Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to
Anna Hazare.... How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our
protests?
Corbis (From Outlook, March 26,
2012)
Antilla the Hun Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey home on Altamont Road. Its bright
lights, say the neighbours, have stolen the night.
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.
A whole spectrum of corruption A. Raja being led to jail in connection
with the 2G scandal. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)
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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India’s new megacorps—Tatas, Jindals, Essar,
Reliance—are those who’ve moved to the head of the spigot that’s spewing
money extracted from inside the earth.
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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.
The litfests Along with film, art installations, they have replaced the
1990s obsession with beauty contests. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)
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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After
three years of trying to flush out the rebels, the Centre’s said it’ll
deploy the armed forces. In India, this is not war, it’s ‘Creating a Good
Investment Climate’.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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RIL owns 27 TV channels. But the reverse is also true.
Dainik Bhaskar owns 69 companies with interests in mining, power
generation, real estate and textiles.
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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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Coercing
a woman out of a burqa is not about liberating her, but about unclothing
her. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one.
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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.
Embracing death Microcredit has been the bane of many a farmer. Many
have been forced to commit suicide.
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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But which of us sinners was going to cast the first
stone? We watch Tata Sky, surf the net with Tata Photon, sip Tata Tea. Hum
Tata ka namak khate hain!
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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.
Team Anna Whose voice are they, really?. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)
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 Pluralism describes 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.
Uniquely placed Nandan Nilekani, ‘CEO’ of Project UID. (Photograph by
Jitender Gupta)
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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Corporate
philanthropy is as much a part of our lives as Coca Cola. Global finance
buys into protest movements via NGOs. More troubled an area, more the NGOs.
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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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Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is
consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what
is causing world hunger.
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As the IMF enforced Structural Adjustment, and arm-twisted
governments into cutting back on public spending on health, education,
childcare, development, the NGOs moved in. The Privatisation of Everything has
also meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared,
NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them
for what they are. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs,
some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs
with the same brush. However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are
global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like
shareholders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within.
They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which
global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers,
alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host
countries. (The Ford Foundation requires the organisations it funds to sign a
pledge to this effect.) Inadvertently (and sometimes advertently), they serve
as listening posts, their reports and workshops and other missionary activity
feeding data into an increasingly aggressive system of surveillance of
increasingly hardening States. The more troubled an area, the greater the
numbers of NGOs in it.
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.
‘Mining happiness’ Vedanta is stripping all that the Dongria Kondh
tribals hold sacred. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)
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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Stones
were pushed up Soni Sori’s vagina to get her to ‘confess’. Sori remains in
jail; her interrogator, Ankit Garg, was awarded the police medal this
Republic Day.
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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.
Black ‘liberation’ Or a bow to the Washington Consensus?. (Photograph by
Reuters, From Outlook, March 26, 2012)
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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Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to
create a market for weapons? It’s the one thing that the US hasn’t
outsourced to China.
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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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When
Mandela took over, socialism disappeared from the ANC agenda. Today, a clutch
of Mercedes-driving ex-radicals and trade unionists rule the country.
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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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Capitalism is in crisis. The international financial
meltdown is closing in. The two old tricks that dug it out of past
crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.
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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”
