(8)

In the post below, Jonathan quotes Theodore Dalrymple saying the following rather mind-boggling statement.

"[Journalists are taxed at lower rates than normal people] ... this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors."

He thinks this is a good thing? Seriously? Journalists have an incentive to cover up the wrongdoings of the powerful, and this is good?

Leaving aside the obvious corollary of this, that France effectively licenses journalists, I personally do not think that politicians and bureaucrats should have any right to privacy whatsoever. They choose to go into politics, and they are trusted with our money and are given considerable power over us. In return, everything they do up to and including going to the toilet should be subject to scrutiny. They should have some protection against being libelled (but even then a relatively weak right - the burden of proof should be on the politician and it should be necessary to prove both untruth and malice). In truth I am not that keen on extending much of a right to privacy to anyone else either. As long as you are telling the truth, you should generally be able to say it out loud, in any forum. This is one case where the Americans have it right with the First Amendment.

As for the vulgarisation of culture, London is the most culturally vibrant city in Europe. Culturally speaking, Paris today is about as interesting as English food circa 1955. At least, Paris inside the peripherique is. There are some interesting things going on in rap music, language and art in some of Paris' suburbs, but I doubt that Dalrymple is much of a fan. The price of cultural interestingness may be some vulgarity, but who gets to decide what is vulgar and what is art? Old men decrying the tastes of yoof today, I guess. The Nazis were very keen on doing this, too. As are the Chinese communists.

China is a deeply authoritarian place. As a consequence of that, the country is culturally pretty dead. The Chinese watch imported movies, and encourage their children to learn to play western classical music. What is produced domestically and gets wide distribution is frighteningly bland, which is what happens under authoritarian regimes. Interesting things can be going on underneath, which can sometimes lead to cultural explosions when the authoritarian regimes are gone (see Spanish and South Korean post-dictatorship cinema, for instance), but China is a way from that.

Who do you compare China with, though? There is one obvious rival.

In late April, a couple of days after some unspeakable barbarians had exploded a bomb in a restaurant in Marrakesh, I was sitting in a cafe in Fez, in a more northern part of Morocco. As in many cafes worldwide, there was a television in the room. This was showing a soap opera of some kind on a pan-Arabic TV channel. (There are many, many, many pan-Arabic TV channels. They are run out of Qatar and Dubai. Moroccan roofs have more satellite dishes on them than I have seen anywhere else on earth). This particular pan-Arab channel was showing a soap opera or a popular movie of some kind.

In any event, the program in question contained some Islamic symbols. There were mosques in the background of a few scenes. The TV was showing subtitles in Arabic. I am not sure if that was because the program was originally in some other language or if these were just closed captions in the same language as the original material, turned on because there was a lot of background noise. (It may have been that the program was in fact Pakistani, and the original language was Urdu, but I am not sure). In any event, though, the program contained musical dance numbers of a form that were familiar to me. And there were slightly more bare female midriffs than one expects on TV in an Arab country. I expect there were more than one sees on domestic Moroccan TV, too, which partially explains the satellite dishes. Morocco is authoritarian enough to censor its own TV, but not authoritarian enough to attempt to ban the dishes.

The program was not made in India, but the grammar of the program was entirely that of Bollywood. In North-West Africa, in the Arab world, one of the leading cultural influences is clearly India. This is hardly surprising. Go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Qatar and who does the actual work? People from South Asia; Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. Even when they are making programs for Arab markets, they use their own cultural reference points. Even when making programs for their own market, Pakistanis use Indian cultural reference points. However it happens, and however second or third hand it comes, the cultural influence of Bombay on the Middle East and North Africa is clearly immense

And is Bollywood vulgar? Oh Lord yes. More conservative Indians elsewhere in the country denounce its amoral wickedness as much as anyone in America has ever denounced Hollywood. The entertainment industries of India are run by gangsters at least as depraved as any who have ever run Hollywood or Las Vegas. It isn't any great coincidence that the most savage terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists in recent years was on the city of Bombay. This is the heart of wickedness and vulgarity, and they know where the enemy is. Indian culture is vibrant and vulgar. On the surface and in the mass market at least, Chinese culture is dead. And Indian culture is the country's greatest weapon against its enemies.

(8)

Further to what I, and Johnathan Pearce, and Natalie Solent, have all being saying here about cricket corruption, and about how this is a story about more than mere cricket corruption, I just noticed this report from a few days ago, at cricinfo.com. Cricinfo is one of my regular haunts, so sorry for not linking to this earlier:

Betting in cricket and other sports should be legalised in India, a Delhi court has said, pointing out that the police have failed to curb illegal betting in the country. Legalising betting, the court said, would help the government keep track of the transfer of funds and even use the revenue generated for public welfare.

"It does not need divine eyes to see that 'satta' in cricket and other games is reaching an alarming situation. The extent of money that it generated is diverted to clandestine and sinister objectives like drug trafficking and terrorist activities," said additional sessions judge Dharmesh Sharma, of a Delhi trial court. "It is high time that our legislature seriously considers legalising the entire system of betting online or otherwise so that enough revenues can be generated to fund various infrastructural requirements for the common man and thus check the lucrative business in organised crime."

Now I will willingly grant you that this is anything but a pure libertarian argument, of the kind that would prevail in Brian-Micklethwait-world. Judge Sharma is emphasising the revenue gathering opportunity inherent in legalisation just as strongly as the anti-crime point. But for what it is worth, I also much prefer a legalised and quite heavily taxed and state-regulated betting regime to total illegality, if those are the only choices I am offered. And they are, given the current state of the world and of its predominant opinions.

(4)

In the previous posting by Brian on the alleged match-fixing scam involving Pakistan's cricket team, one commenter called Jim made the excellent point that gambling is illegal in Pakistan. It is, as the practice is banned under Shariah law - but there is a vast and thriving underground gambling industry there and indeed across the Indian sub-continent.

Now, as we libertarians like to point out, if you ban consenting activities between adults - such as betting on sports - then when such activities are driven underground, criminals get involved, with all the sort of consequences we are now writing about. That is not to say, of course, that if gambling were legalised in Pakistan, that the match-fixer gangsters would hang up their hats and do something else. But it would, in my view, help a great deal to drive some of these scum away.

Americans bored by all this talk of cricket might recall that baseball has had its problems in the past, as have other sports too. This Wikipedia entry is worth reading (and maybe improving).

And there are certain parallels in this issue with insider dealing in financial markets. On one level, I think that it should not be made illegal since it is difficult to work out the difference, sometimes, between a trader who is just quick off the mark to exploit new information and someone who happens to be privy to inside information. Arguablym, distortions caused by insider dealing eventually get arbitraged out by other investors. However, in the case of private stock markets, they are, as private institutions, perfectly entitled to set the rules so that trading is seen to be "fair" and open, if only to encourage investors to buy and sell stocks who might otherwise have been cynical about insiders getting all the best deals. It is like a private sports association setting down rules against things such as use of enhancement drugs, and so on. So long as no-one is forced to compete against their will, no-one can carp about the rules, and the adoption of such rules draws in more people and interest.

Back to the insider dealing point: As more people play in a market if the rules are seen to be fair, then this encourages greater liquidity and reduces the cost of capital. With the match-fixing issue, the costs of not punishing wrongdoers is something similar: it will drive away people from the sport due to greater cynicism, and hence reduce revenues, investment in new grounds and facilities, and so on. Cynicism, whether in sports, business or elsewhere, is a sort of deadweight cost on an activity by driving away fans, investors, etc.

(10)

Recently I've been suffering from shingles, hence my silence here in recent weeks. Shingles has been no fun, but it would have been even less fun had it not been for Indian Premier League cricket on the television to take my mind off my discomforts. For the last forty and more days, there's been at least one twenty-overs-each-way slogfest every day, and often, as yesterday, two. The last Brian Micklethwait posting here, written originally for here but then featured here (which cheered me up a bit just when I most needed that – thank you JP), was about the IPL, and about one of the things I most like about the IPL, namely the fact that it involves lots of Indians getting rich and being happy.

I know what people mean when they claim that IPL-type cricket - slam bang, slog slog, all over in three and a half hours - is very unsubtle compared to proper day-after-day first class and test match cricket. I know what they mean when they say it's not real cricket. But for me it's real enough, and I like it, just as I like pop music and classical music. I also like very much that ITV4's IPL coverage is free. I have never subscribed to Sky Sports, because that would mean wasting forty quid a month on a very few sporting events that I care about (mostly test match cricket in my case), and then, even worse, being tempted to waste the rest of my life watching a lot of other sporting nonsense, just so as not to waste all that money. If only I could spend a tenner a month and get all the best cricket, but nothing else.

But there is still a price to be paid for IPL watching, in the form of adverts between overs, advertising logos all over the players' shirts, and constant commercial self-interruptions by the numerous, obviously very well paid and hence thoroughly compliant commentators. Nothing exciting ever happens in IPL without it being described as a "City moment of success", whoever or whatever "City" ("Citi"?) might be. All catches are described as being "carbon" Kemaal (sp?). Actually it's Karbonn – a mobile phone enterprise, I think. And there is a big blimp that hovers above the grounds with "MRF" on it, which is something to do with a fast bowling scheme paid for by a rubber company, that the commentators talk about incessantly for no reason except that they have been commanded to. But I don't care. For me this is all part of the Indians making money angle. And if all the Karbonn City Moment of Success DLF Maximum (a six) Maxx Mobile Time Out (a bigger than usual advertising break) crap gets too annoying, then I wait an hour or two and instead watch my recording of it all, fast forwarding through all the commerce. Which is also a way to waste less of my life. This didn't matter when I was ill. Wasting my life watching cricket games all day long was all I was capable of, other than sleeping and being depressed. But now, as I improve, that's an important consideration.

Meanwhile, I really appreciate being able to see a lot of the world's best cricketers in action, many of whom have until now just been names to me, albeit huge names. Watching Sachin Tendulkar thread fours through the early close-in field placings, or Shane Warne turn a game with his ripping, dipping spinners and control freak captaincy, or Yusuf Pathan destroy a bowling attack with a hundred in less than forty balls (but, amazingly, in a losing cause) have been particular pleasures. After watching him play a number of worse-than-useless limited overs innings for his English county, and then perpetrating another couple of such futile crawls at the start of this IPL, I have found out why such a fuss is made, still, of Saurav Ganguly, the Prince of Kolkata, at least in Kolkata. When the Prince of Kolkata deigns to really bat, he can really bat. And now, even Rahul Dravid has started to do quite well.

I confess that I have also enjoyed watching Matthew Hayden do rather worse than he would have hoped, after enduring his unbelievably pompous and vacuous radio commentary in England last summer. The contrast with Geoff Boycott's no-facts-or-opinions-held-back style was extreme. Talk about role reversal. Boycott was a grindingly dull batsman but is a great commentator, guaranteeing fireworks of insight every other sentence. Hayden, the commanding bully-batsman, was a commentating bore, repeating the same non-insights over and over, despite increasingly desperate prodding from the real commentators as they tried to justify having got Hayden in to commentate alongside them. So how much does the IPL pay you mate? No answer. And now, Hayden can't even bat so well. Heh. But I believe Hayden took a while to turn himself into a big hitting batsman, so maybe he will stick with commentating and get good at it.

Also, having never been happy about the bowling action of the formidably successful Sri Lankan spin bowler Muttiah Muralitharan, I rather enjoyed seeing him getting carted for fifty in four overs and then dropped from his team. "Balance" blah blah. It wasn't balance. He's just not that much of a threat any more.

Despite the relative ineffectiveness now of Hayden and Muralitharan, twenty-twenty is great for cricketing legends of the recent past, because they can still at least reasonably hope to manage the short bursts of high quality effort that are all that twenty-twenty cricket demands, even as the day-after-day grind of test cricket becomes too much for them. So, IPL is a last chance to see oldies but still goldies, rather as you see other sporting legends of the recent past still going through the best motions they can still manage in tennis tournaments at the Royal Albert Hall, and in golf tournaments in Florida that they show on TV channels like ITV4 at about two in the morning. Except than in the IPL these cricketing oldies (Jacques Kallis is another such whom I have enjoyed watching) can still be real forces to reckon with, just as, I believe, Babe Ruth could still hit real home runs in major baseball games when close to physical disintegration.

Just as interesting as watching the great names of the recent past has been watching the new young Indians on the up and up. The latest star Indian batsman, completely new to me until now, is Murali Vijay, who not long back hit 127 not out off 55 balls, which is amazing for such a technically correct and physically un-gigantic player. And then there are the new batch of Indian spinners, most notably Ohja and Mishra, who, along with all the other spinners in this tournament, are licking their lips as the unexpectedly hot weather even by Indian standards is now causing the pitches to slow down and take some serious spin.

Maybe you notice how I am naming the names of individual players, but not teams. Apparently lots of cricket fans respond to IPL like that, wanting favourite individual players to do well, perhaps because they are fellow-countrymen, but being less bothered about which teams do well. As yet, it is all too artificial and top-down and contrived to make me care about the "Kolkata Knight Riders" or the "Bangalore Royal Challengers" or the "Mumbai Indians" or whoever. These are not real teams, in the sense of having been founded in a pub in 1890 or whenever and then having gradually got bigger and better and richer and more famous, like Surrey or Arsenal or the Harlequins. The Kolkata Knight Riders and the rest of them are instantly cobbled together franchises, bought off the shelf by billionaires. Unless you live in Kolkata or Bangalore or Mumbai, it's hard to get excited about these mere subdivisions of the available playing talent, and a bit hard to care, I should guess, even if you actually do live in one of these places. Perhaps sensing this trend, the organisers have arranged lots of ongoing individual competitions, awarding specially coloured caps to the two players with the highest run tally and wicket tally, for example. Not that runs alone are the point. Run rate matters at least as much. And for bowlers, not conceding runs is just as important as taking wickets, the significance of the latter being that it is the best way to achieve the former rather than a mere end in itself. And above it all, there is the ultimate score, not runs, but money!!! Who is making the most of that? That is the question. That guy is the real IPL winner. Presumably, now, it's Lalit Modi, the man who set it up. Top player? Sachin Tendulkar? Warne? M. S. Dhoni, the current and much admired Indian captain? Don't know. But do very much care. I think it is public, so IPL money comments would be welcome.

Perhaps because team loyalty, as opposed to interest in the doings of individual players, is as yet somewhat skin-deep, there is, for the time being anyway, an air in the IPL of fake enthusiasm superimposed upon genuine enthusiasm, at any rate as the IPL appears on TV. Various implausibly good looking women are to be seen at the front of the crowd – Bollywood actresses, I'm guessing - who mostly look as if they are far more concerned about how good they look on camera than about how well "their" team is doing. Also, there is an annoying fake trumpet blast that keeps blasting forth, followed by an equally fake round of applause, both the trumpeting and the applause being identical every time hence their obvious fakeness.

But then again, which is better: somewhat fake enthusiasm, or the entirely authentic tedium that now prevails at English four day long county cricket games? The only surviving economic rational for these bizarre events seems to be that they are try-out games for potential England international players, being mostly paid for these days by the proceeds of the more lucrative of England's test matches, which are still real events that attract crowds and make money. The English county cricket season has just started up again, greeted by a massive and completely honest groundswell of absolute indifference on the part of almost everyone who might have been expected to care. The people who still try to keep old school English county cricket staggering along, rather than sneering at the fakery of the IPL which in any case they are far too desperate and envious of to do, might instead try televising all their damned four day games, free on YouTube, and then applying some faked-up enthusiasm to that. If they tried that, a few more than about six dozen people per county might seriously care about county cricket, enough to show up and cheer. Also, advertisers might be encouraged.

I went to a county cricket match not so very long ago, at the Oval, between Surrey and Hampshire. Shane Warne was playing, for Hampshire, as was Surrey's Mark Ramprakash, he of TV Come Dancing fame. But despite the presence of such stars, the overwhelming atmosphere of failure and loser-ness was palpable. I felt ashamed to be there, and had to pretend to myself that I was merely reporting on it all, for my blog, as indeed I was. Had I been there for real, just to support Surrey against Hampshire ... well, I might as well have put a big sign on my chest saying: Bury Me Now. That's how it felt to me.

The depressed state of unlimited overs English county cricket, which has been moribund for several decades now, only serves to highlight the fact that twenty-twenty cricket has for many years now been a cricketing cultural revolution waiting to happen. In England (and in Scotland it seems) twenty-twenty or something a lot like it has been going on for decades, in the form of short club games, played of an early evening or on a weekend afternoon by amateur teams way down cricket's pecking order. But it needed the fifty over version of the professional game to become seriously stale before the penny dropped and the English counties finally got around to playing twenty-twenty. As soon as they did it was an immediate popular hit. Suddenly, you could enjoy a game of cricket, and have a life, all on the same day. It helped that they had finally worked out how to play cricket under floodlights.

While English cricket bosses dithered and blundered about what to do next, Indian zillionaire Lalit Modi grabbed the torch and set up the IPL, of which this current tournament is now the third iteration. The IPL, like the Atom Bomb, works. People love it. Indians love it. TV viewers in England like me love it, especially if we don't have to pay. Advertisers love it. All of which means that the players get paid more for a few weeks of this unreal crudity than they are paid for a year of the usual international grind, which, just like county cricket, is as often as not performed before row upon row of empty seats.

Consider Paul Collingwood. Collingwood is a current England test batsman famous until now mostly for his immense skill and resolution in turning imminent England test match losses into draws, by batting for six hours or more while scoring very few runs indeed. Collingwood did this exact thing in England at the end of the first game in the Ashes series last summer against Australia, turning a game England thoroughly deserved to lose, until he started batting on the final day, into a game they just managed to save, thanks to further heroics by their last pair of bowler-batsmen, Collingwood having finally go out just before the end. Given that England went on to win that series 2-1, Collingwood's grind at Cardiff was as important an innings as any played by an Englishman during the entire summer. But until now Collingwood has not excelled at twenty-twenty, and in this respect he resembles England players generally, who are mostly notable in the IPL by their absence and ineffectiveness compared to Australians, South Africans, Indians, and even West Indians and New Zealanders. There are a handful of English batters who are contributing, notably Collingwood and a guy called Michael Lumb, who used to play with Warne for Hampshire and who now plays in Warne's IPL side, but no English bowlers at all, unless you count Collingwood's own medium pace fill-in stuff.

In addition to having become a stalwart in England's test line up, Collingwood has also done well at the fifty-fifty game, especially when England's other batsmen have succumbed and a period of careful rebuilding has been needed. But until now, as I say, the twenty-twenty game had seemed just two hectic for Collingwood, too frantic, too chancy, too twenty-first century. But Collingwood seems now to have adapted to twenty-twenty cricket, at least on the evidence of his first two IPL innings this time around. The first was a mere support act for a small but muscular Australian called Warner who hit an amazing century, but the second was a true man-of-the-match effort. So, here was Paul Collingwood - hitherto a hero only of heroically torpid draws prised hour by agonising hour from the jaws of defeat, and of closely fought fifty-fifty games where his carefully compiled century lasting about forty overs was just enough to make the difference - clouting sixes into the IPL crowd, for all the world like an Indian or an Australian. How come? Whence the transformation?

If you'd seen a TV interview that Simon Hughes did with Collingwood at the beginning of his latest IPL stint, you would have known. Simply, Collingwood had gone into the nets and practiced - practiced, that is to say, hitting sixes. He wasn't strong enough? Very well then, Collingwood went into the gymnasium and did weights. He practiced batting with a bat weighing a quarter of a ton to make himself stronger. Paul Collingwood is, in short, applying the exact same determination that in Cardiff had gained England that crucial test match draw to the business of becoming a fully paid up (the best of them being very well paid indeed) twenty-twenty super-hitter. Subsequent failures demonstrate that Collingwood is not yet the finished article, but this is definitely not for want of him trying. Seasoned Collingwood observers, like me, believe that he'll crack it, and become one of the IPL's most effective players.

My point being that if Paul Collingwood is determined thus to transform himself, this proves that what we have here is a tide in the affairs of men in general and of cricket in particular that is not to be resisted. Twenty-twenty cricket may be crude and unreal, to the sort of cricket fan who considers it crude and unreal. But it is the future. Indeed, when I listened to Collingwood talk about how he needed to build up his strength and learn how to be sure of clearing the boundary, I was reminded of a passage in The Right Stuff, that book by Tom Wolfe about another cultural transformation that took place among an earlier and rather more exalted group of alpha males, namely America's top test pilot fraternity as the best of those men mutated, in the 1950s and 1960s, into astronauts. Old school aviators grumbled that being an astronaut was merely to become a monkey blasted off into space in a tin can over which you had no control. But while the grumblers grumbled, the young astronauts eagerly applied themselves to the new rules of the new game. If becoming an astronaut meant learning how to talk politely and charmingly to journalists and to blow bubbles into bottles for three minutes on end and to hold your urine inside you for an implausibly long time, then by golly that is what they would learn, yes sir, goddamn proud to be doing it and God Bless America. And if Paul Collingwood, the very exemplar of sedate, self-controlled British cricketing manhood of the most heroically old-fashioned sort, is determined to become a twenty-twenty star batsman, then all that any of us cricket fans can really say about that is: God Save The Queen and bring it on.

Talking of Babe Ruth, astronauts, and so forth, there has for some time now been talk of twenty-twenty cricket getting seriously started in the USA. No one is that sure that it will catch on. But everyone concerned is very sure that of all the various versions of cricket that might be tried in America, twenty-twenty has by far the best chance of reaching lift-off. And I say: bring that on too. Might it prove in the longer run that one of the most important impacts of India on cricket was that the Indians Americanised it?

(34)

"I think one of the things I especially like about the IPL is that lefties, I sense, don’t like it at all. They preferred India when it was a basket case, taking its economic policy advice from them and from the USSR. Now that it has liberalised, i.e. turned its back on lefty/USSR economic policy crap, India is doing outrageously well, at any rate by comparison with the bad old days. And IPL showcases that outrageous economic wellness for all the world to see. Ludicrously rich Indian film stars owing entire teams that cost a billion quid. Cheerleaders. Spoilt rich brats making painted faces at the cameras. And above all, Indians hitting sixes and bowling really fast and looking like ancient mythic warriors, rather than all thinking and looking like Mahatma bloody Gandhi and being glad if they scrape a draw. Hurrah!"

- Our own Brian Micklethwait, writing over at his own blog about innovations in the glorious sport of cricket, and what it says about India.

(10)

I had a good chuckle after reading this over on Goat in the Machine:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is concerned that her Pakistani hosts have failed to grasp the nettle of good governance, and reminds them of the high purpose and duty for which democratic societies entrust their representatives with the sovereign power:

"We (the US) tax everything that moves and doesn't move, and that's not what we see in Pakistan."

That sure explains Pakistan's little handful of problems at present. I'm ashamed I never thought of it. I had some childish intuition that they might have something to do with a civil society sufficiently dysfunctional that making a living by taking other people's stuff off them, was far too easy in comparison to getting paid for producing stuff they wanted.

How could we have been so blind? The Taliban and Al Qaeda are pissed off at the world because they are under-taxed! Oh the humanity.

The creepy thing is I am sure that really is, in essence, what Clinton thinks.

(4)

Here is a good-looking study of India, a country that, as we occasionally point out, has been and is playing a much bigger role as an economic power. I am pretty upbeat about India's prospects.

By the way, the review of the book (H/T, Stephen Hicks), makes a passing swipe at the Economist magazine that will gladden the heart of that publication's tormentor, our own Paul Marks.

(9)

Snakes.

A chance encounter? Perhaps not.

We need to try this in the UK as well. Releasing rabid pit bulls in Parliament (and then locking the doors with everyone inside) might be more culturally appropriate however.

(10)

Outside the Westminster Bubble of bent MPs and Brownite thugs, other political developments take place. And few of them are likely to be more important for the state of the world than the Indian polls, now concluded. This report says the Congress party, the party of Nehru and Gandhi, has won. Congress, if my memory is accurate, was associated for a long time with a centre-leftist sort of nationalism. However, it may have moved on a bit from that - India certainly has. Despite the 2008 stock market crash, the ascent of the Indian economy, due in large part to some of the deregulation that has taken place, has been one of the bright spots of the world economy over the past decade or more. It is arguably more sustainable over the long term than in the case of China. Britain, with its post-Empire connections to India, should certainly pay close attention. And given India's proximity to Pakistan, a nuclear power now in a deadly confrontation with the Taliban, it cannot be emphasised often enough how this "Anglosphere" power matters. India should, for example, be taking a lead role in helping to suppress piracy in the Indian Ocean, a subject about which I have written from time to time.

So these elections matter. It is not all about the Chicago Community Organiser or the One-Eyed Nutter With the Stutter, otherwise known as the UK prime minister. Let's remember that.

Update: Guido seems very enthused by the result. The Indian stock market has rallied strongly today.

(12)

I have just heard on an infrastructure mail list that India has lost much international bandwidth and the problem is due to failure on the SeaMeaWea3, SeaMeaWea4 and FALCON submarine cable systems at Alexandria.

There were multiple failures in Alexandria just a few months ago if I remember correctly.

(11)

I think I know best, too, of course. But what I know best is that the world is too complicated for me or anyone else to rule. Other people are generally better placed than I am to decide what is good for them. Even when they are not, nothing gives me in particular the right to impose my ideas.

Gordon Brown is one of the elect (not just the elected) who knows no such restraint.

The Prime Minister: The first point of recapitalisation was to save banks that would otherwise have collapsed. We not only saved the world— [Laughter . ]—saved the banks and led the way— [ Interruption. ] We not only saved the banks— [ Interruption. ]

Mr. Speaker: Order.

The Prime Minister: Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking— [ Interruption. ] Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking system, but not one depositor actually lost any money in Britain.* That is the first thing.

Having contented himself that he only saved world banking, Mr Brown has now set out to work on the rest of the job. He has started on a mission to create peace between Pakistan and India - two countries that have not had a war since 1971. Such is his supreme diplomatic tact that his approach after the Mumbai massacre is to visit the region in order to announce that “Three quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan.” A claim that is both occult (full in equal measure of secret authority and meaninglessness), and calculated to make people in India more hostile to Pakistan.

Maybe this is not a record breaking sprint to megalomania for a British Prime Minister. Perhaps it is that Mr Brown's nostalgia for the 1970s knows no bounds. Having destroyed the British economy in order to become its saviour, he is trying the same trick on the global village.

*[This is a lie: I know personally several depositors who between them lost many millions in Britain when Mr Brown decided to expropriate the Icelandic banks. Even those among them whom the Treasury has made a vague promise to compensate have yet to see a penny, and have had the huge cost, which is unlikely to be refunded, of arranging indefinite bridging finance in near-impossible borrowing conditions.]

(7)

I agree with all those who are now saying that the England cricket tour of India should not be interrupted, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. My understanding of terrorism is that what makes it such a headache to defend against, given that in India people generally are not allowed to carry guns (correct?), is not knowing when or where they might strike. But if you have a number of set-piece, high profile events to defend, with definite times and places attached to them, you can. It will be cumbersome and tiresome, and expensive, with lots more frisking of people who look like they might be terrorists, and lots more frisking of people who do not look at all like terrorists, both to avoid upsetting people who look like terrorists and to make sure that any terrorist plan deliberately not to look like a terrorist is also guarded against. But if the authorities and people of India are willing to put up with all that, then so should our cricketers be.

I am even opposed to the final two one-dayers being cancelled, although I daresay the Indian authorities would not have had the time to make their dispositions, given that the one-dayers would have been very soon. But the test matches should definitely go ahead, including and especially the second one, which they have already, regrettably, moved from Mumbai to Chennai. I guess the Mumbai police have enough on their hands already, or think they have.

Playing those two one-dayers would have changed nothing in a cricketing way. 5-0 to India would almost certainly have become 7-0 to India, but playing those games, and the Mumbai test in Mumbai, would have made another and bigger point. I daresay that, because of their disappointing cricket, England's cricketers are not now very highly regarded in India. This would be a chance to get back into India's good books. Risky? Maybe, a little. But also, given the money now disposed of by India's cricket fans and by Indians generally, to make this small stand against terrorism might also been, you know, rather lucrative. But headlines like Pietersen wants security assurances don't strike the right note at all. This guy had a great chance to make a much more positive statement than that, but he muffed it.

As James Forsyth put it yesterday:

Imagine how we would have felt if after the 7/7 bombings the Australian cricket team had headed to Heathrow.

And commenter CG added:

Some of the star players in the Australian Rugby League team wanted the team to pull out of their English tour in 2001. When they were told that they would be replaced by more willing players, and may not get their places back, they decided to come after all.

I know, I know. The reckless courage of the non-combatant. But I didn't stop using London's buses and underground trains in the immediate aftermath of 7/7, still less run away to the country.

(15)

Yesterday afternoon, and again this afternoon, my hopes of getting a day's worth of stuff done in a day, and then another day's stuff in another day, were dashed by cricket, on the television. This was no ordinary cricket. This was not, for example, English county cricket, which has just begun again, and whose first round of matches concluded today, mostly in draws made inevitable by the gloomy, drizzly English weather. I did not get to see those two test match under-achievers but county supremos, Mark Ramprakash and Graham Hick, score their inevitable opening match centuries, in front of the usual tiny smattering of chilled spectators. No, what I saw was something quite different to all that. What I saw were two games on the first two days of something called the Indian Premier League.

On the face of it, this was not cricket of any great profundity, being twenty-overs-each-way slogfests, quite lacking in the long-drawn-out subtleties of five day test cricket or four day English county cricket or Australian Sheffield Shield matches. Nevertheless the Indian Premier League is something extremely profound. It signals the emergence of India as the superpower of cricket that it now is. Everyone in cricket agrees. It's a new era.

India is not the cricket superpower because of its players, excellent though those players are. Yes, Sachin Tendulkar will soon become the greatest run-getter in test match history, when he overtakes the West Indian Brian Lara. But Australia are still, despite the recent retirements of Warne and McGrath, what they have long been, the best international side in the world. No, what makes India special is the number of its fans. I am fond of saying that there are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe, and my friend and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings would have corrected me long ago if this was wrong. And now, these fans are starting seriously to shift the centre of gravity of cricket.

The Indian Premier League doesn't just feature Indian players. Their plan is to make the IPL have a place in cricket much like that the of the English Premier League in soccer, namely something played by the best players in the world, and watched and followed all over the world. And now, it has started. The atmosphere I got from watching these two games on my television was of a big, big country, self-confident enough not just to offer the world a compelling sporting product but to share the glory of it all with whoever in the world has the nerve and the determination to grab it.

And it so happens that the visitors are seizing their chances, so far rather better than the locals. Perhaps the Indians are weighed down a little by the burden of what they must be telling themselves is cricket history in the making, and are taking it just that much too seriously, whereas the visitors just see it as the chance of some fun and some (in some cases a lot of) highly welcome cash. Warne and McGrath have both forced their tired old bodies to have one final outing, I notice.

In the opening game, the Kolkata Knight Riders crushed the Bangalore Royal Challengers, from whom there was alas not much of a challenge, and the result was settled long before the end of the game, as often happens in these types of games. But New Zealander Brendon McCullum nevertheless got the IPL off to a suitably headline grabbing start by making the biggest individual score ever recorded in a twenty-twenty game. And today, another rapid not out century by Australian run-machine Mike Hussey was also the difference between the two sides, as the Chennai Super Kings set an even bigger target, which the Kings XI Punjab made a decent stab at but in the end couldn't match. The Punjab side would have got closer if their top scorer, another Australian, had hung around longer and hit some more boundaries.

No wonder the best of England's county cricketers are envious. They can hardly wait to get involved.

There are genuine fears that cricket is not so much being played as used up, and that spectators may in due course get bored with all this vulgar slogging, and instead of turning to more refined and antique versions of cricket, may instead switch their allegiances to other sports. But good or bad, this is certainly an event, not just in the history of cricket, but, because of the emergence-of-India-as-a-superpower angle, in the very history of the world.

I chanced upon these excitements (by coincidence immediately after posting this about the IPL at my personal blog) on something called Setanta Sports 1, channel number 34 on my digital TV, which is sometimes "encrypted" (i.e. it doesn't work), but sometimes not (i.e. it does!). Can anyone tell me what further games I might be able to watch here in England on Setanta, given that I am not a subscriber to Setanta and do not plan to be? I get very little live cricket in England to watch, unless I visit a pub. I would love to be able to watch more of this tournament in my home.

(23)

There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world's key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out.

However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled "Mother Earth, Motherboard". This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war.

The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, "British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building". The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain's control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger.

As I said, Stephenson wrote the essay in the heyday of competitive cable-laying in 1996. Prior to the 1990s global telecommunications generally consisted of state owned or state favoured monopolies in virtually all countries. These companies worked together to build and own infrastructure, including undersea cables. Between Europe and Asia, a consortium named SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe) had come into being as a federation of state owned and state favoured telecommunications companies. This was led by AT&T in the US, and Cable & Wireless of the UK - a curious creation that was never a major communications company in the UK but which was in many parts of the former empire. However, by the 1990s, at least competition was allowed in many markets. AT&T was split up into nine companies, and many other countries adopted a model that was initially created in Britain, in which various assets were brought together to create a single, reasonably large competitor to the incumbent. (In Britain, Cable & Wireless was given a licence to compete with BT, which it did under the brand name "Mercury", with rather mixed success for the company although with clearly positive effects for consumers).

This was an era in which fixed line phone companies were still believed to rule the world. More importantly, their banks believed this also, so capital was cheap. The companies had not yet figured out that mobile telephony would soon be everything as far as voice traffic was concerned, and the existence of the internet as a mainstream phenomenon was something they were only just noticing. They knew that there would be data services, but they thought that data services were something they could design and control.

So what we had was a group of new, highly capitalised fixed line phone companies who believed they needed to own their own infrastructure. These companies often had a legal right to build infrastructure in the same places as the incumbents - a concession made by governments to promote competition. And this is where FLAG came from. It was led by NYNEX, one of the "Baby Bells" (RBOCs) that had been spun off AT&T. It was a consortium of second telecommunications companies from various countries, that was building its own pipes to compete with the incumbents. In the US, the companies that had been spun off AT&T were very eager to expand abroad and to compete with one another and their former parent company. Plus, the same imperatives that led to the incumbents' cables tracing the routes between the grand hotels of the former British Empire meant that FLAG followed essentially the same route as SEA-ME-WE. In the real routing bottlenecks the two cables were built side by side, at times going through the same buildings and through the same tunnels. There is a good map that illuminates these details here.

Which is how what happened yesterday is possible. Apparently circumstances led to ships in Alexandria sailing in unusual locations yesterday. Anchors went down in usual places. And, apparently, both FLAG and SEA-ME-WE 4 were ruptured. One would hope that the redundancy due to the fact that there are two competing cable companies would have led to some protection against accident or sabotage, but it seems that the fact that the two cables are right next to one another simply meant that a change in shipping conditions can take out both together.

However, when we think about the consequences of this, we discover how the world has changed in the last decade. If you read Stephenson's article, you get the impression that FLAG was all about connecting the rich countries of Europe with the rich countries of Australasia and East Asia. India is mentioned a couple of times in the 40,000 words of the essay, but it is mentioned in passing, and it does not seem he visited. News stories today are all about the Middle East and particularly India losing their net access. China, Australia, Japan, and Korea are unaffected. This is not because these places do not communicate with Europe, but because there is plenty of capacity across the Pacific and across the Atlantic that there is no trouble rerouting their communications via the United States. FLAG and SEA-ME-WE have actually become the main means of communicating with India and the Middle East, places where a lot has happened economically in the last ten years.

The belief that secondary, competing fixed line phone companies were important to the future died sometime around 2001. If these companies had mobile subsidiaries, they discovered that the mobile subsidiaries were their main sources of profitability. Capital became expensive. The rates that could be charged at wholesale level for international voice services dropped to something close to zero. Ventures like FLAG did not make money for the sorts of services that their investors and builders had hoped. NYNEX is now part of Verizon, and AT&T is now part of Southwestern Bell Corporation (although, confusingly, the whole company took the AT&T name). Neither company is terribly interested in bold international ventures any more, and they instead spend their time concentrating on their US mobile networks and attempting to screw as much money out of their legacy customers as possible. Second, competing, fixed line telephone companies generally got into financial trouble and were sold to former incumbents from foreign countries or to mobile companies or both, which led to the owners of SEA-ME-WE gaining shares in FLAG as well. There is still healthy competition in some telecommunications markets (Britain is extremely competitive - I would say the US is less so), but not so much from the companies that were created by governments and regulators in the 1980s and 1990s.

And what happened to FLAG? Well, in 2000 there was an awful lot of undersea optical fibre capacity, that was not being used in the way the people had build it intended. Inevitably, it ended up carrying a great deal of internet traffic. This coincided with a huge rise in the tech sector in places like India and China. Partly because of this, it became cheap for India to provide certain kinds of services to Europe and the US, because the cost of communicating with India became negligible. FLAG itself ended up being bought by an Indian conglomerate, Reliance Industries. What goes around comes around.

(26)

Only Musharraf could have made lawyers popular. No law, no liberty.

(7)

This is some talk of bringing back the 'fairness doctrine' in the United States. This, before President Reagan got rid of it, allowed the powers-that-be to force broadcasters to have when was deemed to be 'balanced' news and current affairs coverage.

In reality, of course, 'balanced' means either leftist opinions (the establishment, produced by the universities, do not see their opinions as opinions, they see them as 'objective' or even 'scientific' journalism - even when they formally do not believe that there is any such thing as objective truth), or a pointless mess of people shouting debating points at each other.

In reality it takes several minutes to explain a point of view, and the reasons for it, about most political matters - exchanges of debating points do not achieve much. The destruction of such things as talk radio (by demanding a "right of reply") would leave the leftist shows, both serious and comic, untouched. Who wants to bet that the "fairness doctrine" would be applied in some God like "fair" way to them? As for "hard news" as opposed to "comment" (not that I fully accept this distinction).

The left often attack "Fox News" for claiming to be "Fair and Balanced" and (whilst a lot of FNC is not conservative at all) it is perfectly clear where, for example, Brit Hume's political loyalties are, which one can tell by his choice of words, tone of voice, body language and in other ways, but the left fail to see, or pretend to fail to see, that their own people (i.e. all the other news networks) are also not "fair and balanced" - because this is not in the nature of man (sorry "humanity"), and that all that the 'fairness doctrine' would do is to give their side a monopoly of news presentation.

Still, the whole thing is far from confined to the United States.

For example, in Britain we have a version of the 'fairness doctrine' - which means, in practice, that broadcasters (government owned or private) represent the 'liberal' (i.e illiberal) left. Indeed it is almost universal outside the United States. The most recent example I have came upon concerns India:

A couple weeks ago I watched a brief report on NDTV about the new 'content code'. According to this compulsory code stories that were against the Indian "national interest" would be spiked, and broadcasters would not be allowed to "highlight" (i.e. favour) certain opinions. In practice it is a safe guess that the opinions that broadcasters would not be allowed to highlight would be opinions opposed to the Congress party and to the various leftist parties who support in government. However, the NDTV report did not say that broadcasters should be allowed to favour any opinion they wished and that people should be allowed to choose between them.

No - the line was that "self regulation" should be supported. The Indian newspapers, the report said, practice this via the "Press Council of India" and broadcasters should be allowed to the same. The government will force its line into regulations - because no one is really opposing this "fairness" line as a matter of principle.

Sadly it appears that no one really stands for anything like the US First Amendment, or for freedom in general, in India. On the one side we have Congress and the various leftist parties (trying to gradually introduce more welfare spending), and on the other side we have the religious nationalist BJP (i.e the saffron fascists). The old days when the Independence party stood for freedom (yes it lost every election - but it was there) are long over.

The above is not meant as attack on India - things are much the same in Britain. No major political party really stands for freedom here either. Not only not in a strict libertarian sense - not even in a general sense.

(85)

With the 60th anniversary of the end of British rule in the sub continent, there is the normal talk of whether the vast numbers of rapes and murders during partition could have been prevented. The British will, perhaps quite rightly, get the blame for not delaying independence and for not using enough force to try and prevent the violence on partition.

However, it is almost forgotten that Nehru (the leader of the Congress party and first Prime Minister of India) was demanding that the British leave (every day we stayed was a day too many for Nehru), and even claimed that it was mainly where the British were that violence took place.

This was the exact opposite of the truth (and Nehru knew it) - as it was where British forces went in (sadly much too rarely) that the mass rapes and killings were prevented. Nehru had "form" in letting his "get the British out of India" obsession cloud his judgement.

For example, in 1942 he had gone along (whatever doubts he must have had) with the demented "Quit India" campaign. Had the British actually "quit India" the Japanese would have come in (they were at the gates of India) and the Congress party would have found out what "slavery to an Imperial power" really was.

As Prime Minister of India Nehru followed a policy of armed aggression (so much for "non violence") against such places as Portuguese Goa. But also did not bother to prepare against real threats to national security.

The classic example is relations with Red China. Nehru ordered a policy of confronting China in the border area - but did not send a decent level of troops or equipment (the Indian troops did not even axes to cut down trees and where forced into trying to use spades for the task - much to amusement of the watching People's Liberation Army). Nehru also refused to approach the United States for aid - he could handle matters.

When the Chinese invaded in 1962 the Indian force fought bravely, but was hopelessly out-numbered and out-equipped - their defeat was inevitable. The Chinese captured the entire disputed area (which they had no legal right to) and Nehru was left begging the United States for aid - in case the Chinese decided to take any more of India.

But the worst aspect of Nehru was his domestic policy:

Nehru loved talking of "five year plans" and an industrial revolution for India. However, his policies condemned the population of India to poverty, often extreme poverty. Not only was overseas competition virtually banned (for almost all goods and services), but the "permit Raj" meant that almost all domestic competition was crippled as well.

The "freedom" that the Congress party promised India turned out to be so many rules and regulations that it made the British Raj look almost libertarian by comparison (although the British Raj was bad in many ways).

I doubt that most of the above will be mentioned in many places, but people deserve to know.

(4)

In Pakistan they are having 'interesting times', in the Chinese sense of the term. Violent protests in Karachi have killed dozens of people as the authority of President Musharraf has been challenged by the Chief Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court.

Sooner or later, the rule of General Musharraf will come to an end, regardless of how much help the Americans give to prop up his regime. It is anyone's guess who takes over when he does leave the scene - it could be a weak democratic government, another Army commander, or a more sinister Islamic style government. Whatever sort takes over, they
will have a hard time keeping the country in one piece.

These musings on the future of Pakistan would be idle chatter though except that Pakistan is right on the fault line of many of the conflicts in the world today, and it also happens to have nuclear weapons. Quietly, India must be watching with some concern as General Musharraf loses his grip on power. The fastest way for a new regime in Islamabad to gain some legitimacy is to ratchet the tension with India. Given that both are now nuclear armed, it could be interesting times all round.

(15)

Guy Herbert this morning posted a piece commenting on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's decision to "ban" the Australian cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later this year. I generally have little time for Mr Howard, but in this case I can not personally be very harsh on him. What clearly happened is that the Australian Cricket Board (which these days prefers to call itself "Cricket Australia") begged him at length the make such an announcement, and he eventually gave in despite considerable resistance, and he did this because the alternatives open to him were probably worse. I have no disagreement with Guy that the outcome is essentially a dishonourable one, but the other easy options were worse. Some background.

In international cricket, there are only three countries for who the game is directly profitable. These are India, Australia, and England (in decreasing order of profitability). The other countries that regularly play international cricket make money by playing the national teams of these three countries, and then selling television rights and other sponsorship opportunities for these matches. Thus it is very important to (say) Sri Lanka for (in particular) India and Australia to regularly tour Sri Lanka and play matches.

In order to assure its members of some sort of regular cricket and regular income, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has in recent years created a mandatory tour program, requiring each of its members to play each other both home and away over a five year period. Reactions to this rule have varied, and compliance with it has been variable. The rule allows two sides to postpone a series if both are in agreement, which has allowed India and Australia to at times get their way by offering more money or more matches if the matches are played at some undefined "later". However, if a team takes a hard line, then (at least theoretically) the other side must tour, or must pay a fine to the ICC which will be then forwarded to the host team as compensation for the lost revenues from the matches that were to have been played. The ICC's rules allow for two situations in which a fine is not payable: firstly in cases where there is a genuine issue of safety - tours of both Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been called off for this reason in times of high political tension and terrorist threat - and in cases where a government forbids a tour. This second rule has come into play more in cases where Zimbabwe were potentially the touring side, most notably when Zimbabwean players were refused visas by the government of New Zealand.

Zimbabwe are a full member of the ICC. In the mid 1990s Zimbabwe had quite a decent cricket team (of mostly but certainly not entirely white players) but in the years since then Zimbabwean cricket has gone the way of most other things in Zimbabwe. At the demand of the government, white players were pushed out of the team, as were any non-white players who dared to say anything critical of the government. Officials who ran the game and actually cared about cricket were replaced with compliant government yes-men. The organisation of cricket in Zimbabwe became a shambles, and we are not sure right now to what extent the domestic cricket is even taking place. (The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians has recently been complaining about being unable to get scorecards for the domestic Logan Cup, which it has documented with no trouble for over a century). Inevitably, the standard of the national team has dropped from "decent, but not world beating", to utterly woeful. Their performance in the recently completed World Cup was dreadful, and they have dropped to 11th in the world rankings, way behind the rapidly improving Bangladesh, and behind even Ireland, a side just consisting of part time Australian and English expatriates and who are not a full member of the ICC.

However, through all this Zimbabwe has maintained its full membership of the ICC. Zimbabwe has been "temporarily suspended" from playing test matches due to its declining standards, but it is still playing one day international cricket, and other teams are expected to tour in order to play these games. Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe this year.

The obvious thing to do would be to expel Zimbabwe from the ICC, not necessarily on political grounds explicitly, but simply because cricket in Zimbabwe is no longer being administered and organised properly, that the board is no longer independent of government, and because selections are no longer taking place on the basis of merit. However, there are two reasons why this has not happened. The first is that there is a "third world" versus "first world" divide in international cricket, and some aspects of the administration of the game are a post-colonial nightmare. For many years Australia and England (and, prior to their expulsion from international cricket in the apartheid days, South Africa) had the right of veto over any decisions made in the ICC, and the other countries still have a lingering resentment of this. Once this veto was abolished, the Asian cricketing powers were eager to elevate other countries to membership of the ICC so as to gain a voting majority against the former "colonial" powers, and this is one factor that led to the elevation of Zimbabwe in the first place. Expelling Zimbabwe would increase the voting power of the "first world" bloc, and many people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka do not want this.

Secondly, what are the objections to Zimbabwe playing international cricket? For one thing, Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictatorship that restricts civil liberties. Well, other members of the ICC include Bangladesh and Pakistan, who are not exactly wonderful on this score either. South Africa is ruled by people who consider Robert Mugabe to be one of their old comrades in arms. If Zimbabwe were kicked out of world cricket on these grounds, then this would "set a bad example" to Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular. Did I mention that the governing body of cricket in Pakistan is traditionally a branch of the army and the head of its board is usually a general? That complicates matters further, and rules out the "We should expel Zimbabwe because the government controls cricket in the country" argument. The government of Sri Lanka appoints that nation's cricket board too (although not through the army). As for "Zimbabwe selects players on something other than merit", well, South Africa does that too. (Affirmative action with respect to black and coloured players). One would think that "Zimbabwe should be expelled because Zimbabwean cricket is a shambles" might be enough, but the organisation of cricket in a number of countries is a shambles (most notably Pakistan again, also (sadly) the West Indies). The ICC is also a shambles, having demonstrated in its organisation of the recently completed World Cup that it is an organisation that could not collectively get pissed in Porto)

Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe later this year. The Australian players did not want to make the tour. The Australian government definitely did not want the tour to go ahead.

However, until recently it stated that as Cricket Australia is a private organisation, then it is not the government's job to decide. The Australian board mainly cares about making as much money as possible, but in the crunch it did not want to tour either, and really would have just preferred that the whole issue would go away. However, it did not especially want to upset the ICC, and it did not really want to pay a fine. Quite typically, the board asked the government to solve its problem for it.

When it initially got this request from Cricket Australia, the Australian government made comments about how it did want the tour to go ahead, and about how it might be willing to "indemnify" Cricket Australia against a fine from the ICC. What this means is that Cricket Australia would have cancelled the tour as this is what the government wanted and that the government would then have paid the fine on its behalf. This would have been an easy enough thing for the government to do - after all it was only taxpayers' money,. However, when the government said this, it had not comprehended the full implications, which was that the fine would be paid to the Zimbabwean board in compensation, and that as the Zimbabwean board is controlled by Robert Mugabe, paying the fine would essentially mean giving a gift of $2 million directly to Robert Mugabe.

Once the Australian government comprehended this, paying the fine was not a feasible option. The Australian government was not going to give Robert Mugabe a $2 million gift. The only other option was to take advantage of the ICC's rule that a government ban could stop a tour without a fine. In defence of John Howard, I believe he genuinely did this as a last resort. The alternative was worse.

However, from the point of view of Cricket Australia, there was another alternative, which was to simply withdraw from the ICC. The ICC is very culpable concerning Zimbabwe. The participating teams in the recent World Cup and other ICC tournaments have been given a share of the profits of the tournament. This includes Zimbabwe. The ICC is already partly funding Robert Mugabe, and Australia is partly implicated simply by participating in the ICC's tournaments. The recent World Cup was such an organisational debacle that there is no great loss in not participating in future such events. If Australia were to leave, the ICC certainly could not stop Australia playing its traditional series against England, and if they tried then the national boards of England, New Zealand and probably other nations as well would follow Australia out of the ICC. Australian cricket is also based on expectations of receiving money from playing India frequently (next January's series between Australia and India is anticipated to be extremely lucrative), but it is hard to imagine that India would not find a way to continue playing Australia - they need the revenues they receive from playing such games

What Australia should have done was called the ICC's bluff. It may have suffered some short term financial insecurity as a consequence, but it would have regained control over its own destiny and would have at least fixed these kinds of problems for good.

This would have been good, because there is another cricketing crisis in the background. When Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered in March after Pakistan's elimination from the World Cup. most of us speculated that the murder was in some way connected with subcontinental bookmakers, as cricket's problems with match fixing and betting were well known. I expected that this would confirm and the details would leak out relatively quickly, but it did not happen. One thing I did not take adequate notice of was a series of strange articles that were published about the religious devotion of certain members of the Pakistan team, in particular captain Imzamam-al-Haq. Apparently a significant portion of the Pakistan team were devotees of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement, which stresses living a pure and authentic Islamic lifestyle and which is aggressively evangelical. Apparently the team was factionalised between devotees of this movement and non-devotees, and there were prayer rooms set up in team hotels and Tablighi Jamaat clerics mingled with the team and were present in the dressing room. Allegedly Bob Woolmer saw this as divisive and detracting from the team performance.

There have been various leaks and observations since Woolmer's death suggesting that he must have been murdered by someone he knew and who was connected to the team. The possibility is very real that he was murdered by someone in or closely connected to the team, and the reason that he was murdered was mixed in with fundamentalist Islam rather than bookmaking. There are now doubts that the final e-mail sent by Woolmer (resigning his position as coach) before he died was written by him (it does not sound like it was written by a native English speaker). which again suggest that the murderer may have been some what connected to the team, and somehow had access to his laptop. (Of course, this story has already long passed six impossible things happening before breakfast, so perhaps it was some bizarre combination of the two). The fact that we still do not know who killed Woolmer after two months does make me wonder if some sort of cover-up has gone in within the Pakistan team, and if so the "Islam" explanation becomes more likely and the bookmaking explanation less so, I think

I do not know what happened, obviously. The story gets stranger and stranger. It may be that the state of the Pakistan cricket team is symptomatic of the decay and radicalisation of the country of Pakistan every bit as much as the decay of the Zimbabwean cricket team is as symptomatic of the decay of that country. If so, countries such as Australia and England should not be playing Pakistan either. However great the rivalry between Pakistan and India, one cannot imagine some of these revelations increasing the eagerness of India to play Pakistan regularly either. If the ICC mandates regular tours of Pakistan, then this may well be another reason why the ICC is not an organisation that it is advantageous for cricketing authorities in Australia, England, or elsewhere to be connected to any more.

(11)

Yesterday, I came across this story, about the late and much lamented former England international cricketer and cricket coach for Pakistan, Bob Woolmer:

Speculations are rife about foul play being involved in Pakistan coach Bob Woolmers death. Reports indicate that some current senior Pakistan team members might have fixed both matches, against West Indies and Ireland.

It is being debated in cricketing circles that he could have been killed to cover up match-fixing by the Pakistani team. The Pakistan team would not be allowed to fly back home till the investigations are over.

And, although I never blogged about this yesterday, I did talk about this yesterday, while surrounding by Iain Dale who at least pretended to be interested, and by three young Conservative ladies who almost went to sleep with excitement. This was on DoughtyStreetTV last night, by way of mere introduction to saying how very much I had enjoyed reading this short but sweet recollection by Peter Briffa, about how Woolmer was one of his teachers at prep school. We have not, I said, heard the last of this story. I also said there would be a tax cut, although I cannot recall if I actually said it might be income tax. So, I had a pretty good night of it.

Because, the Woolmer story has now erupted from the recesses of the internet and gone global:

NEW DELHI: Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, found dead a day after Pakistan's shock defeat at the hands of Ireland, was murdered, police have confirmed. Although the Pakistan Cricket Board has been claiming that the autopsy conducted on Woolmer was inconclusive, sources, according to Times Now, have confirmed that investigators have indeed said the coach was murdered.

In fact, the Jamaican Police is said to be already ascertaining the whereabouts of some of the Pakistan players at the time the murder could have taken place. Sources confirmed to Times Now that further questioning of Pakistan players is on the cards as well.

The confirmation comes soon after allegations by former Pakistan pacer Sarfaraz [wrong spelling – should be "Sarfraz"] Nawaz that Woolmer was murdered by the betting syndicate. The outspoken Nawaz has said that almost everybody in control of the game is involved in betting and Woolmer was perhaps about to reveal all in a book.

Since they spell Sarfraz Nawaz wrongly, I cannot help wondering if they have any other of their facts wrong, such as little details like: "police have confirmed".

For, on the other hand, there is this, from Woolmer's wife:

"No I don't see any conspiracy in his death. I am aware that his death is being viewed as a suspicious death. He had nothing to do with the match fixing controversy and any such person being involved is highly unlikely. We never got any threats as far as I know."

I await developments with extreme interest. Not least because, whatever the truth of these now very noisy rumours, they do rather put this ruckus in a somewhat different light, do they not?

As for the mere cricket, try reading this.

UPDATE: The BBC now confirms that Woolmer's death is being treated as "suspicious".

(18)

I have no idea whether the journalists at the Daily Telegraph make it their business to read this blog (although they most certainly should do so, naturally) but this article nicely backed up my point the other day about the economic upsurge of India.

In my posting here, a number of commenters scoffed with disbelief that some jumped up rating agency should be so daft as to proclaim that India's debt rating has improved, and that the country'[s economy is improving. "My dear boy, this is India!" you can hear them cry. And one commenter, bless him, even suggested that India is still far behind most of Latin America, a comment sure to provoke hollow laughs from any entrepreneural type hoping to prosper in Chavez's Venezuela. Of course, as I said at the time, India is still moving up from a relatively low base. During the immediate post-war years, the East Asian economies in places like South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan powered ahead while India, influenced by those dreadful Fabians and London School of Economics types who stuffed the old colonial service, embraced socialism, planning and progressive taxes. But the fact, that cannot be denied, is that this country, with its vast, English-speaking population, relatively stable system of property rights and its admirable enthusiasm for the world's greatest sport, is shooting the economic lights out.

There is just no pleasing some people, it seems.

(16)

The good news from India keeps coming. This week, the international credit rating agency, Standard & Poors pronounced that the "Third World" nation had become so prosperous that the risk of lending money to the country had fallen significantly.

New York-based Standard & Poor's said it upgraded India's sovereign rating to BBB-, the lowest investment grade rating, from BB+, the highest junk rating.

The rating revision could help reduce India's borrowing costs on the global market.

As anyone who has taken out a personal loan or mortgage will know, getting a stronger credit rating is a big deal. India is now ahead of economic basket-cases such as Argentina or Venezuela, and has got there by a programme of economic liberalisation. I keep banging on about the vigour of the Indian economy - notwithstanding the still-grinding poverty in parts of the country - because it is probably the most positive economic story of our times. It shouts, loud and clear, that markets work. Market economics is doubly potent when combined with a relatively robust civil society, protection of property rights and the priceless asset of an international language like English.

Meanwhile, India-based Tata Steel has sealed its purchase of UK steelmaker Corus.

(19)

The Times reports that Rickshaw pullers reach end of 'inhuman' road

Rickshaw pullers ... could soon be out of work after the Indian city of Calcutta banned the trade as inhuman.

The vote was boycotted by the Opposition, but Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, told the state legislature: “In the 21st century it is not right for a human being to pull another human being.

It certainly would be inhuman if the rickshaw pullers were forced to this labour - but they are not. The only force involved is that Mr Bhattacharjee is forcing the rickshaw pullers to give up their livelihood. Compensation is promised but the plan for that seems haphazard and uncertain. In any case compensation diminishes but does not annul the wrong done to people who were making an honest living.

What is so bad about human muscle rather than batteries or internal combustion engines being used to power a conveyance? There are plenty of dirtier jobs, plenty more dangerous, plenty (if it were any business of Mr Bhattacharjee's, which it is not) in which the generally perceived difference of class between the person paying for a service and the person providing it is greater than it is between a rickshaw puller and the person riding on the rickshaw. (Though if the class aspect is what bothers you, bear in mind that according to the leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, quoted in Kolkata Newsline, many of the users of rickshaws are "school goers and senior citizens". Not that it matters. If every rickshaw user were a sneering rich businessman with a villain's moustache, it would still be a private matter between the sneering rich businessmen and the rickshaw pullers whether and at what price the latter sold transportation to the former.)

Such has been the strength of the idea of socialism for a century or more that even those who explicitly reject it often adopt its assumptions.

Socialists have always claimed to defend the dignity of labour, and have always been lying. If they really believed that the man who labours with his body was fully equal to the man who labours with his brain they would not have presumed to deny him the right to direct his own life and sell his own labour in the way he thought best. Rickshaw pullers are only one example of people whose dignity has been violated in this way, and India is far from being the only place where it happens. Readers will be able to think of many other examples closer to home.

Incidentally, pound to a rupee the twenty first century will not have run its course by the time the city of Calcutta bans everything but human-powered rickshaws on evironmental grounds.

(14)

If this deal goes ahead, it will be the largest example yet of an Indian firm buying a British one. How the world has turned, 60 years on from the end of the British Empire in India.

Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus Group Plc is set to recommend a 4.1 billion pound takeover by India's Tata Steel Ltd as soon as Friday, sources close to the matter said.

Corus' board met on Wednesday evening to rubber stamp the deal but is waiting until Tata's board meets, which is expected on Thursday or Friday, before making an official announcement to its shareholders, the sources said.

It will be interesting to see how those anti-globalisation campaigners, who in the past were the same sort of folk to demand that the rich West gives aid to "Third World" nations like India, respond to Indian business purchases of British and other European firms. That is the trouble with fighting evil capitalists - one minute they are wearing pin-striped suits and speak in posh English accents, the next, something quite different. It must be very annoying.

(5)

Earlier today, Tim Blair laughingly reported on a senior Pakistani shi'ite cleric falling victim to a suicide bomber - presumably fielded by his sectarian rivals. The manner of this man's demise carries a strong element of poetic justice, considering he allegedly supported Hamas and Hezbollah - both terrorist groups not unfamiliar with "martyrdom operations". However, I do not feel as jolly about this cleric's death as many of the commenters on the linked Blair thread. Certainly, when a prominent Hamas and Hezbollah supporter gets his comeuppance in the so-very-appropriate form of a zealot with a bomb strapped to his gut, one could be forgiven for revelling in schadenfreude. Trouble is, such an event is precisely the sort of thing that could trigger a large-scale Islamist movement that overthrows Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, or adds further impetus to ongoing efforts to assassinate him.

The Economist's recent article on Pakistan is a timely reminder that the West's current alliance with that nation is conditional in the extreme - and almost wholly reliant on Musharraf - whose death could not come soon enough for a large number of people he rules over. If he is assassinated, the General's successor might well be cut from a far more fundamentalist cloth. If this circumstance arises, a nuclear-armed Pakistan becomes an even more alarming prospect; raising the stakes over Kashmir and making nuclear weapons proliferation more likely. The risk of a nuclear weapon being detonated in a Western city is proportionate to the greenness of Musharraf's replacement.

If the Pakistani leadership was to fall into fundamentalist hands, this would represent a massive setback in the global struggle against international Islamic terrorism. The mission in Afghanistan would be deeply complicated, for a start. Then there's the problem of Pakistan becoming an even greater hub for Islamofascists. I will stop there; the list of conceivable heinous consequences could fill many pages. Unfortunately, "our boy" in Islamabad has made a lot of bitter enemies during his rule, and - according to the Economist article linked above - has also governed in a way that makes a post-Musharraf Pakistan a very ugly prospect indeed. Musharraf's removal or death would likely be catastrophic to the interests of those nations struggling against Islamofascism.

Certainly, the Pakistani cleric copped it most aptly. However, any gloating at the nature of his death may well be overshadowed by wider consequences relating to it.

(19)

It now looks like the death toll in the sickening atrocity in Bombay will probably top two hundred innocent civilians, with hundred more injured, many of them horribly maimed. But then as any Indian could have told you years ago, evil horrors like this perpetrated by Islamist psychopaths do not just happen in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

So tell me, how long before the good folks at Democratic Underground find some way to blame BushMacHitler for this? This is a truly ghastly attack and we all know that America-centric buffoons infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome cannot even conceive of something bad happening which does not somehow involve the United States.

I invite the commentariat to find the articles somehow blaming the US administration for this. You know it is going to happen.

(3)

European steel giant Arcelor looks as if it is going to be bought by the Indian Mittal family company. If the ink is allowed to dry on this deal, it will create the world's biggest steelmaker and do so at a time when metal prices have been rising strongly, as have pretty much most other commodities.

That India's economy has been on the rise is pretty much a part of the received economic wisdom these days. What is clear, though, is that country is a lot more than about lots of call centres. It is becoming a breeding ground for a whole crop of entrepreneurs able and willing to take on the biggest businesses in the established industrial world and where necessary, put a few noses out of joint in the process.

(1)

It has been a while since my last visit to the excellent India Uncut blog - too long.

First laugh - Amit's latest post links to a chef dispensing advice concerning prawns. As an Aussie, I was rather amused to discover some poor Seppo writing in, wondering what to do with that whole 'vein thing' running down the back of a prawn. Kiss it goodbye or let it lie? Basically, if you bought your prawns to impress - as a stand-out ingredient in some culinary masterpiece you've had up your sleeve for months - then you should clean them. Even if the prawns are merely a somewhat important ingredient amongst a few others, you should clean them. If you are using those bland tiddlers from Thailand - to add an interesting texture to your gruel or something along those lines - then don't bother cleaning them.

I swear, I was born with that innate knowledge. Bewdy, mate. Throw another... oh, never mind.

Now, if you bought your prawns to impress, and in doing so you selected those aforementioned bland Thai tiddlers - then you should clean them, because that's your punishment for being a tightarse. Apologies, the one minute I spent looking through idiotic online Strine dictionaries did not yield the definition of "tightarse". Note to the confused; if you are a tightarse, you are cheap. And you know who you are.

Second laugh - some politically incorrect Indian astrologer has decided that "Mumbai" is somewhat unlucky, and "Bombay" is rather more auspicious. Whatever. All the terribly clever weathermen on Australia's two publicly-funded television broadcasters take great pride in saying "Moom-Bye", like it is a signifier of one's magnificent cultural adjustment. A decisive strike in your valiant quest to bash down those imperialist Anglosized verbal imposts, comrade! When I was in Bombay, I did not meet a single Indian who termed their fair city 'Mumbai' - although a lot of Western tourists did. Having said that, perhaps the Indians did too, because I believe the correct pronounciation is "Mum (like your non-American, Pommy/Aussie mother) - Bay", and - if you say it quickly (which is invariably the case, because Indians are the greatest communicators in the world) - that sounds rather similar to "Bombay". Then again, I do not know, because I do not speak Hindi, and am basically a stupid Westerner.

(74)

Some authoritarian asses in India who are enraged that a work of fiction called the Da Vinci Code will be shown in cinemas to anyone who wishes to see it, have threatened to starve themselves to death in protest if the movie is not banned by the state.

If these particular Christian protesters are as good as their word and are so keen to snuff it and thereby put their theories to the test, namely that there is a God and their actions (i.e. attempting to use the force of law to prevent freedom of expression followed by suicide if they are unsuccessful) would be viewed favourably by their deity, well why should anyone want to stop them?

(62)

I am just as keen on universal civil liberties as the next Samizdatista, however I must concede that the case of India vis-�-vis the Danish cartoons made me briefly question my blanket commitment to the freedom of the press. I yearn for a major Australian newspaper to have the stones to print these cartoons in self defence and defiance, however I would argue that any editor of an Indian publication who allows them to be published is astonishingly irresponsible, given India's history and continuing record of bloody communal violence. If these cartoons found their way into a publication with a moderate degree of circulation, the question would not be "will there be deaths?", but "how many?" Upon reflection, I certainly do not believe that government censorship is the answer, however it is marginally more justifiable there than in any other nation I can think of. Because of this, it is crucial that Indian editors exercise their judgement wisely - and not publish the cartoons. Hopefully there will come a time when India is not the exception (regarding this issue) amongst countries governed by the rule of law.

I should mention that I have huge faith in the wisdom of Indians.

(50)

One of the advantages of having a comments section is providing me with new ideas to write about, even when the comment in question is so flat-out wrong that it makes me gape with amazement at the screen. In my recent post about the economic fallacies surrounding immigration, a commenter opined that Indian immigrants into the UK were leeching money out of this country by not re-investing it in new businesses but merely writing cheques to "inactive" folks back in the old homeland.

It is a lousy argument on a number of levels, and I am not even going to dwell long on the obvious dangers of inciting distrust and hostility towards economically successful immigrant groups and accusing them of not being sufficiently "patriotic" by not spending all their profits in Britain. The argument also fails because it ignores the subjectivity of economic value. If a businessman earns a million pounds in profit from a drycleaning business in Birmingham and sends the odd cheque back to his aged relatives in Bombay, then how is economic value being destroyed? In the eyes of the businessman, helping his loved ones is worth more to him than investing that money in something else, even though other people might disagree with that decision and think him to be deluded. It is none of my business to force a change in that decision.

Also, that businessman is doing something that supporters of a liberal civil society have traditionally supported: philanthropy. How can it be wrong for a man to steer a portion of his wealth to his dependants, educate them, feed and house them? Who gives any entity the right, least of all the State, the power to say yay or nay to that decision? The argument that such transfers are wrong is an echo of the old Bethamite notion that the State is entitled to seize wealth if that maximises the "greatest happiness of the greatest number".

A final point. No doubt large sums of money are paid by immigrants and migrant workers back to the points of origin all the time. This has happened for centuries. These transfer often sustained people in great hardship.

I have come across some dubious economic arguments in my time, but the idea that immigrants paying money to their folks is some sort of parasitical waste has to be one of the weakest.

(5)

On the anniversary of last year's tsunami, is it time to revisit the damage that this natural disaster may have caused in Myanmar? The secretive and totalitarian government is not known for providing welfare to its citizens. The official death toll was finalised at 86, although sources from within the country placed the number of deaths in the hundreds.

The official death toll was established by the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) in co-operation with the Myanmar Red Cross. The Myanmar Red Cross (pdf file) works closely with the Myanmar state and 23 members of the 37 member governing council are appointed by the government or act as representatives of its ministries. The IFRC, the Myanmar Red Cross, the United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF and World Vision were already working within the country and inspected the affected islands in January 2005. Their conclusions were in line with the government's assessment:

The group concluded that Myanmar has been largely spared from the destructive forces of the earthquake and subsequent Tsunami, and that the initial emergency needs have been met by the Government and by the aid community. The group�s assessment of the scale of impact is in line with the Government�s own findings. The group confirms a death toll of 60-80, and estimates the longer-term affected population at 10-15,000, of whom 5-7,000 are directly affected......

Over the course of the last 10 days a series of assessment and verification missions were undertaken by one or more of the partners already working in Myanmar - to the Rakhine Coast, the Ayeyarwady Delta and the southern coast including the most populated islands of the Myeik archipelago and the islands off Kawthaung around Lampi Island.

Moreover, Kerry Howley, assistant editor at Reason, questioned these statistics on January 7th 2005. All of the organisations that carried out the assessments were unlikely to disagree with the government's figures since they wished to continue their own work.

I spent last year working with a weekly newspaper in Myanmar, where I attempted to cover some of the worst floods to hit the country in 30 years. Getting people to talk about the flooding, which left thousands homeless last August, was tantamount to asking them to denounce the dictatorship. Government officials hung up when my translator asked for specifics (except for one who helpfully explained, "it's not our culture to talk to the public.") The government's Department of Meteorology and Hydrology would not reveal the water levels or would simply lie. The local Red Cross representatives claimed they couldn't tell me about the floods because the branch office in that area was, in fact, flooded. Major International NGOs like WorldVision were afraid their operations would be halted if they so much as revealed how many blankets they were distributing. After much hand-wringing, WorldVision representatives gave me the story, at which point a government censor perused the piece and expunged all reference to death and destruction.

One Year on: when will we know how many died in Myanmar? A United Nations report that 'agrees' with the Myanmar government's own figures should be treated with grave suspicion. The final damage and death toll remains hostage to the murderers of Yangon.

(8)

Once 1989 had passed, the West assumed that communism had lost its power and would trouble vast areas of the globe. Its effects were confined to a few reactionary holdouts such as Cuba or Corin Redgrave and within a few years Soviet symbols had moved from shock to chic. Even the last of the totalitarian movements, the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, had been smashed.

Yet, despite this process of forgetting, it appears that the twenty-first century may witness self-styled revolutionary movements establishing dictatorships of the proletariat and peasants. The most vulnerable country is Nepal and it is disheartening to read of peasants rising up against their communist oppressors.

However, the Maoists have also received several setbacks in recent weeks. People living in 12 village development committee areas in the Dullu region - a heavily Maoist affected villages 600 kilometers west of capital - revolted against the rebels. The uprising began after the Maoists started forcibly recruiting full-time cadres. More than 20,000 people spontaneously organized a rally in the areas denouncing Maoist atrocities.

The Nepalese Maoists, masking their plans behind a demand for a constituent assembly, pose as would-be democrats whilst terrorising the areas of the country that they control. Recalling the fate of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918, one would hold out little hope of a Nepalese 'Constituent Assembly' holding power.

Yet even graver is the rapid spread of the Maoist 'Naxalite' insurgency in India which has spread to nearly half of the country under the apathetic eyes of the government. These Maoists are linked to the Nepalese party and, by employing the same tactics, hope to enjoy similar success. This increase in political risk threatens the future of India since investment shies away from countries threatened by war or terrorism.

(16)

There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or 'Bollywood' as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.

It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Globalisation in action, perhaps?

(7)

Recently the IEA sent me a flier about this book in praise of globalisation, and I went round there and bought a copy from them (at an enticingly reduced price � thank you Adam). That second link is to an IEA review of the book. So far I have only read the Introduction, so I cannot offer you a review of my own, but already I am impressed.

I found especially interesting what the book's author Martin Wolf had to say about the World Bank, and about its boss at the time that he worked for it, Robert McNamara.

For some reason I have never really paid proper attention to the World Bank. I knew that I was vaguely against it. I suspected it of doing too many of the things that the globalisers who are the target of Wolf's book still complain about it not doing. But I had never really got to grips with the story. So this bit of Wolf's Introduction really struck home to me:

By the late 1970s, I had concluded that, for all the good intentions and abilities of its staff, the Bank was a fatally flawed institution. The most important source of its failures was its commitment to lending, almost regardless of what was happening in the country it was lending to. This was an inevitable flaw since the institution could hardly admit that what it could offer - money - would often make little difference. But this flaw was magnified by the personality of Robert McNamara, former US Defence Secretary, who was a dominating president from 1967 to 1981. McNamara was a man of ferocious will, personal commitment to alleviating poverty and frighteningly little common sense. By instinct, he was a planner and quantifier. Supported by his chief economic adviser, the late Hollis Chenery, he put into effect a Stalinist vision of development: faster growth would follow a rise in investment and an increase in availability of foreign exchange; both would require additional resources from outside; and much of these needed resources would come from the Bank. Under his management, the Bank and Bank lending grew enormously. But every division also found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programmes of the countries. This undermined the professional integrity of the staff and encouraged borrowers to pile up debt, no matter what the likely returns. This could not last � and did not do so...

Wolf's next paragraph starts predictably:

By that time I had had enough...

But then Wolf goes into a bit of detail, on the subject of India.

... I had worked on India as senior divisional economist for three years. During that time, my chief function, so far as the Bank was concerned, was to justify the provision of significant quantities of aid, even though this money was helping the government of India avoid desperately needed policy changes. As it turned out, those changes were made in a midst of a deep foreign exchange crisis in 1991, almost two wasted decades later...

And then Wolf hammers home the further point that his Indian experiences illustrate:

Unfortunately, lending too much was not the Bank's only fault. It also had to lend to governments. This had two undesirable consequences: it had to assume that the government represented the interests of the country; and it reinforced an unjustifiably collectivist view of that national interest. Bank lending made it easier for corrupt and occasionally vicious governments to ignore the interests and wishes of their peoples. By the end of my time at the Bank, I came to the conclusion that its borrowers fell into three categories - those that did not need the help; those that would not use the help; and those that needed the help and would use it. The Bank was constitutionally incapable of concentrating its efforts on this third, often quite small group. As a result, its efforts were often either unnecessary or wasteful. I therefore came to agree with most of the criticisms of aid that had long been made by the late Peter (Lord) Bauer.

Who he? (As the IEA's former editorial supremo Arthur Seldon would say.) He.

Wolf continues:

The realization that the institutions designed to oversee aspects of the global economy might fail, even though integration was an important element in successful development, has stayed with me to this day. To defend a liberal world economy is not to defend the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization or any specific institution. These must be judged - and reformed or discarded - on their merits...

The important thing to understand about foreign aid (which is what stupidly soft loans are) is that they do not merely fail to do good. They do active harm. They help to keep in place destructive policies and to keep in office vicious and destructive politicians and officials which and who might otherwise have been done away with. They do bad.

And the World Bank is all part of that sad story, and a very big one I should imagine.

Apologies if I am the last person who writes for or who reads Samizdata.net to have heard this item of news. But no apologies for posting what Wolf says about it, because he is not just saying it, on a blog or something. He is saying it in a big and important book which has the air of establishment-think about it. So the news here is not just that the World Bank is harmful and dangerous, but that People Who Matter are starting seriously to realise it. This is very good news indeed.

(2)

One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.

This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.

Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:

A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. �

"Self reliant" reads to me like "futureless backwater". So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India's economic future will be created.

And second, there is this:

A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. �

... which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. "Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel" sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: "The education system isn't turning out enough political mischief-makers."

There is also much complaint in this article about "para-education", which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.

So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade's great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.

(19)

Paul Staines has some views on the interesting changes going on in India.

My initial disappointment (and surprise) that the world�s largest democracy had rejected the right wing BJP-led coalition for the Congress party, the former home of Gandhian-Nehruvian socialism, has turned to near joy with the news that Sonia Gandhi has stood down in favour of Manmohan Singh, a man described by the Grauniad as "the poster boy of India's reforms, the architect of policies that turned India from a socialist behemoth into a regional economic power."

Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister means India will have an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher in charge. In 1991, with India facing financial crisis, he convinced Rajiv Gandhi to implement liberal reforms in one month.� He has described the changes he made:

We got government off the backs of the people of India, particularly off the backs of India's entrepreneurs. We introduced more competition, both internal competition and external competition. We simplified and rationalized the tax system. We made risk-taking much more attractive... [and] much more profitable. So we tried to create an environment conducive to the growth of business. We removed a large number of controls and regulations, which in the past had stifled the spirit of innovation, the spirit of entrepreneurship, and restricted the scope for competition, both internal competition and external competition. As a result, in the '90s, productivity growth in the Indian industry has been much faster than ever before.

He is pro-globalization and a critic of US and EU agricultural subsidies:

Globalization creates opportunities. As I said, freer trade, if it is genuinely free, and India's labor-intensive products can find markets abroad that will help to get new jobs in our country. That will help to relieve poverty.

I am sure he faces many challenges, the Congress party is allied with communists, but international investors and Indian entrepreneurs are sure to welcome a man once voted "Finance Minister of the Year" by European bond investors. Indeed his first mission has been to re-assure that he would implement a "responsible macro-economic policy... We'll bring in policies that will not hamper India's progress - policies that are pro-growth."

Paul Staines

(32)

Free market people should not be depressed by the result of the Indian general election. The BJP government borrowed money hand over fist (India has a�large government deficit)�and spent the money on government road building projects and other such.

Of course the new Congress Party government (plus its socialist allies) is not going to be any better - but that is democracy.

If anyone knows of any government (democratic or undemocratic) that is cutting government spending I would be pleased to hear of it.

(29)

India has closed the deal for the purchase of the 'Admiral Gorschkov', a Cold War era Russian aircraft carrier. It is expected this ship will come into service with the Indian Navy around 2008, just in time for the retirement of the INS Viraat, their current aircraft carrier.

It is quite interesting that there is a continuing armaments relationship between the Russians and India, despite the seismic geopolitical changes of the last decade. An untutored alien landing for the first time on Earth would make no sense of it. The roles of the US and the USSR in that region should be reversed, Russia should be partnered with the alternating military dictatorship and semi-democratic kleptocracies of Pakistan and the US with India, the oldest liberal democratic state in Asia.

Relations between nations have layers within layers and oft-times deep and conflicting historical roots, I am aware of some of the public history of the region, but cannot help wondering if there is a bit more to it, an unspoken geopolitical undertext.

India has centuries of liberal European traditions behind it. It is also not likely to change very much even under severe pressure. Generations would come and go before the paperwork for change was properly submitted, checked, authorized and filed. In a Cold War world the risk of India actually going Red was rather slim and thus of less worry than perennially unstable Pakistan.

Pakistan borders China and is within spitting distance of Russia across a ultra thin panhandle of Afghanistan. The region is wild and uncontrolled and right in the hotspot is the contested Kashmir Province. Given the location and the consistant interest in access to the oil and southern oceans shown from Tsarist through Soviet days, Northern Pakistan was absolutely ripe for fun and games with the KGB. It seems obvious checkmating this move was of far more Realpolitik value than telling the Indians how much we admired their history.

With the end of the Evil Empire, much of Geopolitics changed, but the full extent of the re-alignment of interests in this part of the world did not really click into place until September 11th, 2001. Islamic fundamentalists were already a clear and present danger to the Russians. Nutcases don't even have to board an airliner to get to Moscow. They can drive there. After 9/11 they were also top priority to the US.

Over the last century or so, the Russians have ticked off a lot of people on their borders and they know it. They've done a far better job at this than the US... so it is somewhat in their interest for the US to take the brunt of whatever direct ire is caused by sorting out the problems. Otherwise they would have to deal with it, and given their level of success in Afghanistan and Chechnya, I would not have much hope for solutions from that direction.

From the Russian viewpoint, it is ideal if the US stabilizes Pakistan and acts as the lightning rod for fundamentalist ire; meanwhile they help arm India so that in the worst case, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan, India can keep Pakistan occupied and looking away from Russian territory.

The Russians see the regional problems up front and personal; they are damned pretty much whatever they do and aren't very good at building stable liberal democracies. They haven't even worked the bugs out of their own yet. The US is somewhat less at risk from the downsides of action in the region since it is far, far away and bordered by oceans and democracies. Not that such is a total protection. It just means the crazies have to expend more energy and more resources to carry out their attacks. To put it bluntly, the US stands to lose a smaller number of cities to the fundies than would Russia.

So there is method to this madness. You just have to sit a moment in everyone's chair and ask 'what's in it for me?'

(7)

More than 10,000 people, falsely declared dead in northern India by greedy relatives and corrupt officials in order to steal their land, are trying desperately to prove that they are really alive.

Fifty of the 'dead' staged a protest last week by shaving their heads in front of the state assembly building in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state. Lal Bihari Mritak, secretary of a pressure group, the Association of the Dead said:

The state refuses to accept that they are alive. If it did, it would mean altering the district revenue records and restoring to them their properties, which is something that dishonest officials oppose.

Mata Prasad, a petitioner explains how court cases can get bogged down for years in the over-burdened and corrupt judiciary.

I haven't had a hearing of my case simply because I can't afford to pay a bribe. My documents disappeared from court overnight and I now have to start from the beginning.

Lal Bihari fought for eight years to be declared alive again, and a Bombay producer now plans to make a film about his struggle.

I finally won the battle and was brought back to life in the revenue records.

It seems that the Indian state has achieved nirvana all states aspire to - the ability to literally decide about the life and death of their citizens.

(1)

Thanks to Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas for the link to this, which says that peace may have broken out between India and Pakistan. They aren't yet talking to each other about it, but touch wood, for the time being, they're doing it.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India said on Thursday it had begun pulling back its soldiers from the border with Pakistan and that the withdrawal would take about six weeks.

"The process has begun. This will take about one-and-a-half months. We are trying to do it faster," Defense Minister George Fernandes told reporters after addressing a conference of coast guard commanders.

The withdrawal will end the longest and biggest peacetime deployment in India's history. Pakistan has also announced it would withdraw its forces in response to the Indian decision.

The two countries massed nearly a million troops along their common border after a deadly raid on India's parliament last December that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants fighting its rule in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir.

I seem to recall not a disagreement exactly, more like a friendly exchange of his fears and of my hopes which both of us shared � "I hope I'm wrong", "I hope I'm right", that kind of stuff - between me and David Carr about India and Pakistan. The trouble with predicting peace and of then getting (a little slice of) it is that peace isn't very newsworthy. War, on the other hand, gets absolutely everyone who ever told us so saying I told you so.

So anyway, I told you so.

Cue a nuclear attack by India. The Indians were withdrawing their forces because they didn't want to bomb them. No, please, no.

Question: if someone wanted to swathe you in cloth dipped in turmeric water and then bury you alive in a pit, what would you say? Awww, c'mon, it's only for a minute or so, and in the 400 years of this tradition, no one has died yet (they say). Actually, the participants on the sharp end (or is it in the deep end?) are typically young children, it being far too terrifying a procedure to subject adults to. They say it's completely consensual, and after all, if the gods are not appeased, who knows what might happen! Naturally, the police don't want to intervene, because no one is calling them to do so.

Hang on a minute, one of those little children is bound to place a call to her local police station or submit a complaint in writing if there is any problem, isn't she? The fact that her parents are making her submit to being buried alive by putting the fear of the gods into her is neither here nor there, is it?

India and Pakistan. Will they? Won't they? Will there be mushroom clouds over Peshawar or will it all amount to nothing more than sporadic mortar fire, vigourous fist-shaking and some spectacular face-pulling before all parties come grudgingly to the table to thresh out their differences? I couldn't tell you because I just don't know.

The preponderance of opinion, though, seems to be that it won't go all the way. That both parties have far too much to lose from all-out, balls-out war and, consequently, the instinct of self-preservation, if not common humanity, will win the day. I don't regard this as a misapprehension. After all, both India and Pakistan do have a lot to lose from all-out war, particularly if it escalates to the point where plutonium bhajias are being lobbed over the Line of Control, and I am sure that this is not lost on the polity of either protagonist. But just because war would be a disaster, that doesn't mean it won't happen anyway.

We in the West find it very difficult to contemplate true catastrophe so we tend to assume rather too glibly that such catastrophe is not possible because catastrophe leaves a vasy body-count in its wake, not to mention the damage it causes to many investment portfolios. But have we not been lulled into a false sense of guarded optimism by the 20th Century? The Century that saw the Nazis buried by the Allies in Word War II, the Soviet Union laid low by capitalism and France beaten by Senegal in the World Cup (Alright the last one happened in the 21st Century but I am just too pleased not to mention it).

In other words, our generation has become well used to seeing the world in terms of the rise of badness and madness being overwhelmed by the onward march of goodness and reason. Those of us born post-WWII have been particularly fortunate to have lived through an era of relative peace where 'war' is played out on TV and mostly consists of a bit of a fracas followed by a peace process. So many times have we seen these melodramas played out that they have become the topography of conflict. We assume that the men in uniforms will be free to do their thing for a short period before everyone calms down and the men in suits step in to press flesh and hammer out some sort of deal. But we may forget that this is a manifestation of our era and not an eternal truth and all eras have to come to an end sooner or later.

'Jaw-jaw is better than war-war' has been the axiom of our age. 'There is no substitute for victory' may be the axiom that replaces it.

With all attention focussed on the Middle East, it might be easy to forget the India .v. Pakistan conflict which, according to this report has moved another half-notch up the ratchet.

Of course, it may be nothing more than a brief intensification of the sporadic skirmishes that have been bubbling under for the last few months but, coming on the back of the news that Delhi has expelled the Pakistani Ambassador, a lot of the ingredients of all-out, balls-out war look like they're falling into place.

Suman Palit over on The Kolkata Libertarian has been prognosticating with considerable plausibility on various nightmare scenarios for the Indian sub-continent. His view on where some of those scenarios could lead are:

In 2050 A.D., Sudan and Botswana surpass the Indian GDP, organize pop-rock concert to deliver food aid to Calcutta.

Not vastly optimistic then, Suman?