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Ishaan Nag – My diary of the human society.

Tag: politics

  • THE OTHER INSTANCE WHEN VALUE IS MORE THAN ECONOMIC: SOCIAL CAPITAL

    Ishaan

    Loneliness and social isolation is a growing epidemic of sorts in the 21st century world, with 1 in 3 American adults experiencing it, and over 1 million British workers experience the same. Loneliness in fact has its fair share of economic implications, with a large opportunity cost being present between “productive” use (debatable definition, but mostly capital and economic value generating expenditure) and the cost of caretaking, as depression, dementia and other psychological issues arising out of loneliness has resulted in a whopping expenditure of 220 million pounds. Even more grave is the cost to society arising out of lower worker productivity, as this has cost over 650 million pounds to firms in lost productivity, and 1.62 billion pounds in voluntary staff turnover, a total of 2.5 billion pounds per year as economic cost of loneliness! Yet there is a reason why loneliness, albeit widely recognized as something to be eliminated, is not looked at from an economic perspective. This is because the social and psychological upliftment in the form of better mental and spiritual satisfaction and thus well-being is far greater than economic benefits. This is no less capital generating, but just another and oft overlooked kind of capital is generated; social capital.

    Now, social capital is almost synonymous with harmony, allowing people in a society to function together, thus elevating collective well-being, at least that’s the gist of it. The same can be said of protests. The BLM protests and the current protests in my city Kolkata against the RG Kar rape and murder case have strong economic implications in the form of disastrous decrease and disturbance in economic activity. In fact, there have been counter protests by hawkers whose businesses have been hurt. However, loneliness is desired to be eliminated while protests continue without regards or even despite economic considerations. And why? Social capital, and its three major purposes: bonding (unity through shared interest, such as of the medical community or ethnic minorities with the previous examples of protests), bridging (binding of different communities) and linking (unity of socio-economic groups, enabling upward mobility over the long term), all serving to foster to harmony.

    We have here, thus a trade-off, an opportunity cost between bad economic and mostly positive societal effects. Why do we, then prioritize the latter? Its because of our so-called hierarchy of needs, as we prioritize societal dignity and spiritual satisfaction the most, right after the basic need for food, shelter and clothing. This is because of the potentially high amount of social capital generated to fulfil that need, that we forget about something seemingly as insignificant as economic capital.

    It is important, thus, to shed light on this new form of capital, to a kind of social economics, which is just so, so important. I mean to talk about more than just society with a fancy tagline of “social economics”, but instead, think of social costs and benefits from a quantitative standpoint. Just treating social capital as money may have the effect of making it more appealing to the level headed and number obsessed among us, and by giving it a quantitative nature, social capital is made more tangible, and maybe even attaching more legitimacy to an important issue. And why not? One of the most important objectives of economics which is to maximize efficiency in way that scarce resources are used for best possible outcomes, of which well-being, and equity are integral.

  • WHEN IS IT NOT AN OXYMORON?- EFFECTIVE AND HUMANE COUNTERINSURGENCY

    Ishaan

    The thing with insurgents inside a country is that more often than not, it involves sneaky guerrilla warfare tactics which involve civilians, with them being caught in the crossfire. And of the insurgents who do get neutralized, the punishment dished out to said insurgents overcompensate. Examples such as Russian government against the Chechens, the Sri Lankan army against the LTTE and the PRC government in Xinjiang are galore and obvious. This doesn’t mean counterinsurgency should stop altogether, because insurgents do threaten the internal security and integrity of legitimate state power (key word-legitimate) and doubtlessly require neutralization. However, I argue that counterinsurgency efforts should be humane, as in, the retribution received should not exceed Geneva Convention laid punishments.

    Counterinsurgency is a kind of irregular warfare, such that there is no conventional military standoff but nor a nuclear war. However, most states fail to master irregular warfare combat, though this varies, and thus leads to somewhat higher casualties than usual. The assymetrical warfare which ensues, as the governments which clearly have much greater resources than insurgents yet do not vanquish the insurgents quickly and instead leading to a long drawn out war, is frustrating and clearly, the animosity towards such insurgents is higher. Moreover, there is also the element of taking civilian hostages, collateral damage to their life and property, and also in the case of localised insurgency, a lack of complete information being provided to the citizens of the rest of the nations, which makes it very easy for sections of the population to be very polarized about such movements.

    Often, insurgents attract civilians to their cause, in large numbers, too. Retribution from governments cause a boomerang effect, as when excessive, it only makes the problem worse and inspire another regiment of civilians to join the fray. This might sound cliché but most counterinsurgency efforts by government fall flat or are much more costly, both on lives and finances, as they do not uproot the causes of insurgency yet merely quash their symptoms. Counterinsurgency efforts must thus focus on developing cultural understanding of the troubled regions and empathy with the prevailing social conditions. This should come off as obvious, yet this is rarely implemented, and I cant observe any obstacle which prevents this basic measure apart from a lack of will.

    Given that insurgents engage in violence in very unconventional ways (irregular warfare, as previously mentioned), it is very easy to enforce extrajudicial penalties on insurgents and those aiding them. Incentivizing them to engage in conventional warfare which does not involve civilians, not cause collateral damage and conduct themselves according to the “rules of war” as set by the international community can help highlight extrajudicial penalties, and encourage civilized forms of punishments. In fact, Francis Lieber through his General Order no.100 or the “Lieber Code” had a great influence in the international community at The Hague and Geneva in incentivizing the regularization of insurgents and guerrilla militias, by codifying the laws of war. Of course, merely codification is far from implementation, and history has proven us so. But also it is substantial in considering that codification laid the groundwork for a new and more civilized approach to the conduct of the war, and hopefully will continue to do so, hence changing popular attitudes to how war should be conducted.

    As for the state’s role in its conduct in counterinsurgency, one of the other identifiable reason for the usually brutal nature of required counterinsurgency is the line of thinking, wherein when the insurgent engages in morally reprehensible practices such as using civilians as human shield from attacks,  the obligation for the counterinsurgent to abide by morally acceptable conduct of war is discounted and excused. Court marshals against these practices may be strengthened, along with the previously explored broadcasting of complete information to the rest of the country regarding the situations in these insurgency affected areas.

    In order to ensure that states too engage in conventional warfare, there needs to a requirement for the intrinsic nature of the state- to be legitimate and have a moral dimension to its security policy, but not necessarily pacifist. Even with the example of the USA, the bogeyman of radical theorists, anti-neoliberals, anti-colonial theorists and so on and so forth, it is undeniable that the socio-political foundation of the country has led to its foreign policy having a moral policy, with of course very notable exceptions, but again, with undeniable examples such as its post war efforts in restructuring the economies of its opponents of the second world war, its current anti war stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict, and more. As long as the basic structure of a nation is moral and democratic, and as long as it derives its legitimacy from these values, we may not be amiss in assuming that self restraint in counter insurgency operations would be present.

    Thus, I feel, the fulfilling of basic conditions of moral and democratic legitimacy from the state’s side and successful incentivizing of insurgent to engage in conventional warfare has the best chance at achieving humane and effective counterinsurgency.

  • MONETARIZATION OF POLITICS-ELECTORAL BONDS ARE DONE AND DUSTED, AND HOPEFULLY THE LAST OF ITS KIND

    Ishaan

    On February 2024, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that political parties could no longer receive political funding from electoral bonds, striking it down as unconstitutional, a measure touted as a mostly clean and accountable method to receive political funding by the ruling BJP, which introduced the scheme back in 2018. Fast forward to the 2019 general elections and the present, and we have seen that the Election Commission of India (ECI) itself raised doubt about its transparency in its affidavit claiming that “the scheme is contrary to the goal of transparency in political finance”, also sharing a letter to the Union Government outlining its impact on the transparency of political funding. Several parties have moved the SC against the electoral bond scheme, prominent among which is the pro-democracy NGO Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), and this eventually resulted in the effective termination of the scheme, much to the rejoice of the opposition parties and pro-democracy organizations and institutions, which begs a few questions: what is the electoral bond scheme which justifies its controversy? Why is its result of further opacity contradicting its supposed intention of higher transparency? Why is the opposition rejoicing? And finally, is there a better option? Were previous methods any better?

    Electoral bonds are instruments wherein the bearer (political parties) is paid a certain amount on demand by the payer, who are according to this scheme, any Indian citizen and domestic or foreign organization. It was introduced in The Finance Bill of 2017 during the Union Budget as the Anonymous Electoral Bond scheme.  Its rationale was that the veil of anonymity regarding from who or what political parties sourced their funding made them less susceptible to be swayed by their interests, hence increasing accountability. It was facilitated by amending legislation to allow foreign funding of parties by finance act 2016. Moreover, amendments to the  Income Tax Act ensured it wasn’t  required for political parties from keeping a detailed record of funding received from the scheme. The cap on maximum donations made by companies to political parties was removed. Previously “companies could only donate up to 7.5 percent of three years of the company’s net profits”.

    The government also argued that since funding was done through the formal banking system, as the SBI was the sole authority in raising these bonds, there was less chance for foul play. This, however, was also flawed, as the SBI being directly under the control of the government, gave the ruling party a further advantage in the acquisition and concealing of information pertaining to the electoral bonds. Thus, any plan to devise a fair method of political funding was flawed at best and ostensible at worst. The striking down of the electoral bond system was hailed by Indian political institution such as the ECI, NGOs such as the ADR, and even opposition political parties such as the Left Democratic Front (which, in fact, was one of the parties which moved the SC against the scheme) and the INC, which in fact promised in its manifesto for the 2019 general elections to remove the scheme if voted. So why the opposition from the opposition?

    Firstly, there are concerns about the growth of a political oligarchy similar to Russia, if you will. The first cycle of electoral bonds showed that 85% of the bonds were purchased in the denomination of Rs 1 crore. This trend continued throughout the existence of the Scheme. Till January 2024, 15,631 electoral bonds worth Rs 15,631 cr were purchased in this denomination, which is more than 94% of the total bonds sold during all the phases. The large denominations of the purchase indicated that it was the conglomerates which bought most of the electoral bonds, which could have resulted in higher influence of corporates, thus giving political priority to corporations over the individual citizens and their interest. So, electoral bonds have been shown to erode the Right To Information Act and the principle of transparency  which is so crucial and intrinsic to the functioning of a legitimate democracy, hurting the so-called Social Contract between the individual and the state. It also ran the risk of promoting an oligarchy in the political system, and some may argue has somewhat succeeded, though not necessarily due to the electoral bond scheme, with the growing public discourse on the seemingly symbiotic relationship between the Adani corporation and the current administration. However, Indian politics has historically always been swayed by powerful individuals and organizations influencing the government to act in their interest, even in previous governments of the current opposition. But I digress.

    The LDF and the INC have also both shown  their disapproval of the scheme, and it is understandable why. The Electoral Bond scheme seems to have denied the opposition parties a level playing field in the area of political funding. BJP’s received 74 percent of bond yields among national parties,  while among both national and state parties both, the share was 57%. Electoral Bonds thus decreased the level playing field between political parties.

    Given these disadvantages, it seems any other form of funding is better, even the previous methods, though they are not without their limitations. Let us take the example of electoral trusts, which ensure funding solely through the banking system, and “disclose the details of political contributions to beneficiary parties through the regular filing of annual reports and the link between the political party and the donor can be traced by the Election Commission”, although the information is not revealed to the public. One of the main arguments for the Bond scheme which argues that funding through the banking system would result only in white money funding is hence redundant, for the system was already in place and Electoral Bonds were, in this regard, nothing novel.

    However, even through this system, Indian politics were still susceptible to unwanted influence. In March 2014, the Delhi High Court had held both the Congress and the BJP guilty of taking foreign funding from Vedanta and its subsidiaries. The then INC government and the opposition of BJP in a shameless example of collusion, amended legislation such that the illegalities resulting from their respective sources of political funding were removed.

    I argue not that the previous system was good, but that it was better. Structural flaws in the form of foreign funding and opacity persist with both the methods of funding, but as explored, legislation gave these unfair practices legitimacy in the case of Electoral Bonds. Our take home as perceptive citizens may be the lesson that legislation does not equal legitimacy. In some cases, legislation makes us worse off for its much harder to overturn a bad practice, in the case of the electoral trusts and its misgivings, the amendments to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act which removed the illegalities of political funding resulted in both the BJP and Congress escaping scot free from the verdict of the Delhi High Court. The bench of justices led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud of the Supreme Court appropriately took the verdict of striking down the Electoral Bond scheme, but it was, in fact, operational for 6 odd years from 2018 to 2024 February. It was a lucky situation that good sense prevailed, but good sense can’t be relied on indefinitely. At some point, institutional and structural changes are the only way out. This is especially true in the case of aforementioned monetarization of politics.

  • “IT’S THE ONLY WAY OUT!”- REALIST SKEPTICISM IS HARMFUL TO CONVIVIAL LIFE.

    Ishaan

    I must admit, I may be slightly guilty of making an “exploitation” post, given the background of Henry Kissinger’s death at the age of 100, but honestly, the debates sparking about the effectiveness of his immensely influential contribution to international relations, politics and society is worth commenting on regardless.

    Henry Alfred Kissinger was a Jewish German-born American professor in Harvard and later the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under the Nixon administration. The communist-hunting poster boy  of realists and neoconservatives had a tumultuous early life, as he fled from Hitler’s Germany in 1938. He was put in charge of the military administration of the German town Krufeld during the American advance in Germany, despite being a private. He later became a faculty of the Department of Government in Harvard. It is thus safe to say he was a pioneer in shaping the field of international relations as we know today, right along there with Bismarck, Castlereagh and Metternich (the latter two of whom were the unabashed realist’s role models). Kissinger’s realist, pessimistic ideals were evident in his definition of legitimacy, such that it-“should not be confused with justice. It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy”. His reservoir of knowledge and political cunning is undebatable, given the broad success he achieved in not only securing détente with communist China but also a strong ally against Soviet influence. Regardless, his success is more than made up by the failures in preventing the former Indo-China region to “fall” to communism despite ruthless, unilateral and even secret bombings of Cambodia and a protracted and ruinous war in  Vietnam, along with the many missteps he took in Africa (evident by the failure of the ruthless anti-communist dictatorship in the Angolan Civil War).

    He was dismissive of the State Department of the time, labeling them (quite fittingly derogatively going by the usual realist perspective almost devoid of moral concerns), as “do-gooders”. There is a great mass of both insightful and not-so-fruitful contributions to the debate regarding Kissinger’s, and his specific actions in the geopolitical scenario of the cold war. But there is something which truly deserves our attention. Let us discuss the celebration of pessimism, and a façade of choice between the bad and the worse, and ONLY the bad and the worse.

    Realist thought has often been criticized for being too pessimistic, and for the right reasons. Realism has often biased towards military power, violence and hard power generally to maintain order, if not peace, in a world of nation-states and their brittle external sovereignty. Given the cyclical nature of war and peace throughout history, their postulations arguably do make sense. Yet one may interpret the very necessity to place importance on the aggressive definitions and aspects of power as their own doing. For example, offensive realism stipulates that states are predisposed to war and expansionism, as they are essential in ensuring the survival of a state. This would motivate other states and hence, entire societies to adopt a war-like stance, giving great importance to the violent aspects of the military, for defense, thus explaining realist predisposition towards military power.

    Moreover, given Kissinger’s rather dystopian, though in some cases relevant, understanding of legitimacy, this perception’s wide acceptance and endorsement is also quite problematic, for it grossly ignores any form of conscience or justice, and almost enables a dog-eat-dog world, compliments of and serving to, again, enhance the acceptability of realism.

    Realists may not condemn justice and morality (both of which, although immensely subjective, are essential and mostly common codes of conducts any human society must follow), but their trivializing of these concepts is not only harmful, but also unnecessary. An eye for an eye approach must only be followed when thus provoked, and oftentimes these provocations in the form of invasions and offensives are a result of realism itself, thus resulting in a self-serving cycle reinforcing that pessimistic realism devoid of moral considerations. The game theory may explain our militant world today, armed to the teeth, and realism is rightly employed thus. Yet, we can always start, one by one, through collaboration. We can always try to be more understanding and wise. We can always exercise a little bit of restraint. We can definitely take collective initiative with like-minded peaceful states. We can definitely change, for we aren’t dealing with nature or absolute, objective truths over which we have no control over (also something becoming less true day by day, thanks to human ingenuity), but our own behavior, society and governance which we ourselves carve and can and have changed. We can achieve these ends, we can one day abandon this hopeless pessimism devoid of considerations for intrinsic values and justice. We can surely achieve more than order. We can achieve collective, consensual peace.

  • ECONOMICS OF MORALITY: COMMUNITIES ARE BETTER

    Ishaan

    A research paper published by Stefan Fiorin on behalf of the LEAP institute of the Bocconi University found, in the experiment conducted in 5 towns of Afghanistan in 2021 before the Taliban takeover, that the percentage of teachers who were willing to whistle-blow teacher absence when there was monetary reward and a possibility of repercussion for the accused reduced drastically when they were not faced with a monetary reward, from 15 percent to 10 percent. What does this strange, almost irrational behavior from a rational consumer’s standpoint, tell us?

    Also worth considering is the fact that tendency to whistle-blow did, in fact,  increase when there was no possibility of repercussions towards  the absent teachers.

    This seems to prove the existence of a subjective, ever-changing economics of morality.  The kind of economics which is both dictated by and also dictates our world. It is true that our lives and livelihoods are supported through monetary gains, and we do, of course, prefer to earn less rather than more. History has proven with colonialism that we go to the farthest and darkest ends to prefer more to less. However, it seems that there is either a drastic change in our intrinsic values, or that close knit communities are inherently more  altruistic.

    With increasing income inequality around the world, funds which can surely be used to solve world hunger withheld by our egoistic selves, the former does not seem to be very true. The latter, however, does make sense. One may attribute the low levels of willingness to whistle-blow  to the fact that these teachers form part of a closely knit, small community (which is ironically acknowledges as a limitation of the conducted study), thus giving rise to high levels of altruistic solidarity.

    The shift from “Gemeinschaft”(communities) to “Gesselschaft”(civil/urban societies) in the industrial revolution era Europe, as recognized by Ferdinand Tonnies, had given rise to myriad social problems and rifts, as populations changed from being small, closely knit with great common understanding to being a messy amalgamation of different such communities with different worldviews, struggles , and diversity, or rather, differences which were seemingly impossible to reconcile.

    I have nothing against intercultural understanding and in fact encourage it. Mingling with different people and not only being tolerant but also welcoming of differences are and should be very celebrated characteristics of the modern day ideal global citizen. Yet, even the most outgoing of us have a comfort zone. The most selfless of our beings would rather let a stranger be sacrificed instead of their own family, and that is not without a reason. I argue only for a “neighbourhood” society, a society where people with different superficial characteristics and backgrounds may interact and form such communities based on common ideological or emotional ground.

    Let us mingle with others, and form closer communities with those we are more comfortable with, regardless of creed or culture. If we were more egoistic towards our communities, we would be more altruistic within, and thus, I feel, peace among humanity would be more easily facilitated.

  • THE HORDE OF THE LONELY, AND THE LONESOME IN A HORDE

    Ishaan

    There is an epidemic of sorts, in both the West and the global South, of increasingly individualistic and collectivized societies. We are becoming increasingly polarized, no matter the region of the world, and this is a trend on the rise. I feel that the imperfect way in which our society is shaped is partly to blame, the absence of a middle ground is to blame.

    Of course, the divisions are different. In collectivized  societies, it is an “us” vs “them” division, while in individualistic societies, it is an “I” vs “them” division, but divisions exist nonetheless. The former is mastered by the group and the government, while the latter is the result of rigid individualism hindering opposing viewpoints. The former has given rise to cruel totalitarian regimes who tolerate no dissent, while the latter has given rise to a fractured social fabric with no solidarity and low interaction, and then one must wonder, is that how humanity is poised to exist, locked by borders between these two extremes?

    Emile Durkheim’s influential though controversial work on suicide gave us four types of suicide: Altruistic Suicide, Egoistic Suicide, Anomic Suicide and Fatalistic Suicide. Egoistic Suicide is one which occurs due to an individual losing their sense of belonging. One has no tether in life, nothing to identify with and nowhere to belong to. Anomic Suicide occurs when an individual has no morals, codes of conduct to follow, a lack of communal, societal structure. One can see why: privacy in such societies is a worshipped concept. Neighbors are separated by good fences, and usually, health and welfare is taken care of by the government. Communal living, however, with greater urbanization and de-industrialization, has drastically reduced. Where one would be expected to conform to rigid standards of living in closely knit villages where closely knit groups knew and cared about each other and thus result in a sense of security, new towns with cosmopolitan demographics and freedom to behave and follow disparate religions, traditions and faiths replace this social safety and security with freedom, resulting in confusion and disappointment. Hyper-nationalism in pre-First World War Germany and toxic identity politics grew out of this transformation from villages to metropolis, from homogeneity to diversity, and as a response to these unwelcome changes. This shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesselschaft, or from community living and norms to a society where self-interest guides the society, as underlined by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, had thus given rise to national chauvinism in Germany and various other newly industrialized nations as a struggle to regain that lost sense of belonging, as a response to a chaotic, lost and sinful individualistic life.

    The problem, I feel, is graver in the case of highly collectivized society. Fatalistic suicides occur due to a feeling of oppression, a sense of failure in conforming to societal rites.  Countries with the highest suicide rates are ones with such rigid, collectivized societies where the community’s needs and wants are put above the individuals needs. For example, South Korea, with a suicide rate of 28.6 per 100000 people, is the country with the fourth-highest suicide rate, while Lesotho coming at first with 72.6 per 100000. South Korea, along with it’s East Asian counterparts, have a highly collectivized society where societal pressure such as pressure at work, education, and a social stigma on open discussion about mental health. The same goes for Lesotho and India, with a strong social stigma against discussion about mental health, countries with the most and 41st most suicides per 100000. This social stigma, I believe, stems from a direct community imposition of rigid codes of conduct for every individual to conform to as a collective, downplaying the individual.

    On the other hand, politically unstable countries such as The Honduras and Syria have some of the lowest rates of suicides. Am I suggesting a country must be rendered politically unstable to have a harmonious social fabric? I honestly cannot suggest anything, for I am not a psychologist. This article may not provide closure or a solution, but my point stands: hyper-individualistic societies and hyper-collectivistic societies are dystopian. The former lack any kind of solidarity, while the latter grant barely any, even basic freedom to it’s individual components, and in extreme cases such as some cases of nudge theory policies as in wide scale surveillance and government invasion of privacy, also serves to dehumanize the individual. In the process of moving towards our own ideas of utopia, one of liberty the other of mutual solidarity, we forget to check these growths and instead form hordes of the lonely and the lonesome in a horde.