Afghanistan was just a way station in the broader civilisational mission of ridding the world of terrorism, a brief halt for the armies of virtue before they went on to nobler tasks. When the larger project got mired in a strategic mess of exclusive U.S. authorship in Iraq, Afghanistan still remained the saving grace, with all the signs it was showing of change for the better.
The puncturing of that delusion began from about early-2006, though the virtuous took a while to recognise that reality. Since May this year, casualties among U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have consistently outstripped the toll in Iraq. Afghan civilian deaths meanwhile, have multiplied, increasingly as a consequence of misdirected attacks by U.S. and allied forces. Each such incident elicits a volley of protests from the Afghan national government, followed by a commitment from the foreign forces that investigations would duly be conducted. And as virtually foretold from the moment the inquiries are launched, the finding, finally, is that the occupying military forces acted “appropriately”.
August 18 may have been a decisive moment in the shattering of these illusions. Coordinated attacks on that day killed ten members of an elite French paratroop company near Kabul and caused extensive damage to one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan. It was the worst toll from one day’s fighting for western troops in Afghanistan since 2002.
The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy’s, hasty rush to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath, was as much about deflecting domestic criticism – he had increased French troop commitments a mere five months back – as to express solidarity with soldiers trapped in an unending and unrewarding mission.
Expectedly, Sarkozy was told by his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, that the consolidation of insurgents on both sides of the border with Pakistan, was really the source of the problem. Karzai’s denunciations of Pakistan, even if well-founded, have acquired much of a ritual quality, not merely because he has been pressing the issue for long, but also because he and his allies have acknowledged – in deeds if not in words – that there is nothing much to do about it.
The reasons why the border with Pakistan is now bristling with insurgency against the Karzai regime, owe entirely to the architecture of the western plan for Afghanistan. Because it did not want the retrieval effort in one failed state to end in a situation of two failed states, the west connived in the early phase of its military campaign in Afghanistan, with Pakistan’s strategy of withdrawing most assets invested in the Taliban regime, or at least all that could be salvaged. This withdrawal was part of an agreed compact by which Pakistan’s army chief and president then, Pervez Musharraf, sought in the cataclysmic defeat of his country’s strategic ambitions, a pretence – even if a very thin one – that the country was well-served by the war in Afghanistan.
The militant tendencies transferred to Pakistan’s northern areas, to greatly add to the restiveness of the Pashto tribes there, were handled through perhaps the first armed incursions by the Pakistan army into areas that had zealously guarded their autonomy. Whether this was make-believe, or a serious effort at extending the authority of the Pakistan state to the territorial frontiers, where its writ had never run strong, is a matter for future historians to assess, when they write up the balance-sheet of the Musharraf years.
The visible outcome of these engagements though, was a precipitate withdrawal of Pakistan’s armed forces and a rather demeaning peace treaty with the chieftains of the tribal areas.
The west, having connived at the evacuation of Pakistan’s assets in Afghanistan, applauded the armed incursion of the Pakistan army into the tribal areas, and perhaps unaware of the irony, warmly congratulated Musharraf on his peace accord with the tribal chiefs.
But with Musharraf now having passed into history, abdicating the presidency he had engineered for himself in a sham election conducted by a defunct national assembly, the civilian government that had, belatedly, summoned up the will to oust him from office, remains even more clueless about dealing with the tribal frontiers.
Afghanistan meanwhile, approaches meltdown, since the leadership that the west had anointed for the supposed democratic transition in the country, has carved up the country into a multitude of personal fiefdoms. Rather than attend to the rigours of building up a genuine sense of national solidarity, the west opted for a confederacy of the same warlords – Rashid Dostum, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Ismael Khan, Karim Khalili, and numerous others – whose ouster by the Taliban was greeted by the people of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s as a form of deliverance.
Denied authority in most of the country, Karzai himself has decided, according to authoritative assessments, to cultivate his own fiefdom in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar – currently Afghanistan’s most fertile breeding grounds for illicit opium. A loss of image in the west, the risk that he may be seen as a patron of the lethal trade in narcotics, is for Karzai, clearly a lesser danger than being overwhelmed by the confederacy of warlords that the western military intervention in his country has created.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Should India's Supreme Court be Writing Rules for Journalism?
The Indian Supreme Court on August 18 declared that it intends to lay down norms for media coverage of ongoing criminal investigations.
According to media reports, India’s highest court, hearing a public interest petition filed by an independent lawyer, determined that media coverage of the investigations into the murder of a teenage girl, Aarushi Talwar, in the township of Noida neighbouring Delhi, had seriously breached all norms of responsible journalism.
As The Hindu (Delhi edition, August 19) reported the court’s observations: “Nobody is trying to gag the media. They must play a responsible role. By investigation, the media must not do anything which will prejudice either the prosecution or the accused. Sometimes the entire focus is lost. A person is found guilty even before the trial takes place”.
The Supreme Court has issued notices seeking an opinion from the Press Council of India and explanations from two newspapers (The Times of India and the Hindustan Times) and three major 24-hour news channels (Aaj Tak, NDTV and CNN-IBN).
The higher judiciary’s attempt to write rules for journalism represents a new threat to the autonomy of India’s robust media industry. Most media houses already have well-considered norms in place covering every such journalistic contingency.
It is another matter though, that these norms are seldom honoured and that new entrants into the profession rarely benefit from mentoring procedures that would attune them to best journalistic practices. The judiciary’s current initiative is in this sense, symptomatic of a wider crisis of standards in the Indian media: one occasioned by the rampant commercialism that has followed the boom in cable television and the new media.
Since Aarushi Talwar was discovered murdered at her family home in Noida on May 16, there has been considerable public disquiet over the spectacular incompetence of the police investigation and the shocking abdication of responsibility by vast sections of the Indian media. These two in a sense, reinforced each other, ensuring that the truth remained obscure for an inordinate length of time. For the Talwar family and for all those who knew Aarushi, it was a deeply truamatic experience to see her being denied dignity even in death.
The media in other words, abandoned its truth-telling role in favour of crass sensationalism. Where it could have, potentially, served as a window for the public to keep themselves informed about the investigations, it chose instead, to reproduce and regurgitate every half-formed explanation put out by the police force.
Media ethics is all about sound internal scrutiny in the newsroom and editorial department, as also, of accountability to the readership or audience. A code of conduct that is externally imposed, even if it pertains to the specific area of ongoing criminal investigations, is not guaranteed either to be effective or to best serve the public interest.
Credible self-regulation on the basis of internally evolved norms, requires that the autonomy of journalism within the media industry be honoured. The increasing encroachment of the marketing and advertising functions into content decisions is responsible for many of the ethical breaches recently manifest in the Indian media.
The Aarushi Talwar case is only the most recent instance involving the use of governmental or judicial authority to restrain the media. On August 14, according to media reports, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued notices to three TV channels, to show cause why they should not be penalised for violating the “programme code”.
It is another matter that the “programme code” is a fairly loosely worded text drawn up in 1995 as an annexure to the sole existing law on cable TV broadcasting. It has never been subject to any form of public scrutiny, or won the explicit endorsement of journalists or the media industry. Indeed, efforts by the Ministry since 2006 to evolve a “content code” in consultation with the industry have so far failed to produce an agreed text, in part, because they have not involved media professionals in any significant way.
Despite an understanding on content being a distant prospect, the Ministry in February this year notified the creation of a number of state and district-level “monitoring bodies” that will assess non-governmental broadcast entities for conformity with the programme code. These committees as first constituted, were made up overwhelmingly of bureaucrats and police personnel. It was only in July, almost as an afterthought, that the Ministry mandated the participation of the journalism profession within these committees.
The media has also had to face the prospect of the judiciary often seeking to get involved in content decisions. In disposing of a public interest petition arising from the “sting” operation that wrongly implicated a teacher in a non-existent prostitution racket, the Delhi High Court held in December 2007, that any channel planning to broadcast programs involving a “sting” should be legally obliged to obtain prior permission from a government-appointed committee. It recommended that the Ministry should appoint a retired judge of a High Court to chair the committee, which should also comprise two others drawn from the bureaucracy.
The fake sting was a canonical case of non-existent editorial processes, which should be tackled through credible norms of self-regulation. In this respect, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) – the organisation this writer works with -- recently launched in association with affiliate unions in India, a series of broad-ranging discussions under the rubric of its “Ethical Journalism Initiative”. The IFJ believes that with the active engagement of journalists, the challenge of ethics in the newsroom can be adequately faced and dealt with.
According to media reports, India’s highest court, hearing a public interest petition filed by an independent lawyer, determined that media coverage of the investigations into the murder of a teenage girl, Aarushi Talwar, in the township of Noida neighbouring Delhi, had seriously breached all norms of responsible journalism.
As The Hindu (Delhi edition, August 19) reported the court’s observations: “Nobody is trying to gag the media. They must play a responsible role. By investigation, the media must not do anything which will prejudice either the prosecution or the accused. Sometimes the entire focus is lost. A person is found guilty even before the trial takes place”.
The Supreme Court has issued notices seeking an opinion from the Press Council of India and explanations from two newspapers (The Times of India and the Hindustan Times) and three major 24-hour news channels (Aaj Tak, NDTV and CNN-IBN).
The higher judiciary’s attempt to write rules for journalism represents a new threat to the autonomy of India’s robust media industry. Most media houses already have well-considered norms in place covering every such journalistic contingency.
It is another matter though, that these norms are seldom honoured and that new entrants into the profession rarely benefit from mentoring procedures that would attune them to best journalistic practices. The judiciary’s current initiative is in this sense, symptomatic of a wider crisis of standards in the Indian media: one occasioned by the rampant commercialism that has followed the boom in cable television and the new media.
Since Aarushi Talwar was discovered murdered at her family home in Noida on May 16, there has been considerable public disquiet over the spectacular incompetence of the police investigation and the shocking abdication of responsibility by vast sections of the Indian media. These two in a sense, reinforced each other, ensuring that the truth remained obscure for an inordinate length of time. For the Talwar family and for all those who knew Aarushi, it was a deeply truamatic experience to see her being denied dignity even in death.
The media in other words, abandoned its truth-telling role in favour of crass sensationalism. Where it could have, potentially, served as a window for the public to keep themselves informed about the investigations, it chose instead, to reproduce and regurgitate every half-formed explanation put out by the police force.
Media ethics is all about sound internal scrutiny in the newsroom and editorial department, as also, of accountability to the readership or audience. A code of conduct that is externally imposed, even if it pertains to the specific area of ongoing criminal investigations, is not guaranteed either to be effective or to best serve the public interest.
Credible self-regulation on the basis of internally evolved norms, requires that the autonomy of journalism within the media industry be honoured. The increasing encroachment of the marketing and advertising functions into content decisions is responsible for many of the ethical breaches recently manifest in the Indian media.
The Aarushi Talwar case is only the most recent instance involving the use of governmental or judicial authority to restrain the media. On August 14, according to media reports, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued notices to three TV channels, to show cause why they should not be penalised for violating the “programme code”.
It is another matter that the “programme code” is a fairly loosely worded text drawn up in 1995 as an annexure to the sole existing law on cable TV broadcasting. It has never been subject to any form of public scrutiny, or won the explicit endorsement of journalists or the media industry. Indeed, efforts by the Ministry since 2006 to evolve a “content code” in consultation with the industry have so far failed to produce an agreed text, in part, because they have not involved media professionals in any significant way.
Despite an understanding on content being a distant prospect, the Ministry in February this year notified the creation of a number of state and district-level “monitoring bodies” that will assess non-governmental broadcast entities for conformity with the programme code. These committees as first constituted, were made up overwhelmingly of bureaucrats and police personnel. It was only in July, almost as an afterthought, that the Ministry mandated the participation of the journalism profession within these committees.
The media has also had to face the prospect of the judiciary often seeking to get involved in content decisions. In disposing of a public interest petition arising from the “sting” operation that wrongly implicated a teacher in a non-existent prostitution racket, the Delhi High Court held in December 2007, that any channel planning to broadcast programs involving a “sting” should be legally obliged to obtain prior permission from a government-appointed committee. It recommended that the Ministry should appoint a retired judge of a High Court to chair the committee, which should also comprise two others drawn from the bureaucracy.
The fake sting was a canonical case of non-existent editorial processes, which should be tackled through credible norms of self-regulation. In this respect, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) – the organisation this writer works with -- recently launched in association with affiliate unions in India, a series of broad-ranging discussions under the rubric of its “Ethical Journalism Initiative”. The IFJ believes that with the active engagement of journalists, the challenge of ethics in the newsroom can be adequately faced and dealt with.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Caste and the world of business
Review article
Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation, Permanent Black in association with the New India Foundation, 2008, Delhi, pp xxiii + 341, Rs 695.
To call this work a fascinating collage of business biographies would best describe the experience of reading it, though perhaps at the risk of undermining the rigour with which its material has been assembled. Quite in contrast to the unfettered subjectivity of a collage, Harish Damodaran has written this book with rigorous attention to the dimension of caste (or more precisely, jati) as a central determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour and business success in India.
Entrepreneurs have been viewed as the dynamic element in economic processes, as the rebels against conformity, who (as Joseph Schumpeter puts it) break the dull rhythms of the “circular flow” of the economy – or the reproduction from day-to-day of stagnant human horizons – and open up limitlessly expanding possibilities. Missing perhaps in this view of the entrepreneur as an epic hero, is a vision of the individual innovator within a larger network of social and cultural ties.
Caste in India, though often considered a residue of the pre-modern economy, has proved an inescapable part of all business histories, indeed, even perhaps a decisive element in modern entrepreneurial success. Social networks are key, simply because business is all about building and sustaining commodity exchange networks and industry is all about establishing productivity enhancing techniques at vital nodes in these networks. To put it in terms of the basic vocabulary of the economist, caste networks aid entrepreneurship by reducing “transaction costs”.
Yet approaches to business history have suffered from certain serious deficiencies, which Damodaran cites as the principal motivation for his work. There has been for one thing, a tendency to remain confined to “traditional” business communities without an understanding of how these traditions are continually being invented and reinvented. This in turn leads to a lack of contemporary focus. Several traditional merchant families, having made the transition to industry and riches beyond imagination, have since fallen away into obscurity. And despite all the continuing prominence of older trading communities in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape, there are new entrants of no recognisable business pedigree who are leading the charge into new frontiers. In terms of geographical focus, the south of the country again, has tended to fall outside the gaze of the conventional business historian.
For these reasons, Damodaran does not dwell at length on the so-called “old merchant communities”, which he identifies as the Banias and Jains of Gujarat and north India, the Marwaris, Parsis, Nattukottai Chettiars, and the Lohanas and Bhatias of the Kutch-Kathiawar-Sindh belt. After a quick consideration of the “general trajectories” of entrepreneurial growth within these communities, which brings the narrative right up to contemporary times, Damodaran turns his attention to the communities less studied: Brahmins and Khatris, Kammas and Reddys, Naidus and Gounders, Nadars and Ezhavas, Patidars and Marathas. He documents the presence of entrepreneurial energy in all these quarters and then turns his attention to explaining an absence. The northern farming communities – in particular, the Jats – he points out, have yet to manifest any tendency to make the transition from agrarian dynamism to industry. Damodaran concludes, a little implausibly since his entire treatment has dealt with “minorities”, with a “note on the minorities”, unable to resist the temptation of using a politicised euphemism in referring to the Muslims. Here again, he is dealing with an absence – or rather, a marginal presence that was splintered and scattered with the partition of 1947.
Damodaran shows how extended kinship networks have concretely worked in ensuring business success. The Nadars of southern Tamilnadu promoted a bank entirely through small capital subscriptions from their caste folk, providing their business ventures with an effective bulwark against fthe uncertainties of finance; a Gounder family of Coimbatore, newly arrived in the sugar industry, overcame a stiff working capital bottleneck by effecitvely persuading clansmen to part with sugarcane on an extended line of credit, a business deal that would have been unthinkable outside of strong and deep community bonds. Then again, Damodaran also demonstrates with a number of illustrations, how globalisation and the stockmarket, which have given a fresh impetus to the mobility of capital and loosened its anchorage in specific social and cultural milieus, has led to a weakening of these kinship ties in business.
Summing up the experiences of these diverse social aggregates, Damodaran identifies three kinds of trajectories of business success. “Bazaar to factory” sums up the path taken by the traditional merchant communities, which are really not the primary focus of this book. Rather, what this book is more concerned with, are the “office to factory” route, which brought the service-oriented and “scribal” castes – Brahmins, Khatris, Kayasths, the Bengali Bhadralok -- into the portals of industry; and the “farm to factory” trajectory represented by the Naidus, Gounders, Patidars, Marathas and Nadars.
Considering the mutability of tradition, it could also be argued that these perhaps are not three distinct trajectories, but three variants of the same trajectory, though displaced in time. That argument perhaps is especially apt when it comes to the “office to factory” trajectory, since many of the traditional merchant communities identified by Damodaran, began their industrial empires as minor functionaries in the early colonial trade in opium, raw cotton and indigo. As these networks of commodity exchange spread out through the south Asian landmass and gradually acquired diversity and depth, greater numbers were drawn into it, both as movers and shakers, and as hapless victims. New identities were forged, such as capitalist and worker, even as several old identities, such as craftsman and subsistence peasant, were undone.
India’s industrial growth was derivative of the dynamics of colonialism, rather than autonomous. The national bourgeoisie that grew out of the process remained segmented, divided into numerous endogamous groups. This book ends with an affirmation of the value of diversity. When democratic political contestation and spontaneous economic change, contribute towards a socially diverse middle class, the likely further outcome is a socially diverse entrepreneurial class. Diversity in turn, becomes an assurance of solidarity. Though the country has in its southern and western regions, achieved a semblance of social diversity, large sections still remain excluded. And in the vast Hindi heartland and the east, even the semblance has not been achieved.
The last two decades of economic liberalisation have seemingly created conditions for those lower in the hierarchy of business and industry to migrate upwards into the interstices of the capitalist system and acquire leadership positions. Yet there has also been in this time, a vast increase of inequalities of income and wealth.
There is currently underway, an impassioned debate among the Dalits – a heterogeneous social group that shares the common attribute of exclusion under the ritual order – on globalisation as a possible antidote to all their inherited debilities. That argument remains inconclusive. And while the jury remains out, material realities are ensuring that the answer is not left to spontaneous forces of entrepreneurship and economic change. Politics, it is increasingly recognised, will now drive the agenda.
Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation, Permanent Black in association with the New India Foundation, 2008, Delhi, pp xxiii + 341, Rs 695.
To call this work a fascinating collage of business biographies would best describe the experience of reading it, though perhaps at the risk of undermining the rigour with which its material has been assembled. Quite in contrast to the unfettered subjectivity of a collage, Harish Damodaran has written this book with rigorous attention to the dimension of caste (or more precisely, jati) as a central determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour and business success in India.
Entrepreneurs have been viewed as the dynamic element in economic processes, as the rebels against conformity, who (as Joseph Schumpeter puts it) break the dull rhythms of the “circular flow” of the economy – or the reproduction from day-to-day of stagnant human horizons – and open up limitlessly expanding possibilities. Missing perhaps in this view of the entrepreneur as an epic hero, is a vision of the individual innovator within a larger network of social and cultural ties.
Caste in India, though often considered a residue of the pre-modern economy, has proved an inescapable part of all business histories, indeed, even perhaps a decisive element in modern entrepreneurial success. Social networks are key, simply because business is all about building and sustaining commodity exchange networks and industry is all about establishing productivity enhancing techniques at vital nodes in these networks. To put it in terms of the basic vocabulary of the economist, caste networks aid entrepreneurship by reducing “transaction costs”.
Yet approaches to business history have suffered from certain serious deficiencies, which Damodaran cites as the principal motivation for his work. There has been for one thing, a tendency to remain confined to “traditional” business communities without an understanding of how these traditions are continually being invented and reinvented. This in turn leads to a lack of contemporary focus. Several traditional merchant families, having made the transition to industry and riches beyond imagination, have since fallen away into obscurity. And despite all the continuing prominence of older trading communities in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape, there are new entrants of no recognisable business pedigree who are leading the charge into new frontiers. In terms of geographical focus, the south of the country again, has tended to fall outside the gaze of the conventional business historian.
For these reasons, Damodaran does not dwell at length on the so-called “old merchant communities”, which he identifies as the Banias and Jains of Gujarat and north India, the Marwaris, Parsis, Nattukottai Chettiars, and the Lohanas and Bhatias of the Kutch-Kathiawar-Sindh belt. After a quick consideration of the “general trajectories” of entrepreneurial growth within these communities, which brings the narrative right up to contemporary times, Damodaran turns his attention to the communities less studied: Brahmins and Khatris, Kammas and Reddys, Naidus and Gounders, Nadars and Ezhavas, Patidars and Marathas. He documents the presence of entrepreneurial energy in all these quarters and then turns his attention to explaining an absence. The northern farming communities – in particular, the Jats – he points out, have yet to manifest any tendency to make the transition from agrarian dynamism to industry. Damodaran concludes, a little implausibly since his entire treatment has dealt with “minorities”, with a “note on the minorities”, unable to resist the temptation of using a politicised euphemism in referring to the Muslims. Here again, he is dealing with an absence – or rather, a marginal presence that was splintered and scattered with the partition of 1947.
Damodaran shows how extended kinship networks have concretely worked in ensuring business success. The Nadars of southern Tamilnadu promoted a bank entirely through small capital subscriptions from their caste folk, providing their business ventures with an effective bulwark against fthe uncertainties of finance; a Gounder family of Coimbatore, newly arrived in the sugar industry, overcame a stiff working capital bottleneck by effecitvely persuading clansmen to part with sugarcane on an extended line of credit, a business deal that would have been unthinkable outside of strong and deep community bonds. Then again, Damodaran also demonstrates with a number of illustrations, how globalisation and the stockmarket, which have given a fresh impetus to the mobility of capital and loosened its anchorage in specific social and cultural milieus, has led to a weakening of these kinship ties in business.
Summing up the experiences of these diverse social aggregates, Damodaran identifies three kinds of trajectories of business success. “Bazaar to factory” sums up the path taken by the traditional merchant communities, which are really not the primary focus of this book. Rather, what this book is more concerned with, are the “office to factory” route, which brought the service-oriented and “scribal” castes – Brahmins, Khatris, Kayasths, the Bengali Bhadralok -- into the portals of industry; and the “farm to factory” trajectory represented by the Naidus, Gounders, Patidars, Marathas and Nadars.
Considering the mutability of tradition, it could also be argued that these perhaps are not three distinct trajectories, but three variants of the same trajectory, though displaced in time. That argument perhaps is especially apt when it comes to the “office to factory” trajectory, since many of the traditional merchant communities identified by Damodaran, began their industrial empires as minor functionaries in the early colonial trade in opium, raw cotton and indigo. As these networks of commodity exchange spread out through the south Asian landmass and gradually acquired diversity and depth, greater numbers were drawn into it, both as movers and shakers, and as hapless victims. New identities were forged, such as capitalist and worker, even as several old identities, such as craftsman and subsistence peasant, were undone.
India’s industrial growth was derivative of the dynamics of colonialism, rather than autonomous. The national bourgeoisie that grew out of the process remained segmented, divided into numerous endogamous groups. This book ends with an affirmation of the value of diversity. When democratic political contestation and spontaneous economic change, contribute towards a socially diverse middle class, the likely further outcome is a socially diverse entrepreneurial class. Diversity in turn, becomes an assurance of solidarity. Though the country has in its southern and western regions, achieved a semblance of social diversity, large sections still remain excluded. And in the vast Hindi heartland and the east, even the semblance has not been achieved.
The last two decades of economic liberalisation have seemingly created conditions for those lower in the hierarchy of business and industry to migrate upwards into the interstices of the capitalist system and acquire leadership positions. Yet there has also been in this time, a vast increase of inequalities of income and wealth.
There is currently underway, an impassioned debate among the Dalits – a heterogeneous social group that shares the common attribute of exclusion under the ritual order – on globalisation as a possible antidote to all their inherited debilities. That argument remains inconclusive. And while the jury remains out, material realities are ensuring that the answer is not left to spontaneous forces of entrepreneurship and economic change. Politics, it is increasingly recognised, will now drive the agenda.
Friday, July 18, 2008
How dollar accountancy of the costs of the Iraq war could be deceptive
Review Article
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Allen Lane (Penguin Books), London, 2008, pp 311, Rs 595; ISBN 978-1-846-14128-7
It was election year in the U.S. and the country was trapped in what seemed an endless war. Confronted with a colossal loss of public confidence in his leadership and widespread revulsion at the tableau of destruction he was staging in a faraway land, the U.S. President took to the airwaves, vowing that he would utilise every forum and opportunity, to discuss “means of bringing (an) ugly war to an end”.
The moral dimension, explicit in the use of the term “ugly”, was not the only consideration. The war as the U.S. president put it, was taking a heavy toll of government finances. Failing the imposition of fresh taxes or stringent expenditure restraints, the U.S. budget deficit would spiral up -- and out of control -- putting at risk the foundation of the nation’s unparalleled prosperity since World War II: the role of the U.S. dollar “as the keystone of international trade and finance”.
If George W. Bush had been capable of acknowledging error, if he had in him the human capacity for contrition, this script could well have been written for him in 2004. In reality, it was the scenario played out by Lyndon Johnson in March 1968, as he renounced his candidacy for a second full term in the U.S. presidency and determined that his remaining days in office would be devoted to ending the Vietnam war (it is quite another story though, that his effort proved futile, partly on account of sabotage from within).
Bush in 2004 followed a rather different script, defying all polls to eke out a narrow win and in that moment of dubious triumph, announcing that he had surmounted a crucial moment of accountability and would not hesitate to make an already ugly conflict positively repellent. What followed was a slash-and-burn offensive through the Iraqi city of Fallujah, borrowed straight from the World War II playbook.
Despite a display of military machismo that reduced Iraq’s city of mosques to smouldering ruins, the insurgency showed little sign of yielding. And even if Bush’s bravado remained undimmed, his approval ratings began a rapid downward plunge.
If this accidental president had at all been interested in arresting the free-fall in his credibility, he could have sought a pathway back from the fatal error of Iraq. As Stiglitz and Bilmes (hereafter S&B) point out in this important book, Bush was given his best opportunity when the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group was submitted, shortly after his Republican party was pummelled in the mid-term elections of November 2006. He passed that moment by with no explanation, repudiating the findings of an expert group he had appointed and entrusted with a broad mandate.
Ever since, the U.S. President has used a familiar trope to deter all talk of withdrawal: to reverse course, he has said, would be to dishonour the sacrifices made by U.S. soldiers in a noble cause. With a wealth of documentation on all current and future human costs of the Iraq war, S&B conclusively establish that this is one of the most cynically insincere pleas ever advanced. The most significant contribution that S&B make to the accountancy of the Iraq war, perhaps, is in their treatment of the burden borne by U.S. military personnel – those killed who have families to be provided for, those incapacitated, who need lifelong care, those returned time and again to the field of battle, who progressively lose their capacity to deal with “normality” because of accumulated traumas.
These costs however, do not go into the headline figure of $3 trillion (or $3,000 billion), which earned S&B the instant attention of those who inhabit the rational fringe in the U.S. and the instant derision of the vociferous band of right-wing commentators and Bush supporters, who called it a lame attempt to coin a “catchphrase”. Contrary to what the diminishing but voluble band of Bush partisans may say, the “three trillion” estimate is arrived at on the basis of very cautious and conservative assumptions. S&B take all the known appropriations that have been made for the war and add them up. This process does not involve any arithmetical operation more complicated than addition.
Bookkeeping procedures in the U.S. defence department, though, are infamously – and deliberately – muddled and this compels S&B to undertake a fine-tooth search to factor in costs that may be hidden elsewhere. Once they track down all those elusive numbers, they add on costs that will likely be incurred in restoring the U.S. armed forces to the state they were in before the war – in terms of munitions replaced, equipment repaired and long deferred maintenance procedures implemented.
War imposes costs on all sectors of society. Higher energy costs, S&B argue, have meant that the U.S. economy has suffered serious harm. But the extra money paid by energy consumers do not figure in the $3 trillion price tag. S&B do however, factor into their cost calculations the consequences – in terms of lower tax accruals to the public exchequer – of the economic slowdown that soaring energy costs has caused.
With the profusion of assumptions, numbers and calculations that S&B lay out, it is often difficult to retain attention on essential distinctions. The headline number of “three trillion”, they explain, relates only to the budgetary costs borne by the U.S. federal government. After full budgetary costs are added, S&B take on board the interest component and then add what they call the “macro-economic costs”, which refer to the benefits the economy has foregone because money has unaccountably gone into the pursuit of war. Finally, S&B add on the costs of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
When S&B declare that this process is “conceptually simple” they perhaps take too much for granted. To begin with, some of the costs they total up are real: they are actually paid out of the public exchequer. Others are notional, the outcome of “what might have been” calculations, such as revenues that have been lost to the public exchequer. Matters are not rendered any easier, by the authors’ choice of “three trillion” as shorthand. At no stage of the reckoning, does the total reach that comfortably rounded sum. Indeed, that sum turns out to be a compromise between two scenarios that the authors construct: strict budgetary costs and total economic costs. S&B could as well have titled their book “the five trillion dollar war”, since that is what they estimate “total economic costs” at. No reason is offered for the choice of the lower number, though this should be deemed a minor omission, since both figures are equally beyond ordinary human comprehension, whether as astronomical distances or dollar sums.
The larger part of S&B’s work is about costs that are outside the boundaries of both “budgetary” and “economic” costs – such as the costs to U.S. community life, and the costs to the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have to their misfortune been designated the principal theatres of the civilisational mission of the U.S. Exercises such as this, inevitably, involve several counter-factual assumptions. Besides, S&B face a considerable moral dilemma in transporting the standards applied in the valuation of the life of a U.S. soldier to a different milieu. S&B seek heroically to grapple with this dilemma: they recognise every estimate that has been made of the deaths in Iraq since the war began, and also take on board humanitarian consequences of exile and internal displacement. They occasionally throw up their hands in despair at the accounting complexities of reckoning with all these human tragedies. But their intent remains, firmly, on putting a dollar value on the consequences of the Iraq war.
So what does it involve to recognise the 100,000 and perhaps 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the U.S. invasion? Parenthetically, one may ask: what does it mean to acknowledge the one million casualties from the sanctions against Iraq that were so zealously enforced by the Clinton administration, which both the authors of this book loyally served?
S&B recognise some of the moral difficulties. But they have little problem branding Bush’s plea of honouring the sacrifices made by the U.S. armed forces, as a cynical ploy and an evasion of responsibility. It is a conspicuous failure of all systems of accountability, even in the most professedly perfect democracy, that decision makers rarely have to face the full consequences of their blunders. Corporate executives who make the most disastrous strategic choices while in authority can always count upon a golden parachute and a comfortable severance package when they leave their cosy billets. Similarly, no U.S. president has ever had to deal with the stigma of defeat in a military adventure that he started.
Discerning the cynicism of Bush’s strategy of leaving the reckoning with Iraq to his successor, does not mean yet, that the U.S. public, or for that matter, the global public, would consent to walking away from the disaster of Iraq. The public also need also to be convinced that this abdication will not entail consequences even more disastrous. S&B offer a simple moral pathway out of the conundrum, summed up in an age-old aphorism: “let bygones be bygones”. This aphorism, they say, also has a foundation in economic theory, in the concept of “sunk costs”.
Yet, what seem like “sunk costs” to the economist may well appear to those who have borne the brunt of U.S. military aggression, as a case for reparations. Even if withdrawal is the strategy of choice for the U.S., the rest of the world would have to reckon with the costs of, first, the illegitimate invasion and next, the dishonourable retreat.
It turns out that the rest of the world is already bearing a significant burden of the costs of the Iraq war. Every war that the U.S. or any other country has fought, has involved a burden of taxation. Johnson’s greatest worry as he renounced the presidency in 1968, was that, despite the tax surcharge he had decreed to pay for Vietnam, the U.S. budget was slipping rapidly into the red, making the sustenance of the dollar as a credible world currency, a virtual impossibility. His successor, Richard Nixon, though committed to a regime of low taxes, repudiated any possibility that the surcharge would be repealed, since there could be nothing more irresponsible for a country at war.
Contrast that with the current situation, when Bush is liable to characterise any suggestion of raising taxes as an act to treason. Between Johnson and Bush, (or between Vietnam and Iraq) there has been something that has changed, which has made nonsense of old-style economic orthodoxy. Simply put, the brutal reality is that the entire U.S. hegemonic drive today is financed through borrowed money. S&B recognise this fact, which they say, makes no difference to their basic arguments, since the borrowed money will have to be repaid. But is that really a reasonable belief?
This needs going back a bit in time to the Johnson abdication in 1968 and his decision to sue for peace in Vietnam, in part, because he thought the U.S. dollar was in jeopardy. And though Nixon refused to do away with the taxes that paid for Vietnam, he did make a decision in 1972 that would have momentous consequences for the future of the U.S. dollar. He took the U.S. currency off the system under which its value was calibrated with a certain weight in gold. From that point on, the dollar had to sink or swim on the strength of its acceptance by other economies. This required that all countries hold their national savings in dollars and that furthermore, transactions in the most widely traded commodities, such as petroleum, should be denominated in dollars.
Discussions of currency values, taxation, expenditure and the national debt tend to be confined to an esoteric corner where only supposed experts are allowed. Unfortunately, S&B, both charter members of that narrow enclave, do not venture into that discussion. Aside from providing an accounting of the Iraq war, they choose to avoid the broader political-economic motivations and consequences. It was not much talked about in expert circles then, but just over a month before the invasion of Iraq took place, the U.S. Treasury Department formally notified the U.S. Congress that the government had reached the limits of borrowing allowed under the law and was in danger of default on debt. The U.S. government, then hot and feverish for war, needed to borrow to merely service its national debt. How could a nation contemplate war in these circumstances?
The drama of raising borrowing limits had been enacted the previous year too and at various times over the preceding decade. The U.S. Congress has been remarkably hospitable to right-wing lunatics who describe tax cuts as a patriotic duty, argue for unending war in the next breath, and then quietly acquiesce in the raising of the national debt limit. It is an interesting coda to S&B’s analysis that between the beginning of the war in Iraq and now, the U.S. national debt has gone up by well over $3 trillion.
How is this figure going to be drawn down? How if ever, is this debt going to be repaid? S&B do not venture in to that territory, except to insist that the debt must be repaid. But finally, they remain blind-sided by the faulty assumptions of contemporary economic analysis. They fail to recognise that the danger Lyndon Johnson warned of -- as far back as 1968 -- is now an accomplished fact: the U.S. dollar as the cornerstone of world trade and finance is in its death throes. In seeking to designate every cost of war in terms of the U.S. dollar, S&B suffer several moral qualms, but never really deviate from their belief that the U.S. dollar provides an invariant standard of value. They prove unable in other words, to look beyond this conceit of the U.S. economy.
S&B put down the huge increase in oil prices in recent months to a variety of causes: the Iraq war, they cautiously say, accounts for just $10 out of the total increase of about $70 in the price of a barrel of oil (at the time this book was sent to press). The rest, in their estimation, could be put down to factors such as increased demand from China and India.
This argument is typical of the kind of loose practices that economics as a discipline is rife with. It offers the Bush administration precisely the alibi it needs, since it obscures the rampant speculation that is driving prices. And the forces behind this speculative drive are themselves part of the political-economic substratum of the Iraq war: briefly put, the dependence of the U.S., since the 1980s, on continuing infusions of world savings to support current consumption. The speculative increase in oil prices, contrary to the effort to cast it in terms of the supposedly neutral, apolitical forces of global supply and demand, is integrally related to the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar and the need to prime the pump that drives a large chunk of global cash surpluses into investments in U.S. government debt and other financial instruments. And yet, despite this priming of the pump, including through patently illegitimate exercises of military power, the mighty dollar continues to plunge in value. This in itself, is a circumstance that should deflate the S&B effort to construct a picture of the “true costs” of the Iraq war in terms of the invariant standard of the U.S. dollar.
With ample reason, S&B dismiss any notion that the Iraq war may have entailed benefits that could even remotely mitigate the severity of the multi-trillion dollar bill it has served up. What then was the motivation for the war? With all the critical literature produced in the U.S., there has yet been no credible public reckoning of this question. Perhaps the reason was that Iraq remained, with its fabled oil wealth, a recalcitrant element. Or perhaps it was because, quite in contrast to the subservience displayed by other major oil producers, Iraq made little secret of its belief that the U.S. dollar was no invariant standard of human value, but an instrument of U.S. cultural-economic hegemony.
The true cost of the Iraq war is not to be computed in monetary terms, certainly not in U.S. dollar terms. Nobody has yet begun the exercise of adding up the human costs of this enormous atrocity. And as these costs are totalled and as the U.S. dollar continues to slide in value – in part as a consequence of the bill that the Bush administration has run up in pursuing its fantasies in Iraq – it will become increasingly obvious that the invariant standard of value that S&B use, is really a very fickle measure. It will become increasingly obvious, in other words, that the claims made on behalf of this supposed standard of value are themselves a serious impediment to appreciating the true human consequences of war.
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Allen Lane (Penguin Books), London, 2008, pp 311, Rs 595; ISBN 978-1-846-14128-7
It was election year in the U.S. and the country was trapped in what seemed an endless war. Confronted with a colossal loss of public confidence in his leadership and widespread revulsion at the tableau of destruction he was staging in a faraway land, the U.S. President took to the airwaves, vowing that he would utilise every forum and opportunity, to discuss “means of bringing (an) ugly war to an end”.
The moral dimension, explicit in the use of the term “ugly”, was not the only consideration. The war as the U.S. president put it, was taking a heavy toll of government finances. Failing the imposition of fresh taxes or stringent expenditure restraints, the U.S. budget deficit would spiral up -- and out of control -- putting at risk the foundation of the nation’s unparalleled prosperity since World War II: the role of the U.S. dollar “as the keystone of international trade and finance”.
If George W. Bush had been capable of acknowledging error, if he had in him the human capacity for contrition, this script could well have been written for him in 2004. In reality, it was the scenario played out by Lyndon Johnson in March 1968, as he renounced his candidacy for a second full term in the U.S. presidency and determined that his remaining days in office would be devoted to ending the Vietnam war (it is quite another story though, that his effort proved futile, partly on account of sabotage from within).
Bush in 2004 followed a rather different script, defying all polls to eke out a narrow win and in that moment of dubious triumph, announcing that he had surmounted a crucial moment of accountability and would not hesitate to make an already ugly conflict positively repellent. What followed was a slash-and-burn offensive through the Iraqi city of Fallujah, borrowed straight from the World War II playbook.
Despite a display of military machismo that reduced Iraq’s city of mosques to smouldering ruins, the insurgency showed little sign of yielding. And even if Bush’s bravado remained undimmed, his approval ratings began a rapid downward plunge.
If this accidental president had at all been interested in arresting the free-fall in his credibility, he could have sought a pathway back from the fatal error of Iraq. As Stiglitz and Bilmes (hereafter S&B) point out in this important book, Bush was given his best opportunity when the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group was submitted, shortly after his Republican party was pummelled in the mid-term elections of November 2006. He passed that moment by with no explanation, repudiating the findings of an expert group he had appointed and entrusted with a broad mandate.
Ever since, the U.S. President has used a familiar trope to deter all talk of withdrawal: to reverse course, he has said, would be to dishonour the sacrifices made by U.S. soldiers in a noble cause. With a wealth of documentation on all current and future human costs of the Iraq war, S&B conclusively establish that this is one of the most cynically insincere pleas ever advanced. The most significant contribution that S&B make to the accountancy of the Iraq war, perhaps, is in their treatment of the burden borne by U.S. military personnel – those killed who have families to be provided for, those incapacitated, who need lifelong care, those returned time and again to the field of battle, who progressively lose their capacity to deal with “normality” because of accumulated traumas.
These costs however, do not go into the headline figure of $3 trillion (or $3,000 billion), which earned S&B the instant attention of those who inhabit the rational fringe in the U.S. and the instant derision of the vociferous band of right-wing commentators and Bush supporters, who called it a lame attempt to coin a “catchphrase”. Contrary to what the diminishing but voluble band of Bush partisans may say, the “three trillion” estimate is arrived at on the basis of very cautious and conservative assumptions. S&B take all the known appropriations that have been made for the war and add them up. This process does not involve any arithmetical operation more complicated than addition.
Bookkeeping procedures in the U.S. defence department, though, are infamously – and deliberately – muddled and this compels S&B to undertake a fine-tooth search to factor in costs that may be hidden elsewhere. Once they track down all those elusive numbers, they add on costs that will likely be incurred in restoring the U.S. armed forces to the state they were in before the war – in terms of munitions replaced, equipment repaired and long deferred maintenance procedures implemented.
War imposes costs on all sectors of society. Higher energy costs, S&B argue, have meant that the U.S. economy has suffered serious harm. But the extra money paid by energy consumers do not figure in the $3 trillion price tag. S&B do however, factor into their cost calculations the consequences – in terms of lower tax accruals to the public exchequer – of the economic slowdown that soaring energy costs has caused.
With the profusion of assumptions, numbers and calculations that S&B lay out, it is often difficult to retain attention on essential distinctions. The headline number of “three trillion”, they explain, relates only to the budgetary costs borne by the U.S. federal government. After full budgetary costs are added, S&B take on board the interest component and then add what they call the “macro-economic costs”, which refer to the benefits the economy has foregone because money has unaccountably gone into the pursuit of war. Finally, S&B add on the costs of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
When S&B declare that this process is “conceptually simple” they perhaps take too much for granted. To begin with, some of the costs they total up are real: they are actually paid out of the public exchequer. Others are notional, the outcome of “what might have been” calculations, such as revenues that have been lost to the public exchequer. Matters are not rendered any easier, by the authors’ choice of “three trillion” as shorthand. At no stage of the reckoning, does the total reach that comfortably rounded sum. Indeed, that sum turns out to be a compromise between two scenarios that the authors construct: strict budgetary costs and total economic costs. S&B could as well have titled their book “the five trillion dollar war”, since that is what they estimate “total economic costs” at. No reason is offered for the choice of the lower number, though this should be deemed a minor omission, since both figures are equally beyond ordinary human comprehension, whether as astronomical distances or dollar sums.
The larger part of S&B’s work is about costs that are outside the boundaries of both “budgetary” and “economic” costs – such as the costs to U.S. community life, and the costs to the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have to their misfortune been designated the principal theatres of the civilisational mission of the U.S. Exercises such as this, inevitably, involve several counter-factual assumptions. Besides, S&B face a considerable moral dilemma in transporting the standards applied in the valuation of the life of a U.S. soldier to a different milieu. S&B seek heroically to grapple with this dilemma: they recognise every estimate that has been made of the deaths in Iraq since the war began, and also take on board humanitarian consequences of exile and internal displacement. They occasionally throw up their hands in despair at the accounting complexities of reckoning with all these human tragedies. But their intent remains, firmly, on putting a dollar value on the consequences of the Iraq war.
So what does it involve to recognise the 100,000 and perhaps 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the U.S. invasion? Parenthetically, one may ask: what does it mean to acknowledge the one million casualties from the sanctions against Iraq that were so zealously enforced by the Clinton administration, which both the authors of this book loyally served?
S&B recognise some of the moral difficulties. But they have little problem branding Bush’s plea of honouring the sacrifices made by the U.S. armed forces, as a cynical ploy and an evasion of responsibility. It is a conspicuous failure of all systems of accountability, even in the most professedly perfect democracy, that decision makers rarely have to face the full consequences of their blunders. Corporate executives who make the most disastrous strategic choices while in authority can always count upon a golden parachute and a comfortable severance package when they leave their cosy billets. Similarly, no U.S. president has ever had to deal with the stigma of defeat in a military adventure that he started.
Discerning the cynicism of Bush’s strategy of leaving the reckoning with Iraq to his successor, does not mean yet, that the U.S. public, or for that matter, the global public, would consent to walking away from the disaster of Iraq. The public also need also to be convinced that this abdication will not entail consequences even more disastrous. S&B offer a simple moral pathway out of the conundrum, summed up in an age-old aphorism: “let bygones be bygones”. This aphorism, they say, also has a foundation in economic theory, in the concept of “sunk costs”.
Yet, what seem like “sunk costs” to the economist may well appear to those who have borne the brunt of U.S. military aggression, as a case for reparations. Even if withdrawal is the strategy of choice for the U.S., the rest of the world would have to reckon with the costs of, first, the illegitimate invasion and next, the dishonourable retreat.
It turns out that the rest of the world is already bearing a significant burden of the costs of the Iraq war. Every war that the U.S. or any other country has fought, has involved a burden of taxation. Johnson’s greatest worry as he renounced the presidency in 1968, was that, despite the tax surcharge he had decreed to pay for Vietnam, the U.S. budget was slipping rapidly into the red, making the sustenance of the dollar as a credible world currency, a virtual impossibility. His successor, Richard Nixon, though committed to a regime of low taxes, repudiated any possibility that the surcharge would be repealed, since there could be nothing more irresponsible for a country at war.
Contrast that with the current situation, when Bush is liable to characterise any suggestion of raising taxes as an act to treason. Between Johnson and Bush, (or between Vietnam and Iraq) there has been something that has changed, which has made nonsense of old-style economic orthodoxy. Simply put, the brutal reality is that the entire U.S. hegemonic drive today is financed through borrowed money. S&B recognise this fact, which they say, makes no difference to their basic arguments, since the borrowed money will have to be repaid. But is that really a reasonable belief?
This needs going back a bit in time to the Johnson abdication in 1968 and his decision to sue for peace in Vietnam, in part, because he thought the U.S. dollar was in jeopardy. And though Nixon refused to do away with the taxes that paid for Vietnam, he did make a decision in 1972 that would have momentous consequences for the future of the U.S. dollar. He took the U.S. currency off the system under which its value was calibrated with a certain weight in gold. From that point on, the dollar had to sink or swim on the strength of its acceptance by other economies. This required that all countries hold their national savings in dollars and that furthermore, transactions in the most widely traded commodities, such as petroleum, should be denominated in dollars.
Discussions of currency values, taxation, expenditure and the national debt tend to be confined to an esoteric corner where only supposed experts are allowed. Unfortunately, S&B, both charter members of that narrow enclave, do not venture into that discussion. Aside from providing an accounting of the Iraq war, they choose to avoid the broader political-economic motivations and consequences. It was not much talked about in expert circles then, but just over a month before the invasion of Iraq took place, the U.S. Treasury Department formally notified the U.S. Congress that the government had reached the limits of borrowing allowed under the law and was in danger of default on debt. The U.S. government, then hot and feverish for war, needed to borrow to merely service its national debt. How could a nation contemplate war in these circumstances?
The drama of raising borrowing limits had been enacted the previous year too and at various times over the preceding decade. The U.S. Congress has been remarkably hospitable to right-wing lunatics who describe tax cuts as a patriotic duty, argue for unending war in the next breath, and then quietly acquiesce in the raising of the national debt limit. It is an interesting coda to S&B’s analysis that between the beginning of the war in Iraq and now, the U.S. national debt has gone up by well over $3 trillion.
How is this figure going to be drawn down? How if ever, is this debt going to be repaid? S&B do not venture in to that territory, except to insist that the debt must be repaid. But finally, they remain blind-sided by the faulty assumptions of contemporary economic analysis. They fail to recognise that the danger Lyndon Johnson warned of -- as far back as 1968 -- is now an accomplished fact: the U.S. dollar as the cornerstone of world trade and finance is in its death throes. In seeking to designate every cost of war in terms of the U.S. dollar, S&B suffer several moral qualms, but never really deviate from their belief that the U.S. dollar provides an invariant standard of value. They prove unable in other words, to look beyond this conceit of the U.S. economy.
S&B put down the huge increase in oil prices in recent months to a variety of causes: the Iraq war, they cautiously say, accounts for just $10 out of the total increase of about $70 in the price of a barrel of oil (at the time this book was sent to press). The rest, in their estimation, could be put down to factors such as increased demand from China and India.
This argument is typical of the kind of loose practices that economics as a discipline is rife with. It offers the Bush administration precisely the alibi it needs, since it obscures the rampant speculation that is driving prices. And the forces behind this speculative drive are themselves part of the political-economic substratum of the Iraq war: briefly put, the dependence of the U.S., since the 1980s, on continuing infusions of world savings to support current consumption. The speculative increase in oil prices, contrary to the effort to cast it in terms of the supposedly neutral, apolitical forces of global supply and demand, is integrally related to the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar and the need to prime the pump that drives a large chunk of global cash surpluses into investments in U.S. government debt and other financial instruments. And yet, despite this priming of the pump, including through patently illegitimate exercises of military power, the mighty dollar continues to plunge in value. This in itself, is a circumstance that should deflate the S&B effort to construct a picture of the “true costs” of the Iraq war in terms of the invariant standard of the U.S. dollar.
With ample reason, S&B dismiss any notion that the Iraq war may have entailed benefits that could even remotely mitigate the severity of the multi-trillion dollar bill it has served up. What then was the motivation for the war? With all the critical literature produced in the U.S., there has yet been no credible public reckoning of this question. Perhaps the reason was that Iraq remained, with its fabled oil wealth, a recalcitrant element. Or perhaps it was because, quite in contrast to the subservience displayed by other major oil producers, Iraq made little secret of its belief that the U.S. dollar was no invariant standard of human value, but an instrument of U.S. cultural-economic hegemony.
The true cost of the Iraq war is not to be computed in monetary terms, certainly not in U.S. dollar terms. Nobody has yet begun the exercise of adding up the human costs of this enormous atrocity. And as these costs are totalled and as the U.S. dollar continues to slide in value – in part as a consequence of the bill that the Bush administration has run up in pursuing its fantasies in Iraq – it will become increasingly obvious that the invariant standard of value that S&B use, is really a very fickle measure. It will become increasingly obvious, in other words, that the claims made on behalf of this supposed standard of value are themselves a serious impediment to appreciating the true human consequences of war.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
No censorship through mob violence, says the Delhi High Court
Few realms of artistic or scholarly excellence were spared the fallout of India’s bitter communal polarisation of the 1990s and beyond. Circumstances were especially hazardous for artists and scholars who drew their inspiration from the rich syncretism of Indian folk traditions. And as events have proven, few were more vulnerable than Maqbool Fida Husain, whose work has been an ongoing and intense engagement with popular culture.
Whether Husain is observant or otherwise of the faith he was born into is immaterial. For the cultural police squads that arose on the wave of neo-nationalist zealotry, the name he bears was sufficient cause to question his entire body of work. No person whose overt social identity was quite so alien to the intrinsic and primordial cultural character of the Indian nation -- as it was then portrayed -- could be permitted the audacity to produce a body of work suffused with the iconography of the Hindu pantheon.
The epigraph to the landmark judgment by the Delhi High Court, dismissing the summons issued Husain to answer criminal charges in cases filed from literally all parts of the country, quotes the legendary Pablo Picasso on the necessarily subversive quality of art. “Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared”.
Picasso was not, most assuredly, making a case for keeping art in sequestration from the lay public and preserving it as a domain for the specialist. That indeed, would be a spirit impossible to reconcile with his work. More particularly, it would be contrary to Husain’s own creative ethos, which as he explained in a recent interview with the weekly magazine Tehelka, is all about art for the people: “I never wanted to be clever, esoteric, abstract. I wanted to make simple statements. I wanted my canvases to have a story. I wanted my art to talk to people”.[i] Clearly, in Husain’s creative universe, there are no ignorant or unwashed masses needing tutelage.
Ignorance perhaps is not so much the issue as the cloistered mind and a sensibility that allows finer perceptions to be overwhelmed at the slightest sniff of political opportunity.
The arguments for and against Husain have been rehearsed endlessly ever since he became the focus of Hindutva ire in the mid-1990s. That the right to free speech does not constitute the right to cause offence or to inflame social sensibilities is of course a well accepted principle of liberal jurisprudence. But when does an act cease being a rightful exercise in free speech and begin to be a provocation? Does the nude depiction of figures from a religious pantheon, in a manner that is integrally connected with classical iconographic traditions, constitute an offence to social sensibilities? Campaign groups arguing Husain’s case, seeking to end his hapless years of exile from India, have been arguing precisely that.
The riposte, as in many such matters, has come from the ideological obermeister of the Hindutva flock, Arun Shourie.
Prefacing his damning remarks with some semblance of compassion, Shourie recently wrote of Husain: “He is a kindly man, and a prodigiously productive artist. There is no warrant at all for disrupting all his exhibitions”. Indeed, Shourie allows Husain the further concession that his depictions of Hindu goddesses “in less than skimpy attire” could pass muster on grounds of sensibility and inspiration, if only it did not leave unanswered a crucial question: “How come in the seventy-five years Husain has been painting, he has not once felt inspired, not once, to paint the face of the Prophet? It doesn’t have to be in the style in which he has painted the Hindu goddesses. Why not the most beautiful, the most radiant and luminous face that he can imagine? How come he has never felt inspired to paint women revered in Islam, or in his own family, in the same style as the one that propelled his inspiration in regard to Hindu goddesses?”[ii]
An artist in a free society is at liberty to choose the motifs that he would like to represent, the cultural lineages that he draws from, and the forms and idioms that he would like to emulate, develop and (if possible) enrich through his practice. In suggesting that Husain should have remained bound by the cultural symbols and traditions of the faith he was born into, or that in the midst of his aesthetic wanderings, he should occasionally have visited Islamic motifs, Shourie betrays a familiar, totalitarian mindset. He also dishonours Husain’s engagement with his craft and with the people of India in such epic political adventures as Rammanohar Lohia’s Ramayan Mela of the 1960s
Besides, there is an answer to Shourie’s question that is so evident, that it could not possibly have escaped the comprehension of even one so culturally obtuse. Simply put, there is nothing like an equally vivid tradition of iconography in any other cultural tradition that Husain may have been exposed to. To hear Husain narrate the story of his early years as an artist of the people is to realise how deep has been his empathy with the diverse folk traditions of the country. “In 1948”, he recalls in the recent interview, “ I exhibited my work publicly for the first time in the Bombay Arts Society show. I had already been painting and practising for years. .. I took the classical images of the Gupta bronzes -- the tribhanga form; the sensuous and erotic colours of Pahari paintings -- its deep maroons, blacks, haldi; and the nine rasas. I wanted my format to be classical, yet retain the innocence of the folk. (Francis) Souza came and asked me excitedly, from where have you got this? I didn’t tell him, I said, you go search it. This is what lies at the heart of the artistic enterprise. .... It is in picking from what has gone before. In India, there have been so many high periods -- Tanjore, Chola, Gupta… Centuries of seeing lie behind that. You cannot reinvent the wheel -- your individuality, your creative eye lies in what you pick”.
But wait, the moral precept of Hindutva is as Shourie very lucidly explains, “deceit towards the deceitful” and “wickedness towards the wicked”. The practical implications of this moral symmetry are clear. If Muslims have the liberty to engage in street protests and demand the withdrawal of cartoons denigrating the prophet of their faith, Hindus enjoy a like privilege.
Muslims worldwide mobilised in February 2006 against a Danish newspaper’s deliberately provocative publication of a series of cartoons representing the figure of the prophet of Islam as an accomplice in terrorism. Far from being an exercise in the right to free speech, the Danish newspaper was by its own boastful claim, engaged in an effort to rub in the superiority of western culture. Clearly, this was the ideological or unarmed component of the “global war on terror” that was then ostensibly being waged between the forces of civilisation and barbarism.
A key issue that emerged from the controversy was that of intent. In all such matters involving rival perceptions of the right to free speech and expression, intent matters. The Danish newspaper had made no secret of its intent to cause offence.
Husain in contrast has never had any intent except to connect to the people in a purely aesthetic form.
Another implication of Shourie’s moral symmetry was laid out by a spokesman for Hindutva, who reacted in fury to the industrialist Vinay Bharat Ram’s defence of Husain. Would “pseudo-secular intellectuals”, asked the agitated propagandist for Hindutva, show the same “breadth of vision and understanding towards the work of an unknown Hindu artist called Kailash Tewari from Bhopal”. This unknown hero, it transpires, was in June 2007, asked to take down an exhibition for its inflammatory representations of the people of another faith. Asked about the incident, the aggrieved painter argued: “My exhibition titled The Face of Terror depicts the truth. I am not talking about Muslims, but unfortunately all terrorists turn out to be Muslims”. [iii]
Thus the many hued richness of Husain’s work, with its characteristic imprint of playfulness, its homage to diverse traditions, and its signature qualities, which are now perhaps the most widely recognised in Indian art, is equated on a moral plane, with the output of a paintbrush hack with political motivations and abundant reserves of social bigotry. It could be said that this is the reductio ad absurdum of Hindutva aesthetics.
The judgment of the Delhi High Court, delivered May 8, 2008 by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, in the matter of Maqbool Fida Husain versus others, dismissing the summons issued Husain in a diverse number of cases filed by individual litigants, is valuable in bringing the focus back on intent and dispelling several of these absurd moral equivalences. There were two grounds on which the petitioners from places as far afield as Pandharpur (Husain’s home village in Maharashtra), Bhopal and Delhi, had filed petitions for the criminal prosecution of Husain: “obscenity” which warrants prosecution under articles 292 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), “causing offence to religious sensibilities”, which is covered under articles 295 and 298, and “creating ill-will among communities on religious grounds” which is covered under article 153.
Since “intent” is the point under discussion, it might be good to first take up the charge of “causing offence to religious sensibilities”. Justice Kaul has clearly held that the charge under these sections of the IPC must establish the intent to cause such offence. In other words, the untitled painting rendered by Husain at some point in the distant past, which passed into a private collection and was brought out to the public domain in 2006 under the title “Bharat Mata” as part of an art auction for the victims of the Kashmir earthquake of October 2005, does not establish any such intent. As Justice Kaul observes in paragraph 107 of his judgment: “the impugned painting cannot form the basis of any deliberate intention to wound the religious feelings of the complainants since the figure, on the basis of the identity alleged, represents an anthropomorphic depiction of a nation as also that to hold a person liable under the above said section, mere knowledge of the likelihood that the religious feelings of another person may be wounded would not be sufficient.”
When it comes to the charge of “obscenity” though, the test of intent does not apply. From an extended review of case law on “obscenity” Justice Kaul concludes that “Knowledge is not a part of the guilty act. The offenders knowledge of the obscenity of the impugned matter is not required under the law and it is a case of strict liability”. In other words, whether he had the intent or not, whether the knowledge existed or not, if an act, an utterance, a song, or a representation by an individual meets the criterion of “obscenity” in a social framework, that individual is liable to strict punishment.
Within this strict standard though, Justice Kaul points out in paragraph 70 of his landmark judgment, that “to fall within the scope of ‘obscene’.. the ingredients of the impugned matter/art must lie at the extreme end of the spectrum of the offensive matter. The legal test of obscenity is satisfied only when the impugned art/matter can be said to appeal to an unhealthy, inordinate person having perverted interest in sexual matters or having a tendency to morally corrupt and debase persons likely to come in contact with the impugned art”.
The complainants against Husain had sought to buttress their charge of “obscenity” on the basis of “the nudity of the figure depicted in the painting and the identity of the figure alleged as ‘Bharat Mata’”. But Justice Kaul concludes in paragraph 72 after weighing all the evidence, that “the alleged identity of the figure has no bearing on the alleged obscenity of the said painting. The alleged ‘Bharat Mata’ painting in issue was at no given point in time either given a title or publicly exhibited by the petitioner. The petitioner had no involvement in any manner with the said on-line auction for charity”.
All these are significant contributions to the right to free expression. But where Justice Kaul perhaps makes his most significant jurisprudential breakthrough for this age of the worldwide web, the internet and all its possibilities of instant communications, is in the matter of jurisdiction. A nonagenarian artist with no greater ambitions than living out the rest of his years in peace and tranquillity, has for over a decade been venomously targeted and forced to flee the milieu that he has loved and flourished in, merely because political circumstances have made his variety of celebratory, eclectic art a taboo. And the wide diffusion of his work through the new modes of communication available, has made it easier for politically motivated individuals to target him.
In this context, Justice Kaul warns that the “criminal justice system”, “ought not to be invoked as a convenient recourse to ventilate any and all objections to an artistic work”. This makes the role of the magistrate who first receives the complaint, not merely “discretionary” but “obligatory”. The magistrate is obliged to “scrutinise each case in order to prevent vexatious and frivolous cases from being filed” and to ensure that litigation is not used as “a tool to harass the accused, which (would) amount to a gross abuse of the process of the court”. Where private complaints are involved, they should typically not be admitted without prior investigation.
May 19, 2008
[i] Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 4, Dated Feb 02, 2008
[ii] Arun Shourie, “Hindutva and Radical Islam: Where the twain do meet”, The Indian Express, Delhi, Friday, December 28, 2007
[iii] This specific link is available at http://www.ivarta.com/columns/070625-mf-hussen-paintings.htm; it can also be accessed through the website set up by a revanchist body of non-resident Indians, with the specific intent of taking down M.F. Husain: http://www.hindujagruti.org/activities/campaigns/national/mfhussain-campaign/.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Bush yearns for an early release from the nightmare he's engulfed in ... we all do, too
Well the man does try to affect a sense of humour. Some years back, after all his WMD claims had been conclusively proven a hoax, he pulled off that act at the annual Gridiron dinner, rummaging around under the dining tables in mock pursuit of the elusive weapons. That was at a time when U.S. servicemen who had been sent into that war of destruction against a sovereign country, were dying in the pursuit of the man's fantasies of remaking the world.
This year's Gridiron dinner, apparently one of the big social events on the Washington DC calendar, saw Bush bringing down the curtain on his presidency. With his approval ratings sunk in the lower-thirties since at least two years, he should have ample reason to wish for an early release from the nightmare he has been engulfed in. The world too has reason to do so, though few could have been amused at the singing routine he pulled off.
Bush longs to get back to his Texas ranch away from all the hurly burly of Washington, where he appears increasingly to be a figure of comical impotence. He sure should be liberated from his current woes (http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=879_1205269923). The whole world too wishes, he would just get the hell out, though a high security prison, rather than a Texas ranch, would be the place to put him away.
Meanwhile, Martina Navratilova regains the Czech citizenship that she lost back in the 1970s, shortly before she became a U.S. national. She found the politics of Czechoslovakia disgusting then, but is more ashamed today that as a U.S. citizen, she is regarded by the world as complicit in Bush's politics (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtmlxml=/news/2008/03/12/wtennis112.xml)
She has a point, Czechoslovakia (as it then was) never elected any of those guys who ruled them. The U.S. has elected this guy of monumental incompetence, whose intelligence sparks to some semblance of life only when contemplating an act of blatant criminality, not once, but twice over. That surely, is one of the great mysteries of this still very young century, which will perhaps survive all that the remaining ninety-plus years may have to throw at it.
Perhaps it is because as Donald Rumsfeld put it, "Stuff Happens". Rummy was in the fawning accounts of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, once considered to have the charisma and popularity of a rock-star. And as he famously put it after the rape of Baghdad's museums and the looting of its historical treasures: ""Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things". http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/04/11/sprj.irq.pentagon/
What if the consequences of the "bad things" that free people do means unending disaster for othe countries. Surely then there is a case for putting these free people under some form of supervision. So Martina Navratilova is clearly suggesting here that the next U.S. elections be held under international supervision.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Why journalists should take leadership of the debate on media ethics
The context for the discussion on ethics in Indian journalism
All sectors of the media in India have grown rapidly in recent years.
Significant changes have occurred in editorial policy and commercial strategies, as traditional sectors (print and radio), have responded to competition from new media like satellite TV and the internet.
Concerns have been raised about the quantitative expansion being accompanied by a perceptible deterioration in quality. The decline in quality in turn, is ascribed to a crisis of ethical standards in journalism.
Three cases highlight the need for this conversation on ethics
Recent cases involving the media and its regulatory environment, which raise critical issues of journalistic ethics, include the following:
*** In September 2007, three journalists and the publisher of an afternoon daily in Delhi were convicted by the Delhi High Court for “contempt of court”. The court held the media workers guilty for a series of investigative articles and cartoons on the Indian Supreme Court’s orders shutting down small commercial establishments and shops in notified residential areas of Delhi. The articles were reviewed by competent legal authorities and found to be factual and accurate. Though the four media workers have obtained a temporary stay on the application of their sentence, their conviction still stands. Other sections of the media have failed to respond to the challenge posed by the Indian judiciary’s arrogation to itself of sky-high powers of conviction for the alleged offence of “contempt of court”.
*** In September 2007, a 24-hour news channel, India Live TV was ordered off the air for a period of one month as a penalty for airing a fake “sting” operation, implicating a school-teacher in Delhi in a non-existent prostitution racket. The case obviously warranted prosecution under legal provisions covering the offences of falsification of evidence, extortion and incitement to violence. There was also a credible case for lawful recompense to the school-teacher who suffered serious trauma and irreparable damage to her reputation. Yet the regulatory response was to pull the channel off the air for a month. There has been no explanation for either the punishment, or its duration. It has all been completely arbitrary.
*** In November 2007, a radio jockey on the Red FM channel was booked under the law for inciting communal violence and creating hatred between the Nepalese Gurkha community and others. Red FM is a channel that broadcasts to various urban markets in India. But it is not known to have a signal in Siliguri district in the state of West Bengal, where riots broke out over allegedly disparaging remarks made against the Nepalese Gurkha community. The individual concerned now faces prosecution in a West Bengal court. Red FM offended against a basic rule of ethical journalism, which is “to do no harm”. But the sanctions that the individual responsible could face, seem excessive and illogical.
A regulatory vacuum and an ethical void
What emerges from this brief catalogue of cases is that there are no accepted standards on the exercise of the free speech right in the Indian media. Neither is there a credible regulatory framework in place. More serious transgressions (than that of Red FM) and more serious abuses (than that of India Live TV), escape sanction, because they do not (for whatever reason) excite violence on the streets. This raises troubling questions about how far media freedom can be hostage to organised riot specialists.
The rapid growth of the Indian media has occurred in a regulatory vacuum. Where satellite TV is concerned, the two main instruments of regulation are the Cable TV Act of 1995 as subsequently amended and the Guidelines on Uplinking of 1999, most recently amended in December 2005.
The Cable TV act was drafted when uplinking from Indian territory was banned. Since the downlinked signals from foreign broadcasters were thought to be beyond the scope of regulatory action, the Cable TV Act laid the onus of good conduct entirely at the doorstep of the local cable TV provider. Thus, the cable operator, who is no more than a window through which broadcast signals pass, is under the Indian legal system, responsible for all content issues in satellite TV.
The uplinking guidelines were introduced in 1999, permitting entities registered in India to uplink to a broadcast satellite. These guidelines have been amended successively over the years, often as a post facto response to realities created by India’s powerful broadcast industry.
Policy tends to downgrade editorial ethics and competence
In its current version, the guidelines specify certain eligibility criteria for obtaining uplinking permission. These include stipulations on the maximum extent of foreign equity ownership (49 percent) and the minimum net-worth of the entity seeking such permission (which varies between INR 10 million and 30 million, depending on the number of channels leased by the broadcaster).
Uplinking guidelines in force do not impose any requirements in terms of competence in media operations or adherence to any set of ethical standards in journalism.
The rules in the Indian media domain have been written by the bureaucracy. And business groups have interpreted these rules according to their convenience. Journalists have not at any stage been involved in the formulation of these rules.
Journalists should get involved
Without the active involvement of media professionals in the writing of rules, the Indian media will continue to suffer the crisis of ethical standards it is going through now. Consistent with the IFJ position on ethical journalism, self-regulation should be advocated for the Indian media industry, not as “self-censorship”, but as “another manifestation of sound editorial judgment”.
To take the case of the fake sting operation by Live India TV that led to violence on the streets of Delhi and immense damage to a school-teacher’s reputation:
With all this known about the fake sting operation, a thorough dissection of the underlying issues has not been undertaken, in part because of the summary decision of the Indian government to unplug the channel for a period of one month.
The alternative would be compliance with the government diktat
Hearing a public interest petition arising from the case, the Delhi High Court on December 14, 2007, held that any channel planning to broadcast programmes involving a “sting” should be legally obliged to obtain prior permission from a government-appointed committee. It recommended that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of the Indian government should appoint a retired judge of the High Court to chair the committee, which should also comprise two others drawn from the bureaucracy.
The grounds on which the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting licences channels are unclear, since the only eligibility criteria specified deal with patterns of equity ownership and the company’s net worth (as already mentioned above).
The grounds on which the Ministry cancels permissions are still more unclear, since the only explanation offered in most cases is a failure to conform to the “broadcast content code” decreed by the Ministry.
The “content code” it must be emphasised here, is a unilateral and arbitrary imposition on the part of the Ministry. It does not represent a consensus position of the broadcast industry.
Commercial calculations do not ensure quality journalism
A recent effort to codify a content code was abandoned when the Ministry’s draft was challenged by a number of media organisations.[1] The Ministry then delegated the job of evolving an agreed position to the broadcast industry and its apex organisations.
This effort according to information available to the IFJ, is today stymied by disagreements and business rivalries between two associations of the broadcast industry: the Indian Broadcasting Federation (IBF) and the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA).
With voluntary codes of conduct and self-regulation being a distant prospect, the Indian government recently notified “monitoring committees” at the level of each state and every district, to enforce its content code. These committees are constituted overwhelmingly by bureaucrats and police personnel.[2]
Journalists cannot afford, as a professional community, to leave the job of enforcing ethical standards to either bureaucrats or business lobbies.
The Ethical Journalism Initiative in its Indian avatar, should put the issue of evolving a content code, which of course would merely be an embodied version of an ethical code, right up front and centre.
How are media rights understood in India?
The Constitution of India guarantees the right to free speech through article 19(1)(a). But the very next clause in the Constitution allows for “reasonable restrictions” on this right, on certain specified grounds.
Unlike the U.S. Constitution, where the first amendment has created a specific niche for the media, the Indian Constitution provides no such special status. As the principal author of the Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, put it, the “press” cannot be held to have any status other than that of an individual or a citizen: “The press has no special rights which are not given or which are not exercised by the citizen in his individual capacity. The editor of a press or the manager are all citizens and therefore when they choose to write in newspapers, they are merely expressing their right to freedom of speech and expression and in my judgment, therefore, no special mention is necessary of the freedom of the press at all”.
Some commentators have observed that the Indian Constitution is unmindful of the institutional needs of the media. But judicial rulings over the years have elaborated on the notion of media freedom as derivative of article 19 of the Indian Constitution, and also read the public right to information into the same constitutional provision.
In 1959, the Indian Supreme Court held that “being only a right flowing from the freedom of speech and expression, the liberty of the press in India stands on no higher footing than the freedom of speech and expression of a citizen and that no privilege attaches to the press as such, that is to say, as distinct from the freedom of the citizen”.
An ambivalent construction of media freedom
In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the “individual rights of freedom of speech of editors, directors and shareholders, are all expressed through their newspaper”. Once having equated the press to any “citizen”, the higher judiciary in India seemed now to be narrowing the right to free speech, in its application, to a very narrow category of citizens.
But then in the same judgment, the Supreme Court also said that it is “indisputable” that “by freedom of the press is meant the right of all citizens to speak, publish and express their views. The freedom of the press embodies the right of the people to read. The freedom of the press is not antithetical to the right of the people to speak and express”.
So here, India’s higher judiciary is speaking of a broader category of rights inherent in the media, which is supposed to be an institutional embodiment of the public right to free speech. In later rulings, the Supreme Court also held that the public right to information, though not explicitly a part of the Indian Constitution, has necessarily to be read into Article 19, to make of it a logically coherent provision.
The right of public access to media space and time
The right of public access to the media was dealt with in the case of Manubhai Shah versus the Life Insurance Corporation of India in 1992. Here, the Supreme Court held that the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) had no right to deny access to its journal to any citizen. Two grounds were cited for this decision: first, as a government owned corporation, LIC fell within the definition of the State and hence could not deny any citizen his or her fundamental right to free speech; and second, as a public forum, it necessarily had to be open to every citizen.
Unfortunately, the issue here involved a soft target, since publishing is not the LIC’s core business. And the Supreme Court named two criteria for upholding the public right of access to media space, without naming either as decisive. It is obvious that if the first criterion alone is decisive, i.e., being an agency of the State, then the right of public access would not apply to the media sector as a whole. If the second criterion, i.e., that of being a public forum were to be taken as the more critical one, then the media would be obliged to grant the right of public access.
The effort to regulate media monopolies
Much of the case law concerning the Indian media has arisen from the political effort to control the growth of media monopolies. A particular area of concern identified by successive policy advisory bodies since the 1950s, has been the ability of larger media houses to leverage their superior command over advertising spending, to increase circulation and drive smaller competitors out of business. In the mid-1990s, this worst case scenario became all too real, with India’s largest newspaper publisher launching price wars to capture circulation from competitors in the pivotal markets of Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.
A truce has now been called in that round of the price wars in the Indian newspaper industry. But its consequences still remain to be assessed. Among other things, it is apparent that despite the overall growth of newspaper readership in India, the degree of concentration has also increased.
Some dubious commercial practices
The competition for ad spend has also led to certain unorthodox practices in the media industry, as for example:
With all these changes underway in the media scene, journalists face multiple challenges to ensure that their profession remains socially relevant and continues to be a valuable participant in the public discourse. Cutbacks in news-room investments have depleted the ranks of the profession. Arbitrary and in most fair-minded peoples’ estimation, unlawful changes in working conditions have damaged the collective bargaining strength of the community. In this context, journalists need to step up and be counted as a voice for change in the domain of media ethics. That would be one way to reestablish the weakening links between the profession and the public interest.
[1] For the memorandum submitted by the IFJ on the draft broadcast bill and content code circulated by the Indian government in 2007 for public comments, see: http://www.ifj-asia.org/files/070906_memorandum_on_broadcast_bill.pdf.
[2] See the story at: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=2956&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=7&valid=true.
[3] The entire concept note of Medianet is available on the web at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=39286961.
[4] For a rare discussion of private treaties in the business press, see: http://www.livemint.com/2008/01/14234923/Should-private-treaties-be-mad.html; for a more critical view: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/searchdetail.php?sid=2902&bg=1.
All sectors of the media in India have grown rapidly in recent years.
Significant changes have occurred in editorial policy and commercial strategies, as traditional sectors (print and radio), have responded to competition from new media like satellite TV and the internet.
Concerns have been raised about the quantitative expansion being accompanied by a perceptible deterioration in quality. The decline in quality in turn, is ascribed to a crisis of ethical standards in journalism.
Three cases highlight the need for this conversation on ethics
Recent cases involving the media and its regulatory environment, which raise critical issues of journalistic ethics, include the following:
*** In September 2007, three journalists and the publisher of an afternoon daily in Delhi were convicted by the Delhi High Court for “contempt of court”. The court held the media workers guilty for a series of investigative articles and cartoons on the Indian Supreme Court’s orders shutting down small commercial establishments and shops in notified residential areas of Delhi. The articles were reviewed by competent legal authorities and found to be factual and accurate. Though the four media workers have obtained a temporary stay on the application of their sentence, their conviction still stands. Other sections of the media have failed to respond to the challenge posed by the Indian judiciary’s arrogation to itself of sky-high powers of conviction for the alleged offence of “contempt of court”.
*** In September 2007, a 24-hour news channel, India Live TV was ordered off the air for a period of one month as a penalty for airing a fake “sting” operation, implicating a school-teacher in Delhi in a non-existent prostitution racket. The case obviously warranted prosecution under legal provisions covering the offences of falsification of evidence, extortion and incitement to violence. There was also a credible case for lawful recompense to the school-teacher who suffered serious trauma and irreparable damage to her reputation. Yet the regulatory response was to pull the channel off the air for a month. There has been no explanation for either the punishment, or its duration. It has all been completely arbitrary.
*** In November 2007, a radio jockey on the Red FM channel was booked under the law for inciting communal violence and creating hatred between the Nepalese Gurkha community and others. Red FM is a channel that broadcasts to various urban markets in India. But it is not known to have a signal in Siliguri district in the state of West Bengal, where riots broke out over allegedly disparaging remarks made against the Nepalese Gurkha community. The individual concerned now faces prosecution in a West Bengal court. Red FM offended against a basic rule of ethical journalism, which is “to do no harm”. But the sanctions that the individual responsible could face, seem excessive and illogical.
A regulatory vacuum and an ethical void
What emerges from this brief catalogue of cases is that there are no accepted standards on the exercise of the free speech right in the Indian media. Neither is there a credible regulatory framework in place. More serious transgressions (than that of Red FM) and more serious abuses (than that of India Live TV), escape sanction, because they do not (for whatever reason) excite violence on the streets. This raises troubling questions about how far media freedom can be hostage to organised riot specialists.
The rapid growth of the Indian media has occurred in a regulatory vacuum. Where satellite TV is concerned, the two main instruments of regulation are the Cable TV Act of 1995 as subsequently amended and the Guidelines on Uplinking of 1999, most recently amended in December 2005.
The Cable TV act was drafted when uplinking from Indian territory was banned. Since the downlinked signals from foreign broadcasters were thought to be beyond the scope of regulatory action, the Cable TV Act laid the onus of good conduct entirely at the doorstep of the local cable TV provider. Thus, the cable operator, who is no more than a window through which broadcast signals pass, is under the Indian legal system, responsible for all content issues in satellite TV.
The uplinking guidelines were introduced in 1999, permitting entities registered in India to uplink to a broadcast satellite. These guidelines have been amended successively over the years, often as a post facto response to realities created by India’s powerful broadcast industry.
Policy tends to downgrade editorial ethics and competence
In its current version, the guidelines specify certain eligibility criteria for obtaining uplinking permission. These include stipulations on the maximum extent of foreign equity ownership (49 percent) and the minimum net-worth of the entity seeking such permission (which varies between INR 10 million and 30 million, depending on the number of channels leased by the broadcaster).
Uplinking guidelines in force do not impose any requirements in terms of competence in media operations or adherence to any set of ethical standards in journalism.
The rules in the Indian media domain have been written by the bureaucracy. And business groups have interpreted these rules according to their convenience. Journalists have not at any stage been involved in the formulation of these rules.
Journalists should get involved
Without the active involvement of media professionals in the writing of rules, the Indian media will continue to suffer the crisis of ethical standards it is going through now. Consistent with the IFJ position on ethical journalism, self-regulation should be advocated for the Indian media industry, not as “self-censorship”, but as “another manifestation of sound editorial judgment”.
To take the case of the fake sting operation by Live India TV that led to violence on the streets of Delhi and immense damage to a school-teacher’s reputation:
this was a case of non-existent editorial processes;
the story involved had
been produced two months prior to its telecast and been rejected by at least one
news channel;
the individual who had produced the story then did some channel
shopping, to find a broadcaster who would telecast his story;
this was done
by India Live TV, which was fully aware of the background to the story and yet
went ahead with its telecast;
With all this known about the fake sting operation, a thorough dissection of the underlying issues has not been undertaken, in part because of the summary decision of the Indian government to unplug the channel for a period of one month.
The alternative would be compliance with the government diktat
Hearing a public interest petition arising from the case, the Delhi High Court on December 14, 2007, held that any channel planning to broadcast programmes involving a “sting” should be legally obliged to obtain prior permission from a government-appointed committee. It recommended that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of the Indian government should appoint a retired judge of the High Court to chair the committee, which should also comprise two others drawn from the bureaucracy.
The grounds on which the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting licences channels are unclear, since the only eligibility criteria specified deal with patterns of equity ownership and the company’s net worth (as already mentioned above).
The grounds on which the Ministry cancels permissions are still more unclear, since the only explanation offered in most cases is a failure to conform to the “broadcast content code” decreed by the Ministry.
The “content code” it must be emphasised here, is a unilateral and arbitrary imposition on the part of the Ministry. It does not represent a consensus position of the broadcast industry.
Commercial calculations do not ensure quality journalism
A recent effort to codify a content code was abandoned when the Ministry’s draft was challenged by a number of media organisations.[1] The Ministry then delegated the job of evolving an agreed position to the broadcast industry and its apex organisations.
This effort according to information available to the IFJ, is today stymied by disagreements and business rivalries between two associations of the broadcast industry: the Indian Broadcasting Federation (IBF) and the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA).
With voluntary codes of conduct and self-regulation being a distant prospect, the Indian government recently notified “monitoring committees” at the level of each state and every district, to enforce its content code. These committees are constituted overwhelmingly by bureaucrats and police personnel.[2]
Journalists cannot afford, as a professional community, to leave the job of enforcing ethical standards to either bureaucrats or business lobbies.
The Ethical Journalism Initiative in its Indian avatar, should put the issue of evolving a content code, which of course would merely be an embodied version of an ethical code, right up front and centre.
How are media rights understood in India?
The Constitution of India guarantees the right to free speech through article 19(1)(a). But the very next clause in the Constitution allows for “reasonable restrictions” on this right, on certain specified grounds.
Unlike the U.S. Constitution, where the first amendment has created a specific niche for the media, the Indian Constitution provides no such special status. As the principal author of the Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, put it, the “press” cannot be held to have any status other than that of an individual or a citizen: “The press has no special rights which are not given or which are not exercised by the citizen in his individual capacity. The editor of a press or the manager are all citizens and therefore when they choose to write in newspapers, they are merely expressing their right to freedom of speech and expression and in my judgment, therefore, no special mention is necessary of the freedom of the press at all”.
Some commentators have observed that the Indian Constitution is unmindful of the institutional needs of the media. But judicial rulings over the years have elaborated on the notion of media freedom as derivative of article 19 of the Indian Constitution, and also read the public right to information into the same constitutional provision.
In 1959, the Indian Supreme Court held that “being only a right flowing from the freedom of speech and expression, the liberty of the press in India stands on no higher footing than the freedom of speech and expression of a citizen and that no privilege attaches to the press as such, that is to say, as distinct from the freedom of the citizen”.
An ambivalent construction of media freedom
In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the “individual rights of freedom of speech of editors, directors and shareholders, are all expressed through their newspaper”. Once having equated the press to any “citizen”, the higher judiciary in India seemed now to be narrowing the right to free speech, in its application, to a very narrow category of citizens.
But then in the same judgment, the Supreme Court also said that it is “indisputable” that “by freedom of the press is meant the right of all citizens to speak, publish and express their views. The freedom of the press embodies the right of the people to read. The freedom of the press is not antithetical to the right of the people to speak and express”.
So here, India’s higher judiciary is speaking of a broader category of rights inherent in the media, which is supposed to be an institutional embodiment of the public right to free speech. In later rulings, the Supreme Court also held that the public right to information, though not explicitly a part of the Indian Constitution, has necessarily to be read into Article 19, to make of it a logically coherent provision.
The right of public access to media space and time
The right of public access to the media was dealt with in the case of Manubhai Shah versus the Life Insurance Corporation of India in 1992. Here, the Supreme Court held that the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) had no right to deny access to its journal to any citizen. Two grounds were cited for this decision: first, as a government owned corporation, LIC fell within the definition of the State and hence could not deny any citizen his or her fundamental right to free speech; and second, as a public forum, it necessarily had to be open to every citizen.
Unfortunately, the issue here involved a soft target, since publishing is not the LIC’s core business. And the Supreme Court named two criteria for upholding the public right of access to media space, without naming either as decisive. It is obvious that if the first criterion alone is decisive, i.e., being an agency of the State, then the right of public access would not apply to the media sector as a whole. If the second criterion, i.e., that of being a public forum were to be taken as the more critical one, then the media would be obliged to grant the right of public access.
The effort to regulate media monopolies
Much of the case law concerning the Indian media has arisen from the political effort to control the growth of media monopolies. A particular area of concern identified by successive policy advisory bodies since the 1950s, has been the ability of larger media houses to leverage their superior command over advertising spending, to increase circulation and drive smaller competitors out of business. In the mid-1990s, this worst case scenario became all too real, with India’s largest newspaper publisher launching price wars to capture circulation from competitors in the pivotal markets of Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.
A truce has now been called in that round of the price wars in the Indian newspaper industry. But its consequences still remain to be assessed. Among other things, it is apparent that despite the overall growth of newspaper readership in India, the degree of concentration has also increased.
Some dubious commercial practices
The competition for ad spend has also led to certain unorthodox practices in the media industry, as for example:
In March 2003, India’s largest newspaper group announced a new initiative that
was professedly a part of its effort to stay current with journalistic practices
in rapidly changing times. The “Medianet” initiative as it was called, was in
the words of the newspaper management, part of an effort to overcome the
deficiencies of traditional news-gathering techniques, especially in new areas
of audience interest – such as “lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, events,
product launches, social personalities and city happenings”. Public relations
agencies had a sensitive feel of the social pulse in these areas, and journalism
had recognised this reality. Yet no feasible method of regulating the flow of
news from this source had been devised. Medianet involved the payment of a fee
for coverage in the newspaper columns. The newspaper management initially
committed itself to clearly identifying every story published under the
“Medianet” initiative.[3] But media analysts have concluded that after a few weeks,
the practice of identifying each story that was paid for, seemed to lapse.
Media houses are now known to conclude “private treaties” under
which they acquire an equity stake in particular companies, which they pay for
through ad support. This assistance in “brand building” and “corporate image
development” is more than paid for since the companies that attract the media
houses’ interest invariably happen to be entities that are on the verge of being
listed on the stock exchanges. Since shares in most companies are known to
appreciate wildly from the day they are listed, media houses have ample
opportunities to cash in on the capital gains windfall that invariably come
their way. There has been little public questioning of the conflict of interest
issues involved in this practice, which an increasing number of media houses in
both the print and broadcast domains, have been resorting to.[4] With fortunes being made and lost on India’s stock
exchanges and investor decisions being critically dependent on media coverage,
there is ample reason to put the practice of “private treaties” under the
scanner from an ethical point of view.
With all these changes underway in the media scene, journalists face multiple challenges to ensure that their profession remains socially relevant and continues to be a valuable participant in the public discourse. Cutbacks in news-room investments have depleted the ranks of the profession. Arbitrary and in most fair-minded peoples’ estimation, unlawful changes in working conditions have damaged the collective bargaining strength of the community. In this context, journalists need to step up and be counted as a voice for change in the domain of media ethics. That would be one way to reestablish the weakening links between the profession and the public interest.
[1] For the memorandum submitted by the IFJ on the draft broadcast bill and content code circulated by the Indian government in 2007 for public comments, see: http://www.ifj-asia.org/files/070906_memorandum_on_broadcast_bill.pdf.
[2] See the story at: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=2956&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=7&valid=true.
[3] The entire concept note of Medianet is available on the web at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=39286961.
[4] For a rare discussion of private treaties in the business press, see: http://www.livemint.com/2008/01/14234923/Should-private-treaties-be-mad.html; for a more critical view: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/searchdetail.php?sid=2902&bg=1.
On media coverage of the India-U.S. nuclear deal and the Nandigram violence
Before I come to the specific questions on these themes, which were put to me by a student doing a college dissertation, let me try to sketch out the broader context. Nuclear energy is at the current time, a contributor to the extent of less than 5 percent to India’s total electricity needs. Nuclear weapons are likely to remain forever, an inert part of the Indian arsenal, since no government is ever going to use them.
In the mid-1980s, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) forecast that it would have 10,000 megawatts of operational electricity generation capacity in place by the year 2000. Its achievement so far has been a mere 4,120 megawatts.
In the 1950s, the DAE drew up a three-stage plan for nuclear energy production in India: from a first stage of natural uranium fuelled reactors, to a second stage using plutonium as primary fuel, and then a third stage of thorium fuelled generation. It was implicitly argued that India had sufficient natural uranium resources to start and sustain this entire cycle of nuclear energy. It was only when the mid-term appraisal of the Tenth Five-Year Plan was published in 2005 that the DAE went public with an admission that India faced a critical shortage of natural uranium.
The DAE has been less than candid and transparent with the Indian public about the prospects for nuclear energy in the country and about its own performance. There are sufficient grounds to be sceptical about the new-found enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a viable alternative to the problems, such as global warming, posed by the carbon fuel-cycle. We have yet no credible and reliable long-term methods of dealing with the various problems posed by the nuclear fuel cycle: such as radioactive waste disposal and the decommissioning of defunct nuclear reactors.
So to set the context for my answers to the specific queries on the India-USA nuclear deal: we are essentially talking here about a deal that involves weapons that will never be used and an energy source that may not amount to much, in even the best of circumstances. Why then was so much energy expended in the coverage of the nuclear issue? I think the answer is in two parts:
First, we have not yet got out of the habits of thinking of the 1950s, which saw a country’s nuclear sector as emblematic of its national pride and technological prowess.
Second, the nuclear deal became a symbol of a new relationship between India and the “sole superpower”. After decades of mutual estrangement, this was a measure of a new cordiality and a new intent to work together for common interests and shared values. More than the tangible benefits that the deal promised, what was perhaps more important were the intangible gains expected to accrue from the official recognition by the U.S. that India merited a special status in the world.
Now to the specific questions
1. What do you think of the way in which the Left has been covered with respect to the Indo-US nuclear deal? Has the coverage been well-balanced? Did it both answer and raise questions?
I think the media created a phoney crisis in the expectation that the Left parties would either buckle under the pressure or quit the United Progressive Alliance. This would have in the estimation of the media pundits, opened the way for a mid-term election in which the Left strength would have been thoroughly marginalised. Alternatively, there was also an expectation that a “coalition of the willing” would emerge out of the wreckage of the UPA, which would be more favourably disposed towards the new strategic relationship with the U.S.
The whole procedure seemed to bear all the hallmarks of a carefully stage-managed affair. First, with the Left parties yet to take a formal position on the nuclear deal, the Prime Minister gave an interview to a journalist known to have close links with the Left, in which he spelt out his ultimatum: the Left could either like it or lump it. The following day (August 12, 2007), the Indian Express, which is among the most breathless propagandists for the new strategic relationship with the U.S., ran a front page story by its editor-in-chief, which was a virtual declaration of war against the Left, with a headline that read: “Will the bully now do what bullies usually do when their bluff is called?”
The coverage was anything but well-balanced. An editorial in the Economic Times on August 16 had this to say about the Left parties: they “inhabit a fantasy world in which India should line up alongside Venezuela, Iran’s Holocaust denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas and Hizbollah, as part of a world-wide global ‘resistance’ to ‘imperialism’.”
The strident tone of this editorial and its vocabulary make it virtually indistinguishable from the media organs of the U.S. neo-conservative lobbies, such as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review and the Weekly Standard. And it must be remembered here that these are precisely those media organisations that lied and misled the U.S. into the continuing catastrophe of the invasion of Iraq. There is indeed, a growing popular backlash against these media organisations in the U.S. today.
The coverage did not raise the crucial questions of what is the real benefit in tangible terms, to India from the nuclear deal. The key question of whether India needed a nuclear arsenal also was evaded. The patriotism and the sense of nationalist commitment of the Left parties was repeatedly impugned, which is the lowest kind of editorial strategy that any media organisation can adopt.
2. What do you think is the reason behind the unanimous support of the Indo-US nuclear deal by almost all sections of the media?
There is a numbing consensus within the Indian media today, that strategic engagement with the U.S. holds the key to India’s emergence on the world stage as a major power. This is a reading that is completely at variance with reality. The U.S. economy today is highly vulnerable. It is deeply in debt and there is no sector within it that is not suffering some degree of debt-induced distress: whether the government sector (federal, state and local tiers); the corporate sector or the household sector. Militarily, the U.S. is stuck irredeemably in the quagmire of Iraq, which is despite all the illusory gains of recent months, a no-win situation and is only likely ultimately, to work to the long-term strategic advantage of Iran. The Indian media seems oblivious to the fact that the country’s fastest growing partners in international trade today are in the east – notably China and its neighbours. And in terms of strategic questions, the best tack for India to take would be to engage with its neighbours in a spirit of realistic give-and-take, without becoming the proxy for a fading superpower’s imperial games.
3. Why is it that most of the newspapers ran a campaign in favour of the nuclear deal rather than a debate on it?
For reasons dealt with above. I think the CPI(M) General Secretary, in his first piece on the subject in the mainstream media, said in so many words that he was opposed to the nuclear deal because it involved accepting U.S. tutelage on issues of serious strategic consequence for India. It was not so much the specifics of the deal that was the issue. Yet the media chose to not engage with this question, but to bury the central questions under a barrage of invective. There probably is a consensus among English-speaking Indians and the relatively more affluent sections that this sector of the media caters to, over the advisability of a strategic engagement with the U.S. These are the same sections of the media that floated the beguiling slogan of a “shining India” in 2003-04 and simply refused to learn the lessons from the drubbing that the BJP received in the 2004 general elections.
4. The Hindu claimed to endorse the Indo-US nuclear deal. However, unlike The Times of India or the Indian Express, it did not have any editorials, articles and Op-Eds which were fiercely in support of the deal. Neither did it cover the Left in a negative manner for opposing the deal. Is it because of the so-called “leftist” tilt that The Hindu is known for?
The Hindu has always prided itself on its superior understanding of the technical issues involved in the nuclear domain. It has also been traditionally, less inclined to the kind of extremist rhetoric that other sections of the media adopted. Having said that, I think The Hindu has often been all too uncritical of the DAE’s performance in vital respects.
5. On 6 Aug 2007, The Hindu published an editorial saying that it endorses the deal. Later, another editorial was published on 20 Aug 2007 which said that the deal should be put on hold. On 22 Aug 2007, Editor-in-Chief N. Ram wrote a piece on the Op-Ed page saying that the two positions are not contradictory. Why did The Hindu change its editorial stance after the CPM became vocal in its opposition of the deal? Also, the absence of editorials on the n-deal issue from then on, is it indicative of some kind of dilemma?
I have not followed the finer print in these editorials or articles. But my impression is that there is no necessary contradiction between these positions. Firstly, the August 6 editorial dealt with the nuclear deal alone and its implications for India’s energy and strategic programs. It was very much a “narrow scope” exercise which purported to see in the deal, significant benefits to the energy program and no significant damage to the strategic component. Once the Left made its objections clear, it became evident that there was no political consensus over the issue. So the democratic course in such circumstances would have been to open a dialogue on the various ramifications of the deal with all elected representatives and try to dispel whatever misgivings they may have had. So The Hindu’s second editorial, arguing that the deal be put on hold and be thoroughly reviewed so that a consensus could be built up on its utility, was, I think, respectful of the course that a democratic polity should adopt in a matter of serious national importance.
6. What is your opinion of the coverage of the Left in the various newspapers with respect to Nandigram? Was it objective?
Without in anyway condoning what the CPI(M) cadres did in Nandigram, let me remind you that this was one among many instances of so-called “development” being imposed at gunpoint. For instance in December 2000, the police opened fire in Maikanch village in Rayagada district of Orissa, inflicting 12 deaths and several more injuries, in a corporate effort to take over mineral-rich land that happened inconveniently, to be occupied by tribal communities that insisted on retaining ownership. And then, the Kalinganagar firing in Jajpur district in January 2006, in which an equal number, if not more, were killed, again involved the reluctance of tribal communities to cede control over their land at the derisory rates of compensation decreed by the Orissa state government. Then there was the Kahalgaon firing a few weeks back in Bhagalpur district of Bihar, in which five people were killed. Kahalgaon happens to be the location of one of the country’s largest thermal power plants, and the people of that town hardly get any electricity! So this was a police firing against citizens of the town who were protesting against this patent inequity.
Ranked on a scale with all these other atrocities, Nandigram was no greater or lesser. So it is a little difficult to understand why the media was so obsessed with Nandigram and so little bothered with Maikanch or Kalinganagar or Kahalgaon. Look up the newspaper files from the relevant periods and check out how much of a moral fervour the media managed to work itself into over these incidents.
The unstated agenda was clearly to cause maximum embarrassment to the CPI(M). And in this the media succeeded.
7. While the Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times blamed the CPI(M) for the November violence in Nandigram . The Hindu, on the other hand refrained from putting direct blame on the CPI(M). In such a case, how would the reader know what the reality is?
It is an open secret that some of the individuals who man the top editorial management positions in The Hindu have had close links with the CPI(M), both formally and informally. This applies especially, to the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper who was at college with the incumbent general secretary of the CPI(M) and has maintained a close friendship with him since.
The reader of course would have ample reason to be dissatisfied with the coverage he is getting, from both sections of the media – both the over-the-top hysteria of the Indian Express and the over-protective approach of The Hindu. What remedies does he or she have? I think the Readers’ Editor in The Hindu confronted a spate of complaints about the quality of the coverage of Nandigram in the paper and wrote an entire column on it. His final conclusions, published in the issue of the paper dated December 19, 2007 are as follows:
There was balance in the coverage to the extent that protesting voices against what was “happening” in Nandigram got adequate representation. But what was really happening? The reader was left to guess. The Home Secretary said it was a “war zone”; Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya described what had happened in Nandigram as legal and justified and added, “we have paid back in their own coin.” These widely reported (but not in The Hindu) remarks indicated something serious had happened and it needed to be justified. Obviously it was not Maoists and Trinamool alone, who were responsible for the situation and the published reports did not make things clear.
The reporting in The Hindu was selective. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s comment on the situation (while on his way to Kuala Lumpur) did not find a place and this had to be inferred from the Chief Minister’s reaction to it. Similarly, the Chief Minister’s “paid back” remark found mention only when there were reactions to it.
The unprecedented public protest in Kolkata was well covered, but one was left wondering what was the “situation” in Nandigram against which the intellectuals and artists were protesting. As a newsman, my first priority would have been spot coverage. That media persons were denied
access to the “war zone” was unknown to The Hindu readers. The first Nandigram-datelined report, from Antara Das, appeared much after things had quietened down in the area. Nandigram did not get the detailed analysis that an explosion in tiny faraway Maldives got at the same time.
8. Also, The Hindu did try to downplay CPI(M)’s role in the Nandigram violence. Why?
For reasons dealt with above. I think the answer to the last question addresses this issue adequately.
In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to state that I was an employee of The Hindu group between December 1991 and August 2004.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Inclusive growth is no mere slogan
But can agriculture contribute a new growth momentum to the economy?
Early commentary on the budget 2008-09 has focused almost entirely on a single parameter: the aggregate level of economic growth. Missing in all the punditry has been a serious effort to engage with the sources of growth in the Indian economy.
Evidently, the recent growth dynamic has had little to do with agriculture. As the Economic Survey just preceding the budget pointed out, growth in the agricultural sector, despite favourable environmental parameters, is expected to be a disappointing 2.6 percent this year.
This would, the Survey continues, “be translated into a lower overall GDP (gross domestic product) growth”.
What the Survey does not attend to though, is the nature of the relationship between agricultural growth and overall GDP. It is no mere arithmetical relationship. And the untold story of India’s growth experience over the last decade or so, has been that it has almost entirely excluded agriculture.
As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations.
With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition.
The two worst decades over the last quarter-century in terms of weather conditions have been 1987 and 2002. In 1987-88 when agricultural GDP fell by 1.39 percent, overall growth clocked in at 3.8 per cent. In 2002-03, the impact of adverse weather on agriculture was even more catastrophic, with GDP in the sector falling by 5.99 per cent. Yet overall GDP registered a growth of almost 4 percent.
The transformations of the last decade-and-a-half have meant that agriculture, despite being the sector that hosts by far the majority of the Indian population, is of less consequence for the economy than ever before. Indeed, much of the growth over this period has been driven by the revolution of rising aspirations of the great Indian middle class.
This is a story that emerges clearly in the rapid diversification of consumption patterns. Food clothing and shelter, the traditional core of the consumption basket, now comprise a much smaller proportion of aggregate private final consumption expenditure than it did in 1990-91.
To take merely food: from almost half the aggregate consumption expenditure in the Indian economy in 1990-91, it today accounts for well under 40 percent.
Yet this is a story that has stubbornly failed to reproduce itself in the rural sector. As a 2003 survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) found, the average monthly per capita expenditure of farmer households was Rs 503, just moderately above the rural poverty line of Rs 349 (itself a rather modest indicator). And of the total consumption expenditure, over 55 percent went into food.
Clearly, the flagging growth momentum in agriculture has meant much more than an arithmetical failure to contribute to overall GDP growth. It has meant that the vast majority of the working population in the country has been unable to participate in the growth story, because their purchasing power has been under severe pressure.
Various strategies have been advanced over time as possible antidotes to the persistent malaise of Indian agriculture.
Virtually all are agreed that investment in agriculture, which has fallen off rapidly over the years and only shown some hesitant signs of recovery in recent times, needs to be stepped up.
Others argue that the subsidies given to agriculture in the terms of cheap fertiliser and assured output prices, should be redeployed as productive investment.
There have been increasingly urgent efforts along both these dimensions in recent times. Yet it is uncertain how successful these administratively complicated and politically difficult operations have been.
Under pressure to do something, the Finance Minister has, unsurprisingly in the light of the political pressures of the imminent electoral contests, opted for a large-scale write-off of agricultural debt.
By all indices, the crisis of indebtedness in agriculture is acute. Two surveys conducted by the NSSO in 2003 have shown that of the 89 million farm households in the country, 43 million are indebted to some or the other degree. Indebtedness is extremely high in states with well-developed agricultural practices, such as Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra and Tamilnadu; as also in Kerala, with its large plantation sector.
Significantly, over 42 percent of the total debt of the agricultural sector was owed to non-institutional sources such as the local village money-lender or trader. This represents a significant backward movement for the agriculture sector, which was dependent to a relatively minor degree of 30 percent on non-institutional credit sources in the early-1990s.
Evidently, Chidambaram’s loan write-off fails to address the huge problem of the non-institutional debt of the farm sector. But in alleviating debt-induced distress at least to some extent, it may generate additional purchasing power in the farm sector, which could conceivably, impart a growth momentum to the economy.
“Inclusive growth” is no mere slogan. It is perhaps a survival imperative for the Indian economy, with the growth impulse driven by the “great Indian middle class” over the last few years now flagging. Chidambaram’s seeming populism perhaps disguises certain hard-headed calculations of economic pragmatism.
Where the fiscal resources for the loan write-off will be found is of course, another question. But if the improvement that Chidambaram claims on the fiscal front is real – rather than the illusory consequence of cleverly hiving off much of the expenditure burden to public sector corporations – then the additional burden should not be insupportable.
Early commentary on the budget 2008-09 has focused almost entirely on a single parameter: the aggregate level of economic growth. Missing in all the punditry has been a serious effort to engage with the sources of growth in the Indian economy.
Evidently, the recent growth dynamic has had little to do with agriculture. As the Economic Survey just preceding the budget pointed out, growth in the agricultural sector, despite favourable environmental parameters, is expected to be a disappointing 2.6 percent this year.
This would, the Survey continues, “be translated into a lower overall GDP (gross domestic product) growth”.
What the Survey does not attend to though, is the nature of the relationship between agricultural growth and overall GDP. It is no mere arithmetical relationship. And the untold story of India’s growth experience over the last decade or so, has been that it has almost entirely excluded agriculture.
As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations.
With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition.
The two worst decades over the last quarter-century in terms of weather conditions have been 1987 and 2002. In 1987-88 when agricultural GDP fell by 1.39 percent, overall growth clocked in at 3.8 per cent. In 2002-03, the impact of adverse weather on agriculture was even more catastrophic, with GDP in the sector falling by 5.99 per cent. Yet overall GDP registered a growth of almost 4 percent.
The transformations of the last decade-and-a-half have meant that agriculture, despite being the sector that hosts by far the majority of the Indian population, is of less consequence for the economy than ever before. Indeed, much of the growth over this period has been driven by the revolution of rising aspirations of the great Indian middle class.
This is a story that emerges clearly in the rapid diversification of consumption patterns. Food clothing and shelter, the traditional core of the consumption basket, now comprise a much smaller proportion of aggregate private final consumption expenditure than it did in 1990-91.
To take merely food: from almost half the aggregate consumption expenditure in the Indian economy in 1990-91, it today accounts for well under 40 percent.
Yet this is a story that has stubbornly failed to reproduce itself in the rural sector. As a 2003 survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) found, the average monthly per capita expenditure of farmer households was Rs 503, just moderately above the rural poverty line of Rs 349 (itself a rather modest indicator). And of the total consumption expenditure, over 55 percent went into food.
Clearly, the flagging growth momentum in agriculture has meant much more than an arithmetical failure to contribute to overall GDP growth. It has meant that the vast majority of the working population in the country has been unable to participate in the growth story, because their purchasing power has been under severe pressure.
Various strategies have been advanced over time as possible antidotes to the persistent malaise of Indian agriculture.
Virtually all are agreed that investment in agriculture, which has fallen off rapidly over the years and only shown some hesitant signs of recovery in recent times, needs to be stepped up.
Others argue that the subsidies given to agriculture in the terms of cheap fertiliser and assured output prices, should be redeployed as productive investment.
There have been increasingly urgent efforts along both these dimensions in recent times. Yet it is uncertain how successful these administratively complicated and politically difficult operations have been.
Under pressure to do something, the Finance Minister has, unsurprisingly in the light of the political pressures of the imminent electoral contests, opted for a large-scale write-off of agricultural debt.
By all indices, the crisis of indebtedness in agriculture is acute. Two surveys conducted by the NSSO in 2003 have shown that of the 89 million farm households in the country, 43 million are indebted to some or the other degree. Indebtedness is extremely high in states with well-developed agricultural practices, such as Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra and Tamilnadu; as also in Kerala, with its large plantation sector.
Significantly, over 42 percent of the total debt of the agricultural sector was owed to non-institutional sources such as the local village money-lender or trader. This represents a significant backward movement for the agriculture sector, which was dependent to a relatively minor degree of 30 percent on non-institutional credit sources in the early-1990s.
Evidently, Chidambaram’s loan write-off fails to address the huge problem of the non-institutional debt of the farm sector. But in alleviating debt-induced distress at least to some extent, it may generate additional purchasing power in the farm sector, which could conceivably, impart a growth momentum to the economy.
“Inclusive growth” is no mere slogan. It is perhaps a survival imperative for the Indian economy, with the growth impulse driven by the “great Indian middle class” over the last few years now flagging. Chidambaram’s seeming populism perhaps disguises certain hard-headed calculations of economic pragmatism.
Where the fiscal resources for the loan write-off will be found is of course, another question. But if the improvement that Chidambaram claims on the fiscal front is real – rather than the illusory consequence of cleverly hiving off much of the expenditure burden to public sector corporations – then the additional burden should not be insupportable.
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