Opinion

John Lloyd

Wanted: Equitable capitalism, profitable socialism

John Lloyd
Oct 23, 2012 16:26 UTC

Socialism – real, no-private-ownership, state-controlled, egalitarian socialism – has been off the political agenda in most states, including Communist China, for decades. The mixture of gross inefficiency and varying degrees of repressive savagery that most such systems showed seems to have inoculated the world against socialism and confined support for it to the arts and sociology faculties of Western universities. But what was booted triumphantly out the front door of history may be knocking quietly on the back door of the present. The reason is inequality.

Pointing out inequality is a political attraction these days, and as good a dramatization of that as any is in the comparison between what Tony Blair, Britain’s Labour Prime Minister, said about it in 2001, on the eve of his second election, and what Conservative leader David Cameron said about it in a speech in 2009, soon before the 2010 election that made him Prime Minister. Blair, questioned about rising inequality, responded that while he was concerned with poverty and its alleviation, he didn’t lose sleep about the rich being rich. “It’s not”, he said, invoking Britain’s most popular sports figure, “a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.”

Cameron, referring to the recently published The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – a detailed argument that inequality is bad for everyone, even the rich – said the book showed that “among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality-of-life indicator.” That left and right should so switch places marks the shift that has taken place in the past decade, from living in societies where the tide of growth lifted all boats to one where most fear they’ll soon be sinking (assuming they already aren’t).

The political discourse in the United States has long held that getting rich is glorious, on the assumption that everybody has an equal chance of doing it. But that hasn’t been the case for some time, a fact that would seem to make Mitt Romney vulnerable. He is very rich, though he has skillfully in distanced himself from the Romney who remarked at a (leaked) private meeting that 47 percent of his fellow Americans wouldn’t vote for him because they paid no taxes. He even managed a joke about it at the Alfred E. Smith memorial dinner last week, saying it was relaxing to wear the most formal dress, the kind of thing that “Ann and I wear around the house.” Obama, also jocular but rather sharper, said, “Earlier today I went shopping at some stores in Midtown. I understand Governor Romney went shopping for some stores in Midtown.”

Beneath the wit, there’s an anxiety in the Romney camp that his wealth is a disadvantage. Likewise, there’s an evident calculation in the Obama camp that while the political culture in the United States still precludes an all-out attack on the rich, a constant reminder of presidential modesty does no harm. (“Modesty” is relative: The Obama family holds assets in in the $2.6 million to $8.3 million range, versus Romney’s $190 million to $250 million.)

Socialism is routinely accused of being the product of envy, and there’s something to that. Russian, Chinese, Cuban and other revolutionaries mobilized workers, peasants and intellectuals by pointing to the luxury in which the wealthy few lived. After the revolutions, “rich peasants” were slaughtered and repressed even as many of the really rich managed to escape – hence the large number of Russian counts and countesses in early 20th century Paris.

But then, capitalism is routinely accused by its enemies of being based on greed, and there’s something to that, too. Few would choose to put in the long, stress-filled hours that working in the financial sector, or founding a company, demand unless they believed it would make them rich – and envied for being so.

The excesses of the 1920s and earlier were deemed by most to be immoral and passé. But recently, as Paul Krugman observed a decade ago, we entered a “new gilded age,” from which the middle disappeared. The trends have only deepened since then. In South Africa, where inequality is among the highest, white plutocrats have now been joined by “a fabulously rich black elite.” In Russia, 96 billionaires control 18.6 percent of the wealth, while 48 of their Indian comrades control 10.9 percent – though the latter country is on the lower slopes of inequality, about the same as the United Kingdom and Germany. Sweden – of course – registers among the lowest, though there, as almost everywhere, inequality grows.

The situation is grossly unfair, but it’s not necessarily simple to solve. The protesters at the various Occupy movements, spreading out from Wall Street last year, proclaimed that “we are the 99 percent.” But as the political scientist David Runciman points out, “the implication of the slogan … is that we have all been duped … (and) now that we know about it we can stop it. But how?”

How is the question. Socialism’s central justification is in its name: It is concerned with the social. Its moral force is that it implicitly asks the question: What are you doing for society that entitles you to more of its resources? From that question flows a myriad of considerations, such as: Why should the soldier whose country puts him in harm’s way earn one-hundredth that of a financier, whose job is to increase wealth? How do we weigh the relative rewards due to the entrepreneur, who takes risks and creates jobs, against the worker who goes through the sewers every day among the rats to ensure the effluent flows out and we don’t go back to pre-19th century levels of disease? “The market” has decided such things. The growth of inequality – and in many societies the corruption bolted to it – now questions its wisdom.

Socialism’s central flaw has been its inefficiency – and in the hands of the revolutionaries and their descendants, its murderous application. Social democracy, by contrast, has been pacific and mildly redistributionist. But it hasn’t had the strength to withstand the gale of globalized inequality blowing through our societies. We’re lacking an alternative.

Yet out of the continuing and maybe deepening crises of the Western economies there may come some political force that seeks to address the social at least as much as the individual. It is already straining to emerge and gain traction. Making it compatible with the freedom we have enjoyed will be the trick.

PHOTO: A protestor marches through the streets as others hold a banner during a demonstration ahead of the NATO meeting in Chicago May 18, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Young

The endangered lifestyle of the rich and famous alpha male

John Lloyd
Oct 16, 2012 20:59 UTC

Mark Anthony, in his oration for the murdered Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, observes: “The evil that men do lives after them.” Indeed, in our supercharged world, evil lives with its perpetrator, tearing him down while still in his prime. Anthony’s musing would bring a grim smile to the faces of many men; none grimmer, perhaps, than that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, former presidential hope of France’s Socialist Party, and – given the success that the more modest Francois Hollande had in beating Nicolas Sarkozy  – a former future president of France.

In an interview given to the weekly Le Point earlier this month, the former and future world statesman complained that he was the victim of a “manhunt” but added that he had been “naïve” and “out of step with French society.” Cleared of sexually assaulting a maid in New York, he still faces charges of being part of a prostitution ring in which fraudulently acquired money was used to pay the women. He denies them, calling the accusations absurd. All he did, he says, was to go to sex parties in which many people – including many distinguished people –took part. He has never denied he was a swinger himself. Reportedly, he told his wife, Annie Sinclair, before their marriage 20 years ago: “Don’t marry me, I’m an incorrigible skirt-chaser!” Ms. Sinclair, indulgent of faults for which she had been warned, stood by him for months but left him this summer.

He says he was never a rapist, though a journalist, Tristane Banon, who sought an interview with him in 2002, alleges he tried to rape her and threatened a civil suit against him.

Strauss-Kahn implies he is guilty only of misreading French public opinion, with more than a suggestion that he is being judged by a bunch of hypocrites who do, or wish to do, what he does.

But it’s more than that. He’s being judged against a modern, feminist view that power – economic, social, political – remains deeply unequal between men and women, and that sexual power is thus also unequal.

That perspective got dramatic and Prime Ministerial underpinning last week when Julia Gillard, the Australian premier and Labour leader, rounded on opposition leader Tony Abbott. Pointing a finger at her opponent a few feet away across the parliamentary chamber, Gillard said, “I will not take lessons on misogyny from that man!” She listed a series of occasions in which she was offended by his actions, including his posing by a placard that read “Ditch the Witch.”

Australian comment, much of it in News Corporation newspapers opposed to the Labour government, upbraided her for hypocrisy. Her speech drew attention away from the fact that she had felt constrained to support a party colleague whose public sexism – comparing women’s genitalia to shellfish – was more obvious. But it has been widely lauded elsewhere an expression of exasperation by a woman, unmarried and childless, accused by a Liberal Party senator, Bill Heffernan, five years ago of being “deliberately barren” and thus unfit to lead.

The world’s most seductive statesman, Silvio Berlusconi, also, like DSK, faces a trial, in which he is accused of paying for sex with an underage woman, Karima el-Mahroug, a.k.a. Ruby Heart-stealer, a Moroccan exotic dancer. The trial, postponed during Italian justice’s extensive summer pause, resumed in Milan earlier this month. No one will bet that Silvio will be found guilty. He’s beaten every one of the many raps against him so far. Even when it was clear that associates ferried busloads of young women to his parties and that he told many transparent lies about his activities, he retained his popularity with a majority of voting Italians. Never charged with rape, his money and media holdings made him as much a target of seduction as an initiator. In her book, We, Silvio’s girls, Elisa Alloro, a former employee of Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels, presented him as a man of kindness and honour, saying in an interview, “I have always considered every moment I have spent with him as a gift from God.” as Along with the attractions of money and media, Berlusconi has been able to count on a culture more accommodating than the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian ones to the use of power and wealth, including its use to attract young women to older men.

But no retreat to smugness. Most of the male world saw wealth and fame that way (and many women acquiesced), including the Anglo-Saxons. Britain, not for the first time, is transfixed by a sex scandal, this one involving a famed and popular broadcaster, Sir (no less) Jimmy Saville, who died last year and who reveled in his riches and fame – Rolls Royce, big cigars. He did much for charity – hence his knighthood – and, it now appears, used charitable activities with the young and vulnerable to force himself upon them. He stands, posthumously, accused of many cases of harassment, and two of rape. The BBC, his main employer, also stands accused of assuming, as he did, that wealth, celebrity and power would shield him from investigation.

That is less – much less – likely to be true now. But it is true, still, in much of the world. In some parts, women don’t report rape because they, not the rapist, will be punished.  Yet even where only shame has attended women who are sexual victims, there are a few hopeful signs. A friend of mine, Supriya Sharma, a reporter at the Times of India, wrote last month of an alleged gang rape of a Dalit (lower caste) girl in the state of Haryana in India’s northern area of Punjab by a gang of boys of a higher-level Jat caste. One of the boys had been identified to the police by a Jat girl, a schoolmate of the Dalit victim. She won’t be identified, but she said, “These boys should be punished. … It could have been any one of us (girls).” “Sisterhood triumphs,” was the optimistic title of Sharma’s piece, ending with her comment that “when it came to choosing between her schoolmate and her caste-cousin, the college girl who tipped off the police says she didn’t have to think twice.”

Sisterhood is, we must hope, triumphing. It may at times dish out rough justice in the rich states, but it is hard and dangerous in the poor ones. The fate of 14-year old Malala Yousufzai, nearly killed this month by a Taliban hitman for championing girls’ education in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, is a lesson in just how dangerous. For men in comfortable societies, Edgar in King Lear put it well (Shakespeare foresaw everything): “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/Make instruments to plague us.” Just or unjust, the plaguing makes the vice less pleasant. Ask Dominique.

PHOTO: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes 

A peace prize for a continent that’s far from tranquillity

John Lloyd
Oct 12, 2012 20:46 UTC

If, upon hearing the news that the Nobel Peace Prize is going to the European Union, the first response is “You’ve got to be kidding”, the second must be… “they’ve got a point.” The third is: But how much of a point?

You’ve got to be kidding is easy enough. The demonstrations, the strikes, the protests. An unprecedented police presence in Athens to ensure the prime minister of friendly Germany, Angela Merkel, is safe from angry mobs. The military in Spain hinting they may intervene to stop the country breaking up. A stream of opinion pieces speculating on Greek exit, euro collapse…and/or German domination. A faltering of the belief, on the part of most European intellectuals, that the EU was a unique, enlightenment project that showed the world (and particularly the United States) what peaceful, consensual spread of civic virtues looked like.

And then, in the midst of this, with no guarantee that all will be well, the European Union gets the Nobel Peace Prize, joining past winners Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa and Andrei Sakharov, among others. One of these is not like the others.

This latest prize, then, has echoes of the Nobel committee’s last beguiling selection: Barack Obama. I thought in 2009 that it was a bad idea, not because I didn’t admire him, but because I did. I admired him for his intelligence, his ability to enthuse and his seriousness, but I didn’t know how good a president he would be (nor, of course, did he). To give him a prize before he had proved himself one way or the other was to fall into the same trap as much of the media: that is, to conflate the fact that he was the first black president of the U.S. with his ability as a president – to assume that because race no longer automatically barred some ethnicities from the highest office, that he was already a world historic figure (shouldn’t the prize have gone to the U.S. electorate?). It was to make race the defining element in him. Yet here was a man who was an American, an intellectual, and a politician and who made it clear, as he had throughout his career, he was to be judged as such.

If Obama was a prize too soon, the EU’s award seems one too late. The Union was indeed conceived by its founding fathers as a mechanism first of all for ending war. Though I believe the progressive determination of the German people to face the horrors they had visited on the world was and remains the key to decades of peace, there’s little doubt that the enterprise for peace was assisted by a framework – in which Germany most of all believed – that gave them (and Italy) an entry into a democratic club. The system played the same role for Greece, Portugal and Spain, all countries where authoritarian governments, with much blood on their hands, were replaced by parties and leaders who also used Europe to give democracy legitimacy. But these were now decades ago. They spurred a wave of European optimism then. So why – as sane voices call for an end to the Union – now?

That’s where they’ve got a point comes in. By taking for granted that peace is firmly established, we diminish or neglect the EU’s part in it. We forget, if we knew, how hard it was to forgive, to start again. We forget the era when the former communist states of Central Europe broke from the Soviet bloc because their new (and some old) politicians saw in the EU a return to a European identity. It was a union that was voluntary and consensual, and one in which politics was influenced but not dictated – there would be no tanks when countries strayed from the line. The late Ralph Dahrendorf, in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, wrote that there should no longer be one way to run a society, but a hundred – “and we can forever learn from each other in framing our own way.”

The present crisis has cast a fog over that. In despair that the Union has not achieved what many wished (an integrated state) we see, in the depth of the crisis, the end of the attempt. We can forget that in being what it is – a collection of independent states that do many things together – it has produced huge and benign change. That is a very large point to get.

Despite all this, how much of a point does the committee have in awarding its prize to the Union? Not enough, it seems to me, for a prize like the Nobel. Not now. Had it been awarded in 1950, when the first blueprint of the Union – the Coal and Steel Community – was constructed, or when it brought in the southern authoritarian states, or when the former communist countries joined, there would have been a coming together of symbol and facts on the ground, comprehensible to all, a real inspiration at every level. Prizes like the Nobel must have a wide public resonance, a sense in the world audience that it’s fitting, a prize in time.

To award it now seems out of joint. It’s meant, it seems, as an encouragement, a way of saying that times are tough, but remember you were great once and can be again. But Europe is in too much contention for a gesture of that kind. Its fissures are too wide and too real. The gulf at the core of it – that the crisis demands greater integration while the people of Europe seem to oppose it – is much wider than it has ever been. The job of European politicians in nearly every state is a doleful one for as far ahead as we can see. It is to cut and cut again, to reduce, radically in some instances, what Europeans had come to assume was their birthright – an efficient and generous welfare state.

These conflicts may yet be resolved. Leaving aside extremists, no European – whatever view she holds on the utility or desirability of the Union – can seriously wish collapse. The consequences have been shown, clearly enough, to be deeply harmful, not just to Europe but also to the world. The Union, if it is to survive, has great changes to make, changes that will strain its fabric and exhaust its leaders. If and when they succeed, that would be worth a Nobel Peace prize. But they’ve already got it – like Barack Obama – before they’ve properly begun.

PHOTO: Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland speaks as he announces the European Union as the recipient of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, October 12, 2012. The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its historic role in uniting the continent in an award meant as a morale boost for the bloc as it struggles to resolve its debt crisis. REUTERS/Heiko Junge/NTB Scanpix 

The politician’s hagio-biography

John Lloyd
Oct 8, 2012 22:03 UTC

Last week, Ed Miliband, who wants to be Britain’s prime minister, had the kind of public event that changed people’s, or at least the media’s, perception of him: He was punchy, sharp, raspingly dismissive of the government’s strategy. The Labour Party leader, in his speech to the party’s annual conference, spoke for over an hour without notes, moved about the stage with apparent ease, and seemed in a fine, combative humor. He got good press, which he generally hasn’t for the first year of his leadership. It didn’t have quite the earth-moving quality of Mitt Romney’s steamrollering of President Obama a day later – another, and much greater, turnaround event for the man who wants the somewhat larger job of U.S. president. But Miliband did good.

Unfortunately, he also spoke about himself.

This was unfortunate, because what he told his audience – the nation, rather than just the Labour Party conference – was the now-standard democratic politician’s confected biography. He had a loving family, and he was just like most people – in his case, because he went to state schools. Trust me, says this biography: I am psychologically secure, and I know ordinary life. As he said in his speech: “that’s who I am”.

But who is this “I”, really? The “I” who went on to Oxford University and to the London School of Economics (elite)? Then to Harvard (elite and American)? Then almost immediately to a career in politics, as a senior politician’s aide (far from ordinary life)? The “I” who had a father, Ralph, who was the UK’s most prominent Marxist sociologist? This “I” has apparently been banished from Miliband’s story – he is just the “I” that he thinks his electorate wants him to be.

How much more, or less, important is it that Ed Miliband was brought up by Marxists than that Mitt Romney was brought up by Mormons? One man’s father believed in the ultimate victory of the working class over capitalism, the other’s religion believes that the Book of Mormon was discovered by the early 19th century divine Joseph Smith on a series of gold plates and later taken back by the angel who had given them to him (before they could be fact-checked). Miliband’s past is less important, one would guess, since he is not a Marxist, while Romney remains a Mormon. Yet what does even that tell us about the Romney “I”? Indeed, which Romney are we talking about – the hard-right, Tea Party-approved Romney of the primaries or the managerial, centrist Romney of the first presidential debate?

Those American politicians who could, without too much mendacity, point to a hardscrabble youth and who used it in presenting themselves to the electorate have increasingly set the pace in the democratic world. The creation of a narrative of ordinariness, even material or psychological hardship, is one of the earliest tasks of a leader’s spin doctors. British politicians, closest to the U.S. political culture, have in recent decades constructed, where they had the material for it, their own versions of such a story. Margaret Thatcher had some success using the story of her father, the shopkeeper, and the humble flat above the hard-worked shop; Gordon Brown rather less, with his father the Presbyterian minister.

Nicolas Sarkozy had a wealthy father – but the latter left the family, and the future French president did his best with this character-building desertion, and the fact that he was shorter than and not as rich as schoolmates from even wealthier families. Silvio Berlusconi spent many millions introducing himself to his future electorate as a man from a simple Italian family – pious, industrious and modest. That went well for him, for nearly two decades.

These essays in hagio-biography are unfortunate because they chafe so much against what’s obvious to all who see these politicians: that the most important thing about them is their driving ambition, their preternatural energy, their relentless will, their rapid intelligence – their startling un-ordinariness. It is of course interesting that Thatcher, who seemed so posh, had a father who was a shopkeeper and that Sarkozy’s father, who owned an advertising agency, left his family. We all like gossip. But it tells you nothing about the fitness of either for the job they strove so hard, and successfully, to gain.

Our demand – or our acquiescence in the media’s demand – for “authenticity” is the root cause of this deeply inauthentic trend in politics and political PR. It is inauthentic – the opposite of what it claims to be – because we are, none of us, the simple projection of our younger selves and experiences, much less a carefully edited version of these. The effect of both nature and nurture upon us combine in infinitely complex ways and interact with our conscious efforts to remake ourselves as public men and women. In his book Agile Gene, the British zoologist and journalist Matt Ridley illuminates the endless to-ing and fro-ing between the natural and the nurtured in our makeup – a complexity of interaction that means it is wholly impossible to be dogmatic about character from a few indications plucked from one’s upbringing.

We demand the wrong thing of our politicians. We demand an obeisance to ordinariness when we are electing men and women to do tasks that are all but superhuman. Seeing President Obama fumble in his debate last week with Republican candidate Romney was to feel close to pity (the last thing a presidential candidate wants to hear, to be sure) for one who has had four years of nightmarishly negative politics and is now confronted with his challenger’s set of simplified (and apparently newly coined) nostrums. Yet Obama himself, as a candidate in 2008, leaned heavily on a message of simple will (“Yes we can!”) and a biography of upward mobility from humble, even difficult, origins, skillfully conflating the taking of the historic step of electing the first black president with the implication that his own first presidency would be necessarily historic.

The right thing to know, as responsible voters, is the set of tasks any president or prime minister will inherit – a simplified version of the thick briefings that will lie on their first day’s desk. The right thing to ask for, when politicians make their pitch, is not the loving nature of their parenting but their unsentimental grasp on the most salient of the issues that confront their country. For a British would-be leader, these are in the first instance how debt is to be reduced and how growth is to be restored – and beyond that, a wilderness of crises, setbacks and treacheries that await any political leader. For an American president, the tasks he will take on are at once national and global in scope, vast, complex and often intractable. They range from a steadily growing debt to the nuclearization of Iran to the neglected but increasingly looming threat of global warming.

To test would-be, or sitting, leaders on their professed responses would tell us far from everything. Many of the answers would be necessarily speculative. The issues change, sometimes by the day; a candidate answering questions on a podium is not a leader surrounded by advisers and intelligence reports. But it is something closer to the reality with which we ask our leaders to deal. It is, in every way, more authentic. And through the answers, and the intellectual and psychological preparation they have (or have not) made for the often crushing burdens of power, we can make at least a provisional judgment on that part of their character that matters to us: their will and ability to lead. Whether their father liked their politics or not can wait for real biographies.

PHOTO: Ed Miliband, leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, waves to delegates as he arrives for a question-and-answer session at the party’s annual conference, in Manchester, northern England, October 3, 2012.  REUTERS/Andrew Winning

In India, a press corps searching for its morality

John Lloyd
Oct 2, 2012 19:13 UTC

I was in India last week, where I met three frustrated moralists. One was a journalist, an investigator of some distinction (which, to be fair, can be frustrating anywhere). The other two were regulators of the press and broadcasting, respectively. They have little power and thus little influence over what they see as a scandal: the way the media ignore the “real” India – impoverished, suffering, socially divided – in favor of a glossy India that’s little more than the three “C’s” – cinema, celebrity and cricket.

Justice Markandey Katju is one of these frustrated regulators. Katju, a former judge of India’s Supreme Court, is chairman of the Press Council of India, which – very loosely – oversees the press. When I told smart Indian journalists that I would see him, they were amused, and many told me he was “mad”. Justice Katju does thunder, but he’s not crazy: He’s an outspoken moralist, and his thundering says something not just about Indian media but also about India.

Calling Katju “outspoken” would fall too short. He hectors and lectures. In fact, Katju does speak with something of the fervor of the Indian governing class of the pre- and post-independence period, when ideals were at least as important as details and mechanisms. “There was a fashion show recently in Mumbai,” he said, “where there were 512 journalists. 512! The models were wearing clothes made of cotton grown by farmers who are committing suicides in their thousands every year! And is that reported? Maybe one reporter will be sent sometimes.

“The content of Indian journalism is an insult to the poor. Seventy percent of the country who live on $2 a day or less are invisible. The media show the rich and famous. The corporations and the finance houses control the politicians.”

Katju’s tirade isn’t very nuanced. The fashion shows and other beautiful-people events, which now abound, are eagerly covered but often give the proceeds to the poor; while there is one famed reporter, Palagummi Sainath, who writes often in his paper, the Hindu, about rural poverty and has put rural suicides into the consciousness of many. Still, it’s small potatoes.

Dipankar Gupta, another of my frustrated contacts, isn’t in the least like Justice Katju, despite also being a regulator, at the National Broadcasting Association. He’s gentle in speech, cosmopolitan in manner. A scholar of distinction, he has written or edited a string of books on Indian society, many dealing with the still vexed question of caste. Like at the Press Council, the large majority on the association’s board are from the industry, and they aren’t about to crack down hard on their colleagues and start feuds. Exhortation is all Gupta and Katju have.

Where Katju is a kind of preacher, Gupta is more of a social democrat. “Democracy should not be about gross ratings. Democracy is very difficult. You must always have people who give an example by commending its values.

“But TV is very constrained in what it can say, most of all by the big corporations. Advertising is the great constraint. TV does go hard on politicians, though the big politicians they can’t really touch unless it’s a huge scandal. But they don’t go for the corporations themselves.”

Katju and Gupta don’t have much faith that the masses will do much. Katju thinks they are drugged by the media, Gupta that they have no real way of expressing their voice nor any consciousness of what that would be (neither give much space in their reflections to social media – now growing fast). He looks to the elite to take the lead – an elite that crucially includes the news media. His next book will be about the character of the elite, an institution that, he believes, has largely given up on espousing and promoting the values of democracy.

“It’s a paradox”, says Gupta, “that we, in a democracy for nearly seven decades, should have done so little for the poor, who are the large majority. The middle class in Europe had a project: to relieve poverty through what became the welfare state, so that poverty is very small and at least in our terms, almost everyone is middle class. The middle class in India has no such project.”

It would be wrong to suppose that there are no idealists among India’s thousands of journalists. Not all are blind or indifferent just because they benefit from the boom. Tired of making the complex simplistic for her editor, one young woman who didn’t want to be named told me she was leaving her secure and well-paid job to work for an NGO in the rural villages (where most Indians live).

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the investigative journalist and the third of the frustrated troika, believes in keeping complex things complex, or at least not making them artificially pleasant when they affect the poor. He made a documentary, Blood and Iron, on the iron-ore mines of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. When I was in Delhi, he asked me along to a conference he was running on “Crony Journalism” which, as its name suggests, was not designed as a self-congratulatory event.

The conference panel told tales of political parties bidding against each other to buy pages of “advertorial” in regional papers; of large favors passing between media moguls and corporate bosses; and, again, of the domination of advertising. But T.K. Arun, the opinion page editor of the Economic Times, shoved the ball back into the politicians’ court, stating flatly that “Indian democracy is financed almost completely by corruption.”

That’s a big statement – but all the people on the panel, who included a top PR man and the head of corporate affairs for one of the biggest companies, hurried to agree. The exception was the one politician present, an important minister of state, for parliamentary affairs, Rajiv Shukla, who had been a journalist and whose wife is a TV anchor. When it came time for questions, I asked him what he thought of this sweeping dismissal of his class’s probity: “I don’t agree at all, not at all,” he said brusquely, and left it at that.

Thakurta, speaking afterwards, said he didn’t think all politicians were corrupt, “but many are and there’s a culture of it.” There is. Though the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is thought to be incorruptible, his government is widely thought to be venal – with scams including corrupt sales of mobile-phone licenses, undercover allocations of coal concessions, criminal contracts for the Delhi Commonwealth Games, and illegal mining in Karnataka – Thakurta’s theme for his film. Arun had said that there was little to be done about it, and Thakurta agreed. All you could do was keep on keeping on.

For these men, freedom of the media is badly compromised because freedom has come to mean indifference to misery and poverty, and connivance in corruption. Like many moralists, they can be blind to popular taste: Poor people anywhere often prefer fantasy to lift them from their environment, rather than representations of reality that remind them of it. But they would respond that media must have a higher calling: to put on the record the true state of society. The moralists see in the grossness of the disparities between the few and the many a standing affront – on the part of the government and the corporate elite and the media – to democracy itself. That’s not mad.

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