Vinoth Ramachandra

In 2024, around 70 countries are heading for  either presidential or parliamentary elections.

Some of these elections are farcical, as in Putin’s Russia last month or in Bangladesh in January where Sheikh Hasina won her fourth consecutive term in office after the opposition boycotted elections in protest. In Pakistan, Imran Khan was jailed and his party banned from contesting; but despite his supporters emerging with the largest collective vote, the military-backed dynastic oligarchs regained their control of the country.

It is striking how pronounced is the tendency in many other countries to embrace what are called “strongmen”- figures who project authority that promises to assuage the anger and frustrations of many. Any time we see a widespread politics of backlash and grievance, there is reason to worry. And especially when a government wins with an overwhelming majority and uses that to change the basic constitutional framework in ways that undermine the rights and liberties of individuals and minorities. That constitutes an erosion of democracy.

India, long respected as a bastion of democracy in Asia, is rapidly turning into a police state. Civil society activists and organizations are being suppressed. The foreign exchange licences of international NGOs (including Oxfam, Amnesty, Greenpeace and World Vision) have been revoked, forcing them to lay off many employees and restrict their activities. Anti-conversion laws in some states are being enforced, making a mockery of the much-vaunted “Hindu tolerance”. TV and print media are controlled by super-rich tycoons hand-in-glove with Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP party.

India goes to the polls later this month in what will be the most crucial elections in its history. Its future as a rights-respecting democracy is at stake. The BJP is using state resources to intimidate or bribe potential rivals. The arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by India’s financial crime investigation agency two weeks ago follows on the heels of similar arrests of opposition leaders and raids on their properties by law enforcement agencies. India’s biggest opposition party, the Congress, is struggling to continue campaigning because all its bank accounts had been frozen in connection with an ongoing tax dispute.

The election campaign is also being manipulated by AI disinformation, much of it created by Hindutva-oriented Indian IT specialists in Western countries. While India has the world’s largest number of Internet users next to China, digital literacy as well as conventional literacy levels are low. In February 2020, Manoj Tiwari, a BJP member of parliament, became among the world’s first to use deepfakes for campaigning. In three videos, Tiwari addressed voters in Delhi ahead of the capital’s legislative assembly elections in Hindi, Haryanvi and English – reaching three distinct audiences in the multicultural city. Only the Hindi video was authentic: The other two were deepfakes, where AI was used to generate his voice and words and alter his expressions and lip movement to make it almost impossible to detect, just on viewing, that they were not genuine.

Since then there has been a flood of AI-generated, or manipulated, media that marred a series of elections in India’s states in recent months, and that’s now threatening to fundamentally shape the country’s future general elections. Apart from AI, there are several dubious YouTube “news channels” being created to boost Modi’s election chances. Factchecker.in, India’s fact-checking site, found out that there were 43 claims made by Narendra Modi between 2014 and 2019 that were untrue. (Gaurav Sood, Fake News, Penguin, p.224)

India recently purchased USD 4 billion worth of armed drones from the US. This is roughly the current foreign currency reserves of Sri Lanka. At the same time as this news was released, India was ranked shamefully high in a study calculating the prevalence of children aged 6-23 months who have not eaten anything over a 24-hour period, across 92 low- and middle-income countries. Farmers protesting in Delhi over the manipulation of food prices by a government- backed retail giant are being tear-gassed.

Some European countries are shamelessly courting Modi, seeking market access to the country’s large and affluent middle-class. The latter are obsessed with boosting India’s global image. Sophisticated probes to Mars and cutting-edge medical research float above a sea of urban squalor and crumbling infrastructure. India aspires to become the third largest economy in the world before 2030 while ranking among the bottom fifty countries on every indicator of health and environmental well-being, not to mention religious liberty and the welfare of women and children.

Democracy, advancing hand-in-hand with the national self-determination, was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. But it has been a more ambiguous achievement than most of its admirers today realize. The warnings of Tocqueville, Constant, Mill and others from an earlier generation of Western liberal thinkers have not lost their force. While it may be true that once a democratic nation has attained a certain level of economic development it will not revert to autocracy, illiberal forms of democracy always loom on the horizon. Just witness Europe and the USA today. Where the love of freedom, justice and tolerance are absent or eroded in the dominant culture, mirages of democracy set in.

The Habsburg Empire protected civilized values more effectively during its last sixty years than did most of the nation-states by which it was replaced during the nearly one hundred years that followed the empire’s collapse in the aftermath of World War I.

Gandhi famously remarked, when told that an independent India would also produce oppressors, “But they will be our oppressors.” I cannot agree less. I prefer, any day, good governance by foreigners to bad governance by natives.

The most frustrating aspect of speaking or writing about Palestine/Israel over the years is to encounter the same evasive, knee-jerk reactions: “It’s all so complex”, “There are two sides to the story”, “We should leave them to deal with it”.

When I ask, “What is so complex about the situation?”, the usual answer is “Israel also has a right to exist.”  A heart-breaking case of historical amnesia. In the late 1970s the PLO (then the main political arm of the Palestinian people) demanded a two-state solution. Where in the world has any people been willing to surrender 80 per cent of its ancestral lands to a foreign colonial power?

And in the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, the PLO renounced the use of violence and accepted the Israeli state. What did they get in return? Continuing ultra-right Jewish settler violence; and Netanyahu and his Likud party scuppered the accord which led to the second Intifada (or “uprising”) and the popularity of Islamist groups like Hamas.

When I ask, “What is the other side to the story?”, the usual answer is, “Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorism”. Yes, Israel has that right. But Hamas also has the right, under international law, to resist a foreign military power that has occupied its lands for 56 years. And, of course, both sides have a moral obligation to engage in military action that respects the Geneva Conventions and other aspects of international law.

Paolo Freire, the eminent Brazilian educationist noted that violence never begins with the oppressed. Every non-violent demonstration in Gaza and the West Bank over the past 56 years has been brutally suppressed by the Israeli army. Why does this not also count as “terrorism”?

As for the response “Leave them to deal with it”, this is to ignore the fact that the tragedy of Palestine is a creation of British imperialism, and that since 1967 the USA has exacerbated the tragedy by giving unconditional military and diplomatic support to Israel. So no British or American government (or British or American church) can wash its hands in mock innocence.

In November last year, 69 international Christian church leaders and aid agencies sent a strong letter to the British Prime Minister  and other world leaders saying “enough is enough” and calling on them to support a bilateral ceasefire. “We are deeply grieved,” they wrote,” by the complicity of the United States and several other Western countries in the continued violence through efforts to actively oppose a ceasefire, including by vetoing multiple United Nations Resolutions.” They drew attention to “the conflict’s broader backdrop – ongoing Israeli occupation and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians for more than 70 years. Three-quarters of Palestinian residents of Gaza are refugees dating back to 1948.”

In contrast, the Bishops of the Anglican Church have come out with various tepid statements in which they bemoan the “humanitarian tragedy” that has befallen Gaza, call for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages, but refrain from mentioning Israeli war crimes, the historical backdrop to Hamas’ terrorist attacks on 7 October, and the 5000 children and women held in Israeli military prisons without recourse to lawyers or their families (all contrary to international law).

Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is reported to have refused to meet with the Palestinian Lutheran pastor, Munther Isaac, simply because the latter had shared a platform with Jeremy Corbyn at a huge Palestinian Solidarity rally in London.

Corbyn is a former leader of the Labour Party in Britain who has championed justice for Palestine for many decades. His major crime is that he is not from the social class to which the British political establishment belongs. He is still popular among young people but, like Bernie Sanders in the US, his economic egalitarianism and calls for a new anti-imperial world order have not endeared him to the Blairites in his party (the so-called New Labour) and he was ousted from the leadership after the last elections in a reprehensible manner.

If Welby has been influenced by the patently absurd and unjust accusations of antisemitism that were levelled at Corbyn, that is very disappointing. One can understand and welcome Welby’s desire not to alienate the Jewish community in the UK which has experienced renewed anti-Jewish violence since 7^th October. But the Jewish community is not monolithic, and there are many Jews, both in the UK and Israel, who are not Zionists and who have courageously opposed Netanyahu and the apartheid state he has created since 2018- not to mention his murderous policies. So this is also an insult to them.

But to express condolence with a war criminal like Netanyahu and spurn a fellow desperate Christian pastor? This is to alienate himself from the Palestinian church as well as many of us in the wider Anglican communion.

If a disordered concern for public relations is what is uppermost in Welby’s mind, I suggest he follow the example of Jesus, the Lord of the Church,  who hung out with the ostracized of his society, and not with the men of power, so alienating the religious establishment. And if crucifixion was the form of execution the Romans reserved for terrorists and the “scum of the earth”, then he can take a cue from the early Church who announced that among that crucified “scum” was one who was the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. What a public relations disaster that must have been!

The leaders of the Anglican (and other) churches would do well to heed the warning of Rowan Williams, Welby’s illustrious predecessor: “[The Church’s] credibility does not depend on its unbroken success; only on its continued willingness to be judged by what it announces and points to.” (Faith in the Public Square)

A year from now, the world will have another American President-elect.

Given the global influence of the American Presidency, in a fairer world all of us should be able to have a say in who gets elected.

I have often told my American friends that, when it comes to foreign policy, it makes no difference whether they vote Democrat or Republican. The candidates on offer tend to be parochial and insular in their worldviews. That the most powerful position on earth is often occupied by men who are largely ignorant of world history, or world religions, and cultures other than their own, is one of the biggest obstacles to the possibility of greater world peace and a more just economic order. Given that many of the problems humanity faces are global in scope, this is a dreadful prospect.

American democracy has long been corrupted by the power of private wealth. Money dictates politics in the US to a degree more brazen than perhaps any other country. One needs to be wealthy, or court the wealthy, to be a president, governor, or senator.

The Democratic party ceased, a long time ago, to represent blue-collar America (many of the latter voted for Trump!) and only pays lip-service to uplifting the socially and economically disadvantaged. The Republicans pose as custodians of Judaeo-Christian morality, while destroying every vestige of that morality in American society. In a Blog post on 18 March 2012, I wrote: “The men now vying for the Republican Party presidential nomination reveal the depths to which that once honourable party has now sunk. They embody the very antitheses to the values of the Kingdom of God which Jesus announced: ignore the poor, protect and pamper the rich, plunder the earth, exalt greed, kill your enemies.” What has changed since then?

The UK has not been any different since the Thatcher years. A tiny elite of rich, privately educated men and women out of touch with the mass of their compatriots, let alone with the rest of the world, has come to dominate their political parties. And the UK has not had an independent foreign policy since the 1960s. It is America’s lapdog, faithfully trotting at its master’s feet. Just look at its tepid kowtowing to the US’s support for Israel’s murderous actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

The simplest definition of a leader is one who inspires followers. A good political leader is one who effectively communicates a moral vision, and rejects immoral means but accepts pragmatic strategies in seeking to realise that vision.

The US and UK have most of the top-ranked universities in the world. The tragic irony is that the men and women who enter politics from these prestigious universities tend to be unattractive specimens of humanity, let alone good leaders!

I recently watched on Youtube a panel discussion at the Harvard Business School on the war in Gaza. The moderator, himself an academic from that institution, kept massaging the egos of his student audience, frequently referring to them as “the world leaders of the future”. I wanted to ask him, “What ‘world leaders’ have HBS, or the Harvard Law School, or the Kennedy School of Government, produced?” Henry Kissinger? Robert McNamara? George Bush? Alan Dershowitz? Yes, smile!

Neither the Rev. Martin Luther King nor Nelson Mandela- two statesmen whom the whole world still admires- came from such elite institutions. Mandela’s formation into a statesman was his 27 years of solitary confinement in South Africa’s most notorious prison.

Christian witness in such universities should include pricking the bubble of such pretentiousness.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of books, videos and courses on leadership exported to the rest of the world by American business schools, seminaries and churches and the quality of leadership in those very institutions.

Is the United States government today the biggest threat to world peace? It would appear so. China, Russia, Iran are controlled by brutal, ambitious regimes; but they make no pretence about believing in human rights, the rule of law or liberal democracy. The biggest buyers of American military hardware are the Israeli apartheid state and the despotic, patriarchal monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Democracy and human rights matter less than US economic and military interests. This fuels cynicism towards the former.

And, as I have often commented on this Blog, since 1967 American taxpayers, whether knowingly or ignorantly, have been providing unconditional diplomatic and military support for a country that routinely ignores all UN resolutions, tramples upon international law and the Geneva Conventions, and commits war crimes and ethnic cleansing with impunity.

I wish that Americans- and Europeans, too- would understand that such hypocrisy and double standards when it comes to the practice of human rights and international humanitarian law undermine the efforts of all those civil society organizations and individuals (including myself) who try, often at risk to their lives, to promote these in the societies in which they live. You owe it to us to speak out!

I hope that many who follow this Blog will join the public protests taking place in many cities around the world against the colossal human tragedy unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank.

More civilians have been killed there in the past month than in the past 18 months in Ukraine.

There will be many Jews, including rabbis, joining these protests. The courage of many Jews, both within and outside Israel, in repeatedly denouncing Israel’s apartheid state and Netanyahu’s murderous policies, stands in stark and shameful contrast to the blind support of many religious fundamentalists (Christian and Jews) in the US and Europe. Such support in the case of Christians stems from wilful ignorance of both Scripture and the past hundred years of Palestinian history.

Just as many Western Christians today wonder how their forebears could ever have used the Bible to justify slavery or apartheid, so their progeny will wonder how they ever remained silent in the face of the slaughter and forcible eviction of their fellow Christians in Palestine.

Gaza has been under military occupation for 56 years. This is disputed by those who argue that Israel withdrew its military in 2005 and therefore the word “occupation” is inappropriate. But in a recent interview, the former UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, Michael Lynk, pointed out that the test in international law is: Does the military exercise – the term is “effective control” – over the land or territory?

“It’s like if the guards leave the prison, but they take all the keys with them; They’re still controlling how much food goes inside the prison each day and how much electricity goes into the prison each day. The people inside the prison are free to roam wherever they want within the confines of the prison but have no ability to be able to leave – that would be ‘effective control’ over the prison. This is the same way Israel exercises effective control over who and what leaves Gaza and who and what enters Gaza, as well.” (https://rb.gy/90nek9 )

Even now ultra-orthodox colonial settlers in the West Bank are using the crisis to kill Palestinians and take over their homes. This is not reported in the Western media. Israel has long ignored international law (e.g. erecting permanent settlements in territory seized by military invasion) and committed war crimes with impunity. But as long as it has the support of the US and the UK, it will simply continue to do so. (Just compare the reaction to Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the silence of the same Western governments re the current war crimes in Gaza).

Having lived in a country torn apart by “terrorism” I know that terrorist groups are spawned and aided by state terror. There is a symbiotic relationship, one feeding off the other. The UN Secretary-General said as much when, having rightly condemned the brutal attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians, he also reminded the world that such acts do not “happen in a vacuum”. They have a history. And even if Hamas is wiped off the face of the earth, the hypocrisy of the US government and Israeli military arrogance will ensure that new terrorist groups will emerge from among the current victims.

A former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was himself the leader of the terrorist Irgun group whose most infamous act was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. A “terrorist” from one perspective is a “resistance-fighter” from another. What unites these perspectives is contempt for non-combatants. When the chief of the Israeli Defence force declared that “Those who do not support us are terrorists” he was echoing George Bush’s “Those who are not with us are against us” mantra in the aftermath of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror. We are still struggling with the fallout.

Another word whose usage in Western media and by Western governments baffles me is “Anti-Semitic”. Semitic is a linguistic term which according to the Oxford dictionary denotes a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian. By extension, it relates to peoples who speak Semitic languages, especially Hebrew and Arabic. But it is used in the English-speaking world purely as an equivalent to “Jewish”, and “anti-Semitic” is never used to describe hostility towards Arabs. And then when “anti-Semitic’ is conflated with “anti-Zionist” it not only insults those Jews who are not Zionists, but sows further confusion.

Not only is truth the first casualty of war, but linguistic confusion adds to “the fog of war”.

“Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable.”

These words, attributed to the 18^th-century British statesman Edmund Burke, are relevant to many of the growing number of authoritarian regimes around the world. And never more so than the state of Israel.

I am currently on a short visit to universities in southern California, speaking at meetings of faculty and students. These are some of the top ranking educational institutions in the world, but the levels of historical ignorance and theological naivete found among them is often shocking. American TV news coverage is, of course, the most parochial and partisan in the Western world. It’s reaction to the most recent horrors in Gaza is predictably reminiscent of the reaction to 9/11: a black-and-white narrative of vicious, unprovoked violence.

I have written so often on this Blog (particularly, 26 November 2014 and 09 April 2019) about the indifference of Western governments and publics towards the colonial aggression of the Israeli state that it depresses me to address this topic again, in the light of the recent events in Gaza.

On 26 November 2014, in a post entitled “Eyeless (But Not Speechless) in Gaza” (with apologies to Aldous Huxley) I wrote: “Mainstream Western media are not only highly selective but fickle when it comes to reporting on the Middle East. The 50 day war in Gaza this summer has been quickly forgotten, a war in which Israel killed 2,200 Palestinians, including more than 500 children. Courageous human rights and peace groups within Israel (B’Tselem and Break the Silence) are investigating independently what happened in Gaza, as the official army investigation will be a cover-up.”

I also noted that “Every act of violence by Hamas or unrepresentative Palestinians (as in the recent horrific attack by two axe-wielding men on a Jewish synagogue) is exploited by government propaganda to stereotype and caricature all Palestinians and to tighten its stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank, crushing Palestinian aspirations for an end to the 75-year dispossession and conquest.”

And, more recently (23 May 2021), in “Israel: A Unique State”: Following the brutal onslaught on Gaza in 2009, hailed by the Israeli government as a “military victory”, one of the wisest political voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, wrote: “What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.  In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves, too, a crime against the State of Israel.”

For unbiased warnings that Western governments (especially the US and UK) have failed to heed:

Elders warn of consequences of “one-state reality” in Israel and Palestine

How Israel has misused its position as an occupying power

‘Israel and the Zionist enterprise were born in sin’, says heir to an iconic Zionist family

And, for anyone wishing to understand the context of, without necessarily condoning,  Hamas’s attacks on Israel, see:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/8/there-is-nothing-surprising-about-hamass-operation

President Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine is dismaying. While they are not banned internationally, more than 120 countries, including most NATO members, have signed on to a convention prohibiting their use. The US, Ukraine and Russia are not party to that agreement.

The indiscriminate nature of these weapons makes them immoral. Each cluster bomb can contain hundreds of smaller explosives that spread across a targeted area, but not all of these bomblets detonate on impact. The unexploded bombs can remain embedded in the ground for years, posing a serious danger to non-combatants, most notably children.

Can artefacts/technologies be called “immoral”? Whenever the question of technology and ethics is raised, the typical answer relates to how we use it. Technology itself is considered politically and morally neutral. You know the refrain “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” that is bandied about. This is short-sighted. A hammer may indeed be used to either build a bookcase or bash someone’s head in. But, as the social critic Neil Postman famously observed, “To the man with a hammer, everything is a nail.”

How might carrying a gun in my pocket with me all the time shape the way I perceive the world? What feelings does a gun in hand induce in me? How does it affect relationships with strangers? The world is no longer a hospitable habitation, but a space that is fraught with constant threats. Hence the frequent killing of innocent suspects by armed police in the USA and, more recently, in Paris. Paranoia now reigns.

As self-centred human beings, it is easier to delight in the technical aspects of our craft than to face up to tough, challenging issues which may call for a spiritual maturity which as scientists and engineers we may lack. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project (the secret US project during the latter part of World War II to develop an atomic bomb), testifying before a commission of enquiry in 1954, admitted: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

Similarly, another physicist, Freeman Dyson comments: “Nuclear explosives have a glitter more seductive than gold to those who play with them. To command nature to release in a pint pot the energy that fuels the stars, to lift by pure thought a million tons of rock into the sky, these are exercises of the human will that produce an illusion of illimitable power.”

It is the same hubristic mind-set that lies behind the hi-tech corporate sectors relentless, and unaccountable, ambition to replace human beings with AI and robots. (The grim irony, of course, is that the AI data-sets are all catalogued, annotated and checked by human beings, often poorly paid, on crowdworker platforms).

Back to cluster munitions, less “technically sweet” than AI or nuclear bombs, but embodying the same moral blind-spots. Biden has basically told Putin, “We will follow you in sacrificing innocent lives for the sake of a military victory.”

And Zelensky, by not refusing such weapons, has impaired his own moral credibility which has hitherto won the admiration and sympathy of so many people around the world. Biden’s action has also served to undermine the criticism of nations such as India, South Africa and Brazil, for their cowardly “neutrality” towards the Russian invasion. Cynicism now reigns.

As the US approaches another election year, many of us shake our head in bemused wonder as to why that nation consistently fails to throw up leaders that are both competent and morally upright, despite having many of the finest educational institutions in the world. We are flooded with books and videos on “leadership” emanating from American colleges, corporations and churches. Yet there is not a single American political leader or church leader since the Rev. Martin Luther King- with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter- that the rest of us have the faintest desire to emulate.

Money dictates politics in the US to a degree more brazen than perhaps any other country. One needs to be wealthy, or court the wealthy, to be a president, governor, or senator.

Biden’s Democratic party abandoned long ago its historic base in the labour unions. It may not have become as degenerate as the Republican party today which still flirts with Donald Trump, opposes gun control, stokes irrational fears of immigrants, and is overtly racist (the antithesis of the Republican party of Lincoln’s day).

But when it comes to foreign policy, voting Democrat or Republican makes little difference. The prospect of Trump or Pence as President of the most powerful country in the world is frightening; but Biden too has strengthened the autocratic regimes in Israel, India and a host of other places despite all his rhetoric about human rights. As early as 2019 he was assuring his donors in the Democratic establishment that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected. To that promise he has remained true.

Boris Johnson’s systematic lies to the UK parliament have been exposed by a parliamentary privileges committee. Facing a 90-day suspension, Johnson chose to resign, but continues to damn the report of his lying. Many hope this is the end to his political career, but people like Johnson and Trump know how to manipulate public opinion and galvanize their acolytes in self-righteous crusades.

This is more than about government parties during the Covid lockdowns. It is about the centrality of truth and truth-telling to public life. Whatever academic parlour-games are played around the concept of truth in some university departments, and whatever cynical politicians and business magnates may say about their “realism” or “pragmatism”, morality lies at the heart of democratic politics and economic conduct. Enquiries and investigations into misconduct presuppose the objectivity of truth and moral values. Can a well-ordered market economy flourish in a cultural climate of moral relativism (where morality is treated as a matter of convention or individual choice)?

Truth-telling, making and honouring promises, are the sine qua non of healthy governments and markets. “My word is my bond” was the old motto of the financial City of London. Fraudulent traders, tax evaders, money-launderers and dishonest accountants prey on the taken-for-granted honesty of the majority. Once they are found out, confidence in the system collapses.

The British philosopher Roger Trigg observes:“Any view that sees obligations as merely created by agreements must still accept that any agreement has to have force even when it is inconvenient to keep it.  In other words, parties to an agreement have to have a moral outlook already formed. It must give them a sense of what is right, and a willingness to abide by it, even when it is in their own interests not to do so. The problem is that a liberal view of society is one where morality is a private matter, and public reason may not appeal to private, individual moral beliefs.  Yet at the same time it depends on tacit, or actual, agreements and promises to live by certain public procedures, and to follow them in good faith… The character of the whole may depend on the character and principles of the participants, but liberal doctrine wants to remain neutral as to what those should be… this is a deep problem for liberalism.” (Morality Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)

Furthermore, in a society that tends to reduce all moral language to talk about “personal preferences”, why is it that the moral character of a witness, whether in a law-court or a scientific laboratory, is still considered absolutely vital to the pursuit of “truth”?

In other words, a vibrant liberal democracy presupposes a particular moral culture: one in which not only freedom and tolerance are valued, but also where truthful speech, civility in public interactions, respect for the weak, and financial integrity in public institutions are practised by a significant majority.

In many post-colonial societies, liberal institutions do not work well because the required cultural mind-set is either absent or deficient. Sri Lankan politicians, for example, routinely tell blatant lies in parliament, let alone in the mass media. They are simply shrugged off by the general public. The idea of appointing a select committee to investigate lies told by a head of state to parliament is unthinkable!

Johnson’s Partygate fiasco also raises deeper questions about the morality and gullibility of the electorate in one of the the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies. Here is a man who was sacked by the Times newspaper when a young reporter for making up a quote, and who was later demoted to the Conservative back benches in parliament for lying about an affair. Nevertheless, all his lies about Brexit were swallowed wholesale by a public that gave him a huge majority in the last parliamentary elections.

It raises troubling questions about the public culture in Britain and the USA, where “politics as spectacle” has come to imitate Reality TV.

South Asia comprises more than a quarter of the world’s population. It is home to ancient religious civilizations and thousands of ethno-linguistic groups. When it comes to human rights and economic inequality, it features at the bottom of global rankings.

Leave aside Afghanistan and Myanmar, where the sheer horrors inflicted by the ruling regimes simply defy the imagination (at least mine). One can only weep with anger (but still ask: who supplies these evildoers with the military and financial means to wreak terror?). But in India and Sri Lanka, ostensibly democracies in the eyes of the West, the voices and rights of minorities are suppressed, ignorant voters are routinely bribed, and honest police and judges often victimized. These are majoritarian democracies, not rights-respecting democracies.

In its annual report released on Monday, an independent commission investigating international religious freedom (USCIRF) once again called on the US Department of State to designate India and Sri Lanka as countries “of particular concern”. This label, applied to India since 2020, accuses a government of “systematic, ongoing [and] egregious violations” of religious freedom and opens the door to economic sanctions.

The commission reports that the Indian government “at the national, state and local levels promoted and enforced religiously discriminatory policies” in 2022. Those included “laws targeting religious conversion, interfaith relationships, the wearing of hijabs and cow slaughter, which negatively impact Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits and Adivasis (indigenous peoples and scheduled tribes)”.

Nearly 6,000 organizations are adversely affected by the financial regulations in India, including losing licenses to receive funds from abroad.

Moreover, Indian academics are under pressure to rewrite not only the history of India but their specialist courses so as to obliterate or diminish the contribution of Muslim, Christian and other minority communities. Liberal and Marxist scholars and journalists, no less than Christians and Muslims, are often the targets of vicious personal attacks. Christian non-profit organizations working among the poor (largely ignored by vocal Hindu politicians except at election time) are constantly harassed with allegations of making “unethical conversions”.

However, given that the US (and the EU/UK) always subordinate their human rights rhetoric to their own narrowly-conceived economic and military interests, it is unlikely that the Biden administration will act. The US is obsessed with China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region, and it is also India’s largest trading partner.

If the sheer hypocrisy and double standards practised by Western governments (at least the Chinese and the Russians don’t talk of human rights) needs to be exposed more widely in Western media and by Western churches, the primary challenge we in South Asia face is to “deconstruct” the dominant religious-cultural narratives that support state tyranny.

My life-long exposure to religious communities (Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian) has led me to believe that the great majority have a purely functional understanding of their traditions: they are useful for meeting various felt needs, as rites of passage or as sources of consolation in periods of bereavement, calamity or national tragedy. The intellectual systems may carry some startling insights and sophisticated logical arguments; their rites and ceremonies may evince moments of great beauty and tenderness; but on the popular level, they are rife with superstition and gullibility, self-righteousness and oppression.

Politicians and business leaders in India and Sri Lanka routinely dabble in various occult practices, from using shamans to put “curses” on their rivals to consulting astrologers and personal gurus before making any major decisions.

Under the current BJP government in India, cow protection groups, operating with impunity, have killed Muslims and low-caste peoples simply for transporting cattle. In BJP-ruled states the lynching of Muslim men by Hindu mobs has been commonplace.

Anybody familiar with Indian cities knows that cows are treated far worse in India than in other countries. Malnourished cows, their ribs painfully sticking out and munching on discarded polythene bags, are a common sight in Indian cities. But anyone familiar with Indian politics knows that such contradictions are central to the nationalist ideology of Hindutva. Every nationalist needs a bogeyman, and Pakistan and the Muslim and Christian minorities in India serve that end.

If more Hindus in India and the so-called Indian diaspora in the West do not raise their voice in support of civil society activists in India who defy such cruel practices, they should not be surprised if the fear, anger and frustration of young Muslims becomes channelled in the direction of ISIS and other radicalised Islamist groups. If there is one lesson we have learned in South Asia in the post-colonial era it is that extremism breeds extremism, and the silence of elites strengthens the voice of the mob.

Regarding Sri Lanka, several civil society groups, church leaders and trade unions have, over the past few weeks, been vigorously protesting the attempt by the ruling regime to introduce an “Anti-Terrorism Act” which is even more draconian than the current Prevention of Terrorism Act which has been the target of human rights activists for years. The leaders of the influential Buddhist monastic orders, however, remain silent.

Amnesty USA has also called on President Biden to speak out against the proposed law. Since the only language this government seems to understand is the threat of economic loss, if Western democracies that profess human rights were to issue travel advisories cautioning their citizens from visiting Sri Lanka and businesses from investing here, in the event of this new legislation being passed, that would help us enormously in our struggle.

What is God’s word for South Asia today? The most scathing denunciations of empty religion (when religious devotion is divorced from basic morality) are found not in the writings of Marxists or secular “Enlightenment” liberals, but in the pages of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). Of hundreds of prophetic passages, here is one of my favourites:

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

I cannot stand your assemblies.

Even though you bring me offerings,

I will not accept them…

Away with the noise of your songs!…

But let justice roll down like a river,

Righteousness like a never-failing stream! (Amos 5: 21f)

Easter Sunday is an appropriate day to be reflecting on the meaning of one’s life and what we will be remembered for- and by whom- once we shuffle off these mortal coils.

I’ve been watching the film “Living” (2022). It stars one of my favourite British actors, Bill Nighy, in a role perfectly suited to his customary soft-spoken, melancholy demeanour. Nighy plays a senior civil servant in the London of the 1950s, a creature of routine rather than reflection or action, whose childhood ambition rose no higher than to be a respectable “gentleman” of predictable habit. One day he receives a terminal health diagnosis from his doctor and the rest of the film deals with how he handles the last six months of his life. It is slow-paced, and the dialogue, while subtle, doesn’t sparkle. But it holds one’s attention throughout, as do all good works of art, by its understated, nuanced quality. The silences and facial expressions are more pregnant with meaning than the typical chatter of Hollywood.

The film is a loose adaptation of the Japanese classic “Ikuru”, and the screenplay was written by the Japanese-born British Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro whose novel “Remains of the Day” also deals with another emotionally repressed white Englishman of an earlier era (the ritualized handling of emotional disturbance, including not expressing grief publicly, seems to unite feudal Japanese and English cultures).

Staying with films, let’s put the clock back twenty five years. In the brave new world of “Gattaca” (1997), one of the most thought-provoking science fiction films, the earth belongs to those humans who have been engineered genetically to high IQs and long lifespans. They form the elite “valids”. The “in-valids” are those conceived by natural means and are a menial underclass. Vincent is an “in-valid” because he was born in the old-fashioned way, and his genetic tests show he has bad eyesight, heart problems and a life expectancy of about 30 years. He works as a cleaner in the space centre. Aspiring to join an expedition to one of the moons of Saturn, Vincent rebels against the system. Using an illegal DNA broker, he gets a new biological identity from a “valid” who has been paralyzed in an accident.

I learn from the IMDB website that “When Gattaca was first released, as part of a marketing campaign there were adverts for people to call and have their children genetically engineered. Thousands of people called, wanting to have their offspring genetically engineered.”

If “Living” raises the question whether there is more to life than merely occupying a place in space and time, “Gattaca” openly confronts the question, “Who has the right to decide which life is not worth living?”

The twentieth century began with the auspicious discovery of genetic inheritance by the Moravian biologist Gregor Mendel. He supplied the mechanism of inheritance that was missing in Darwin’s theory of “descent by modification”. Mendel’s work was seized upon by a breed of Social Darwinists who were eager to apply the new ideas of inheritance and the “survival of the fittest’ (a term coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin) to their dream of perfecting human societies by weeding out those who were “undesirable” in the way that animal breeders had been doing for centuries. (Infanticide of unwanted babies and restricting the reproductive rights of certain classes of humans have long been practised in many cultures.)

It was in the US that the new vision of Eugenics flourished. Doctors began sterilizing poor blacks, the mentally infirm, those deemed sexual deviants, recidivist criminals. The majority of states had coercive sterilization on their books for most of the 20th century, and somewhere between 70,000 to the highest estimates of 400,000 people were sterilized against their will or knowledge. New terms such as “feeble-mindedness”, “moron”, “imbecile” were given a pseudo-scientific status as ways to classify human intelligence. Many of the major universities in the US included a eugenics course in their curriculum.

From the US eugenics spread to Britain. It was embraced by intellectuals and politicians across the political spectrum, from the conservative Winston Churchill to the socialist George Bernard Shaw. Notable members of the British Eugenics Society included, apart from Churchill and Shaw,  Francis Galton, Neville Chamberlain, Charles Davenport, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and the president of the society from 1911 to 1928. During his time as Home Secretary under the Asquith government [1908-1915] Churchill proposed legislation for the involuntary sterilization of the “feeble-minded. Fortunately, the British parliament rejected his involuntary sterilization suggestions in the Mental Deficiencies Act of 1913.

The opposition by American conservative Christians in the 1920s to Darwinian evolution was partially fuelled by the political identification of evolution (a scientific theory) with eugenics (a program of social engineering that was both scientifically and morally defective).

American eugenicists visited Germany regularly, and the German eugenics institutions in Berlin were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Well before Hitler took power in 1933, his biography Mein Kampf preached the Nazi doctrine of “racial hygiene”: “Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy”, Hitler wrote, “shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of his children.” Hitler referred to “The Passing of the Great Race,  a  bestselling book written by American eugenicist Madison Grant, as his “Bible,” and it was the first foreign language book to be published in Germany after the Nazis came to power.

It was only after the Nazi doctors’ appropriation of it in the death camps that the bogus science behind eugenics became subject to widespread criticism.

I find it chilling how biological science was co-opted by some of the leading intellects of their day to promote both “scientific racism” and “eugenics” with terrible consequences for the twentieth century. It is important that science students learn the history of their discipline, and especially how it has been misused to degrade and exclude, rather than empower, the weak.

Standing on the bleak platform of a New York subway last week, I was captivated by a shabbily dressed stranger who dropped a bag by my side, unzipped it to produce a trumpet and began to play the most haunting jazz I have heard in some time. I decided to miss three trains so that I could stay and listen to the glorious music.

There was something ethereal about the experience: beauty in the midst of drabness, human creativity bursting through poverty and squalor. It recalled the late sociologist Peter Berger’s description of what he called “rumours of angels” or “signals of transcendence”- for instance, the universal human experiences of play, ordering, protesting evil, defying death, and so on.

Identifying such signals in the midst of the bleak political landscape of our times calls for a knowledge and imagination that exceed my own. And I invite readers of this Blog to share such explicitly political “rumours of angels”.

In my own country, people continue to peacefully protest the incompetence and corruption of a government that seeks to suppress them by means of repressive decrees. In Iran, the indomitable courage of schoolgirls puts to shame the protestations of armchair critics of tyranny that “nothing can be done”. The complicity of banks in Australia and Singapore in buttressing the military junta in Myanmar has been exposed, albeit too late. Bolsonaro has been evicted in Brazil; but, at the same time, a far-right politician takes over in Italy and fascist Jewish groups control Israel politics. (Indeed, the state of Israel, as I have often noted, is a classic example of how people brought up on a collective narrative of victimhood can become victimisers themselves. How different are the far-right Zionist settlers from the Nazi thugs who terrorized German Jews?)

Conventional economics separates economic outcomes from political and cultural practices. Marx turned such thinking on its head. Political ideologies reflected the economic forces of production. But Marx’s middle-classes are now themselves at the mercy of “market forces” shaped by oligarchs and oligopolies. And the proletariat (if it exists in its classical form) are seduced by the new opium of sport- World Cup football and T20 cricket- to be anything approaching a revolutionary force.

The Tory leadership in the UK represents the callous indifference of upper echelons of British society and are completely out of touch with the lives of the average Briton. (In this regard they are more like monarchies than Marx’s bourgeosie). As for both the Labour party leadership in the UK and the Democrats in the US, they have long become estranged from their historic bases in the lives and aspirations of blue-collar workers.

The unholy alliance of economic and political power is shown not only by the influence of the big merchant banks on government policies (remember the bailouts of 2008?) but by the erosion of all global and domestic efforts to ensure fair economic competition and moral accountability. Corporations routinely ignore the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Western corporations have meekly submitted to China’s draconian Community Party line in order to gain access to its huge markets and supply chains.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not simply an economic act. It has huge political ramifications, for Musk has significant business interests in China, just as Trump’s empire has in the Persian Gulf. China is Tesla’s second-largest market, and sales in China have increased significantly in the past couple of years. Tesla’s plant in Shanghai is the world’s largest electric vehicle factory. In January, Tesla opened a showroom in Xinjiang that was criticised by some members of the  US Congress and rights groups because of the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity targeted at the region’s Uighur community and political dissidents.

The Chinese government is sensitive about its image abroad and has repeatedly targeted Twitter uses in the country. It has jailed those who criticise the party, and forced them to delete sensitive tweets or close their accounts. At the same time, they have used the platform to spread false information, creating numerous fake accounts that defend the government’s positions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, COVID-19 and other issues.

Online safety groups and human rights campaigners have expressed concerns about Mr Musk’s plans to relax content moderation and reverse permanent Twitter bans given to controversial figures, including former US president Donald Trump.

But Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has overjoyed the Chinese regime. It has now created an opportunity for China to reshape the discourse on that social media platform about its practices of cultural genocide, arbitrary imprisonments and forced labour.

Writing in The Times of India four decades ago, the well-known sociologist Rajni Kothari lamented: “As I talk to my friends, my relatives, my professional colleagues today, I get a feeling of total ignorance of the other India. When in fact they are forced to take note, such as when they walk through the pavements on which people are sleeping, there is a feeling of revulsion, of rejection, of contempt, not of compassion, empathy and least of all of any sense of guilt.”

Little has changed since Kothari wrote those chilling words. And they apply not only to India, but to the Western liberal democracies. The insularity and parochialism of current global politics, coupled with massive, unaccountable and concentrated economic power, threaten all humanity and future generations. From where will arise rumours of angels?