Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare.... How
long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?
Is it a house or a
home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since
Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace,
things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there
said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”
Antilla belongs to
India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive
dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts,
hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking,
and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a
soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass
was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly,
Trickledown hadn’t worked.
But Gush-Up certainly
has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own
assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.
The word on the
street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after
all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows
for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui.
Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has
conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like
the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells”.
In India, the 300
million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the
market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of
dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of
2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million
who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive
on less than twenty rupees a day.
Mukesh Ambani is
personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance
Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47 billion
and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas,
polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life
sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent
shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment
channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost
every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G
Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology works,
could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket
team.
RIL is one of a
handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas,
Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned
by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe,
Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are
visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for
example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s
oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields,
steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole
townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar,
Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a
major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising
tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.
According to the
rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.
The era of the
Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest
growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its
main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals,
Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the
head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s
a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to
buy.
The other major
source of corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over the world,
weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agro-business
corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course,
this entails commandeering water too.) In India, the land of millions of people
is being acquired and made over to private corporations for “public
interest”—for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways,
car manufacture, chemical hubs and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private
property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that
their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they
ever had is actually part of employment generation. But by now we know that the
connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After 20 years of “growth”,
60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s
labour force works in the unorganised sector.
Post-Independence,
right up to the ’80s, people’s movements, ranging from the Naxalites to
Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, were fighting for land reforms, for the
redistribution of land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today any
talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just
undemocratic, but lunatic. Even the most militant movements have been reduced
to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have. The millions of
landless people, the majority of them Dalits and adivasis, driven from their
villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and mega cities,
do not figure even in the radical discourse.
As Gush-Up
concentrates wealth on to the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires
pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy—the
courts, Parliament as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability
to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the carnival around
elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.
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Each new corruption
scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame. In the summer of
2011, the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learnt that corporations had siphoned
away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the Union
minister of telecommunication who grossly underpriced the licences for 2G
telecom spectrum and illegally parcelled it out to his buddies. The taped
telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of
industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists and a
TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes were
just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.
The privatisation and
illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not involve war, displacement and
ecological devastation. The privatisation of India’s mountains, rivers and
forests does. Perhaps because it does not have the uncomplicated clarity of a
straightforward, out-and-out accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all
being done in the name of India’s “progress”, it does not have the same
resonance with the middle classes.
In 2005, the state
governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand signed hundreds of
Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with a number of private corporations
turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals for a
pittance, defying even the warped logic of the free market. (Royalties to the
government ranged between 0.5 per cent and 7 per cent.)
Only days after the
Chhattisgarh government signed an MoU for the construction of an integrated
steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia,
was inaugurated. The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local
people who were fed up of the “repression” by Maoist guerrillas in the forest.
It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the
government and subsidised by mining corporations. In the other states, similar
militias were created, with other names. The prime minister announced the
Maoists were the “single-largest security challenge in India”. It was a
declaration of war.
On January 2, 2006,
in Kalinganagar, in the neighbouring state of Orissa, perhaps to signal the
seriousness of the government’s intention, ten platoons of police arrived at
the site of another Tata Steel plant and opened fire on villagers who had
gathered there to protest what they felt was inadequate compensation for their
land. Thirteen people, including one policeman, were killed, and 37 injured.
Six years have gone by and though the villages remain under siege by armed
policemen, the protest has not died.
Meanwhile in
Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through
hundreds of forest villages, evacuating 600 villages, forcing 50,000 people to
come out into police camps and 3,50,000 people to flee. The chief minister
announced that those who did not come out of the forests would be considered to
be ‘Maoist terrorists’. In this way, in parts of modern India, ploughing fields
and sowing seed came to be defined as terrorist activity. Eventually, the Salwa
Judum’s atrocities only succeeded in strengthening the resistance and swelling
the ranks of the Maoist guerrilla army. In 2009, the government announced what
it called Operation Green Hunt. Two lakh paramilitary troops were deployed
across Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal.
After three years of
“low-intensity conflict” that has not managed to “flush” the rebels out of the
forest, the central government has declared that it will deploy the Indian army
and air force. In India, we don’t call this war. We call it “creating a good
investment climate”. Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade
headquarters and air bases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the
world is now preparing its Terms of Engagement to “defend” itself against the
poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await the
declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the
army legal immunity and the right to kill “on suspicion”. Going by the tens of
thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur
and Nagaland, it has shown itself to be a very suspicious army indeed.
While the
preparations for deployment are being made, the jungles of Central India
continue to remain under siege, with villagers frightened to come out, or go to
the market for food or medicine. Hundreds of people have been jailed, charged
for being Maoists under draconian, undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with
adivasi people, many of whom have no idea what their crime is. Recently, Soni
Sori, an adivasi school-teacher from Bastar, was arrested and tortured in
police custody. Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to “confess” that
she was a Maoist courier. The stones were removed from her body at a hospital
in Calcutta, where, after a public outcry, she was sent for a medical check-up.
At a recent Supreme Court hearing, activists presented the judges with the
stones in a plastic bag. The only outcome of their efforts has been that Soni
Sori remains in jail while Ankit Garg, the Superintendent of Police who
conducted the interrogation, was conferred with the President’s Police Medal
for Gallantry on Republic Day.
We hear about the
ecological and social re-engineering of Central India only because of the mass
insurrection and the war. The government gives out no information. The
Memorandums of Understanding are all secret. Some sections of the media have
done what they could to bring public attention to what is happening in Central
India. However, most of the Indian mass media is made vulnerable by the fact
that the major share of its revenues come from corporate advertisements. If
that is not bad enough, now the line between the media and big business has
begun to blur dangerously. As we have seen, RIL virtually owns 27 TV channels.
But the reverse is also true. Some media houses now have direct business and
corporate interests. For example, one of the major daily newspapers in the
region—Dainik Bhaskar (and it is only one example)—has 17.5 million
readers in four languages, including English and Hindi, across 13 states. It
also owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power generation, real estate
and textiles. A recent writ petition filed in the Chhattisgarh High Court
accuses DB Power Ltd (one of the group’s companies) of using “deliberate,
illegal and manipulative measures” through company-owned newspapers to
influence the outcome of a public hearing over an open cast coal mine. Whether
or not it has attempted to influence the outcome is not germane. The point is
that media houses are in a position to do so. They have the power to do so. The
laws of the land allow them to be in a position that lends itself to a serious
conflict of interest.
There are other parts
of the country from which no news comes. In the sparsely populated but
militarised northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, 168 big dams are being
constructed, most of them privately owned. High dams that will submerge whole
districts are being constructed in Manipur and Kashmir, both highly militarised
states where people can be killed merely for protesting power cuts. (That
happened a few weeks ago in Kashmir.) How can they stop a dam?
The most delusional
dam of all is Kalpasar in Gujarat. It is being planned as a 34-km-long dam
across the Gulf of Khambhat with a 10-lane highway and a railway line running
on top of it. By keeping the sea water out, the idea is to create a sweet water
reservoir of Gujarat’s rivers. (Never mind that these rivers have already been
dammed to a trickle and poisoned with chemical effluent.) The Kalpasar dam,
which would raise the sea level and alter the ecology of hundreds of kilometres
of coastline, had been dismissed as a bad idea 10 years ago. It has made a
sudden comeback in order to supply water to the Dholera Special Investment
Region (SIR) in one of the most water-stressed zones not just in India, but in
the world. SIR is another name for an SEZ, a self-governed corporate dystopia
of “industrial parks, townships and mega-cities”. The Dholera SIR is going to
be connected to Gujarat’s other cities by a network of 10-lane highways. Where
will the money for all this come from?
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In January 2011, in
the Mahatma (Gandhi) Mandir, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi presided over
a meeting of 10,000 international businessmen from 100 countries. According to
media reports, they pledged to invest $450 billion in Gujarat. The meeting was
scheduled to take place at the onset of the 10th anniversary year of the
massacre of 2,000 Muslims in February-March 2002. Modi stands accused of not
just condoning, but actively abetting, the killing. People who watched their
loved ones being raped, eviscerated and burned alive, the tens of thousands who
were driven from their homes, still wait for a gesture towards justice. But Modi
has traded in his saffron scarf and vermilion forehead for a sharp business
suit, and hopes that a 450-billion-dollar investment will work as blood money,
and square the books. Perhaps it will. Big Business is backing him
enthusiastically. The algebra of infinite justice works in mysterious ways.
The Dholera SIR is
only one of the smaller Matryoshka dolls, one of the inner ones in the dystopia
that is being planned. It will be connected to the Delhi Mumbai Industrial
Corridor (DMIC), a 1,500-km-long and 300-km-wide industrial corridor, with nine
mega-industrial zones, a high-speed freight line, three seaports and six
airports, a six-lane intersection-free expressway and a 4,000 MW power plant.
The DMIC is a collaborative venture between the governments of India and Japan,
and their respective corporate partners, and has been proposed by the McKinsey
Global Institute.
The DMIC website says
that approximately 180 million people will be “affected” by the project.
Exactly how, it doesn’t say. It envisages the building of several new cities
and estimates that the population in the region will grow from the current 231
million to 314 million by 2019. That’s in seven years’ time. When was the last
time a state, despot or dictator carried out a population transfer of millions
of people? Can it possibly be a peaceful process?
The Indian army might
need to go on a recruitment drive so that it’s not taken unawares when it’s
ordered to deploy all over India. In preparation for its role in Central India,
it publicly released its updated doctrine on Military Psychological Operations,
which outlines “a planned process of conveying a message to a select target
audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and
behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of
the country”. This process of “perception management”, it said, would be
conducted by “using media available to the services”.
The army is
experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage
social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War
against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class,
white-collar workers, intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception
management”. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of
Corporate Philanthropy.
Of late, the main
mining conglomerates have embraced the Arts—film, art installations and the
rush of literary festivals that have replaced the ’90s obsession with beauty
contests. Vedanta, currently mining the heart out of the homelands of the
ancient Dongria Kondh tribe for bauxite, is sponsoring a ‘Creating Happiness’
film competition for young film students whom they have commissioned to make
films on sustainable development. Vedanta’s tagline is ‘Mining Happiness’. The
Jindal Group brings out a contemporary art magazine and supports some of
India’s major artists (who naturally work with stainless steel). Essar was the
principal sponsor of the Tehelka Newsweek Think Fest that promised
“high-octane debates” by the foremost thinkers from around the world, which
included major writers, activists and even the architect Frank Gehry. (All this
in Goa, where activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining
scandals, and Essar’s part in the war unfolding in Bastar was emerging.) Tata
Steel and Rio Tinto (which has a sordid track record of its own) were among the
chief sponsors of the Jaipur Literary Festival (Latin name: Darshan Singh
Construction Jaipur Literary Festival) that is advertised by the cognoscenti as
‘The Greatest Literary Show on Earth’. Counselage, the Tatas’ “strategic brand
manager”, sponsored the festival’s press tent. Many of the world’s best and
brightest writers gathered in Jaipur to discuss love, literature, politics and
Sufi poetry. Some tried to defend Salman Rushdie’s right to free speech by
reading from his proscribed book, The Satanic Verses. In every TV
frame and newspaper photograph, the logo of Tata Steel (and its tagline—Values
Stronger than Steel) loomed behind them, a benign, benevolent host. The enemies
of Free Speech were the supposedly murderous Muslim mobs, who, the festival
organisers told us, could have even harmed the school-children gathered there.
(We are witness to how helpless the Indian government and the police can be
when it comes to Muslims.) Yes, the hardline Darul-Uloom Deobandi Islamic
seminary did protest Rushdie being invited to the festival. Yes, some Islamists
did gather at the festival venue to protest and yes, outrageously, the state
government did nothing to protect the venue. That’s because the whole episode
had as much to do with democracy, votebanks and the Uttar Pradesh elections as
it did with Islamist fundamentalism. But the battle for Free Speech against
Islamist Fundamentalism made it to the world’s newspapers. It is important that
it did. But there were hardly any reports about the festival sponsors’ role in
the war in the forests, the bodies piling up, the prisons filling up. Or about
the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Public
Security Act, which make even thinking an anti-government
thought a cognisable offence. Or about the mandatory public hearing for the
Tata Steel plant in Lohandiguda which local people complained actually took
place hundreds of miles away in Jagdalpur, in the collector’s office compound,
with a hired audience of fifty people, under armed guard. Where was Free Speech
then? No one mentioned Kalinganagar. No one mentioned that journalists,
academics and filmmakers working on subjects unpopular with the Indian
government—like the surreptitious part it played in the genocide of Tamils in
the war in Sri Lanka or the recently discovered unmarked graves in Kashmir—were
being denied visas or deported straight from the airport.
But which of us
sinners was going to cast the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from
corporate publishing houses. We all watch Tata Sky, we surf the net with Tata
Photon, we ride in Tata taxis, we stay in Tata Hotels, we sip our Tata tea in
Tata bone china and stir it with teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We buy Tata
books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka namak khate hain. We’re under
siege.
If the sledgehammer
of moral purity is to be the criterion for stone-throwing, then the only people
who qualify are those who have been silenced already. Those who live outside
the system; the outlaws in the forests or those whose protests are never
covered by the press, or the well-behaved dispossessed, who go from tribunal to
tribunal, bearing witness, giving testimony.
But the Litfest gave
us our Aha! Moment. Oprah came. She said she loved India, that
she would come again and again. It made us proud.
This is only the
burlesque end of the Exquisite Art.
Though the Tatas have
been involved with corporate philanthropy for almost a hundred years now,
endowing scholarships and running some excellent educational institutes and
hospitals, Indian corporations have only recently been invited into the Star
Chamber, the Camera stellata, the brightly lit world of global
corporate government, deadly for its adversaries, but otherwise so artful that
you barely know it’s there.
What follows in this
essay might appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand,
in the tradition of honouring one’s adversaries, it could be read as an
acknowledgement of the vision, flexibility, the sophistication and unwavering
determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keep the world safe
for capitalism.
Their enthralling
history, which has faded from contemporary memory, began in the US in the early
20th century when, kitted out legally in the form of endowed foundations,
corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity as Capitalism’s
(and Imperialism’s) road opening and systems maintenance patrol. Among the
first foundations to be set up in the United States were the Carnegie
Corporation, endowed in 1911 by profits from the Carnegie Steel Company; and
the Rockefeller Foundation, endowed in 1914 by J.D. Rockefeller, founder
of Standard Oil Company. The Tatas and Ambanis of their time.
Some of the
institutions financed, given seed money or supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation are the UN, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, New York’s
most fabulous Museum of Modern Art, and, of course, the Rockefeller Center in
New York (where Diego Riviera’s mural had to be blasted off the wall because it
mischievously depicted reprobate capitalists and a valiant Lenin. Free Speech
had taken the day off.)
J.D. Rockefeller was
America’s first billionaire and the world’s richest man. He was an
abolitionist, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and a teetotaller. He believed his
money was given to him by God, which must have been nice for him.
Here’s an excerpt
from one of Pablo Neruda’s early poems called Standard Oil Company:
Their obese emperors
from New York
are suave smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars
petty tyrants and dictators.
are suave smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars
petty tyrants and dictators.
They buy countries,
people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.
A President
assassinated for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.
When
corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the US, there was
a fierce debate about their provenance, legality and lack of accountability.
People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise
the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those
days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in
fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with
massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly
non-transparent—what better way to parlay economic wealth into political,
social and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for
usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How
else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers,
find himself designing education, health and agriculture policies, not just for
the US government, but for governments all over the world?
Over the years, as
people witnessed some of the genuinely good the foundations did (running public
libraries, eradicating diseases)—the direct connection between corporations and
the foundations they endowed began to blur. Eventually, it faded altogether.
Now even those who consider themselves left-wing are not shy to accept their
largesse.
By the 1920s, US
capitalism had begun to look outwards, for raw materials and overseas markets.
Foundations began to formulate the idea of global corporate governance. In
1924, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations jointly created what is today
the most powerful foreign policy pressure group in the world—the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR), which later came to be funded by the Ford Foundation
as well. By 1947, the newly created CIA was supported by and working closely
with the CFR. Over the years, the CFR’s membership has included 22 US
secretaries of state. There were five CFR members in the 1943 steering
committee that planned the UN, and an $8.5 million grant from J.D. Rockefeller
bought the land on which the UN’s New York headquarters stands.
All eleven of the
World Bank’s presidents since 1946—men who have presented themselves as
missionaries of the poor—have been members of the CFR. (The exception was
George Woods. And he was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and
vice-president of Chase-Manhattan Bank.)
At Bretton Woods, the
World Bank and IMF decided that the US dollar should be the reserve currency of
the world, and that in order to enhance the penetration of global capital, it
would be necessary to universalise and standardise business practices in an
open marketplace. It is towards that end that they spend a large amount of
money promoting Good Governance (as long as they control the strings), the
concept of the Rule of Law (provided they have a say in making the laws) and
hundreds of anti-corruption programmes (to streamline the system they have put
in place.) Two of the most opaque, unaccountable organisations in the world go
about demanding transparency and accountability from the governments of poorer
countries.
Given that the World
Bank has more or less directed the economic policies of the Third World, coercing
and cracking open the markets of country after country for global finance, you
could say that corporate philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary
business of all time.
Corporate-endowed
foundations administer, trade and channelise their power and place their
chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think-tanks,
whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors. Contrary
to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing
groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this
arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell
companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except
that the currency is power, not money.
The transnational
equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David
Rockefeller, the former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
(founder-member of the Afghan Mujahideen, forefathers of the Taliban), the
Chase-Manhattan Bank and some other private eminences. Its purpose was to
create an enduring bond of friendship and cooperation between the elites of
North America, Europe and Japan. It has now become a penta-lateral commission,
because it includes members from China and India. (Tarun Das of the CII; N.R.
Narayanamurthy, ex-CEO, Infosys; Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director, Godrej;
Jamshed J. Irani, director, Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO, Avantha Group).
The Aspen Institute
is an international club of local elites, businessmen, bureaucrats,
politicians, with franchises in several countries. Tarun Das is the president
of the Aspen Institute, India. Gautam Thapar is chairman. Several senior
officers of the McKinsey Global Institute (proposer of the Delhi Mumbai
Industrial Corridor) are members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the
Aspen Institute.
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The Ford Foundation
(liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller Foundation, though the two
work together constantly) was set up in 1936. Though it is often underplayed,
the Ford Foundation has a very clear, well-defined ideology and works extremely
closely with the US state department. Its project of deepening democracy and
“good governance” are very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of
standardising business practice and promoting efficiency in the free market.
After the Second World War, when Communists replaced Fascists as the US
government’s enemy number one, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal
with the Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a
military think-tank that began with weapons research for the US defense
services. In 1952, to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to penetrate and
disrupt free nations”, it established the Fund for the Republic, which then
morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions whose brief was
to wage the cold war intelligently without McCarthyite excesses. It is through
this lens that we need to view the work Ford Foundation is doing, with the
millions of dollars it has invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers
and activists, its generous endowment of university courses and scholarships.
The Ford Foundation’s
declared “goals for the future of mankind” include interventions in grassroots
political movements locally and internationally. In the US, it provided
millions in grants and loans to support the Credit Union Movement that was
pioneered by the department store owner, Edward Filene, in 1919. Filene
believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving
workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only
half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was
the more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the
first half of Filene’s suggestion, and by disbursing “affordable” loans of tens
of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into
people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.
Many years later,
this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when
Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants
with disastrous consequences. Microfinance companies in India are responsible
for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national
daily recently published a suicide note by an 18-year-old girl who was forced
to hand over her last Rs 150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the
microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take
loans.”
There’s a lot of
money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
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By the 1950s, the
Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funding several NGOs and international
educational institutions, began to work as quasi-extensions of the US
government that was at the time toppling democratically elected governments in
Latin America, Iran and Indonesia. (That was also around the time they made
their entry into India, then non-aligned, but clearly tilting towards the
Soviet Union.) The Ford Foundation established a US-style economics course at the
Indonesian University. Elite Indonesian students, trained in counter-insurgency
by US army officers, played a crucial part in the 1965 CIA-backed coup in
Indonesia that brought General Suharto to power. Gen Suharto repaid his mentors
by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Communist rebels.
Eight years later,
young Chilean students, who came to be known as the Chicago Boys, were taken to
the US to be trained in neo-liberal economics by Milton Friedman at the
University of Chicago (endowed by J.D. Rockefeller), in preparation for the
1973 CIA-backed coup that killed Salvador Allende, and brought in General
Pinochet and a reign of death squads, disappearances and terror that lasted for
seventeen years. (Allende’s crime was being a democratically elected socialist
and nationalising Chile’s mines.)
In 1957, the
Rockefeller Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Prize for community
leaders in Asia. It was named after Ramon Magsaysay, president of the
Philippines, a crucial ally in the US campaign against Communism in Southeast
Asia. In 2000, the Ford Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Emergent
Leadership Award. The Magsaysay Award is considered a prestigious award among
artists, activists and community workers in India. M.S. Subbulakshmi and
Satyajit Ray won it, so did Jayaprakash Narayan and one of India’s finest
journalists, P. Sainath. But they did more for the Magsaysay award than it did
for them. In general, it has become a gentle arbiter of what kind of activism
is “acceptable” and what is not.
Interestingly, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement last summer was spearheaded by three Magsaysay Award winners—Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi. One of Arvind Kejriwal’s many NGOs is generously funded by Ford Foundation. Kiran Bedi’s NGO is funded by Coca Cola and Lehman Brothers.
Though Anna Hazare
calls himself a Gandhian, the law he called for—the Jan Lokpal Bill—was
un-Gandhian, elitist and dangerous. A round-the-clock corporate media campaign
proclaimed him to be the voice of “the people”. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street
movement in the US, the Hazare movement did not breathe a word against
privatisation, corporate power or economic “reforms”. On the contrary, its principal
media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from massive corporate
corruption scandals (which had exposed high-profile journalists too) and used
the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of
discretionary powers from government, for more reforms, more privatisation. (In
2008, Anna Hazare received a World Bank award for outstanding public service).
The World Bank issued a statement from Washington saying the movement
“dovetailed” into its policy.
Like all good
Imperialists, the Philanthropoids set themselves the task of creating and
training an international cadre that believed that Capitalism, and by extension
the hegemony of the United States, was in their own self-interest. And who
would therefore help to administer the Global Corporate Government in the ways
native elites had always served colonialism. So began the foundations’ foray
into education and the arts, which would become their third sphere of
influence, after foreign and domestic economic policy. They spent (and continue
to spend) millions of dollars on academic institutions and pedagogy.
Joan Roelofs in her
wonderful book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralismdescribes
how foundations remodelled the old ideas of how to teach political science, and
fashioned the disciplines of “international” and “area” studies. This provided
the US intelligence and security services a pool of expertise in foreign
languages and culture to recruit from. The CIA and US state department continue
to work with students and professors in US universities, raising serious
questions about the ethics of scholarship.
The gathering of information to control people they rule is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the government has embarked on a massive biometrics programme, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information-gathering projects in the world— the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor”, will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry? (A conservative estimate of the UID budget exceeds the Indian government’s annual public spending on education.) To “digitise” a country with such a large population of the largely illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum-dwellers, hawkers, adivasis without land records—will criminalise them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, “numerical targets”, “scorecards of progress”. As though it is a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt and skewed profit-oriented, corporate policy.
Corporate-endowed
foundations are the biggest funders of the social sciences and the arts,
endowing courses and student scholarships in “development studies”, “community
studies”, “cultural studies”, “behavioural sciences” and “human rights”. As US
universities opened their doors to international students, hundreds of
thousands of students, children of the Third World elite, poured in. Those who
could not afford the fees were given scholarships. Today in countries like
India and Pakistan there is scarcely a family among the upper middle classes
that does not have a child that has studied in the US. From their ranks have
come good scholars and academics, but also the prime ministers, finance
ministers, economists, corporate lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who helped to
open up the economies of their countries to global corporations.
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Scholars of the
Foundation-friendly version of economics and political science were rewarded
with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments and jobs. Those with
Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalised and
ghettoised, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one particular imagination—a
brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs
into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia
at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural
economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent
that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default
position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised
ordinariness, and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as
challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No
Alternative’.
It is only now,
thanks to the Occupy Movement, that another language has appeared on US streets
and campuses. To see students with banners that say ‘Class War’ or ‘We don’t
mind you being rich, but we mind you buying our government’ is, given the odds,
almost a revolution in itself.
One century after it
began, corporate philanthropy is as much part of our lives as Coca Cola. There
are now millions of non-profit organisations, many of them connected through a
byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations. Between them, this
“independent” sector has assets worth nearly 450 billion dollars. The largest
of them is the Bill Gates Foundation with ($21 billion), followed by the Lilly
Endowment ($16 billion) and the Ford Foundation ($15 billion).
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Mischievously, when the government or sections of the Corporate
Press want to run a smear campaign against a genuine people’s movement, like
the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or the protest against the Koodankulam nuclear
reactor, they accuse these movements of being NGOs receiving “foreign funding”.
They know very well that the mandate of most NGOs, in particular the
well-funded ones, is to further the project of corporate globalisation, not
thwart it.
Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world,
turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists,
intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical
confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender,
community development—the discourse couched in the language of identity
politics and human rights.
The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of
human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have
played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an
atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both
parties in a conflict—say, for example, the Maoists and the Indian government,
or the Israeli Army and Hamas—can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators.
The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of
Palestinian land by the State of Israel then become footnotes with very little
bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t
matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or
remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.
Another conceptual coup has to do with foundations’ involvement
with the feminist movement. Why do most “official” feminists and women’s
organisations in India keep a safe distance between themselves and
organisations like say the 90,000-member Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan
(Revolutionary Adivasi Women’s Association) fighting patriarchy in their own
communities and displacement by mining corporations in the Dandakaranya forest?
Why is it that the dispossession and eviction of millions of women from land
which they owned and worked is not seen as a feminist problem?
The hiving off of the
liberal feminist movement from grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist
people’s movements did not begin with the evil designs of foundations. It began
with those movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid
radicalisation of women that took place in the ’60s and ’70s. The foundations
showed genius in recognising and moving in to support and fund women’s growing
impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional societies as
well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of Left movements. In a
country like India, the schism also ran along the rural-urban divide. Most
radical, anti-capitalist movements were located in the countryside where, for
the most part, patriarchy continued to rule the lives of most women. Urban
women activists who joined these movements (like the Naxalite movement) had
been influenced and inspired by the western feminist movement and their own
journeys towards liberation were often at odds with what their male leaders
considered to be their duty: to fit in with ‘the masses’. Many women activists
were not willing to wait any longer for the “revolution” in order to end the
daily oppression and discrimination in their lives, including from their own
comrades. They wanted gender equality to be an absolute, urgent and
non-negotiable part of the revolutionary process and not just a post-revolution
promise. Intelligent, angry and disillusioned women began to move away and look
for other means of support and sustenance. As a result, by the late ’80s,
around the time Indian markets were opened up, the liberal feminist movement in
a country like India has become inordinately NGO-ised. Many of these NGOs have
done seminal work on queer rights, domestic violence, AIDS and the rights of
sex workers. But significantly, the liberal feminist movements have not been at
the forefront of challenging the new economic policies, even though women have
been the greatest sufferers. By manipulating the disbursement of the funds, the
foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the range of what
“political” activity should be. The funding briefs of NGOs now prescribe what
counts as women’s “issues” and what doesn’t.
The NGO-isation of
the women’s movement has also made western liberal feminism (by virtue of its being
the most funded brand) the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The
battles, as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at
one end and burqas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the
double whammy, Botox and the Burqa.) When, as happened recently in France, an
attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a
situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about
liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and
cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion.
Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing
gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an
issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US
government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded
Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the
Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their
problems.
In the NGO universe,
which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become
a “subject”, a separate, professionalised, special-interest issue. Community
development, leadership development, human rights, health, education,
reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed
into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief.
Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could. Poverty
too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As though the poor
have not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to
exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal
(administered by NGOs on an individual, person to person basis), and whose
long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance. Under the regime of
Global Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying.
Indian poverty, after
a brief period in the wilderness while India “shone”, has made a comeback as an
exotic identity in the Arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog
Millionaire. These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and
resilience, have no villains—except the small ones who provide narrative
tension and local colour. The authors of these works are the contemporary
world’s equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honoured for
working on “the ground”, for their brave journeys into the unknown. You rarely
see the rich being examined in these ways.
Having worked out how
to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media and
liberal opinion, there was one more challenge for the neo-liberal
establishment: how to deal with growing unrest, the threat of “people’s power”.
How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you
vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys?
Here too, foundations
and their allied organisations have a long and illustrious history. A revealing
example is their role in defusing and deradicalising the Black Civil Rights
movement in the US in the 1960s and the successful transformation of Black
Power into Black Capitalism.
The Rockefeller
Foundation, in keeping with J.D. Rockefeller’s ideals, had worked closely with
Martin Luther King Sr (father of Martin Luther King Jr). But his influence
waned with the rise of the more militant organisations—the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. The Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations moved in. In 1970, they donated $15 million to “moderate” black
organisations, giving people grants, fellowships, scholarships, job training
programmes for dropouts and seed money for black-owned businesses. Repression,
infighting and the honey trap of funding led to the gradual atrophying of the
radical black organisations.
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Martin Luther King Jr
made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the
Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated, even his memory became a
toxic threat to public order. Foundations and Corporations worked hard to
remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King
Junior Centre for Non-Violent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2
million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors,
Mobil, Western Electric, Procter & Gamble, US Steel and Monsanto. The
Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement.
Among the many programmes the King Center runs have been projects that “work
closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces
Chaplains Board and others”. It co-sponsored the Martin Luther King Jr Lecture
Series called ‘The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Non-violent Social
Change’. Amen.
A similar coup was
carried out in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. In 1978, the
Rockefeller Foundation organised a Study Commission on US Policy toward
Southern Africa. The report warned of the growing influence of the Soviet Union
on the African National Congress (ANC) and said that US strategic and corporate
interests (i.e., access to South Africa’s minerals) would be best served if
there were genuine sharing of political power by all races.
The foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the more radical organisations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated them. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black President, he was canonised as a living saint, not just because he was a freedom fighter who spent 27 years in prison, but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great “peaceful transition”, so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalisation of South Africa’s mines. Instead, there was Privatisation and Structural Adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good Hope—to his old supporter and friend General Suharto, the killer of Communists in Indonesia. Today, in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedes-driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country. But that is more than enough to perpetuate the illusion of Black Liberation.
The rise of Black
Power in the US was an inspirational moment for the rise of a radical,
progressive Dalit movement in India, with organisations like the Dalit Panthers
mirroring the militant politics of the Black Panthers. But Dalit Power too, in
not exactly the same but similar ways, has been fractured and defused and, with
plenty of help from right-wing Hindu organisations and the Ford Foundation, is
well on its way to transforming into Dalit Capitalism.
‘Dalit Inc ready
to show business can beat caste’, the Indian Express reported
in December last year. It went on to quote a mentor of the Dalit Indian Chamber
of Commerce & Industry (DICCI). “Getting the prime minister for a Dalit
gathering is not difficult in our society. But for Dalit entrepreneurs, taking
a photograph with Tata and Godrej over lunch and tea is an aspiration—and proof
that they have arrived,” he said. Given the situation in modern India, it would
be casteist and reactionary to say that Dalit entrepreneurs oughtn’t to have a
place at the high table. But if this is to be the aspiration, the ideological
framework of Dalit politics, it would be a great pity. And unlikely to help the
one million Dalits who still earn a living off manual scavenging—carrying human
shit on their heads.
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Young Dalit scholars
who accept grants from the Ford Foundation cannot be too harshly judged. Who
else is offering them an opportunity to climb out of the cesspit of the Indian
caste system? The shame as well as a large part of the blame for this turn of
events also goes to India’s Communist movement whose leaders continue to be
predominantly upper caste. For years it has tried to force-fit the idea of
caste into Marxist class analysis. It has failed miserably, in theory as well
as practice. The rift between the Dalit community and the Left began with a
falling out between the visionary Dalit leader Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar and S.A.
Dange, trade unionist and founding member of the Communist Party of India. Dr
Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the Communist Party began with the textile
workers’ strike in Mumbai in 1928 when he realised that despite all the
rhetoric about working class solidarity, the party did not find it
objectionable that the “untouchables” were kept out of the weaving department
(and only qualified for the lower paid spinning department) because the work
involved the use of saliva on the threads, which other castes considered
“polluting”.
Ambedkar realised
that in a society where the Hindu scriptures institutionalise untouchability
and inequality, the battle for “untouchables”, for social and civic rights, was
too urgent to wait for the promised Communist revolution. The rift between the
Ambedkarites and the Left has come at a great cost to both. It has meant that a
great majority of the Dalit population, the backbone of the Indian working
class, has pinned its hopes for deliverance and dignity to constitutionalism,
to capitalism and to political parties like the BSP, which practise an
important, but in the long run, stagnant brand of identity politics.
In the United States,
as we have seen, corporate-endowed foundations spawned the culture of NGOs. In
India, targeted corporate philanthropy began in earnest in the 1990s, the era
of the New Economic Policies. Membership to the Star Chamber doesn’t come
cheap. The Tata Group donated $50 million to that needy institution, the
Harvard Business School, and another $50 million to Cornell University. Nandan
Nilekani of Infosys and his wife Rohini donated $5 million as a start-up
endowment for the India Initiative at Yale. The Harvard Humanities Centre is
now the Mahindra Humanities Centre after it received its largest-ever donation
of $10 million from Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra Group.
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At home, the Jindal
Group, with a major stake in mining, metals and power, runs the Jindal Global
Law School and will soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public
Policy. (The Ford Foundation runs a law school in the Congo.) The New India
Foundation funded by Nandan Nilekani, financed by profits from Infosys, gives
prizes and fellowships to social scientists. The Sitaram Jindal Foundation
endowed by Jindal Aluminium has announced five cash prizes of Rs 1 crore each
to be given to those working in rural development, poverty alleviation,
environment education and moral upliftment. The Reliance Group’s Observer
Research Foundation (ORF), currently endowed by Mukesh Ambani, is cast in the
mould of the Rockefeller Foundation. It has retired intelligence agents,
strategic analysts, politicians (who pretend to rail against each other in
Parliament), journalists and policymakers as its research “fellows” and
advisors.
ORF’s objectives seem
straightforward enough: “To help develop a consensus in favour of economic
reforms.” And to shape and influence public opinion, creating “viable,
alternative policy options in areas as divergent as employment generation in
backward districts and real-time strategies to counter nuclear, biological and
chemical threats”.
I was initially
puzzled by the preoccupation with “nuclear, biological and chemical war” in
ORF’s stated objectives. But less so when, in the long list of its
‘institutional partners’, I found the names of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin,
two of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers. In 2007, Raytheon announced
it was turning its attention to India. Could it be that at least part of
India’s $32 billion defence budget will be spent on weapons, guided missiles,
aircraft, warships and surveillance equipment made by Raytheon and Lockheed
Martin?
Do we need weapons to
fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the
economies of Europe, US and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry.
It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.
In the new Cold War
between US and China, India is being groomed to play the role Pakistan played
as a US ally in the cold war with Russia. (And look what happened to Pakistan.)
Many of those columnists and “strategic analysts” who are playing up the
hostilities between India and China, you’ll see, can be traced back directly or
indirectly to the Indo-American think-tanks and foundations. Being a “strategic
partner” of the US does not mean that the Heads of State make friendly phone
calls to each other every now and then. It means collaboration (interference)
at every level. It means hosting US Special Forces on Indian soil (a Pentagon
Commander recently confirmed this to the BBC). It means sharing intelligence,
altering agriculture and energy policies, opening up the health and education
sectors to global investment. It means opening up retail. It means an unequal
partnership in which India is being held close in a bear hug and waltzed around
the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.
In the list of ORF’s
‘institutional partners’, you will also find the RAND Corporation, Ford
Foundation, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution (whose stated mission is
to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad
goals: to strengthen American democracy; to foster the economic and social
welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and to secure a more open,
safe, prosperous and cooperative international system”.) You will also find the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany. (Poor Rosa, who died for the cause of
Communism, to find her name on a list such as this one!)
Though capitalism is
meant to be based on competition, those at the top of the food chain have also
shown themselves to be capable of inclusiveness and solidarity. The great
Western Capitalists have done business with fascists, socialists, despots and
military dictators. They can adapt and constantly innovate. They are capable of
quick thinking and immense tactical cunning.
But despite having
successfully powered through economic reforms, despite having waged wars and
militarily occupied countries in order to put in place free market
“democracies”, Capitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not
revealed itself completely yet. Marx said, “What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.”
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The proletariat, as
Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs
have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. The proletariat has, over
the years, been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India, it
has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi,
caste against caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is
fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India,
the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest
corporations in their tracks.
Capitalism is in
crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international
financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per
cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are
sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the
financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the
juggernaut of global capital.
Capitalism’s real
“grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned
ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have
trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two
old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not
work.
I stood outside
Antilla for a long time watching the sun go down. I imagined that the tower was
as deep as it was high. That it had a twenty-seven-storey-long tap root,
snaking around below the ground, hungrily sucking sustenance out of the earth,
turning it into smoke and gold.
Why did the Ambanis’
choose to call their building Antilla? Antilla is the name of a set of mythical
islands whose story dates back to an 8th-century Iberian legend. When the
Muslims conquered Hispania, six Christian Visigothic bishops and their
parishioners boarded ships and fled. After days, or maybe weeks at sea, they
arrived at the isles of Antilla where they decided to settle and raise a new
civilisation. They burnt their boats to permanently sever their links to their
barbarian-dominated homeland.
By calling their
tower Antilla, do the Ambanis hope to sever their links to the poverty and
squalor of their homeland and raise a new civilisation? Is this the final act
of the most successful secessionist movement in India? The secession of the
middle and upper classes into outer space?
As night fell over
Mumbai, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appeared
outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blazed on, to scare away
the ghosts perhaps. The neighbours complain that Antilla’s bright lights have
stolen the night.
Perhaps it’s time for
us to take back the night.
1. Edited March 18,
2012: the year of CIA backed coup in Indonesia was earlier incorrectly
mentioned as 1952. Corrected to 1965
2. Edited March 20,
2012: The sentence that now reads “All this in Goa, where activists and
journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining scandals, and Essar’s part
in the war unfolding in Bastar was emerging” was earlier published as: “All
this in Goa, while activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal
mining scandals that involved Essar”
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