Corbyn has faced consistent criticism from within his party for his “ineffective” performance in the “Remain” campaign.
Corbyn has faced consistent criticism from within his party for his “ineffective” performance in the “Remain” campaign.
Britain’s opposition leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn with shadow defence secretary Angela Eagle as she leaves stage at the annual Labour Party Conference in Brighton, southern Britain. Credit: Reuters/Luke MacGregor/Files
London: Britain’s main opposition Labour Party headed for a leadership battle, mirroring a fight for control of the ruling Conservative Party, after the decision by voters to leave the EU last week led to upheaval in Westminster.
Angela Eagle, a senior Labour lawmaker, will announce on June 30 that she will challenge leader Jeremy Corbyn who has been facing a growing revolt within the party, media reports said on June 29.
Eagle, a former pensions minister, quit as Labour’s top business official on June 28, one of more than 20 people to resign from Corbyn’s opposition policy team.
Among the Conservatives, a leadership battle is already underway after Prime Minister David Cameron responded to his stinging defeat in last week’s EU referendum by announcing he would resign.
A former defence minister, Liam Fox, said he would announce his bid to succeed Cameron on June 30, when Boris Johnson, a leader of the victorious “Leave” campaign in the EU referendum, is also expected to confirm his challenge.
Johnson’s main rival to run the Conservatives and take over as prime minister is likely to be Theresa May, Britain’s interior minister, who was on the “Remain” team.
An opinion poll, by polling firm YouGov for The Times newspaper, showed May would have the support of 55% of Conservative Party members, ahead of 38% for Johnson, if the two of them made it to a final shortlist of two candidates.
May launched a barely disguised attack on Johnson in a column in the The Times newspaper, portraying herself as representative of ordinary Britons, and more understanding of their lives, than her rival who went to Britain’s most elite school Eton.
“Frankly, not everybody in Westminster understands what it’s like to live like this. And some need to be told that what the government does isn’t a game,” she wrote.
Work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb has already announced his candidacy.
Both of Britain’s biggest parties have been left reeling by the EU referendum, creating a political vacuum just as financial markets have been hammered by uncertainty about leaving the bloc and fears grow of economic recession.
Many Labour MPs are angry at Corbyn for what they see as his lacklustre performance in the “Remain” campaign.
“Existential crisis”
Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson said the party, which cruised to three back-to-back election victories under former leader Tony Blair between 1997 and 2010, risked an “existential crisis” as Corbyn refused to bow to pressure to resign.
Corbyn, a veteran hard-left Labour lawmaker, is unpopular with many Labour MPs, who passed a motion of no confidence in him this week.
But he commands strong support among party activists who helped him to take over in 2015, raising the prospect of a continued stalemate within Labour over his leadership.
Cameron said on June 29, it was bad for the country to have a weak opposition party. “For heaven’s sake, man, go,” he told Corbyn in parliament.
Corbyn won control of Labour with the help of trade unions after the party lost a national election last year.
In a joint statement on June 29, the leaders of 10 big unions said the crisis within Labour at Westminster was “deeply regrettable and unnecessary” but stopped short of saying Corbyn’s grip on the party should not be disputed.
“His position cannot and should not be challenged except through the proper democratic procedures provided for in the Party’s constitution,” the statement said. “We urge all Labour MPs to abide by those procedures, and to respect the authority of the Party’s leader.”
The discovery is the latest thing to unnerve the city as it grapples with rising crime, a recession and exhausted state finances.
Children walk near a part of a mutilated body near the construction site of the beach volleyball venue for the 2016 Rio Olympics on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Credit: Reuters/Sergio Moraes
Rio de Janeiro: Parts of a mutilated body washed up on the sands of Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on June 29, police said, just metres from where beach volleyball athletes will compete in the upcoming Olympics.
The discovery, first reported to a newspaper by a Rio street vendor, is the latest to unnerve the city as it grapples with rising crime, a recession and exhausted state finances at a time when it hoped to be celebrating the first Olympics ever held in South America.
It was unclear on June 29 afternoon what conditions may have led to the mutilated body, but a policeman standing guard by a security perimeter confirmed its existence to Reuters.
Police officials did not immediately return calls to their public affairs office for more details.
The Olympics, which start August 5, were intended to show off an economic boom that has since fizzled in Latin America’s biggest country. Now the games come as the state of Rio de Janeiro awaits emergency funding of 2.9 billion reais ($892 million) to ensure financing for public services.
The Olympics also will play out with a backdrop of political instability as Brazil’s Senate tries suspended President Dilma Rousseff, who is accused of accounting tricks in the government budget, to determine whether she will be ousted for good. The trial is expected to finish after the games.
The state in recent months, even as it races to complete a new subway line and other key pieces of infrastructure promised for the Olympics, has missed crucial debt payments and has been forced to postpone purchasing and salary payments for everyone from public health workers to police.
Rio‘s acting governor, Francisco Dornelles, earlier this month declared a financial emergency in the state because of budget shortfalls caused by a recession, plummeting oil revenues and a run-up in public expenditures in recent years.
He has fretted publicly that the Olympics could be “a big failure” if financing does not come through, but Brazil’s federal government has said that it will.
Earlier this week, police and firemen demonstrated at Rio‘s international airport, protesting their missed wages and greeting arriving passengers with a sign reading “Welcome to Hell”.
Pakistan must introspect about why jihadism thrives on its soil. The first step to rectifying its addiction to jihadism would be to recognise that it is hooked on a dreadful habit.
Pakistan must introspect about why jihadism thrives on its soil. The first step to rectifying its addiction to jihadism would be to recognise that it is hooked on a dreadful habit.
Credit: Reuters
The elimination of Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a US drone attack inside Pakistan last month has once again raised questions about Pakistan’s nexus with, and seriousness to eliminate, jihadist groups on its soil. Instead of serious introspection about why an Afghan jihadist was found inside Pakistan and apparently carrying that country’s passport, the Pakistani civilian and military leadership has opted to respond by blaming the world for not doing enough to help Pakistan fight terrorism. A senior advisor to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called the US a ‘selfish friend’. Faced with increasing diplomatic isolation within the region and on the world stage, the Pakistani leadership, instead of taking stock of its own disastrous policies, went on to blame even those Pakistanis who have consistently warned against using jihadism as tool of foreign policy and national security.
The Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations, General Asim Saleem Bajwa, recently told the Deutsche Welle’s Urdu service that “The world had abandoned Pakistanto handle and face the terrorists in the region alone, and Pakistan has completed the task”. The Pakistani military spokesperson’s allegation could not be farther from the truth. The direct overt US aid appropriations for and military reimbursements to Pakistan between fiscal years 2002-2016 have been about $7.9 billion while the coalition support fund disbursements were a little over $14 billion. Additionally, US civilian economic assistance to Pakistan was at least $11.1 billion. Pumping over $33 billion into Pakistan’s coffers along with granting access to state-of-the-art military hardware is not exactly abandoning a country, which is in a mess of entirely its own making. While Pakistan’s leaders portray its terrorism problem as an aftermath of the campaign against the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, the fact is that the country’s love affair with jihadism and proxy warfare started right at its inception and has continued uninterrupted since.
A history of backing jihadist activities
Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, presided over the 1947-48 incursion into Kashmir by the tribal jihadists and ex-servicemen. Military historian Shuja Nawaz has noted that one of the planners of the jihadist invasion, Colonel (later general) Akbar Khan, even adopted “the nom de guerre General Tariq, after Tariq bin Ziad, the legendary Berber Muslim invader of Spain after whom Gibraltar is named”. Pakistan’s fascination with jihadism continued and in 1965 the military conceived another plan, dubbed Operation Gibraltar, to foment an uprising in Kashmir, ostensibly to jumpstart a “freedom” struggle. The botched operation led to an all out war with India but the use of assorted jihadist proxies, many of whom have been proclaimed terrorist organisations and sanctioned by the UN, against India continues to date. India-oriented jihadists parading the streets of major Pakistani cities, including in the federal capital, is a common sight.
On its western frontier, Pakistan started its jihadist manoeuvring by hosting Afghan extremists as early as 1974, ostensibly to counter the Afghan support for the secular Pashtun nationalist-separatist movement in Pakistan, when there was no Soviet Union or the US presence in Afghanistan. The founder of the Haqqani Network, Jalaluddin, set up his jihadist shop in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region around 1975 and by 1980 he was running a jihadist seminary there. These same jihadists were enlisted to fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, an effort in which Pakistan did receive support from the US and Saudi Arabia. But while the US and others backed off, Pakistan never did stop backing and using these jihadists to project its hegemonic designs on Afghanistan even after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Pakistan not only played a major part in the rise of the Afghan Taliban in 1996 but also became the first of only three countries in the world to recognise its brutal regime. Many of the Taliban cadres and leaders, including its chief Mullah Omar, had been educated in religious seminaries in Pakistan and others like Jalaluddinbecame ministers in that barbaric regime.
After 9/11, Pakistan became a reluctant US ally in the war against terror, but within no time the Afghan Taliban regrouped on Pakistani soil and launched attacks against Afghanistan, undermining the US and international efforts at stabilising that country. In return for the $33 billion, Pakistan had little to show in practical terms. America’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was discovered and neutralised next to Pakistan’s premier military academy. Omar, whose men targeted and killed not just Afghans but also the US servicemen and servicewomen in Afghanistan, had sanctuary in and died in Pakistan. Similarly, Omar’s successor Mansour was selected as the Taliban emir and killed inside Pakistan. The Haqqani Network used Pakistani territory in Waziristan to launch attacks on Afghanistan and US personnel there. Despite Pakistan’s claims that it has targeted the Haqqani Network in its ongoing military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, it has failed to produce even a shred of evidence that it has ever captured or killed any of the terror group’s leaders.
Patience wears thin
Pakistan only acts against the jihadists when it is faced with a principal-agent dilemma and a misalignment of its interests with sections of the jihadists it has groomed. A section of jihadists, which called itself the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has attacked Pakistan over its nominal alliance with the US. The military operations that Pakistan has undertaken over the past decade have been exclusively against the TTP or an occasional foreign group or elements allied with it. The India- and Afghanistan-oriented jihadists (agents) have not posed a threat to Pakistan (the principal) and have thus not faced even a rap on the knuckles. Pakistan has arbitrarily divided the jihadists into the ‘bad’ ones, who attack its interests, and the ‘good’ ones, who don’t. The problem with this approach is two fold: first, to maintain a steady stream of ‘good’ jihadists, an extremist ecosystem has to be maintained at the expense of Pakistani society and people, with the hard blowback in the form of TTP-type attacks; second, the region and the world’s patience with the ‘good’ jihadists is wearing extremely thin with each bloodbath perpetrated by these elements.
Pakistani leaders must put their house in order and stop blaming the world for their jihadist policies, which have led to nothing but disaster both within and outside Pakistan. The first step to rectifying its jihadism addiction would be for Pakistan to recognise that it is hooked on a dreadful habit. The selection of Mullah Haibatullah – inside Pakistan once again – to replace Mansour as the Taliban’s emir and a $3 million government grant to the alma mater of the jihadists located just 70 miles from the country’s military headquarters, however, indicates that any introspection may not be forthcoming.
Mohammad Taqi is a former columnist for the Daily Times, Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @mazdaki.
Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails is a riveting intellectual biography that brings to life the men and women who transformed existentialism from a fancy idea with a fancier lineage, to a full-fledged ‘movement’.
Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails is a riveting intellectual biography that brings to life the people who transformed existentialism from a fancy idea with an even fancier lineage, to a full-fledged ‘movement’.
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir being welcomed to Israel by poets Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg in March 1967. Credit: Wikimedia
Earlier this year, while leafing through assorted bookshelves at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, I had the good fortune of finding a copy of Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016). What made this discovery particularly fortuitous was that it connected very well with a question I had been pondering in the preceding weeks and months – namely, how can one lucidly communicate ideas from the discipline of the social sciences to wider audiences, especially those not given to the arcane jargon and terminology that inundates and, arguably, imprisons much of our contemporary academic thinking and writing?
Several years ago, the anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel, while addressing a gathering at Jawaharlal Nehru University, candidly stated that social scientists generically write badly (with some exceptions). He went on to suggest that as a partial remedy to all the bad writing they do during the day, they must soak themselves in some good fiction at night, a gesture akin to washing away one’s sins. That counsel has stayed with me ever since, and I remain acutely aware that in academic writing there is still a lot of verbal grime to rub off and flab to shed.
Bakewell’s book is a fine exception to this norm. It does a great job of telling the story without sacrificing the facts. And it does so with erudition and some lovely, clean prose. The book makes a telling point – ideas can be fun and charting their trajectories with the people involved can be even more enjoyable. After all, ideas do not appear in a vacuum. They are a product of sustained engagement with intellectual currents at a specific place and moment in history. The work is a deep, engaging and sprightly intellectual history that surmounts every conceivable obstacle in terms of breaking down complex ideas into digestible morsels. My sense is that it could serve as an excellent illustration for anybody keen on transcending barriers – real or imagined – between distinct genres of writing. But first, let’s take a look at the contents of the book.
Imaginary conversations
Sarah Bakewell At the Existential Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails Chatto & Windus, 2016
Bakewell (a philosopher by training), traces the origins of existentialism to a conversation at a watering hole in 1932-33 Paris. She reconstructs a conversation between Jean Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Simone de Beauvoir. In the conversation, Aron draws attention to his recent exposure in Berlin to a philosophical development referred to as phenomenology which focuses on ‘…the things themselves’. Bakewell suggests that what mattered to the phenomenologists was not an endless contemplation of what we knew and how we knew it but to access the world itself with an immediacy and urgency that was not hitherto encountered. Sartre and Beauvoir’s curiosity is aroused. Soon after, Sartre travels to Berlin to get a first-hand exposure to these ideas, and returns to Paris in 1934, where the early seeds of French existentialism are sown.
Among other things, Bakewell’s account reveals the German roots of French existentialism. She offers us a fine account of how Sartre gives phenomenology a distinct spin through several of his works, including the well-known Nausea and Being and Nothingness. Sartre claimed that ‘existence is prior to essence,’ the foundational premise of existentialism. Bakewell captures the sentiment eloquently. Sartre realised that “I am my own freedom: no more, no less.”
Beauvoir contributes substantively in her own right through her unique voice – memoirs, autobiographies and chronicles that lend human experiential reality a rich texture while inaugurating a unique feminism. Beauvoir’s TheSecond Sex is ‘applied existentialism’ writ large in Bakewell’s rendition. There is a palpable dialogue between ideas and lived lives. Sartre and Beauvoir scoffed at bourgeois morality (and institutions like marriage) and were involved in an ‘open relationship’, which required them to be honest to each other about the many sexual partners they individually took on. Bakewell also dissects their differing attitudes towards sexuality – Sartre repelled by the ‘viscous’ world of bodily fluids and Beauvoir embracing sexuality with the spirit and appetite for life of Zorba the Greek.
Disagreement all round
Quite early in the book, Bakewell leads us to absorbing life sketches of two philosophers particularly associated with the phenomenological tradition – Edmund Husserl and his student and, later, sharp detractor Martin Heidegger. The real strength of this book lies in its ability to straddle the personal and scholarly inclinations of these figures while amply demonstrating the deep imbrication of ideas and lives. For anybody interested in knowing what Husserl and Heidegger thought about the nature of ‘being’ as captured in their classic works, Bakewell provides an excellent point of departure. Heidegger remains an oddball to decipher – especially given his later support for the Nazis and subsequent reluctance to disassociate himself with this fascist streak in German history. Being and Time comes in for close attention, as do the early quibbles and later quarrels between Husserl and Heidegger over the very nature of ‘being’ and the content of phenomenology. In Bakewell’s reading, Heidegger argued that phenomenology was too vague a term to define and Husserl excluded the very nature of ‘being’ in his account of what he regarded as phenomenology.
Albert Camus. Credit: Wikipedia
Husserl and Heidegger are not the only ones to disagree. With the exception of Sartre and Beauvoir, everybody appears to disagree with everybody else. Sartre and Albert Camus remain unconvinced of each other’s positions. Camus is committed to the idea of estrangement and ‘absurdity’ while Sartre and Beauvoir remain sceptical of ‘absurdity’ as the be-all and end-all of human existence. Camus is opposed to capital punishment, arguing that the state must never have the right to take the life of a citizen, while Sartre under certain conditions makes the case for capital punishment as a justified response by the state to terror. Sartre labours the importance of the politically engaged writer while Camus is much more sceptical about what he regards as forms of posturing in the life of a writer.
A number of other candidates make their entry on this stage; the influence of Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the well-known German philosopher, also come in for close scrutiny. Bakewell argues that they were the genuine intellectual antecedents of modern-day existentialism. Besides them, other prominent figures are a part of the narrative as well – Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.
Human frailties and the power of ideas
A figure whom Sartre is particularly invested in is Jean Genet. Genet was many things – he wrote novels, plays, poems and essays and was politically active. He is credited with several works. Some of his better-known works are The Thief’s Journal, Prisoner of Love and his recently re-published political essays in the volume The Declared Enemy. What attracted Sartre, though, was Genet’s capacity for ‘inversion’. Bakewell observes that ‘Genet’s books turn shit into flowers, prison cells into sacred temples, and the most murderous prisoners into the objects of greatest tenderness. This is why Sartre called him a saint: where a saint transfigures suffering into sanctity, Genet transforms oppression into freedom.’ Sartre devotes a full-length book to him that bore the title Saint-Genet.
What makes this account particularly lively is its simultaneous account of human frailties. It is not uncommon to see these figures disagree over fundamentals and sometimes parting ways on unpleasant terms, given their attachment to the ideas and inability to separate their political persuasions from their friendships.
Another great strength of the book lies in Bakewell’s ability to adroitly recapture the zeitgeist. From the gathering of war clouds over Europe, through the two world wars that followed, to Sartre’s rejection of the Nobel prize in Literature in 1964, the student uprisings of 1968 and Beauvoir’s rejection of the Légion d’honneur in 1982 – everything comes under the close scrutiny of Bakewell’s inimitable prose. She argues that the history of existentialism is the history of Europe across a century and the ideas associated with the ‘movement’ are far from extinguished. Rather, she says that we often do not realise the extent to which they are lodged in our contemporary consciousness, where they have assumed a natural life. There are several illustrations that bring to bear these connections in Bakewell’s account.
The book leaves you with much to mull over, perhaps most significantly a series of hints on how to go about both reconstructing and auditing the ecology of big ideas in history from other places and times as well.
It also serves as a welcome reminder of the original questions that bothered the existentialists regarding the true nature of human agency, the interplay of freedom and responsibility and the ephemerality of our constructs. Obviously none of these concerns have exhausted their original potential in either intellectual or practical terms so many years later.
Siddharth Mallavarapu currently teaches International Relations at South Asian University, New Delhi, while on deputation from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, wins over the working class. That will be the most important US election.
The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, wins over the working class. That will be the most important US election.
Donald Trump. Credit: Gage Skidmore/ Flickr
The voters vowed to take their revenge at the polls. They’d missed out on the country’s vaunted prosperity. They were disgusted with the liberal direction of the previous administration. They were anti-abortion and pro-religion. They were suspicious of immigrants, haughty intellectuals, and intrusive international institutions. And they very much wanted to make their nation great again.
They’d lost a lot of elections. But this time, they won.
In Poland, that is.
In two elections last year, the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) won the Polish presidency and then, by a more convincing margin, a parliamentary majority.
And this wasn’t just a victory for PiS. It was a victory for Poland B.
Since its post-Communist transition, that country is often described as having cleaved into two parts, commonly known as “Poland A” and “Poland B.” Poland A links together an archipelago of cities and their younger, wealthier inhabitants. Poland B encompasses the poorer, older parts of the population, many clustered in the countryside, particularly in the country’s eastern reaches near the former Soviet border.
After 1989 and the implementation of a punishing series of economic reforms, Poland A took off economically. By 2010, Warsaw, the capital, had become one of the most expensive places to live in Europe, outranking even Brussels and Berlin. New entrepreneurs and corporate managers took advantage of a host of economic opportunities, particularly after Poland joined the EU in 2004.
In the countryside, on the other hand, Poland B fell ever further behind. Factories closed, and many farms couldn’t keep going. Jobs disappeared. Several million Poles decamped abroad in search of better economic opportunities. In other words, as the good times rolled in Poland A, Poland B languished.
Until the elections of 2015, Poland’s liberals dominated political, economic, and cultural life. Although they may not exactly be ‘liberal’ in the American sense of supporting government entitlement programs, they are generally less religious, more tolerant of differences and more open to the world than their conservative counterparts. They have squared off against the denizens of Poland B over such issues as the role of the Catholic Church in public life, the number of immigrants the country should allow in and how close Poland should be to the EU.
You can find the equivalent of Poland A and Poland B elsewhere in eastern Europe, too. The capitals of the region – Prague, Bratislava, Budapest – enjoy per capita GDPs well above the European average, while rural areas suffer. The B populations, however, have not taken their increasingly second-class citizenship quietly. Throughout the region they’ve risen up to vote for populist, often rabid, right-wing parties like FIDESZ and Jobbik in Hungary and GERB and Ataka in Bulgaria that voice their disappointment and swear they’ll make their countries great again. These parties are consistently anti-liberal in the European sense, opposing both an unregulated market and tolerant open societies.
Even in the western European heartlands, you can see a Europe B coalescing around nationalist, anti-immigrant parties like the National Front in France, the UK Independence Party in Great Britain, the Swedish Democratic Party and the Freedom Party of Austria (whose leader just lost the country’s presidency by 0.6% of the vote). While Europe A tries to keep the EU show going, Europe B is already heading for the exits. (Think: Brexit in England.)
No doubt it’s occurred to you by now that the US is not immune to this trend. With the rise of an aggressive version of right-wing American populism, the US is waking up to a dividing line that is becoming sharper by the day. Donald Trump has made headlines with his talk of building a wall between the US and Mexico, but his campaign has highlighted a more important division: between America A and America B.
Responding to the irresistible pull of celebrity culture and to the exclusion of almost anything else, the US media has focused on the person of Donald Trump. Far more important, however, are the people who support him.
America B
In the speech that made him famous, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, President Barack Obama challenged the way “the pundits like to slice and dice our country” – into black America and white America, liberal America and conservative America, and most famously into red states and blue states as defined by party affiliation. We live, however, in a purple America, Obama suggested, “all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America”.
That rousing speech put Obama on the map. But that map would have its revenge. Once he reached the Oval Office four years later, the representatives of the Republican red states would ceaselessly battle the president’s every initiative from health care to the Iran nuclear deal. As a result, during his tenure, the US became more, not less, politically divided.
In some sense, though, the Obama of 2004 was right. The key dividing line in the US had little to do with Republican vs Democrat, rich vs poor or liberal vs conservative. To explode these conventional oppositions, it would take a billionaire Republican populist, who had once been a solid Democrat and who offered a political program that mixed together liberal and conservative ideas, conspiracy theories and racial animus, but above all else exhortations to America B to rise up and retake the country. Indeed, the triumph of Trump in the Republican primaries – based, in part, on his appeal to former white working class Democrats and independents, his fierce attacks on mainstream Republicans and his flouting of what passes for conventional wisdom about electability – sent the pundits back to their think tanks to figure out what on earth was happening with American voters.
Trump was, they concluded, sui generis, a peculiar mutation of the American political system generated by the unholy coupling of reality television and the Tea Party revolt. But Trump is not, in fact, a sport of nature. He reflects trends taking place around the world. He is, in many ways, just a mouthpiece for America B.
It’s been notoriously difficult to characterise the Trump constituency. It’s much easier to identify the people who will never vote for him: Latinos angered by his racist taunts about Mexican immigrants and a federal judge, women outraged by his sexual innuendo and misogyny, and virtually everyone with an advanced degree. Writing off these constituencies – particularly women, since they constituted 53% of the electorate in 2012 – should doom Trump’s presidential bid.
Yet Trump is proving to be a guilty pleasure for many voters, like binge-watching a TV show about a serial killer or eating an entire quart of artery-clogging premium ice cream. The urge to vote for him is something that some Americans will never admit to outside the curtained privacy of the voting booth. But he scratches an itch. He’s the electoral equivalent of a day at the firing range, a way of blowing off political steam.
Trump voters tend to be overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, lower-income men whose education stopped at high school. They are not stupid, nor are they, as Thomas Frank argued about working-class Republican voters in his astute book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, voting against their own economic interests. Trump may be a billionaire, but he has articulated an economic policy that diverges from the naked plutocracy of the party of Mitt Romney.
He has opposed trade deals that outsource American jobs, supported higher taxes for “hedge-fund managers” and declared his commitment to saving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yes, of course, Trump has also made statements directly contradicting these positions or aligned himself with politicos who take the exact opposite stances. But the billionaire has constructed an image of himself as a triumphant version of an ‘average Joe’ (with billions in pocket change) that plays well in America B. Whether consciously or not, he has taken a page from the Europe B playbook by combining positions skeptical of the unrestrained free market with a lot of nationalist bluster. It bears a family resemblance to fascism, but the American variant is firmly anchored in the kind of individual initiative celebrated on The Apprentice.
What also sets Trump apart is his commitment to making “America great again”. His opponents have tried to argue that America is already great, has been great and will always be great. But the truth is, for many Americans, things have not been so great for at least the last two decades.
This line, more than Trump’s intemperate rants and off-the-cuff insults, is what ultimately distinguishes America A from America B. At a time when the US economy is growing at a respectable pace and the unemployment rate is below 5% for the first time since 2008, America B has not benefitted from the prosperity. It has suffered, not profited, from the great transformation the country has gone through since 1989 (and was particularly hard hit by the near economic meltdown of 2007-2008).
After all, it wasn’t just the former communist world that experienced a transition at the end of the twentieth century.
Transitions are US
In the 1990s, the US changed its political economy. It was not quite as dramatic a shift as the regime changes that took place across Eurasia, but it had profound consequences for the realignment of voting patterns in the country.
During that decade, the US economy accelerated its shift from manufacturing – along with the well-paying blue-collar jobs that sector had once generated – to an ever more dominant service economy. In terms of employment, manufacturing jobs dropped from 18 million in 1990 to 12 million in 2014, while wages for such jobs tumbled as well. Over that same period, the healthcare and social assistance sector alone grew from 9.1 million to more than 18 million jobs. At one end of that service economy were the 1% in financial services making stratospheric sums, particularly as compensation packages soared from the mid-1990s on. On the other end were the people who had to add shifts at McDonald’s or Walmart to their full-time jobs or monetise their spare time by driving for Uber just to make what they or their parents once earned with one job at the local factory.
The US was not alone in undergoing this shift. Thanks to technological innovations like computers and robotics, greater access to cheap labor in places like Mexico and China, the rise of the internet and the deregulation of the financial world, the global economy was being similarly transformed. Blue-collar workers no longer played as vital a role in any advanced economy.
In the US, put bluntly, the imagination of America A no longer needed the muscle of America B.
At one time in its history, government programmes narrowed the gap between economic winners and losers through taxes and the entitlement programs they supported. But ‘small government’ fever – which had remarkably little to do with actually reducing the size of government – swept the US in the 1980s, first in the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and then in the ‘reinvent government’ faction of the Democratic Party. In the 1990s, they would collaborate across the aisle to slash assistance to low-income people. The resulting political (and economic) realignment created some notorious ironies, including the fact that Richard Nixon, with his wage-and-price controls and environmental policies, was a far more liberal president in the early 1970s than the Democratic Party standard bearer of the 1990s, Bill Clinton.
Because of this realignment, an entire group of Americans no longer could count on support from either the Republican or the Democratic Party. They lost good jobs during the economic expansion of the Clinton years, and did not benefit significantly from the tax cuts of the George W. Bush era. Instead, by the Obama years, they were working longer hours and taking home less money. In the meantime, a new liberal-conservative consensus was emerging. Both yuppie liberals and 1% conservatives, at odds over so many political and cultural matters, had agreed to abandon America B.
Falling behind economically and feeling betrayed by politicians on both sides of the aisle, America B might have moved to the left if the US had a strong socialist tradition. In the 2016 primary campaign, many of the economically-anxious did, in fact, support Bernie Sanders, particularly the younger offspring of America A fearful of being deported to America B. Unlike Europe B, however, America B has always been more about rugged individualism than class solidarity. Its denizens would rather buy a lottery ticket and pray for a big payout than rely on a handout from Washington (Medicare and Social Security aside). Trump, politically speaking, is their Powerball ticket.
Above all, the inhabitants of America B are angry. They’re disgusted with politics as usual in Washington and the hypocritical, sanctimonious political elite that goes with it. They’re incensed by how the wealthy have effectively seceded from American society with their gated estates and offshore accounts. And they’ve focussed their resentment on those they see as having taken their jobs: immigrants, people of colour, women. They’re so desperate for someone who ‘tells it like it is’ that they’ll look the other way when it comes to Trump’s inextricable links to the very elite who did so much to widen the gap between the two Americas in the first place.
Left behind
As the Democratic Party emerges from a bruising primary, it is trying to emphasise both the importance of unity and the urgency of the upcoming elections. Indeed, pundits are calling 2016 “perhaps the most important presidential vote in our lifetime” and “one of the most pivotal moments of our time”.
But if Poland is any indication, the presidential election this year will not be the critical one. Although Trump may speak for America B, he is a weak candidate. His negatives are high, he has an unenviable record to run on and his tendency to shoot from the hip will eventually cause innumerable self-inflicted wounds. Even if he does manage to win in November, he’ll still face a divided Republican Party, an unremittingly hostile Democratic Party and a political-economic elite inside the Beltway and on Wall Street who will push back against his unworkable and unpalatable proposals.
That’s the situation that the PiS faced in 2005 in Poland, when it first managed to squeak into power. The Polish parliament was divided and was not able to implement the party’s populist agenda. Two years later, the liberal opposition returned to power, where it remained for eight more years.
But when PiS won again last year, conditions had changed. It finally had a comfortable parliamentary majority with which to power through its Tea-Party-like transformation of Poland. Moreover, it was riding high on a Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant wave that had practically inundated the continent.
America B has a fondness for Trump and his almost childlike audacity (Gosh, kids say the darndest things!). Right now, his fans are attached to an individual, rather than a platform or a party. Many of his supporters don’t even care whether Trump means what he says or not. If he loses, he will fade away and leave nothing behind, politically speaking.
The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, sets out to woo America B. Perhaps the Democratic Party will decide to return to its more populist, mid-century roots. Perhaps the Republican Party will abandon its commitment to entitlement programs for the 1%.
More likely, a much more ominous political force will emerge from the shadows. If and when that new, neo-fascist party fields its charismatic presidential candidate, that will be the most important election of our lives.
As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those “others” hijacked the red, white and blue. Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.
Then it will matter little how much both liberals and conservatives rail against ‘stupid’ and ‘crazy’ voters. Nor will they have Trump to kick around any more. In the end, they will have no one to blame but themselves.
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His dystopian novel, Splinterlands, a Dispatch Books original (with Haymarket Books), will appear this fall. He is a TomDispatch regular.
As Hindu mythology’s influence spans from Hollywood superheroes to Indian cinema, questions of cultural adaptation and appropriation abound
Wooden Krishna at Bangalore Habba. Credit: Rajesh Dangi. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Another summer, another season of superhero movies. Big budgets, big muscles, big explosions: Each release only strengthens the genre’s domination of Hollywood – and the sense that comic-book franchises make up a contemporary mythology and superheroes are its gods.
Among this year’s offerings is X-Men: Apocalypse, which opened the last week of May. Apocalypse is the name of the villain, who makes his own claim to divinity in no uncertain terms. One of the film’s trailers features this grandiose statement: “I have been called many things over many lifetimes: Ra, Krishna, Yahweh.” And as reported in Time magazine, the line caught the attention of Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest based in Reno, Nevada. “Lord Krishna was meant to be worshiped in temples or home shrines,” he protested, “not for pushing movies for the mercantile greed of filmmakers,” and pressed the director to have all Krishna references deleted from the film.
Theatrical poster. Credit: Facebook
Zed is the president of an organisation called the Universal Society of Hinduism, but – notwithstanding his own rather grandiose styling – it is unclear how many Hindus he actually speaks for. (Along with Time, some South Asian YouTube channels picked up the story, and comments can be found there echoing Zed’s sense of offence; mishearing “Ra” as Ram has added to the grievances of some.) There has been one notable occasion, however, on which Zed attained national visibility as the face of American Hinduism. In 2007 he opened a session of the United States Senate, the first Hindu guest chaplain in its history. Zed’s prayer was interrupted several times from the gallery; news of his invitation, by Harry Reid of Nevada, had been met with an e-mail protest circulated by Christian groups. One senses that American misunderstandings of Hinduism, and prejudice against it, are sources of familiar and enduring concern for Zed.
That being noted, the association of the X-Men’s blue-faced villain with Krishna would seem to owe little to any actual antecedent in Hindu tradition. Or to any Hindu antecedent, that is, that doesn’t already come filtered through layers of American popular culture, including another comic-book franchise. The Apocalypse character dates back to the X-Men stories published by Marvel Comics in the mid-1980s, and his origin story involves motifs borrowed not from Hindu, but Egyptian mythology (whence the Ra reference). But in the same period, perhaps not entirely by coincidence, another blue-complected character emerged at Marvel’s rival, DC – a figure that does show a clear debt to Krishna. The most powerful character in DC’s celebrated “alternative” comics series, Watchmen, is Dr. Manhattan, a philosophically inclined giant whose name and imagery were inspired by the Manhattan Project – and specifically by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s epiphany on viewing the first atomic detonation, as voiced in the words of the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” Dr. Manhattan’s cinematic debut in 2009’s Watchmen was a memorable one. For comic-book fans and other serial viewers of superhero movies, his is surely the definitive combination, to date, of blue skin, portentous rhetoric, and apocalyptic power – the avatar (so to speak) to beat.
Part of Zed’s point has to do with appropriation. Perhaps the right of non-Hindu filmmakers to use imagery that derives its power and appeal from Hindu sources should be challenged. But his contention that Krishna is “meant” to be worshiped in temples, instead of viewed on the movie screen, relies on a too-simple dichotomy. Indian filmmakers have been working with Hindu imagery (and profiting handsomely off it) for over a century. Indeed, in its first decade Indian film production was entirely dominated by the so-called mythological genre. Famously, D.G. Phalke, the “father of Indian cinema,” cast his own daughter in the early classics Shri Krishna Janma (1918) and Kaliya Mardan (1919) in the starring role – none other than that of Lord Krishna.
Over a hundred years of cinema history, the mythological genre has gone through its vicissitudes. One high point was 1961’s Sampoorna Ramayana, “The Complete Ramayana,” a three-hour Hindi-language spectacular featuring songs, stunts, special effects, and the popular wrestler-actor Dara Singh as the epic’s own action hero, the monkey god Hanuman. These days, in northern India, mythological films have largely ceded their place to mythological television, the catalyst having been the phenomenally successful broadcast of a Ramayana series in 1987–88 (Dara Singh—still going strong—again played Hanuman). But the mythological continues to enjoy prominence in the regional cinemas of South India, which have even fostered distinct subgenres centred on mother goddesses and snake deities. And from time and again the gods do still incarnate themselves in A-list Hindi movies. The 2012 Bollywood hit OMG cast the superstar Akshay Kumar as a suave and well-toned modern Krishna at large in Mumbai; when he races his motorcycle through CGI-enhanced nighttime streets, the scene could be mistaken for Gotham City or Metropolis.
Theatrical poster. Credit: Facebook
And a final point: What goes for movies goes these days for comic books as well. For a long time starting in the 1960s, the Indian comics market had been dominated by the Amar Chitra Katha line of stories adapted from Sanskrit — a children’s series that served up the classics in an easy-to-digest format. But in recent years, glossier comics about the gods and epic heroes — flashier graphics, fleshier physiques — have come muscling into the picture. In the States, the affinity between Hindu gods and American-style superheroes received wide exposure last year with Pixar’s release of a charming short film by an Indian-American animator, Sanjay’s Super Team. But I’ll give the last word on this connection to the interlocutor who first brought it home to me, many years before that. He was seven at the time, and we were speaking in Hindi. “I know all the mans,” he said to me proudly. “Spiderman . . . Superman . . . Hanuman!”
William Elison is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is an author, with Christian Novetzke and Andy Rotman, of “Amar Akbar Anthony”: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation. Special thanks to Amanda Lucia for a last-minute assist with this article.
This article was originally published on OUPblog. See more here.
House Democrats are legitimising error-prone, Islamophobic terrorist “watch lists” as the basis for gun control. That won’t make anyone safer.
House Democrats are legitimising error-prone, Islamophobic terrorist “watch lists” as the basis for gun control. That won’t make anyone safer.
US President Barack Obama receives a standing ovation as he addresses a Joint Session of Congress inside the chamber of the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill in Washington. Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing/Files.
It was almost midnight when I found myself glued to the live video of scores of Democratic members of Congress, who were then about 12 hours into their historic sit-in. They were calling for a vote on new gun restrictions following the Orlando nightclub massacre.
They occupied the House, jerry-rigged a television broadcast when the Republican leadership took C-SPAN off the air, and continued rising one after another to speak with passion, reminding the nation that business as usual is no longer okay. They continued their protest until well into the next day.
Led by Republican John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement, they insisted that there be no congressional recess without a vote on their proposed gun control bills. They reminded the world that since 1968, more Americans have been killed by gun violence than in all the wars in US history.
It was a moving, empowering thing to see. And yet, there’s a huge problem.
The Democrats’ own leadership has refused to allow their own now-insurgent party to officially endorse the most sensible (however insufficient) gun control proposals — including outlawing assault weapons, removing the prohibition on federal research on the public health consequences of gun violence and universal background checks. Those things, lethally opposed by the National Rifle Association, wouldn’t stop the epidemic of gun violence in this country by themselves. But they would certainly help.
A few members rejected the restrictions. At 12:35 am, Texas Republican Beto O’Rourke, one of those who’d set up the live-streaming of the debate after the Republican leadership turned off the C-SPAN cameras, called for all three of those goals.
But for the most part, the Democrats limited their demands to only two things. First, they proposed a small, completely insufficient expansion of background checks. Second — and more dangerously — they repeated a slogan of “no fly, no buy.” That refers to a proposal that would ban anyone on law enforcement’s so-called No Fly List from buying a weapon.
If implemented, this would do nothing to prevent gun violence, nearly all of which is perpetrated by people who aren’t on that list. But it would do much to increase racial profiling and Islamophobia.
If we were talking about actually preventing terrorists from buying weapons, that would be one thing. But the government’s various terrorist watch lists, including the No Fly List, aren’t lists of terrorists. They’re lists of people — American citizens, green-card holders, visitors, citizens of other countries — who end up on government lists for reasons we and they never know.
Maybe they share a name with someone once suspected of knowing someone whose second cousin once Skyped with someone else thought to be a would-be terrorist. Or perhaps their college roommate ended up trying to go to Syria. Maybe a few of them really do have dangerous intentions.
But there are thousands of people on these lists. Most of them can’t even find out why they’re not allowed to fly, let alone challenge the prohibition. “Our nation’s watchlisting system is error-prone and unreliable,” the American Civil Liberties Union explains (ACLU), “because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.”
If it were up to me, I’d prohibit anyone — anyone, on or off those lists — from buying or possessing these lethal weapons. But it’s not up to me — and unfortunately the “no fly, no buy” rule proposed at the surprisingly militant House sit-in isn’t going to prevent gun violence either.
What it is going to do, unfortunately, is legitimise watch lists as the basis for a politically popular version of gun control.
Those vague criteria the ACLU calls out end up being applied disproportionately to Muslims, Arabs, South Asians and others wrongly assumed to be linked to terrorism. We shouldn’t forget that Nelson Mandela remained on the US “terrorist” list until 2008. Even John Lewis, who’s leading the sit-in, was reportedly once on the No Fly List himself.
It’s terribly sad that some of our most principled, consistent members of Congress — members of the Black Caucus, the conscience of the Congress, and the Progressive Caucus, who work against racism, racial profiling, Islamophobia, war and beyond — are among those urging even greater reliance on this ineffective system in the name of preventing gun violence.
The congressional sit-in brought some moral power and renewed urgency to the cause of gun control. It’s a challenge to the partisan bickering that’s paralysed Congress for years. It may even ignite a turn towards re-legitimising Congress — long demonised as the least effective, least useful, least popular institution around.
That reversal would be far more likely if these members of Congress, as they consolidate their new moral credibility, would finally reject the current iteration of the No Fly List as the basis for gun control — or a legitimate method of counter-terrorism.
Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The petitioners argued that their right under Article 21 of the Constitution (right to life and liberty) encompasses the right to sexuality, sexual autonomy and choice of sexual partner.
Supporters of the equal rights protesting the Decmeber 11, 2013 decision of the Supreme Court that upheld the section 377 of the IPC. Credit: PTI/File Photo
New Delhi: The Chief Justice of India (CJI), T. S. Thakur will take a call on whether or not to hear a fresh writ petition filed by members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community challenging the validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code as it criminalises consensual sexual relations between two consenting adults of the same sex and thus violates their right to life.
The public interest litigation (PIL) which seeks to end the injustice perpetrated by a colonial law, came up for admission on Wednesday before a bench of Justices S. A. Bobde and Ashok Bhushan. Senior counsel Arvind P. Datar, appearing for the petitioners submitted that this was the first writ petition filed by members of the LGBT community, as earlier petitions were filed by NGOs and others. He said the matter had already been referred to the constitution bench.
Justice Bobde told counsel that the petitioners could either await the verdict of the constitution bench or their matter could be referred to the CJI for passing appropriate orders to place it before the constitution bench. The counsel agreed to refer the issue to the CJI and accordingly the bench directed the registry to refer the writ petition to the Chief Justice for his order.
In February this year, acting on a batch of eight curative petitions seeking review of the Supreme Court’s verdict upholding Section 377, a three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice T. S. Thakur and justices Anil R. Dave and J. S. Khehar posted the matter for hearing before a five-judge constitution bench. This gave fresh hopes and a major relief to the LGBT community seeking review of the earlier verdict.
Fresh PIL in the SC
In the present PIL, petitioners Navtej Singh Johar, Sunil Mehra, Ritu Dalmia, Aman Nath and Ayesha Kapur, who are prominent and well-accomplished citizens and members of the LGBT community contended that Section 377 IPC violated the right to sexuality, sexual autonomy, choice of sexual partner, life, privacy, dignity and equality.
The petitioners submitted that they are the first LGBT persons to approach the apex court seeking quashing of Section 377. The criminalisation of sexual minorities has necessarily meant that LGBT persons have been reluctant to approach this court, in their own standing, out of fear of both prosecution and persecution. With the passage of time, just as this court has recognised that certain social norms may be violative of constitutionally protected fundamental rights, the petitioners have also gained confidence to assert their sexual identities and approach this court for recognition and protection of this most fundamental right.
Sexuality under the constitution
They said their right under Article 21 of the constitution (right to life and liberty) encompasses the right to sexuality, sexual autonomy and choice of sexual partner. The apex court has protected persons who have chosen their conjugal partner in defiance of the caste and religious norms sought to be enforced by a section of the society. The court has asserted a right to bodily integrity and autonomy which is intrinsic to a person’s right to dignity and self-determination.
It was argued that sexuality is an intrinsic, inherent and immutable characteristic of any human being; that its development without social stigma and criminalisation, particularly within the privacy of a home, is an essential component of a life with dignity. The petitioners pointed out that today medical science has ceased to view homosexuality as an abnormality or a disease. It is now accepted as part of a diverse continuum of the human experience. While so, criminalisation is a dynamic process and reflects the social and political settings of the times.
The petitioners were of the view that the issue in the present writ petition does not concern only removing an injustice perpetuated by a law, but also to take further the constitutional vision of a society that recognises, celebrates and protects the plurality and diversity of the human experience.
The curative petition which is before the five-judge bench challenges both the December 11, 2013 judgment and the January 2014 order, in the review petitions to cure the gross miscarriage of justice. It said, “The effect of re-criminalisation on account of the impugned judgment has caused immense prejudice to gay activists, who have been put at risk of prosecution under Section 377 IPC, on account of the association between homosexuality and penile-anal/penile-oral sexual acts.”
The petitioners drew the court’s attention to the fact that under an amendment introduced in the IPC in 2013, Section 375 of the IPC in 2013 makes penile non-vaginal sexual acts, between man and woman, without consent an offence. By necessary implication, such sexual acts between man and woman, which are consensual, are no longer prohibited. Consequently, “These consensual acts between man and woman have been taken out of the ambit of Section 377, otherwise the amended Section 375 would be rendered redundant. Therefore Section 377 now effectively only criminalises all forms of penetrative oral sex, which makes it ex facie discriminatory against homosexual men and transgender persons and thus violative of Article 14.”
The court said it would examine to what extent it could interfere with Muslim personal laws, if they were found to violate the fundamental rights of citizens as enshrined in the constitution.
The petitioners highlighted the plight faced by Muslim women on account of arbitrary divorces. Credit: PTI
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday decided to examine the validity of the triple talaq system which enables Muslim men to unilaterally exercise the power of divorce. The court said it would examine to what extent it could interfere with Muslim personal laws, if they were found to violate the fundamental rights of citizens as enshrined in the constitution.
A bench of justices T.S. Thakur and A.M. Kanwilkar heard a batch of petitions filed by Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality and others, that sought a declaration that triple talaq was invalid and unconstitutional. Senior counsels Anand Grover, Indira Jaising, Balaji Srinivasan and others submitted that earlier judgments that gave the right to Muslim men to divorce their wives through triple talaq should be revisited. Jaising pointed out that the triple talaq system was un-Islamic even under Muslim personal law.
Advocate Farha Faiz, president of the Rashtrawadi Muslim Mahila Sangh, questioned All India Muslim Personal Law Board’s (AIMPLB) in fatwas to Muslim women and making decisions on their rights. She said that the AIMPLB was successfully governing the community giving a fake impression that Muslim personal laws were made by it. She wanted a direction from the court to restrain the board and the media from debating the triple talaq issue.
Chief Justice of India, Thakur, told the counsel “this is an important issue concerning the lives of large number of Muslim population and divergent views are possible. However, we will not be influenced by television debates.” He asked the counsel to file their responses in six weeks. Thakur said that depending upon the nature of arguments, he would decide on posting the matter for adjudication by a larger bench.
The petitioners highlighted the plight of Muslim women in the country because of arbitrary divorces without due intervention of courts. They said Muslim women were thrown out of their homes causing trauma for them and their children.
The petitioners said that the triple talaq system was an infringement and violation of the fundamental rights of equality guaranteed under Article 14 and 21 of the constitution. They said that under the principle of law a person could not be a judge of his own cause. They said triple talaq was clearly opposed to public policy since Muslim men were allowed to unilaterally decide to put an end to their marriages.
The petitioners said that only through mandatory granting of divorce with due intervention of courts, established under law, would protect the interests of both parties in resolving their marital disputes.
The apex court in October 2015, in a suo motu writ petition, had decided to examine various issues on the ground that Muslim personal law is discriminatory to women. It is said it would examine whether practices under Muslim personal law regarding marriage, divorce and maintenance were violative of fundamental rights of the constitution.
The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, an organisation working for the welfare of Muslims, said that the apex court had on earlier occasions examined various issues regarding Muslim personal law – the practice of polygamy, divorce without resorting to judicial process of courts, whether the mere fact that a Muslim husband takes more than one wife is an act of cruelty – and had declined to entertain these issues stating that these were matters wholly involving issues of state policies with which the court would not ordinarily have any concern.
It wanted the apex court to keep off from deciding these issues as these were matters which were to be dealt with by the legislature.The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind is of the opinion that since Muslim law is founded essentially on the Quran, it was not within the purview of the expression “laws in force” as mentioned in Article 13 of the constitution and hence its validity could not be tested on a challenge based on Part III (fundamental rights) of the constitution. In view of such clear provisions, if the court frames fresh provisions, it will amount to judicial legislation and will be violative of the doctrine of separation of powers, it said.
In the first of a two-part interview, former foreign secretary Shyam Saran discusses India’s bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group with Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire.
In the first of a two-part interview, former foreign secretary Shyam Saran discusses India’s bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group with Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire.
Siddharth Varadarajan: We will be discussing today India’s effort to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an effort that ended inconclusively, some would say in failure, when the 48-member nuclear suppliers cartel ended its 2-day plenary on June 24th without a decision on Indian membership.
The Seoul meeting began with a question mark. India had made its desire to join the NSG publicly known. The foreign office said that the prime minister was personally taking this up in Switzerland with Mexico. We know that he met [Chinese President] Xi Jinping in Tashkent just before the meeting started at Seoul. Do you think that India has reason to be disappointed with the fact that the Seoul meeting was unable to resolve this issue? Or, do you think that what we are seeing is the beginning of a process which will eventually work out in India’s favour?
Shyam Saran: No two situations are quite the same. What happened in 2008, if you take that analogy, then if you recall, we had a disappointing experience in August 2008 – the first plenary meeting [to decide on the NSG’s waiver for India]. But that did not deter us from engaging even more.
SS: There were about 50 amendments! So, if an outside observer saw this, he would have thought there is really no way in which India could possibly mobilise a consensus in favour of getting the waiver at the subsequent meeting. In fact, I think the Chinese calculation at that time was this would not happen – if you see People’s Daily, you know, the article which appeared after that. So the fact that we were able to overcome, within that period of one month, the many voices opposing the waiver, would appear to show that there is some value, some merit in doing active diplomacy and turning things around. But I think at this particular juncture, if we see what happened in Seoul, one very big difference is that China – which had taken a somewhat discreet stand in opposing the waiver for India in 2008 – was actually very public and upfront in opposing the membership this time around. So that actually, to me, seemed to be the one big difference.
SV: Even so, they hid behind procedure.
SS: Well, whatever be the reason. After all, in 2008, they also hid behind procedure. They used the same arguments, that you know we should have a criteria-based approach, we should not have a country-specific exception, that we should be mindful of the fact that the international non-proliferation regime may be undermined as a result or that you know, the balance in South Asia may be adversely impacted by this and may even trigger a nuclear arms race in South Asia. The arguments are almost exactly the same as in 2008. But this time they have been made in a very public fashion and in a somewhat assertive fashion.
SV: And repeated …
SS:Yes, whenever this matter has been raised, not only at the governmental level, but also in the Chinese official media. It appears to me that we are facing a different China. We are facing a different geopolitical situation. Don’t forget that in 2008, we had virtually, with the exception of China, all countries very enthusiastically in favour of the waiver for India. This time around, people may not have been so energetic. This is partly because after all, if the idea was the way should be cleared for some of the important countries to engage India in nuclear commerce and derive some benefit from it by the sale of nuclear fuel and nuclear reactors – that is already there as a result of the waiver. In substantive terms, whether you are a member of the NSG or not, it does not really change the situation [in terms of access to material].
SV: Let’s go through this sequentially. For the benefit of our readers and viewers, if you were to take them one-by-one. The questions would obviously be: why does India want to be a member? Why now? In other words, have we acted at the right time? Third, the nature of objections that we saw in Seoul; and fourth, where do we go from here. If we proceed in that fashion, let’s discuss why India wants to be a member of the NSG given that the major restrictions imposed on the sale of nuclear material and fuel were lifted in 2008. Is it purely a defensive desire for India to be in a group that may later specify new rules that we can’t prevent? What is it?
SS: Well, that’s certainly an important consideration… that not being a member, you do not have any full control over future amendments. It means that the waiver that you enjoyed, in a sense, can be reversed by subsequent amendments.
SV: As we saw in 2011…
SS: Well, yes some part of it was. Therefore, being a member shows that even if there are amendments which may be tabled in the future, we have a voice in how they are possibly formulated. So that’s an important consideration. And what it would do is, that the waiver that you enjoy, currently, would be formalised. In a sense, it does not have the same level of formality, as you would have if you were a member of the NSG. So, there’s a value in the membership. One should not belittle the importance of being a member of the NSG. Now the issue is, you know, if we have not been able to get membership at the Seoul meeting, does it mean that our nuclear energy plans are somehow or the other suspect, or that our access to nuclear technology or fuel are in any case impacted. No.
SV: But the government said that it would…
SS: Well, the government has said that. But let us not forget that since the waiver, we have signed long term fuel supply agreements with a large number of countries.
SV: The electricity outputs of most of our nuclear plants has gone up …
SS: Exactly. They have gone up to 80-85%. So this is not a small gain from the waiver. Secondly, the nuclear power plant contract which was still on hold with regards to say, France and even with respect to the additional reactors from say, Russia. And of course, you know, the continuing saga of whether or not we are going to buy nuclear reactors from the US. All that has actually changed in the favour of India. So, the importance of this membership is to the extent, as I said, that it would formalise the waiver. But in terms of substantive advantage from membership, currently, since we have these long term arrangements, I do not think we should worry too much that this is somehow going to impact our nuclear energy.
SV: Now, in 2008, the waiver that was given by the NSG, had a clause where India committed to adhere to the NSG guidelines. It also had a paragraph that Indian adherence to any future guidelines would be facilitated by the NSG consulting India. We have seen that, since then, there has been one major change in guidelines which is that the NSG in 2011, in Noordwijk, adopted a new rule which introduced a non-proliferation treaty criterion for the export of reprocessing and enrichment (ENR) equipment … To the best of my knowledge, India was either not consulted or if we were consulted, our protestations were discounted or ignored when the new rule was introduced. So what you are saying in a sense is that membership would actually…..
SS: Would give you a voice in, as I said, the amendment process. But let me remind you that even at the time of the waiver itself, there were several countries which were asking for India to accept that there would be a prohibition on the transfer of ENR. And we said, no we cannot… So I don’t think this is a problem in substantive terms. But the principle that you mentioned that it would be better if we were part of the membership, because it would allow us to have a role to play in terms of the rule-making process – this is important precisely because, in a sense, you have been an exceptional case. Because you have been given a country-specific exemption, which is what China objected to. What the membership would do is, that country-specific exemption would actually be formalised if you actually become a member of the NSG. Now, yes, we have not succeeded in Seoul. My sense is given the kind of opposition we have seen from China and the fact that some of the countries are now hiding behind, in a sense, China’s opposition, it may be much more challenging in the coming weeks and months. We should continue to try and mobilise the consensus as we had done in the case of the waiver. But I don’t think that we should elevate this into a kind of elemental issue for India. I do not believe that it is an elemental issue.
SV: Do you think the government erred by casting this in such a high profile manner. Deploying the prime minister…there is an argument that what we have accomplished as a result is the re-hyphenation of [India with Pakistan]…
SS: Well, if we had succeeded, then the same people would have said, you know, thanks to the very energetic diplomacy which was engaged by the prime minister.
SV: But the point is we didn’t succeed.
SS: No, it didn’t succeed. I think we should be a little fair in this respect. Because I am conscious of the fact that the last time around, we had to engage in very energetic diplomacy. And my sense is that we would not have been able to get the waiver, if we had not engaged in that energetic diplomacy.
SV: And as you said, there was a major setback in August 2008, followed by…
SS: Exactly. So people could have said, after August,why are you doing this? Because there’s no good hope of your getting this.
SV: Let’s talk about timing now. You were involved in the first phase of negotiations. You saw the India-US 2005 statement all the way through to Vienna. I covered the story as a reporter. What were the discussions then about possible membership of the NSG? Did we raise it at that time as something that we want or did we flag it as an issue that would come up later?
SS: Well, you know, what happened then was that we went down to the wire when we were trying to get an agreement on the separation plan. And it was early in the morning of March 6 [2006] that we managed to actually get the agreement. And at that time, actually, there had been some talk of India becoming a member of those global organisations. But because of the very difficult and somewhat acrimonious exchanges which took place between the two sides, this particular issue actually was put aside. This is something which we’ll see later. The kind of political capital that the US would have to deploy in order to get this would be difficult, it may be easier to try and get the waiver. Therefore, we did not actually pursue this. But the idea that we should eventually become members of these global regimes was something which was already present in 2005-2006.
Former foreign secretary Shyam Saran. Credit: The Wire
SV: So 2010 is when it gets raised again by President Obama…
SS: Well, it had been raised subsequently, not immediately after the waiver in 2008. But after the waiver, I think there were exchanges between the two sides on, what’s the next step. We also need to build a degree of credibility and a certain sense that you know, this is not a half-way house. And the US then agreed.
SV: So, in 2010, President Obama comes to Delhi, makes the announcement. This is followed up the next year by Richard Stratford of the US state department presenting his ‘food-for-thought’ paper to the NSG plenary in Noordwijk, Holland, where he raises the possibility of how India could be a member. In particular, he addresses this question of NPT as a criterion by saying that perhaps the 2008 waiver for India could be treated as an equivalent agreement. Then, things go quiet. From 2011 till pretty much last year, there doesn’t seem to be much forward movement. Is this because the previous government did not pursue matters or…
SS: Well, frankly, I am not in a position to really answer this question. Because I was not in government during this particular period. But my sense is that at various consultations which India had with the NSG, I think an assessment would have been made whether the time is right for us to be able to take this particular proposal forward. There is no doubt that when the Modi government took office, there has been a certain change in style. A sense that active diplomacy, energetic diplomacy, personal diplomacy between the prime minister and the counterpart leaders…this is something that can actually change the nature of the game, you know. So what we have seen is not just with respect to the NSG membership, but we have seen with respect to other aspects of India’s foreign policy as well. Now, you may argue for or against that kind of energetic diplomacy but I think what has resulted in this great effort to try and get this membership is the belief that given the kind of leadership you have, given the kind of energetic diplomacy that you have, this is worth trying. Having tried, if you have not got what you wanted, I don’t think you should take this as a great setback or this is the end of the road for us. I think we should cut our losses and you know, wait for a more propitious time when we can raise this again.
SV: We’ll have evaluated the reasons …
SS: Exactly. Evaluating the geopolitical backdrop against which this has happened is very important. We should be able to see why the situation today is different. Why is China today different than it was in 2008. I think these are more important questions than the mere question about membership of the NSG.
SV: So, we have questions pouring in our Facebook page…more than we can ask really. I’ll throw two at you. This is a question by Pranav Gupta: How important is diplomacy by stealth versus diplomacy by caution? How much does the centralisation of foreign policy by PMO matter? I think here, this question is getting to the heart of the style of diplomacy, if you will. He is suggesting perhaps that pursuing this matter behind closed doors might have been more effective than deploying, making public announcements about the prime minister being involved, so on. Does he have a point?
SS: As I said that, if this had succeeded, then people would have said, thanks to the personal diplomacy by Prime Minister Modi and the manner in which he sort of took it up at his level with his counterparts, is what actually has made the difference. Because it has not succeeded this time, so you have a lot of criticism. Frankly speaking, I think different leaders at different occasions have different styles. I think we should allow that element of you know, difference in style. As a professional diplomat, I would say, I would certainly give greater credence to you know, quiet diplomacy. You know, certainly not diplomacy by stealth, but certainly discretion. Not raise everything to the public level, not put countries in the dock. I don’t think that serves our interests well by doing this.
SV: Have we erred then – this is a question by Arvindan – by projecting only Chinese opposition when actually other countries have also opposed us. Are we making a mistake in singling out China?
SS: I would certainly hope that we do not make this into a major issue of contention between India and China. That I do not believe in…
SV: Have we already done that? By saying that ‘one country’…
SS: If you ask my own personal opinion, I would not have done that. You know, I wouldn’t have identified one or two countries. Remember, even in 2008, despite the fact that it was known which countries were actually opposed to India, we never went public with ‘Oh, this is the country which opposed or this is the country which voted for.’
SV: But I suppose this is because you got the waiver.
SS: Well, we got it. But we could have made a public statement saying you know, we thank the countries which supported us and you know, these are the bad guys.
SV: But, let me be Devil’s advocate. Why shouldn’t we? After all, if China has blocked something which is important for India. And has done so in tandem with Pakistan, which is opposed to Indian interests. What is the harm in going public?
SS: Well, that we should be mindful of the fact that there is opposition is something which is…I mean it doesn’t need a statement on the part of India to make that. There are ways in which you can make it very clear what really was the reason that we were not able to get this through. I am saying that in terms of an official posture by the government, it is best not to raise this to a level of, you know, a very major contention between India and China. Because there is much more to India-China relations than just the issue of the NSG membership. That’s why I said, earlier in my remarks, that I would not make this into an elemental issue for India.
SV: Vikrant Suryavanshi asks: despite the 2008 waiver, the Indian civil nuclear programme is not up to mark. Do you think that civil nuclear liability is the elephant in the room?
SS: (Laughs) Well, number one, I think perhaps people do not realise that had we not got the nuclear deal through, several of our nuclear reactors, which are based on uranium, would have actually faced major fuel shortages. Several of them were running much below capacity. So, one of the very important gains for India has been that the issue of nuclear fuel has been now resolved. And that’s a very major gain, as I mentioned. Also, in terms of nuclear technology, you know, our domestic technology, which is very good… we have been able to master the CANDU technology and havebrought in our own design features, but we have not been able to go beyond… the largest reactor that we have… yeah, 700 MW. Now the world has moved to 1000 MW. Now even 1000 MW has become somewhat out-of-date, we are talking about 1500 MW reactors, 1700 MW reactors. So, if you really want to upgrade your technology and reach that level which we see internationally, then again, the nuclear deal has been extremely important. As you have seen, we have been able to conclude agreements with Russia and France. And now you have the prospect of being able to do the same with the US. Is the nuclear liability bill a hindrance? For some the US corporations, it is. Even now.
SV: Even now, despite the so-called FAQs…
SS: But I think what the government has done in terms of the insurance pool that it has introduced with the sort of re-interpretation of some of the legislative language, it has, in fact, substantially overcome that concern. Not the ideal, I grant that, but I think it has at least given sufficient amount of confidence to allow major international firms to actually think in terms of engaging in nuclear commerce.
Tomorrow: Part II of the interview, on the role of China and the way forward
