Modi's brutal treatment of Kashmir exposes his tactics – and their flaws

A year after a ferocious crackdown, I see the region facing nothing less than cultural erasure writes Arundhati Roy in The Guardian 

‘Why did Narendra Modi decide to inaugurate the Ram Mandir now?’ Photograph: India Press Information Bureau Handout/EPA


At midnight on 4 August 2019, phones in Kashmir went dead and internet connections were cut. On 5 August 2019, a year ago today, 7 million people were locked into their homes under a strict military curfew. Up to 10,000 people, from young children and teenage stone pelters to former chief ministers and major pro-India politicians, were arrested and put into preventive detention, where many of them still remain. On 6 August, a bill was passed in parliament stripping the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and special status enshrined in the Indian constitution. It was stripped of statehood, downgraded into two union territories, Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir. Ladakh would have no legislature and would be governed directly by New Delhi.

The problem of Kashmir, we were told, had been finally solved once and for all. In other words, Kashmir’s decades-long struggle for self-determination, which has cost tens of thousands of lives of soldiers, militants and civilians, thousands of enforced “disappearances” and cruelly tortured bodies – was over.  

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In India’s parliament, home minister Amit Shah went further. He said he was prepared to lay down his life to take over the territories of what India calls Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and what Kashmiris call Azad Kashmir, as well as the frontier provinces of Gilgit-Baltistan. He also threw in Aksai Chin, once part of the erstwhile kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, now a part of China. He was wading into dangerous territory, literally as well as figuratively. The borders he was talking about lie between three nuclear powers. Amid the unseemly celebrations on India’s streets, the extra wattage generated by Kashmir’s humiliation intensified the glow of prime minister Narendra Modi’s already god-like halo. Provocatively, the Indian meteorological department began to include Gilgit-Baltistan in its weather reports. Few of us in India paid attention to the Chinese government when it urged India to “be cautious in its words and deeds on the border issue”.

In the year that has gone by, the struggle in Kashmir has by no means ended. In just the past few months media reports say that 34 soldiers, 154 militants and 17 civilians have been killed. A world traumatised by coronavirus has understandably paid no attention to what the Indian government has done to the people of Kashmir. The curfew and communication siege, and everything else that such a siege entails (no access to doctors, hospitals, work, no business, no school, no contact with loved ones), lasted for months. Even the US didn’t do this during its war against Iraq.

Just a few months of Covid lockdown, without a military curfew or communications siege, has brought the world to its knees and hundreds of millions to the limits of their endurance and sanity. Think of Kashmir under the densest military deployment in the world. On top of the suffering coronavirus has laid on you, add a maze of barbed wire on your streets, soldiers breaking into your homes, beating the men and abusing the women, destroying your food stocks, amplifying the cries of humans being tortured on public address systems.

Add to this a judicial system – including the supreme court of India – that has for a whole year allowed the internet siege to continue and ignored the 600 habeas corpus petitions by distraught people seeking the whereabouts of their family members. Add further a new domicile law that opens the floodgates by allowing Indians a right of residence in Kashmir. The precious state subject certificates of Kashmiris are now legally void except as backup evidence to bolster their applications to the Indian government for domicile status in their own homeland. Those whose applications are rejected can be denied residency and shipped out. What Kashmir faces is nothing less than cultural erasure.

Kashmir’s new domicile law is a relative of India’s new blatantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that is supposed to detect “Bangladeshi infiltrators” (Muslim of course) whom the home minister has called “termites”. In the state of Assam, the NRC has already wreaked havoc. Millions have been struck off the citizens register. While many countries are dealing with a refugee crisis, the Indian government is turning citizens into refugees, fuelling a crisis of statelessness on an unimaginable scale.

The CAA, NRC and Kashmir’s new domicile law require even bona fide citizens to produce a set of documents approved by the state in order to be granted citizenship. (The Nuremberg laws passed by the Nazi party in 1935 decreed that only those citizens who could provide legacy papers approved by the Third Reich were eligible for German citizenship.)

What should all this be called? A war crime? Or a crime against humanity? 

And what should the collusion of institutions and the celebrations on the streets of India be called? Democracy?

A year down the line, these celebrations over Kashmir are distinctly muted. For good reason. We have a dragon on our doorstep and it isn’t happy. On 17 June 2020, we awoke to the horrifying news that 20 Indian soldiers including a colonel had been brutally killed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the icy reaches of the remote Galwan Valley on the Ladakh border. Over the next few days reports in sections of the Indian press suggested that there had been several points of ingress. Army veterans and respected defence correspondents have said that the PLA has occupied hundreds of square kilometres of what India considers to be its territory. Was it just naked aggression as portrayed by the Indian media? Or have the Chinese moved to protect what they see as their vital interests – a road through the high mountains of Aksai Chin and a trade route through Pakistan Occupied/Azad Kashmir? Both are under threat, if the belligerent statements made by India’s home minister were to be taken seriously, and how can they not be?

For a ferociously nationalist government such as ours to concede what it thinks of as sovereign territory has to be its worst nightmare. It cannot be countenanced. But what can be done? A simple solution was found. Just days after the Galwan Valley tragedy, Modi addressed the nation. “Not an inch of land has been occupied by anyone,” he said, “no one has entered our borders” and “none of our posts have been occupied by anyone”. Modi’s critics fell about laughing. The Chinese government was quick to welcome his statement, because that’s what they were saying, too. But Modi’s statement isn’t as stupid as it sounds. While army commanders of both countries are discussing withdrawal and the “disengagement” of troops and the social media is full of jokes about the art of exiting without entering, and while the Chinese continue to hold territory they claim to be their own, to the vast, uniformed majority of India’s population, Modi has won. It was on TV. And who’s to say which is more important? TV or territory?

Whichever way you slice it, in the long-term, India now requires a battle-ready army on two fronts – the western frontier with Pakistan and the eastern frontier with China. In addition, the government’s hubris has alienated its neighbours Nepal and Bangladesh. We have been reduced to boasting that in the event of war, the US – reeling from its own crises – will come to India’s rescue. Really? Like it rescued the Kurds in Syria and Iraq? Like it rescued the Afghans from the Soviets? Or the South Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese?

Last night a Kashmiri friend messaged me: “Will India, Pakistan and China fight over our skies without seeing us?” It’s not an unlikely scenario. None of these countries is morally superior or more humane than the other. None of them is in this for the greater good of humanity. 

But even without an official war, for India to keep a standing army on the Ladakh border, supplied and equipped for high-altitude warfare, for it to even remotely match China’s arsenal, India’s defence budget would probably have to double or triple in size. Even that won’t be enough. It will come as a huge blow to an economy that was already in steep decline (with unemployment at a 45-year high) before the Covid-19 lockdown, and is now predicted to shrink between 3.2 and 9.5%. Modi is not doing too well in the early rounds of this game of Chinese chequers.

The first week of August comes with some other milestones, too. Despite the ill-planned, draconian, back-breaking lockdown, despite woefully few tests compared with other countries, confirmed cases of coronavirus in India are now growing at perhaps the fastest rate in the world. Among its victims is our sabre-rattling home minister, who is spending the anniversary in a hospital bed. Not for him the cures being peddled by the quacks, godmen and members of parliament in his party – drinking cow urine, a magic potion called Coronil, blowing conch shells and banging pots and pans, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa, chanting “Go, Corona, Go!” in the flat intonations of a Sanskrit sloka. Oh no. For him the most expensive private hospital and the best (allopathic) government doctors on call.

And where will India’s prime minister be?

If Kashmir had really been “solved” once and for all, he would be there to be feted by adoring socially distanced crowds. But Kashmir isn’t solved. It’s shut down again. And Ladakh is almost a battlefront. So, Modi has wisely decided to retreat from those troubled borders to a very safe place to make good another long-standing election promise. By the time you read this, he will, accompanied by prayers from priests and people across the country, as well as the blessings of India’s supreme court, have laid a silver slab that weighs 40kg as the foundation for the Ram Mandir, a temple that will rise from the ruins of the Babri Masjid, a mosque that was hammered into the dust by Hindu vigilantes led by members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party in 1992. It’s been a long journey. Let’s call it a Triumph of the Will.

Kashmir curfew brought in as region marks one year since special status revoked

 

Lockdown or no lockdown, as I write, I can sense the very air trembling in anticipation of the historic moment. Only the naive or the hopelessly indoctrinated can still believe that hunger and joblessness will lead to revolution – that temples and monuments cannot feed people. They can. The Ram Mandir is food for millions of starved Hindu souls. The further humiliation of the already humiliated Muslims and other minorities only sharpens the taste of victory on the tongue. How can bread compete?

It would be easy to look at the 365 days between last August and now – the final “integration” of Kashmir into India, the passing of the CAA and NRC, and the inauguration of the Ram Mandir – as the defining period in which India under Modi has formally declared itself a Hindu nation, the dawning of a new era. But declarations can contain unacknowledged defeats. And showy beginnings can contain unforeseen ends. It’s worth remembering that despite Modi’s larger-than-life presence and the BJP’s massive majority in parliament, only 17.2% of India’s population voted for them.

Perhaps, as the Chinese suggest, in this matter we should proceed with caution. Think a little. Why did Modi decide to inaugurate the Ram Mandir now? After all it’s not the festivals of Dussehra or Diwali, and the date has no particular relevance in the Ramayana or the Hindu calendar. And there’s a partial lockdown in most parts of India – many of the priests and policemen preparing and securing the site have already tested positive for Covid. So why now? Is it to rub salt into Kashmir’s wounds, or is it to put balm on India’s? Because, whatever they tell us on TV, there’s been a tectonic shift on the borders. Big plates are moving. The world order is changing. You can’t bully people and act like the top dog in the neighbourhood when you’re not top dog. That’s not a Chinese saying. It’s just common sense.

Could it be that this August anniversary is not actually what it’s being cracked up to be? Could it be instead the little limpet of shame clamped to the soaring cliff of glory?

When and if India, China and Pakistan fight over Kashmir’s skies, the least the rest of us can do is to keep our eyes on its people.

The 2008 and 2020 crises are related

Using HCQ for Covid - Is it Cheating the Ignorant Patient?

By Girish Menon

My piece ‘Does Modern Medicine have a Platypus Problem?’ unleashed a 'minor storm in a teacup'. So, to improve my own understanding I write these words in the hope that some patient man will spare some time to clear my doubt.

In the immediate aftermath of my piece, a friend* suggested that using Dr, Immanuel's prescription to treat Covid was similar to using semen to cure Covid.

Another friend provided a slide showing the negative effect on countries not using HCQ. This data according to a third friend was fake news.

In the meantime:

The BBC carried an ad hominem article on Dr. Stella Immanuel stating that she was a pastor who had made wild claims about aliens in the past.

The WHO carried out a study which claimed that HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) was ineffective in the treatment of Covid. However, the WHO on the same page also stated " The decision to stop hydroxychloroquine’s use in the Solidarity trial does not apply to the use or evaluation of hydroxychloroquine in pre or post-exposure prophylaxis in patients exposed to COVID-19" (sic).

Yesterday another friend announced that her friend in Mumbai had recovered from Covid. During the illness she was given HCQ.

So, I asked this friend ‘does that mean HCQ cured her of Covid?’

She replied, ‘I don't know. She had tested negative for Covid. Her symptoms started with a rash which was not a symptom of Covid and yet her doctor diagnosed her condition as a Covid attack.’

So does this mean that at least there could be a positive correlation between HCQ and Covid treatment?’

‘I don't know’

‘Suppose you were in Mumbai, contracted Covid and a doctor you trust prescribed HCQ would you take it?’

‘Yes’

‘Now in a thought experiment, suppose you were teleported to Cambridge say four days later, still having Covid and the GP does not prescribe HCQ?’

‘I will obey the Milton physician.’


All these discussions reminded me of Omar Khayyam's "Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went."

And my questions remain:

What conclusion should a layman draw about HCQ and Covid?

Should I take HCQ as a prophylactic?

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* All friends quoted in the article are related to science and medicine.

The road to Ram’s temple: If Congress party believed in real secularism, Ayodhya movement would never have happened

Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river writes Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express


The bhoomi pujan of Ram Temple in Ayodhya will be held on August 5. (Express file photo)

Let me make clear at the outset that I support the building of that temple in Ayodhya whose consecration takes place next week. It should have happened decades ago. It did not because of the pseudo-secularism that the Congress party has long adopted as its creed. The founding principle of this evil creed was that under the safety blanket of ‘secularism’ it was alright to abuse all secular tenets and principles if this helped win elections. It is important here to remind you that this is the second time that a shilanyas is being done of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The first one was done by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 when he began his election campaign in Ayodhya with the promise of Ram Rajya.
Not a secular slogan at all, but considered necessary at the time because of his foolish decision to allow Muslims their own personal law based on the Shariat. This decision enraged even secular Hindus, so the promises of a Ram temple and Ram Rajya were made in the hope that Hindus would fall back into the Congress party’s ‘secular’ arms. Rajiv ended up losing the election. But this was a last-ditch attempt to show that although he had pandered to the very worst kind of Islamist Muslims in the Shah Bano matter, he was still a good Hindu. Actually, he was a Parsi because in India it is the father’s religion that counts. Had the Congress party been truly secular, it would have shown the courage to resist the pressure from the Islamists who demanded that they be allowed to use the Shariat as their personal law. Had Rajiv Gandhi stood by the principles of real secularism, he would never have interfered in the Supreme Court’s order that said divorced Muslim women had the same rights as divorced Hindu women.

If the Congress party believed in real secularism, the Ayodhya movement would never have happened. It was after it started mixing religious fundamentalism with politics that the Bharatiya Janata Party realised that this was a game that they could play much better. So it was that in 1990 Lal Krishna Advani converted a Toyota truck into ‘Ram’s chariot’ and set off from Somnath for Ayodhya with the demand that a temple be built where Ram was said to have been born. Millions of Hindus believe that this Ayodhya is the same as the Ayodhya of antiquity, and that where Babur built his mosque is the exact spot where Ram was born. So, there should never have been a dispute at all and instead of a demolition the mosque could have been respectfully moved, stone by stone, onto the other bank of the river Saryu. But, this would have deprived many political leaders of electoral gains, so it was not allowed to happen.


Political leaders were not the only culprits. Religious leaders were just as bad, and it needs to be said that Muslim religious and political leaders, who took such an implacable stand against the Ram temple, did more to harm their community than anyone else. They were obdurate, unyielding and unreasonable and many still are. The same Muslim leaders who insist that they will continue to fight for restoration of the Babri Masjid at the very spot where it once stood said not one word when the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul was converted into a mosque just last week.

Asaduddin Owaisi has objected publicly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi going to Ayodhya to attend the shilanyas. He argues that it would be against the secular principles of the Constitution for him to attend a consecration that is specific to one religion. What intrigued me about the certainty with which he argued his case in TV debates was that he seemed to forget that Islam puts secularism in the same basket as apostates, heretics and heathens. It is only Indic religions that do not make any distinction between believers and unbelievers and only Indic religions like Buddhism and Jainism that are fundamentally atheistic.

When Congress leaders behave as if secularism was their personal gift to India, they forget that it was not an idea needed in India because the king was always not just secular but above caste. And, there has never been a Shankracharya who had his own army like the Pope once did. As a result of so much muddled thinking and a political culture that allows anything to be done for the sake of winning elections, we have now come to a pass when in these Hindutva times the supporters of Narendra Modi openly spread hatred against Islam and Muslims. The distinction between Pakistani and Muslim has been slowly erased in the past six years and the word ‘Paki’ has become a term of abuse. It is an ugly time but if our political leaders still have in them a modicum of honesty let them make the Ram temple in Ayodhya a symbol of healing.

Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river. India needs a process of healing now almost more than it ever has before. Let it begin in Ayodhya next week and let the Prime Minister show us that he truly believes in his own slogan ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’.

Vande Mataram and India's Minorities

The State of Indian Cricket Commentary

Sanjay Manjrekar is ‘happy to apologise’ for his reinstatement in the BCCI commentary panel writes Devendra Pandey in The Indian Express

Sanjay Manjrekar (File)

Five months after he was removed from the BCCI commentary panel, former cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar has written to Board president Sourav Ganguly and other members of the Apex Council explaining his position and offering to apologise “if I have offended anyone.”

Manjrekar stated that he would be “happy to apologise” and that the sacking has “shaken my confidence” and was a “big jolt”. In this communication accessed by The Indian Express, Manjrekar noted that he was told by a BCCI official on phone that he was sacked because “some players had an issue with me as a commentator”.

The mail was a precursor to another letter the former batsman wrote to Board officials requesting his reinstatement in the commentary panel for the upcoming edition of the Indian Premier League – most likely to be held in the United Arab Emirates – and promising to abide by the regulations set by the BCCI.

“You are already in receipt of the email I sent to explain my position as commentator. With the IPL dates announced, bcci.tv will pick its commentary panel soon. I will be happy to work as per the guidelines laid by you. After all, we are working on what is essentially your production. Last time, maybe there was not enough clarity on this issue,” he wrote.

It has been speculated that Manjrekar was removed from the panel as a result of his comment calling Ravindra Jadeja a “bits-and-pieces player” during last year’s ODI World Cup and the subsequent reactions from fans and the player himself were an important trigger in him losing his job.

On July 3 last year, Jadeja had tweeted his ire at Manjrekar’s comments: “Still, I have played twice the number of matches you have played and I am still playing. Learn to respect ppl who have achieved. I have heard enough of your verbal diarrhea @Sanjaymanjrekar”.

After his half-century in the World Cup semi-final against New Zealand, Jadeja had gesticulated angrily towards the commentary studio. The official Twitter handle of the ICC posted a video of a post-match discussion involving Manjrekar. “By bits and by pieces, he just ripped me apart today. Bits of pieces of sheer brilliance, he proved me all wrong,” he had said that day.

In his first mail to Board officials, Manjrekar also flagged the perils of being a commentator in these times. “If we are not seen praising the iconic players all the time, the fans of those players tend to assume that we are antagonistic towards the players they worship … Anyone who has followed my career as a commentator would know that I have no malicious agenda against anyone and that my opinions come from a very pure place that I hold sacred. It’s cricket we are talking about, a sport that’s given me and my father so much,” Manjrekar stated. “I was greatly hurt! Especially because this came as a real shock!” he added.

Manjrekar reiterated his willingness to apologise. “So, really, this sacking for whatever reason, has shaken my confidence as a professional. If unwittingly, I have offended anyone I would be happy to apologise to the concerned party.”

Manjrekar also brought up the Jadeja issue in great detail in his email to the Apex Council, attaching an audio file of his comments. “You will see how benign it is when you hear it in right context”. He also wrote, “The player concerned obviously misunderstood this or was perhaps misinformed. By the way, the player and I have since privately made peace over this issue.”

He stated that the comment was not made during commentary but in an interview. “Please note this comment was not made by me on Twitter or in commentary, it was in an audio interview to a news agency… that got blown out of proportion. It was made as a part of a long media interview but unfortunately was made into an eye-catching headline by just one website and the player reacted sharply to it on Twitter. This got the issue the traction it did not deserve. ‘Bits-and-pieces’ is a cricketing term commonly used for cricketers who are non-specialists. It is regularly used by commentators to describe certain players and it’s never considered to be demeaning.”

In his email, Manjrekar listed out his standing as a commentator until he was “suddenly not found good enough”. “Until this moment I had been the leading commentator on the BCCI panel for many years fulfilling some of the biggest responsibilities there are in live broadcasting: lead commentator, post-match awards presenter, hosting the toss, doing player interviews and yes, impromptu BCCI functions on ground too. I am also one of the first Indian commentators that gets rostered for the World Cups by the ICC. I did my job with great pride and a 100 per cent commitment and suddenly not found to be good enough to be in the panel was a big jolt.”

Excerpts from Manjrekar’s email to BCCI

Dear esteemed members of the Apex Council,

In February 2020, completely out of the blue, I was told by Dev Shriyan, the head of production, BCCI Tv, that I was being removed from the commentary panel.

I have publicly maintained that — “the BCCI are my employers and they have every right to either have me or not, in their commentary panel. I have never considered being on a commentary panel an entitlement.”

But here, amongst a small circle of important stakeholders of Indian cricket, friends and colleagues, please allow me to open my heart.

I was greatly hurt! Especially because this came as a real shock!

I did my job with great pride and a 100 percent commitment and suddenly not found to be good enough to be in the panel was a big jolt.

Later I was told on phone by a senior office bearer that some players had an issue with me as a commentator . Now here is where our job gets a bit tricky.

If we are not seen praising the iconic players all the time, the fans of those players tend to assume that we are antagonistic towards the players they worship. That’s the professional hazard we have to live with doing our job. Anyone who has followed my career as a commentator would know that I have no malicious agenda against anyone and that my opinions come from a very pure place that I hold sacred. It’s cricket we are talking about, a sport that’s given me and my father so much.

My comments and opinions could be wrong, but they are never personal, derogatory or borne out of prejudice or cunning design, I am only biased towards excellence in performances, whether it’s a team or a player.

Now, let’s take the ‘ bits and pieces’ comment that got blown out of proportion during the last World Cup.

‘Bits and pieces’ is a cricketing term commonly used for cricketers who are non-specialists. It is regularly used by commentators to describe certain players and it’s never considered to be demeaning.

The player concerned obviously misunderstood this or was perhaps misinformed. By the way, the player and I have since privately made peace over this issue.

So, really, this sacking for whatever reason, has shaken my confidence as a professional. If unwittingly, I have offended anyone I would be happy to apologise to the concerned party.

Regards,
Sanjay

GDP Is the Wrong Tool for Measuring What Matters

Joseph E Stiglitz in Scientific American

Since World War II, most countries around the world have come to use gross domestic product, or GDP, as the core metric for prosperity. The GDP measures market output: the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in an economy during a given period, usually a year. Governments can fail if this number falls—and so, not surprisingly, governments strive to make it climb. But striving to grow GDP is not the same as ensuring the well-being of a society.

In truth, “GDP measures everything,” as Senator Robert Kennedy famously said, “except that which makes life worthwhile.” The number does not measure health, education, equality of opportunity, the state of the environment or many other indicators of the quality of life. It does not even measure crucial aspects of the economy such as its sustainability: whether or not it is headed for a crash. What we measure matters, though, because it guides what we do. Americans got an inkling of this causal connection during the Vietnam War, with the military's emphasis on “body counts”: the weekly tabulation of the number of enemy soldiers killed. Reliance on this morbid metric led U.S. forces to undertake operations that had no purpose except to raise the body count. Like a drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost (because that is where the light is), the emphasis on body counts kept us from understanding the bigger picture: the slaughter was inducing more Vietnamese people to join the Viet Cong than U.S. forces were killing.

Now a different body count—that from COVID-19—is proving to be a horribly good measure of societal performance. It has little correlation with GDP. The U.S. is the richest country in the world, with a GDP of more than $20 trillion in 2019, a figure that suggested we had a highly efficient economic engine, a racing car that could outperform any other. But the U.S. recorded upward of 100,000 deaths by June, whereas Vietnam, with a GDP of $262 billion (and a mere 4 percent of U.S. GDP per capita) had zero. In the race to save lives, this less prosperous country has beaten us handily.

In fact, the American economy is more like an ordinary car whose owner saved on gas by removing the spare tire, which was fine until he got a flat. And what I call “GDP thinking”—seeking to boost GDP in the misplaced expectation that that alone would enhance well-being—led us to this predicament. An economy that uses its resources more efficiently in the short term has higher GDP in that quarter or year. Seeking to maximize that macroeconomic measure translates, at a microeconomic level, to each business cutting costs to achieve the highest possible short-term profits. But such a myopic focus necessarily compromises the performance of the economy and society in the long term.

The U.S. health care sector, for example, took pride in using hospital beds efficiently: no bed was left unused. In consequence, when SARS-CoV-2 reached America there were only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people—far fewer than in other advanced countries—and the system could not absorb the sudden surge in patients. Doing without paid sick leave in meat-packing plants increased profits in the short run, which also increased GDP. But workers could not afford to stay home when sick; instead they came to work and spread the infection. Similarly, China made protective masks cheaper than the U.S. could, so importing them increased economic efficiency and GDP. That meant, however, that when the pandemic hit and China needed far more masks than usual, hospital staff in the U.S. could not get enough. In sum, the relentless drive to maximize short-term GDP worsened health care, caused financial and physical insecurity, and reduced economic sustainability and resilience, leaving Americans more vulnerable to shocks than the citizens of other countries.

The shallowness of GDP thinking had already become evident in the 2000s. In preceding decades, European economists, seeing the success of the U.S. in increasing GDP, had encouraged their leaders to follow American-style economic policies. But as signs of distress in the U.S. banking system mounted in 2007, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy realized that any politician who single-mindedly sought to push up GDP to the neglect of other indicators of the quality of life risked losing the confidence of the public. In January 2008 he asked me to chair an international commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. A panel of experts was to answer the question: How can nations improve their metrics? Measuring that which makes life worthwhile, Sarkozy reasoned, was an essential first step toward enhancing it.

Coincidentally, our initial report in 2009, provocatively entitled Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up, was published right after the global financial crisis had demonstrated the necessity of revisiting the core tenets of economic orthodoxy. It met with such positive resonance that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—a think tank that serves 37 advanced countries—decided to follow up with an expert group. After six years of consultation and deliberation, we reinforced and amplified our earlier conclusion: GDP should be dethroned. In its place, each nation should select a “dashboard”—a limited set of metrics that would help steer it toward the future its citizens desired. In addition to GDP itself, as a measure for market activity (and no more) the dashboard would include metrics for health, sustainability and any other values that the people of a nation aspired to, as well as for inequality, insecurity and other harms that they sought to diminish.

These documents have helped crystallize a global movement toward improved measures of social and economic health. The OECD has adopted the approach in its Better Life Initiative, which recommends 11 indicators—and provides citizens with a way to weigh these for their own country, relative to others, to generate an index that measures their performance on the things they care about. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), traditionally strong advocates of GDP thinking, are now also paying attention to environment, inequality and sustainability of the economy.

A few countries have even incorporated this approach into their policy-making frameworks. New Zealand, for instance, embedded “well-being” indicators in the country's budgetary process in 2019. As the country's finance minister, Grant Robertson, put it: “Success is about making New Zealand both a great place to make a living and a great place to make a life.” This emphasis on well-being may partly explain the nation's triumph over COVID-19, which appears to have been eliminated after roughly 1,500 confirmed cases and 20 deaths in a total population of nearly five million.

APPLES AND ARMAMENTS

Necessity is the mother of invention. Just as the dashboard emerged from a dire need—the inadequacy of the GDP as an indicator of well-being, as revealed by the Great Recession of 2008—so did the GDP. During the Great Depression, U.S. officials could barely quantify the problem. The government did not collect statistics on either inflation or unemployment, which would have helped them steer the economy. So the Department of Commerce charged economist Simon Kuznets of the National Bureau of Economic Research with creating a set of national statistics on income. Kuznets went on to construct the GDP in the 1940s as a simple metric that could be calculated from the exceedingly limited market data then available. An aggregate of (the dollar value of) the goods and services produced in the country, it was equivalent to the sum of everyone's income—wages, profits, rents and taxes. For this and other work, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971. (Economist Richard Stone, who created similar statistical systems for the U.K., received the prize in 1984.)

Kuznets repeatedly warned, however, that the GDP only measured market activity and should not be mistaken for a metric of social or even economic well-being. The figure included many goods and services that were harmful (including, he believed, armaments) or useless (financial speculation) and excluded many essential ones that were free (such as caregiving by homemakers). A core difficulty with constructing such an aggregate is that there is no natural unit for adding the value of even apples and oranges, let alone of such disparate things as armaments, financial speculation and caregiving. Thus, economists use their prices as a proxy for value—in the belief that, in a competitive market, prices reflect how much people value apples, oranges, armaments, speculation or caregiving relative to one another.

This profoundly problematic assumption—that price measures relative value—made the GDP quite easy to calculate. As the U.S. recovered from the Depression by ramping up the production and consumption of material goods (in particular, armaments during World War II), GDP grew rapidly. The World Bank and the IMF began to fund development programs in former colonies around the world, gauging their success almost exclusively in terms of GDP growth.

Sources: World Bank (GDP data); U.S. Census Bureau (inequality data); Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Better Life Index data)

Over time, as economists focused on the intricacies of comparing GDP in different eras and across diverse countries and constructing complex economic models that predicted and explained changes in GDP, they lost sight of the metric's shaky foundations. Students seldom studied the assumptions that went into constructing the measure—and what these assumptions meant for the reliability of any inferences they made. Instead the objective of economic analysis became to explain the movements of this artificial entity. GDP became hegemonic across the globe: good economic policy was taken to be whatever increased GDP the most.

In 1980, following a period of seemingly poor economic performance—stagflation, marked by slow growth and rising prices—President Ronald Reagan assumed office on the promise of ramping up the economy. He deregulated the financial sector and cut taxes for the better-off, arguing that the benefits would “trickle down” to those less fortunate. Although GDP grew somewhat (albeit at a rate markedly lower than in the decades after World War II), inequality rose precipitously. Well aware that metrics matter, some members of the administration reportedly argued for stopping the collection of statistics on inequality. If Americans did not know how bad inequality was, presumably we would not worry about it.

The Reagan administration also unleashed unprecedented assaults on the environment, issuing leases for fossil-fuel extraction on millions of acres of public lands, for example. In 1995 I joined the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bill Clinton. Worrying that our metrics paid too little attention to resource depletion and environmental degradation, we worked with the Department of Commerce to develop a measure of “green” GDP, which would take such losses into account. When the congressional representatives from the coal states got wind of this, however, they threatened to cut off our funding unless we stopped our work, which we were obliged to.

The politicians knew that if Americans understood how bad coal was for our economy correctly measured, then they would seek the elimination of the hidden subsidies that the coal industry receives. And they might even seek to move more quickly to renewables. Although our efforts to broaden our metrics were stymied, the fact that these representatives were willing to spend so much political capital on stopping us convinced me that we were on to something really important. (And it also meant that when, a decade later, Sarkozy approached me about heading an international panel to examine better ways of measuring “economic performance and social progress,” I leaped at the chance.)

I left the Council of Economic Advisers in 1997, and in the ensuing years the deregulatory fervor of the Reagan era came to grip the Clinton administration. The financial sector of the U.S. economy was ballooning, driving up GDP. As it turned out, many of the profits that gave that sector such heft were, in a sense, phony. Bankers' lending practices had generated a real-estate bubble that had artificially enhanced profits—and, with their pay being linked to profits, had increased their bonuses. In the ideal free-market economy, an increase in profits is supposed to reflect an increase in societal well-being, but the bankers' takings put the lie to that notion. Much of their profits resulted from making others worse off, such as when they engaged in abusive credit-card practices or manipulated LIBOR (for London Interbank Offered Rate of interest for international banks lending to one another) to enhance their earnings.

But GDP figures took these inflated figures at face value, convincing policy makers that the best way to grow the economy was to remove any remaining regulations that constrained the finance sector. Long-standing prohibitions on usury—charging outrageous interest rates to take advantage of the unwary—were stripped away. In 2000 the so-called Commodity Modernization Act was passed. It was designed to ensure that derivatives (risky financial products that played a big role in bringing down the financial system just eight years later) would never be regulated. In 2005 a bankruptcy law made it more difficult for those having trouble paying their bills to discharge their debts—making it almost impossible for those with student loans to do so.

By the early 2000s two fifths of corporate profits came from the financial sector. That fraction should have signaled that something was wrong: an efficient financial sector should entail low costs for engaging in financial transactions and therefore should be small. Ours was huge. Untethering the market had inflated profits, driving up GDP—and, as it turned out, instability.

OPIOIDS, HURRICANES

The bubble burst in 2008. Banks had been issuing mortgages indiscriminately, on the assumption that real-estate prices would continue to rise. When the housing bubble broke, so did the economy, falling more than it had since the immediate aftermath of World War II. After the U.S. government rescued the banks (just one firm, AIG, received a government bailout of $130 billion), GDP improved, persuading President Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve to announce that we were well on the way to recovery. But with 91 percent of the gains in income in 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, the majority of Americans experienced none.

As the country slowly emerged from the financial crisis, others commanded attention: the inequality crisis, the climate crisis and an opioid crisis. Even as GDP continued to rise, life expectancy and other broader measures of health worsened. Food companies were developing and marketing, with great ingenuity, addictive sugar-rich foods, augmenting GDP but precipitating an epidemic of childhood diabetes. Addictive opioids led to an epidemic of drug deaths, but the profits of Purdue Pharma and the other villains in that drama added to GDP. Indeed, the medical expenditures resulting from these health crises also boosted GDP. Americans were spending twice as much per person on health care than the French but had lower life expectancy. So, too, coal mining seemingly boosted the economy, and although it helped to drive climate change, worsening the impact of hurricanes such as Harvey, the efforts to rebuild again added to GDP. The GDP number provided an optimistic gloss to the worst of events.

These examples illustrate the disjuncture between GDP and societal well-being and the many ways that GDP fails to be a good measure of economic performance. The growth in GDP before 2008 was not sustainable, and it was not sustained. The increase in bank profits that seemed to fuel GDP in the years before the crisis were not only at the expense of the well-being of the many people whom the financial sector exploited but also at the expense of GDP in later years. The increase in inequality was by any measure hurting our society, but GDP was celebrating the banks' successes. If there ever was an event that drove home the need for new ways of measuring economic performance and societal progress, the 2008 crisis was it.

Credit: Samantha Mash

THE DASHBOARD

The commission, led by three economists (Amartya Sen of Harvard University, Jean-Paul Fitoussi of the Paris Institute of Political Studies and me), published its first report in 2009, just after the U.S. financial system imploded. We pointed out that measuring something as simple as the fraction of Americans who might have difficulty refinancing their mortgages would have illuminated the smoke and mirrors underpinning the heady economic growth preceding the crisis and possibly enabled policy makers to fend it off. More important, building and paying attention to a broad set of metrics for present-day well-being and its sustainability—whether good times are durable—would help buffer societies against future shocks.

We need to know whether, when GDP is going up, indebtedness is increasing or natural resources are being depleted; these may indicate that the economic growth is not sustainable. If pollution is rising along with GDP, growth is not environmentally sustainable. A good indicator of the true health of an economy is the health of its citizens, and if, as in the U.S., life expectancy has been going down—as it was even before the pandemic—that should be worrying, no matter what is happening to GDP. If median income (that of the families in the middle) is stagnating even as GDP rises, that means the fruits of economic growth are not being shared.

It would have been nice, of course, if we could have come up with a single measure that would summarize how well a society or even an economy is doing—a GDP plus number, say. But as with the GDP itself, too much valuable information is lost when we form an aggregate. Say, you are driving your car. You want to know how fast you are going and glance at the speedometer. It reads 70 miles an hour. And you want to know how far you can go without refilling your tank, which turns out to be 200 miles. Both those numbers are valuable, conveying information that could affect your behavior. But now assume you form a simple aggregate by adding up the two numbers, with or without “weights.” What would a number like 270 tell you? Absolutely nothing. It would not tell you whether you are driving recklessly or how worried you should be about running out of fuel.

That was why we concluded that each nation needs a dashboard—a set of numbers that would convey essential diagnostics of its society and economy and help steer them. Policy makers and civil-society groups should pay attention not only to material wealth but also to health, education, leisure, environment, equality, governance, political voice, social connectedness, physical and economic security, and other indicators of the quality of life. Just as important, societies must ensure that these “goods” are not bought at the expense of the future. To that end, they should focus on maintaining and augmenting, to the extent possible, their stocks of natural, human, social and physical capital. We also laid out a research agenda for exploring links between the different components of well-being and sustainability and developing good ways to measure them.

Concern about climate change and rising inequality had already been fueling a global demand for better measures, and our report crystallized that trend. In 2015 a contentious political process culminated in the United Nations establishing a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Progress toward them is to be measured by 232 indicators, reflecting the manifold concerns of governments and civil societies from around the world. So many numbers are unhelpful, in our view: one can lose sight of the forest for the trees. Instead another group of experts, chaired by Fitoussi, Martine Durand (chief statistician of the OECD) and me, recommended that each country institute a robust democratic dialogue to discover what issues its citizens most care about.

Such a conversation would almost certainly show that most of us who live in highly developed economies care about our material well-being, our health, the environment around us and our relations with others. We want to do well today but also in the future. We care about how the fruits of our economy are shared: we do not want a society in which a few at the top grab everything for themselves and the rest live in poverty.

A good indicator of the true health of an economy is the health of its citizens. A decline in life expectancy, even for a part of the population, should be worrying, whatever is happening to GDP. And it is important to know if, even as GDP is going up, so, too, is pollution—whether it is emissions of greenhouse gases or particulates in the air. That means growth is not environmentally sustainable.

The choice of indicators may vary across time and among countries. Countries with high unemployment will want to track what is happening to that variable; those with high inequality will want to monitor that. Still, because people generally want to know how they are doing in comparison with others, we recommended that the advanced countries, at least, share some five to 10 common indicators.

GDP would be among them. So would a measure of inequality or some pointer toward how the typical individual or household is doing. Over the years economists have formulated a rash of indicators of inequality, each reflecting a different dimension of the phenomenon. It may well be that societies where inequality has become particularly problematic may need to have metrics reflecting the depth of the poverty at the bottom and the excesses of riches at the top. To me, knowing what is happening to median income is of particular importance; in the U.S., median income has barely changed for decades, even as GDP has grown.

Employment is often used as an indicator of macroeconomic performance—an economy with a high unemployment rate clearly is not using all of its resources well. But in societies where paid work is associated with dignity, employment is a value in its own right. Other elements of the dashboard would include indicators for environmental degradation (say, air or water quality), economic sustainability (indebtedness), health (life expectancy) and insecurity.

Insecurity has both subjective and objective dimensions. We can survey how insecure people feel: how worried they are about adverse effects or how prepared they feel to cope with a shock. But we can also predict the likelihood that someone falls below the poverty line in any given year. And some elements of the dashboard are “intermediate” variables—things that we may (or may not) value in themselves but that provide an inkling of how a society will function in the future. One of these is trust. Societies in which citizens trust their governments and one another to “do the right thing” tend to perform better. In fact, societies in which people have higher levels of trust, such as Vietnam and New Zealand, have dealt far more effectively with the pandemic than the U.S., for instance, where trust levels have declined since the Reagan era.

Policy makers need to use such indicators much as physicians use their diagnostic tools. When some indicator is flashing yellow or red, it is time to look deeper. If inequality is high or increasing, it is important to know more: What aspects of inequality are getting worse?

STEERING THROUGH STORMS

Since we began our work on well-being indicators some dozen years ago, I have been amazed at the resonance that it has achieved. A focus on many of the elements of the dashboard has permeated policy making everywhere. Every three years the OECD hosts an international conference of nongovernmental organizations, national statisticians, government officials and academics furthering the “well-being” agenda, the most recent being in Korea in November 2018, with thousands of participants.

Whenever the conference next convenes, the global crisis in human societies that a microscopic virus has precipitated will surely be on the agenda. The full dimensions of it could take years or decades to become clear. Recovering from this calamity and steering complex societies through the even more devastating crises that loom—catastrophic climate change and biodiversity collapse—will require, at the very least, an excellent navigational system. To paraphrase the OECD: We have been developing the tools to help us drive better. It is time to use them.