The ethics of walking in cricket: from Socrates to Nietzsche

Anthony McGowan in The Guardian

It has been a frustrating season. You’ve managed a scratchy 30, a couple of awkward teens and more ducks than a farmyard pond in a children’s picture book. Thoughts of retirement float into your mind, along with the existential terror of what might take the place of these long days on a green field under greying skies. Golf? God, no.

Then, finally, it seems like you’re in. Blue sky, no swing, flat track, friendly bowlers. You’ve done the hard work, wafting and missing outside off, surviving the early run-out opportunity. You’re starting to think the new socks might be just the talisman you needed. You allow yourself the luxury of hope. Along comes an innocuous delivery down the leg side. You flick at it, hoping for a glanced boundary, expecting the airy miss. 

And then you feel it. A barely perceptible touch. Almost like the little electric tingle you get from a tooth that will soon need root canal work. The bowler begins to go up but has a change of heart. Was there really a noise? He decides to keep on the umpire’s side for now, saving one in the bank for the nip-backer that might just clip leg. Then he’ll give his lungs a workout. The young keeper was a little more convinced but stifled his shout when he saw the bowler’s lack of conviction. But the keeper is suspicious. He looks at you as if to say: “Did you? I think you might have…”

What do you do? Had you stroked your way to a nice 60, you might well nod, stick your bat under your arm and walk off, garnering goodwill and praise from all. But it’s not been that kind of season. You keep your head down and you ponder. I’m not sure any other sport has anything quite like this. There are plenty of opportunities for cheating in other sports and you can choose to reject them. Nudging your ball so it lies a little easier in the rough. Feigning assassination in the 18-yard box to win a penalty, then adding a flamboyant roll and clutching the face for the bonus of a sending-off. Calling “out” when your opponent’s backhand hits the line.

But walking is different. It isn’t cheating to stand your ground. There is nothing in the laws of cricket that says you can’t wait for the umpire to make a decision. But there are moral aspects to this case. The fact that the laws are silent on walking means it is – almost uniquely in sport – a purely moral issue. One for the philosophers, rather than the third umpire.

Let us imagine that the batter has felt that sickening click. He wants to do the right thing and is in a meditative, philosophical frame of mind. So he quickly reviews the history of Western moral philosophy to find some guidance from the greatest minds to have pondered the question of right and wrong.

Socrates

Ethics really gets going with Socrates, who changed the central question of philosophy from “what kind of stuff is there?” to “how should I live?”. His method was simple. He would find a person who claimed to be an expert in some area of ethical concern – the nature of, say, courage or piety or justice – and he would show them that everything they knew was wrong. But Socrates never actually answers the question of how we should live. The dialogues always end in a vaguely unsatisfactory way – not so much a hard-fought draw as match abandoned due to fog.

Ten commandments every club cricketer should follow


But a few linked ethical principles emerge. The first is that the pursuit of virtue is the only worthwhile goal in life. The second is that virtue is the only real good. Other things that may appear good – wealth, power, beauty – are illusory and will never bring happiness. Living a virtuous life is the only path to happiness. And the third is that every person does, in fact, want to be good. Only ignorance stands in our way.

Would Socrates have walked? The manner of his death tells us much. When he was put on trial for denying the gods and corrupting the young, he was found guilty and condemned to death. Although his friends offered to spirit him away, Socrates argued that it was only right for him to obey the laws of his city. He calmly took the hemlock and shuffled off to the great pavilion in the sky. So we can be sure that he would never question the umpire’s decision.

He would have walked. To do otherwise, to stay at the wicket to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of not being out, would be to betray his life’s work.

Plato

Socrates never gave a full account of what virtue actually is. That was left to his pupil, Plato. For Plato the world we perceive around us is an insubstantial shadow realm, a pale reflection or copy of the “real” world. This real world is made up of “ideas” or “forms” that act as a kind of template for the stuff we find around us in our world. As well as the original forms of material things such as triangles and beds, more exalted concepts such as beauty, virtue and justice also live in the world of the forms.

How do we know every vaguely triangular thing is a triangle, or that a blue object is really blue? It’s because, says Plato, we have the ideas of a perfect triangle and perfect blueness already in our minds, and we use this template to judge whether or not these shapes before us are blue triangles. The same applies to virtue. If we want to judge any act – for example, walking when we’ve nicked off – we simply compare it to the idea of virtue in our minds. The ideas of triangle and blue are already in our mind because, argues Plato, before we were born our soul lived in that world of the perfect forms and has a vague memory of what it knew there.

This last part is clearly nuts, but many philosophers still say ideas or forms do exist separately from their material embodiments, and that goodness or virtue must be one of these entities, and any act of virtue is such because it in some way copies or partakes in that form. Does this help us to decide whether or not to trudge back to the pavilion? The problem is that we still don’t know what this vague cloud of goodness is and how precisely it applies to our current dilemma.

In his most famous dialogue, The Republic, Plato argues that injustice comes when the separate sections of the soul or the state get ideas above their station – your opening bowler trying to convince the skipper that he’s actually a perfect fit for the No 4 berth. There are three parts to the state: the rulers, warriors and workers (or skipper, batters and bowlers). The subdivisions of the soul are: the rational part, which uses reason to guide our action; the appetitive, which keeps us alive by driving us to eat and drink; and the spirited, which gives us courage and urges us on towards honour and victory.

But how does this theory of justice apply to our dilemma? It’s hard to know. And – cards on the table here – although Plato is perhaps the most revered of all philosophers, I think he’s wrong on almost every important issue. But in general terms he, like Socrates, believed we should follow the laws of our particular state – anything else leads to chaos. I think Plato would have walked. However, he was also opposed to most forms of entertainment. He would have banned poetry, plays and any kind of music other than military marches, so he would probably have done away with cricket altogether. Wanker. 

The Cynics

The word “cynic” – which derives from the Greek term for “dog-like” – has come to mean someone who “disbelieves in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms.” It’s not an attractive picture: the thin-lipped misanthrope, mocking good intentions, forever pulling away the mask of virtue to reveal the hypocrite behind. Perhaps you’ve played with a Cynic, witnessed that sneer of cold contempt, the assumption of superiority, the presumption that all decency and honour are merely a sham.

The Cynics lived simply, disdaining the trappings of wealth and worldly success, dressing in rags, sleeping rough, railing against the greed and materialism of the affluent. No convention was sacrosanct; no moral or religious tradition left unmocked. They believed in doing openly those things most of us reserve for the privacy of the bedroom or bathroom. But Cynicism was, above all, a creed devoted to achieving a virtuous life and their critique was a necessary, if destructive, first step to enlightenment.

What would the Cynics have said about walking? I’m afraid that they would have regarded the game itself as a ludicrous artifice. Diogenes (412-323 BC), the founder of the group, would have marched out to the wicket and defecated on the pitch, just short of a good length. No help there.

The Epicureans

These are one of the more misunderstood groups of Ancient philosophers. “Epicurean” has come to mean something similar to “hedonist” – someone who lives purely for pleasure. There’s something in that – the group’s leader, Epicurus (341-270 BC), did argue that the ultimate good is pleasure (as opposed to virtue, favoured by rival Platonists and Stoics).

However, it wasn’t the crude pleasures of the flesh he had in mind, but instead calm contemplation and philosophical speculation. And his main concern wasn’t with actively finding physical delights but with eradicating things that cause us mental or physical pain. Retreat from the hurly burly, find a quiet garden to cultivate. Fend off hunger by all means, but live modestly and keep your desires in line with your ability to achieve them.

Epicurus would have been most concerned about the mental consequences of not walking – the guilt, the anxiety, the fear of a confrontation with that angry bowler after the game. He probably would have walked and advised you to do the same.

The Cyrenaics

There was one group of ancient philosophers who were straightforwardly hedonistic. The Cyrenaic school, founded by Aristippus (435–356 BC), believed that the one thing you could know for certain was whether you were enjoying pleasure or suffering pain. The only good or virtuous things are pleasant sensations. The only bad things are unpleasant sensations. The past is gone forever and the future is unknowable. So live for this moment, eat, drink, and be as merry as you can. Frequent the pub and the bawdy house.

Aristippus and the Cyrenaics would say do not walk. Enjoy your time out there. Do anything you can to maximise the pleasure of batting. Lie, cheat, whatever you like. Because there is nothing else – no greater goods, no higher power.

The Sceptics

The Sceptics, a school that began with Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 BC), maintained that knowledge was impossible. Our senses are fallible and our intellect can lead us astray. For any issue, you can argue equally persuasively on both sides. Therefore the only rational option is to withhold your judgment. Decide nothing. Did you edge the ball? Impossible to say. To walk would mean that you knew that you touched it. You can’t know that, or anything else for that matter. So don’t walk.

The Stoics

The Stoics believed that everything is determined by an all-knowing, all-powerful god-like entity. Nothing happens by chance and nothing can be changed by human will. We are like dogs tied to a cart rolling uncontrollably down a hill. A foolish dog will whine and pull and skid and writhe; a clever dog will understand that the cart cannot be resisted and trot along beside it. Knowledge and wisdom can only help us understand the direction that fate is taking us and to conform our will to that outcome.

The Stoic virtues – prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance – are designed to help us endure the suffering that is inevitable in life. But we should take comfort from the fact that the ultimate destination is a good one. These are immensely useful thoughts for cricketers. Our sporting lives are full of woe. Yet we must, somehow, endure.

And walking? The Stoic’s belief that the universe is a well ordered place, guided in the right direction by a benign god, means they trust in fate. If the umpire hasn’t given it, that must be the right thing. To interfere would be like the dog resisting the pull of the cart. The Stoic does not walk.

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 BC) argued that every virtue is at the midpoint between two extremes represented by vices. For example, the virtue of courage is at the midpoint between the vices of recklessness and cowardice. Think of the quaking batsman backing away to square leg as one extreme, and the fool who goes out without wearing a box as the other. Or take generosity, which is at the midpoint between meanness and showy prodigality. Picture the skulking miser who never gets his round in after the game, and the show-off who flashes his Amex card and buys drinks for the whole bar. And then the modest fellow who buys a modest round for his mates and, in the rare event of a fifty, gets his jug in uncomplainingly.

Applied to walking, I’d suggest that the two extremes are the player who will stand his ground even when given out and the player who is fairly sure he has missed it but walks to be on the safe side. Aristotle would have walked only if he was pretty sure the umpire was about to give him anyway. Otherwise I think he’d stay.

As evidence, we can look at what happened when he, like Socrates, was threatened with prosecution for impiety. Rather than stay and take his punishment, Aristotle lifted up his skirts and fled. He’s a runner, not a walker.

Kant

We’re leaping forward a couple of thousand years to the 18th century and the greatest of all philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant strove to find a moral principle that any rational person would agree on. He hits on his “categorical imperative”, a rule that says: “Act always in such a way that your action could become a universal law.”

The example he gives is breaking a contract. If you agree to a contract and then break it, the categorical imperative asks that you imagine a world where it was a law of nature that all contracts were broken. In that world, nobody would ever enter into a contract and the whole institution of contracts would collapse. Your goal – to benefit by breaking your contract – would end in failure.

Or take lying. Lying is a useful strategy only in a world in which most people tell the truth. If everyone always lied, there would be no point in your lies. The categorical imperative says your actions must be checked against the following principle: what would happen if everyone did what you do? Even if lying were to bring some great benefit to lots of other people, you shouldn’t do it.

At this point people always come up with a counter example that makes the categorical imperative sound absurd. And the example they give is nearly always the mad axe murderer who knocks on their door and asks for the whereabouts of their intended victim, your best friend. The categorical imperative informs us that we must never lie and yet who could in conscience reveal the hiding place?

Rather beautifully, Kant anticipates this precise example and his answer helps to explain why he thought you cannot base a moral system on looking at the consequences of your actions. The trouble with consequences is that they are, by definition, in the future, and the future is unpredictable. You might lie to the axeman, telling him that your friend isn’t at home when you know he is. But, seeing the axeman at the door, the friend might already have slipped out the back. And now the axeman encounters him in the street.

In Kant’s view you can never be held responsible for the consequences of telling the truth, though you are responsible for the bad consequences of a lie. And there’s always the option of simply refusing to answer the axeman’s question or slamming the door in his face and calling the police. Refusing to walk could be seen as a type of lying. And lying breaks categorical imperative, so you have to walk.

But Kant gives another formulation to the categorical imperative: “Act always in such a way that you treat other people as an end in themselves, and not as a means to an end”. We should not view our fellow cricketers as the means to our own pleasure. They also have hopes, dreams and fears. You owe them the truth. Walk.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is another type of hedonism. It declares that the only good is happiness and that happiness is a measure of the pleasure and pain we feel. The goal of life should be to maximise pleasure and minimise pain in any society.

Now, there are problems here. What counts as pleasure? Is there a hierarchy in which some pleasures (such as cricket) get more points than others (such as golf)? How do we measure these pleasures? Can we impose our judgments on others? Can we force people to be happy in accordance with our own conceptions of happiness?

Despite these problems, utilitarianism is the best hope we have for finding a genuinely rational way to think about morality. In any given situation we have a duty to ponder seriously on the likely consequences and to do our best to minimise harm and promote wellbeing. One possible advantage of Kant’s system is that we don’t have to think: we just apply the rule that says never lie. With utilitarianism, we have to continually assess the outcomes of our actions.

I’m not sure that this is a bad thing. To be a moral person we must constantly engage with these problems. And so the utilitarian would, on feeling that edge, quickly assess various factors: the state of the game, the nature of the opposition, their own mental condition, as well as that of the other 21 players. And he or she will then decide which choice will lead to the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

It’s not entirely straightforward but, there is something that may help in the decision-making process. As someone who has batted and bowled, I can confirm that the pain of being out is greater than the pleasure of taking a wicket. So, in most circumstances, the utilitarian does not walk.

Nietzsche

Anyone who thinks about morality these days does so in the shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche argued with great force and panache that morality is always a matter of power, a way of asserting your will. What is right is what those in charge, or those who want to be in charge, say to preserve or enhance their own position in society. So morality, specifically Christian morality – all that talk about gentleness and cheek-turning – was a weapon forged by slaves and cowards and weaklings to combat the natural aristocracy of the bold and strong.

Nietzsche says we all have to forge our own morality. In this view there is nothing to stop the strong and the brave trampling over the weak and the dim. Nietzsche would not have walked.

So where does all this leave our poor batter, still suspended in that moment of judgment? I favour the utilitarians, but philosophy isn’t like maths or physics. The answers are always provisional. The argument never concludes. It’s a timeless Test. But to live a fully human life, a life that engages with the complexity and difficulty of our moral universe, you need to think through the options. So make a choice. What are you – Platonist? Cynic? Sceptic? Stoic? Aristotelian? Kantian? Utilitarian? Nietzschean? Come to think of it, those sound like a perfect set of franchise names for a new cricket tournament…

How native English speakers can stop confusing everyone else

Michael Skapinker in The FT 

From 1999 until 2003, the UK’s Channel 4 screened an Emmy award-winning female-led comedy series called Smack the Pony. In one sketch a woman called Jackie O’Farrell (played by Doon Mackichan) marches into an adult education centre somewhere in England, sits down and tries to register for a course in speaking English as a foreign language. 

But you already speak English, the puzzled course organiser (played by Sally Phillips) says. “I only speak English English,” Jackie replies. “I don’t know how to speak it as a foreign language.” She travels a lot, she says. “Foreign people can’t understand a word I’m saying.” 

Hilarious, except that Jackie was ahead of her time. It is now widely recognised that many people don’t understand what native English speakers are saying. Widely recognised by non-native English speakers that is. The Brits, Americans, Australians and others who have been speaking English all their lives are largely oblivious to the incomprehension they leave behind at conferences, business meetings and on conference calls. 

“The CEO gave me the most almighty bollocking,” I heard a British speaker tell a conference in Berlin a few years back. “I spent time at London Business School cutting my teeth,” I heard another Brit tell a room full of Dutch, French and German speakers in Amsterdam this year. “From the horse’s mouth,” yet another UK speaker proclaimed to a conference I went to in Dubai last month. 

I don’t know what the audiences made of all this. A 2015 survey of a Nato working group tactfully observed that “native speakers of English are not always good at adjusting their English to the manner and level that is used”. 

Regular readers of this column know that I have been exercised by native English speaker ignorance on this issue for years. There are thousands of courses, books and videos on how to be a better communicator, but almost nothing on how native speakers should speak English to foreigners, largely because, like the Smack the Pony course organiser, most native anglophones don’t realise they have a problem. 

So I was pleased to be sent a pocket book (where I found the Nato study) called Is That Clear: Effective Communications in a Multilingual World by Zanne Gaynor and Kathryn Alevizos, two teachers of business English. They describe the book as “easy-to-follow tips for adapting your English”. 

As well as telling native speakers to slow down when they speak to international audiences, Gaynor and Alevizos have advice on two issues I have addressed before: avoiding idiomatic language and being careful with the use of phrasal verbs — a verb plus a preposition — which many non-native speakers find hard to understand. 

Different prepositions can change the verb’s meaning — break in, break up, break down. The authors also point out that the same phrasal verb can have different meanings: put someone down, put down a deposit, put down the cat, put the baby down. 

They add other pieces of advice. I have written about the problems that colloquial language can cause non-native speakers: “shall we crack on then?” But the authors point to the confusion that polite language can use too — “to be honest, I was a bit upset he arrived so late” sounds convoluted to a non-native speaker. “I was angry he was late” is clearer. 

Another issue is the phrasing of questions. “You don’t have time for a quick chat, do you?” is tough for a non-native speaker because it starts with a negative. “Do you have time for a chat?” is clearer. 

The authors advise cutting down on “filler words” such as “as it were”, “actually” and “basically” because they cloud the central message. I am not sure about this. I find filler words helpful when I hear them used in other languages, such as finalement in French. Not only do they slow the speaker down; having heard them often I can also use them myself when I speak, which gives me more time to think of what to say next. 

But the authors do have sound advice on slides. Don’t fill slides with words. Native speakers find them hard enough to read; second language speakers find them even harder. But do put numbers on slides, they say. Numbers can be hard to understand in your second language and seeing the figures on a slide makes it easier.

Barrister Hamid Bashani realistic analysis of Muslim world

Boris Johnson on London Attack

America is not the land of the free but one of monopolies so predatory they imperil the nation

Its growing economic crisis is in contrast to a thriving and newly innovative Europe writes Will Hutton in The Guardian


  

Illustration by Dom McKenzie


Tomorrow, President Trump arrives in London for the annual Nato summit. Despite the boasting and the trappings of superpower status, he is an emissary from a country whose economy and society are in increasing difficulty, and whose global leadership is under challenge not just from the usual suspect, China, but from Europe. With the unerring capacity to be wrong that defines the Brexit right, Britain is about to decouple itself from a continental economy beginning to get things right, and hook up with one that is palpably beginning to fail.

This is not the conventional wisdom. The EU is sclerotic, undynamic, stifled by quasi-socialist red tape, and hostile to insurgent startups. It is so degenerate it cannot even defend itself – as Trump will undoubtedly remind its leaders over the next two days. The US is the mirror opposite. A free trade agreement post 31 January with the US is the number one strategic policy aim for Brexit Britain – unshackling the UK from the declining old, and embracing the English-speaking, dynamic new. Best be nice to “the Donald”.

Except the latest research demonstrates the reverse is true. Britain is about to make a vast mistake. In the recently published The Great Reversal, leading economist Thomas Philippon of New York University and member of the advisory panel of the New York Federal Reserve, mounts a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom, so perfectly embodied by the witless Boris Johnson. The news is that over the last 20 years per capita EU incomes have grown by 25% while the US’s have grown 21%, with the US growth rate decelerating while Europe’s has held steady – indeed accelerating in parts of Europe. What is going on?

Philippon’s answer is simple. The US economy is becoming increasingly harmed by ever less competition, with fewer and fewer companies dominating sector after sector – from airlines to mobile phones. Market power is the most important concept in economics, he says. When firms dominate a sector, they invest and innovate less, they peg or raise prices, and they make super-normal profits by just existing (what economists call “economic rent”). So it is that mobile phone bills in the US are on average $100 a month, twice that of France and Germany, with the same story in broadband. Profits per passenger airline mile in the US are twice those in Europe. US healthcare is impossibly expensive, with drug companies fixing prices twice as high or even higher than those in Europe; health spending is 18% of GDP. Google, Amazon and Facebook have been allowed to become supermonopolies, buying up smaller challengers with no obstruction.

This monopolising process gums up everything. Investment in the US has been falling for 20 years. Because prices stay high, wages buy less, so workers’ lifestyles, unless they borrow, get squeezed in real terms while those at the top get paid ever more with impunity. Inequality escalates to unsupportable levels. Even life expectancy is now falling across the US.

But why has this happened now? Philippon has a deadly answer. A US political campaign costs 50 times more than one in Europe in terms of money spent for every vote cast. But this doesn’t just distort the political process. It is the chief cause of the US economic crisis.

Corporations want a return on their money, and the payback is protection from any kind of regulation, investigation or anti-monopoly policy that might strike at their ever-growing market power. Boeing, for example, ensured – as one of the US’s biggest lobbyists – that regulation was friendly to its plans to shoehorn heavier engines on to a plane not designed for them – the fatal shortcut behind the two crashes of the 737 Max 8. Philippon shows this is systemic; how both at federal and state level ever higher campaign donations are correlated with ever fewer actions against monopoly, price fixing and bad corporate behaviour.

In Europe, the reverse is true. It is much harder for companies to buy friendly regulators. The EU’s competition authorities are much more genuinely politically independent than those in the US – witness the extraordinary fines levied on Google or the refusal this February to allow Siemens to merge with the French giant Alstom. As a result, it is Europe, albeit with one or two laggards such as Italy, that is bit by bit developing more competitive markets, more innovation and more challenge to incumbents while at the same time sustaining education and social spending so important to ordinary people’s lives.

Even starting up businesses is now easier. France is generating multiple hi-tech startups, with unemployment falling. Parts of Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam or even Milan are now rivalling San Francisco’s Bay area.

The EU’s regulations are better thought out, so in industry after industry it is becoming the global standard setter. Its corporate governance structures are better. And last week, to complete the picture, Christine Lagarde, the incoming president of the European Central Bank, in the most important pronouncement of the year, said the environment would be at the heart of European monetary policy. In other words, the ECB is to underwrite a multitrillion-euro green revolution. In short – bet on Europe not the US.

Thus Jeremy Corbyn, seizing on leaked documents showing how US trade negotiators want UK drug prices to rise to US levels, is on to something much bigger than the threat to the NHS, fatal though that is. Any trade deal with the US will require the UK to accept the protections that are making US capitalism so sclerotic, predatory and high priced – while dissociating itself from a European capitalism that is not only beginning to outperform America’s, but so much better reflects our values.

This election is set to seal not just the geopolitical but geo-economic mistake of Britain’s recent history. The tragedy is that our national conversation is hardly aware of how high the stakes have become.

Richard Wolff: Political Strategy for Transition

WHY DO EXPATS VOTE DIFFERENTLY?

Nadeem F Paracha in the Dawn


Some nine years ago when, I was heading the media department of a British organisation, I got the chance to observe how most British expats in Pakistan voted in the UK 2010 parliamentary elections. Even though most of the Karachi-based British expats that I managed to talk to in this regard were somewhat reluctant to divulge which party they voted for, some eventually did tell.

Nine out of the 12 expats who agreed to reveal the party that they voted for, cast their votes for the Conservative Party. Two voted for the Liberal Democrats and just one claimed to have voted for the Labour Party. Two of them told me that, since the early 1980s, a majority of British expats around the world have preferred to vote for the Conservative Party. British expats have the right to vote in their country’s parliamentary elections, but this right lapses if the expat has remained resident outside the UK for more than 15 years.

Last year in Washington DC, during a round-table session that I attended on the electoral behaviour of expat Americans, most speakers were of the view that a majority of expat Americans tend to vote for the Republican Party. No significant data was shared to corroborate this, but some former US ambassadors attending the session claimed that most expat Americans working in Asian and South American countries vote for the Republican Party and that this has been the trend since 1980.

The session concluded that expats — at least American and British — were likely to vote for conservative parties. This is interesting, because over the last few years, there have been many reports published and columns written about expat Pakistanis and Indians overwhelmingly exhibiting support for centre-right parties such as the PTI and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Indian expats were given the right to vote in Indian elections only in 2010, but those holding dual nationalities still cannot. Pakistani expats were given this right in October 2018, during the by-elections. Whereas 7,461 expats registered online to vote, only 6,233 cast their votes.

The phenomenon of most Indian and Pakistani expats demonstrating support for the BJP and the PTI has been repeatedly observed by many, but never fully studied. The answers may lie in a hefty study published in the May 2019 issue of the Oxford Academic Journal.

The study conducted by two American political scientists, A.C. Goldberg and Simon Lanz, concentrated largely on European countries. But Goldberg and Lanz argue that the results of the study can be relevant for other countries as well. One of their conclusions was that the voting/support preferences of expats are often contrary to those at home.

This is because their social, political and economic contexts are different. An issue in the country of origin will have a more abstract impact on expats residing in a different environment, hundreds or thousands of miles away. The impact of the same issue on those living in the home country is more tangible and immediate. This might be the reason behind the somewhat different understanding of the issue among the two sets of voters.

An earlier 2006 study, by the Dutch economist Dr Jan Fidrmuc and econometrist Orla Doyle, came to the same conclusion after studying the voting behaviour of Czech and Polish migrants/expats in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. The results of this study indicated that the political preferences of immigrants change significantly because the migrants adapt to the norms and attitudes prevailing in the host country.

Fidrmuc and Doyle found that most Czech and Polish migrants living in European countries tended to vote for right-wing parties at home but, interestingly, those living in African and Middle-Eastern countries preferred left-leaning parties.

The economic and political environments in Europe and Africa and/or the Middle East differ. So expats/migrants in Europe, after experiencing the advantages of developed economies, are likely to understand ‘progress’ in their home country through the lens provided to them by their lived experience in developed countries. Thus they tend to support home parties promising progress along these lines.

But what about expats from developed countries opting to vote for conservative parties? Studies suggest that British and American expats voting for the Conservative Party and Republican Party largely vote to retain their countries’ rarely-changing external policies rather than the more fluid internal matters. They are more impacted by the foreign policies of their home countries than by their countries’ internal, more localised issues.

Findings of both the mentioned studies also more than allude to the fact that, outside the voting patterns of US and UK expats, expat voting can be fickle. Since most expats are likely to vote for the opposition, they can be quick to withdraw their support once the opposition comes to power and is slow to deliver.

Both PTI and BJP enjoyed overwhelming support from Pakistani and Indian expats before both were voted into power. However, the support for the two ruling parties is now receding at home, and there is restlessness within the pro-PTI and pro-BJP Pakistani and Indian diasporas respectively.

Indian PM Narendra Modi and Pakistani PM Imran Khan now apply separate rhetorics for their supporters within and outside the country. Outside their countries, to retain the diaspora’s attention and support, they have to continue sounding like they did when they were in the opposition, whereas the same rhetoric is now failing to stand up to a plethora of economic and political problems at home.

Indian historian Meera Nanda writes in The God Market that the changing worldview of the Indian middle classes (and diaspora) is being shaped by the “state-temple-corporate complex.” Rich Indians are heavily investing in this by fusing Hindu nationalism with modern economics. This combination excites the Indian diaspora and they identify it with Modi. But what happens when the corporate is finally swallowed by Hindu zealotry and leaves behind only Hindu nationalism?

On the other hand, what excited the Pakistani diaspora about PM Khan was the manner in which he tapped into the Pakistani diaspora’s engagement with contemporary identity politics, especially in the West. He did this by clubbing together displays of religiosity, anti-corruption tirades, populist post-colonialist rhetoric and lofty allusions to Scandinavian social democracy — which is curiously explained by him as an Islamic concept.

Whereas identity politics can lead to some awkward ethnic and sectarian tensions in Pakistan, it works well on the Pakistani diaspora. Therefore, the gap between the understanding of present-day Pakistani politics between the expats and the locals has continued to grow. Some locals have lamented that expats are still stuck in 2014, or in PTI’s more glamorous dharna years.