muslim family was forced out of a theatre in Mumbai for allegedly doing the same?

The Indian Muslim is dealing with a silent, undeclared psychological war that the State has unleashed on it. This war’s strategy is clear: Demonise the Muslim in the mind of the Hindu in some form or the other – the cow-eater, the ‘love jihadi’ on the prowl for Hindu girls, the anti-national who won’t chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’, the monstrous husband who divorces his wife via instant triple talaq, the descendant of the ‘rabid anti-Hindu’ ruler Aurangzeb, etc. Use chest-thumping TV anchors and fake videos on WhatsApp to set the discussions for the living rooms of the urban Hindu, or the chaupals of the rural Hindu. The overwhelming majority of Hindus is peace-loving, so it will react by keeping distance from the “horrible Muslims” and vote against “pseudo-secular” parties. But the violent, jobless youth may catch hold of a Muslim farmer, or a young boy wearing a topi, and beat him to death. That these youths are glorified as ‘gau rakshaks’ and not penalised emboldens them.

But cleverly, such murders are not done together at one time and at one place. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in The Indian Express, ‘A big riot would concentrate the mind, make a damning headline. A protracted riot in slow motion, individual victims across different states, simply makes this appear another daily routine.’ Once the Muslim has been demonised, corner him further. Don’t wish him for Eid. Boycott the iftaar held by the President. Shame him for not saying ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ (sorry, the Urdu ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ doesn’t work), and do politics over yoga-namaaz, Ramzan-Diwali, shamshaanghaat-qabristaan. Send the message loud and clear to the Muslim: ‘You, your vote don’t matter.’ And send the message to the Hindu: ‘Muslims have been finally shown their place after 1,000 years of subjugation of Hindus by Muslim rulers. You have won. You are safe.’

Thus, the mind of the majority, the Hindus, is quietly and successfully diverted from the real issues that matter to them as Indian citizens — development, jobs, investments, ‘achche din’. No chest-thumping TV anchor shouts down panellists over the lack of jobs. Everyone is only talking cows, beef, and triple talaq. The diversionary tactics of the State have also taken away the mind of the Muslim from what matters to him as an Indian citizen – development and jobs. All that matters to the Muslim now is his right to a life of dignity and safety, one that is led without fear. Something the ‘New India’ is snatching away from him.