What history tell us about the reasons for Nepal to edge away India and turn to China

 An excerpt from ‘All Roads Lead North’ by Amish Raj Mulmi.

In a sense, Nepal’s relationship with Tibet and China, between the early years of contact in the first millennium and the annexation of the valley’s city-states by the Gorkha Shahs in the eighteenth century, was largely apolitical, with trade and religion being the locus. While China figured in the imagination of Nepali rulers, contact between the two civilisations went through several periods of lapses.

Tibet, however, was next door, and with Vajrayana and trade as spiritual and temporal connections, Tibet and the Nepal valley grew entwined with each other.

Nepal itself drew closer to the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism headed by the Karmapa; in particular, with the Shamarpa Lama associated with the Yangpachen monastery near Lhasa. Nepali historian Ramesh Dhungel traces this tradition back to the fifteenth century, when the fourth Shamarpa constructed a monastery near Swayambhu.20 The eighth lama in the tradition was born in Helambu, a Himalayan valley east of Kathmandu, in 1695.

China's President Xi Jinping and Nepal's President Bidhya Devi Bhandari at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu, October 2019. | Prakash Mathema / REUTERS

The relationship between Nepali traders and Tibetan Buddhist monks furthered this exchange. Even as late as 1956, a few years before the Tibetan Uprising, the sixteenth Karmapa, head of the Kagyu school, visited the home of Bhajuratna, a noted Newar trader, just before the latter’s death. “No one else was permitted to be present in the room during this [week] while they prayed and meditated together, except to bring in their meals,” a biography recalls. The relationship between the trader and the teacher began in 1947 when the Karmapa desired a Rolex watch, which Bhajuratna imported into Lhasa via Kalimpong.

“The relations of Nepal with China and Tibet reflect, in their vicissitudes, the great events of central Asia. Nepal, in fact, marks the extreme limit where Chinese influence can reach, at the height of her expansion,” Levi wrote. As he combed Chinese and Tibetan sources for any traces or records of contact with Nepal – ‘[n]ow interrupted, now taken up again, now held up to be again renewed’ – Levi concluded that relations between the three had “commence[d] from the very day that the tribes of Tibet emerge into civilisation and become an organised state”. In doing so, Levi was perhaps the first European scholar to acknowledge Nepal’s turn towards the north.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, Nepal was a collection of hill states.

Then, Shah King Prithvi Narayan Shah, who hailed from a hill state known as Gorkha, embarked on an ambitious military campaign. By the end of the eighteenth century, Nepal – which until then signified just the valley that comprised the three city-states of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan – emerged as the modern polity it is today.

While the 1814-16 war with the East India Company chipped away at its territory, domestic political squabbles eventually led to the emergence of the Rana dynasty under Jung Bahadur in the 1840s. For the next hundred years, barring one brief rule that ended in assassination, the descendants of Jung Bahadur’s youngest brother ruled Nepal as prime ministers, while the Shah kings’ authority was completely whittled away.

With the British as allies, Rana authority was supreme. In 1950, however, the Ranas ceded power to Shah King Tribhuvan after a popular revolution. The king had been backed by independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, while a motley group of idealistic revolutionaries that came to form the Nepali Congress had launched an armed struggle against Rana rule. Nehru then negotiated a settlement that allowed the king to return to power.

The key to understanding India-Nepal ties lies in how the British viewed Nepal, and also had a firm influence in the Kathmandu court by controlling Nepal’s foreign and defence matters.

The British first recognised Nepal as an independent nation via a 1923 treaty. Until then, the colonial authority’s attitude towards the country could be surmised through Viceroy Lord Curzon’s 1903 letter to the secretary of state: “[The British relationship with Nepal] approximates more closely to our connection with Bhutan than with any other native state...Nepal should be regarded as falling under our exclusive political influence and control.”

While the British guaranteed Rana rule over Nepal, the Ranas in turn supplied soldiers to the famed Gurkha regiments, and more than 250,000 Nepalis fought in the two world wars. The dynasty also built its fortune by supplying timber and other natural resources to British India.

The 1923 treaty was the basis for the 1950 agreement between India and Nepal – one that the latter continues to regard as unequal. A post-colonial India under Jawaharlal Nehru wanted a special relationship based on its security umbrella over all three of its Himalayan neighbour-states, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. Although it insisted the three were independent and sovereign, there was a catch.

Nehru, in the same 1950 speech to the Indian Parliament in which he outlined the Himalaya as India’s “magnificent frontier”, outlined his views on what an independent India’s relationship with Nepal was to be like: “We have been inheritors of many good things from the days of British rule, and many bad things also; and our relations with our neighbouring countries grew up sometimes in an expansive phase of British policy, of British imperialism... Naturally, and quite frankly, we do not like, and we do not propose to like, any foreign interference in Nepal... So our relationship is intimate, and no other country’s relationship with Nepal can be as intimate, and every other country must have to realise and appreciate this intimate geographical, cultural and other relationship of India and Nepal. There is no way out except by realising this fact.”

While the religious, cultural and economic ties between India and Nepal are, without doubt, the backbone on which the political relationship is built, it is this “special” nature of the ties that Nepali leaders since 1950 have chafed at.

Those who have ruled Nepal – although many have come to power because of Indian support – perceived India as a threat to their rule, and encouraged anti-Indianism to cement their positions in Kathmandu. India’s argument – that if Nepal wants special economic ties, it must acknowledge special political ties too – holds ground. Nonetheless, anti-Indianism has long been encouraged by Nepali monarchs and politicians as an effective and popular countermeasure against perceived Indian intervention in the country.

While Delhi would accuse Nepal of playing the “China card” as a counterweight to Indian influence, it was not until the first decades of the twenty-first century that the ‘card’ would deliver any real results.

Today, contemporary India’s insecurities over losing its influence and primacy in Nepal and South Asia to China are well founded. While this is partially a result of China’s new ambitions in its neighbourhood, Indian micromanagement of Nepali political affairs during the post-Maoist conflict transition, which peaked with the 2015 blockade, has been a key argument for Nepali leaders to look to the north.

Through all these decades, China has been perceived as a “better neighbour” in Nepal; leaders and ordinary people alike point to Beijing’s respect for Nepali sovereignty and its aid and grant projects as the reasons why this is so. But a closer reading would suggest that Beijing has been beneficent when its own concerns have been addressed by Kathmandu.

Nonetheless, the perception remains, built upon years of Indian political manoeuvres in Nepal as well as Delhi’s own cultivation of a Kathmandu elite that has utilised anti-Indianism to consolidate power. Combined with the long-standing tendency of Nepali rulers to point to the 1950 treaty as the root of the unequal relationship between the two countries, China proves to be a natural alternative – a fact that Beijing has long understood, and is now capitalising on.

Excerpted with permission from All Roads Lead North: Nepal’s Turn to China, by Amish Raj Mulmi, Context/Westland.

(Source: Scroll)

Moscow-on-Thames: Soviet-born billionaires and their ties to UK's political elite

How party donations, sports teams and lavish London residences have granted access to highest echelons of public life

Businesspeople born in the Soviet Union play a significant role in British business and politics. Some have given money to political parties. Others have made substantial investments in media and industry. All have homes in London, with several visiting regularly from Moscow.

Boris Johnson pictured with Alexander Temerko, who has given more than £1.3m to the Conservative party. Photograph: alexandertemerko.co.uk

Following a week in which Russia and its links to the UK have been in the news, the Guardian has looked into the impact of Soviet-born men and women on recent UK public life.

Lobbying and the media

Alexander Lebedev bought the loss-making Evening Standard newspaper in 2009, installing his son Evgeny as proprietor. Lebedev later acquired the Independent and launched a successful spinoff version, the i. The Standard office is around the corner from where Lebedev worked in the 1980s as an undercover spy based at the Soviet embassy.

As he recounts in his memoir, Hunt the Banker, the KGB approached Lebedev in his final year at university in Moscow. He learned espionage at the Red Banner Institute and joined the KGB’s prestigious first directorate, specialising in foreign intelligence work. After the USSR’s collapse, Lebedev went into banking and the media.

Lebedev funded Russia’s independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper. In 2016, however, he wrote a column in the Evening Standard defending Vladimir Putin after the Russian president’s close friend Sergei Roldugin appeared in the Panama Papers. Lebedev supported Russia’s takeover of Crimea and held a conference there in 2017 to counter what he said was western media “bias”. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova went to his Moscow book launch.

In recent years, Lebedev has come under scrutiny over his close personal ties with Boris Johnson.

Alexander Lebedev (left) and his son Evgeny (right), with the former chancellor George Osborne in September last year, when Osborne was editor of the Evening Standard. Photograph: David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images

In spring 2018, Johnson flew to the Lebedevs’ villa in Perugia, Italy. The then foreign secretary left his security detail behind and was spotted at the airport on his way home, dishevelled and hungover. 

Johnson attended Lebedev’s 60th birthday party the day after winning December’s general election. David Cameron and then Evening Standard editor George Osborne were guests too.

Meanwhile, Lebedev’s billionaire Moscow contemporary Alexander Mamut bought the bookshop chain Waterstones in 2011 for £53.5m. 

Mamut introduced a Russian-language section to its store in Piccadilly Circus, central London. His then teenage son was educated at a leading British private school.

Mamut owns extensive media assets in Russia, including the news website Lenta.ru. In 2014, he fired its editor, Galina Timchenko, after she published an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist. Mamut replaced her with a pro-Kremlin journalist. In 2018, he sold a majority stake in Waterstones to a hedge fund.

The PR executive and former Ulster Unionist MP David Burnside has introduced several prominent Kremlin figures to senior Conservatives. His communications firm, New Century Media, founded a Positive Russia foundation to improve Moscow’s image in the UK. One of Burnside’s employees is Alex Nekrassov, whose late father Alexander was a Kremlin adviser and hardline Putin apologist.

In 2012, Burnside took a Russian embassy diplomat, Sergei Nalobin, to a Conservative party fundraising dinner. Nalobin, the son of a senior officer in the FSB, the successor to the KGB, founded the Conservative Friends of Russia, a parliamentary group. Its 2012 launch party took place in the Russian ambassador’s Kensington garden.

John Whittingdale MP and Carrie Symonds, then a young Tory party worker and now Johnson’s fiancee, were among the guests. Raffle prizes included a biography of Putin and bottles of vodka.

The following year, Burnside invited Vasily Shestakov, an influential MP in Russia’s Duma, to the same Tory fundraising dinner. He introduced him to the prime minister, David Cameron. Shestakov is an old friend of Putin’s and with him co-authored several books, including Learn Judo With Vladimir Putin and Judo: History, Theory, Practice.

Politics

The Conservatives have received more than £3m from wealthy Soviet-born donors – all of whom can legally give money to the party as British citizens. They include Alexander Temerko, a former Russian junior defence minister, and Lubov Chernukhin, a financier whose husband Vladimir served in Putin’s cabinet as deputy finance minister.

Alexander Temerko said he was ‘no friend’ of Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Temerko has funded the constituency associations of several leading Tory MPs, including the business secretary, Alok Sharma, and Mark Pritchard. Pritchard sits on parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC), which on Tuesday published its long-awaited Russia report. The Scottish National party has called on Pritchard to resign from the committee or give the money back.

In an interview with the Guardian, Temerko said he was “no friend” of Putin’s, whom he called an “enemy of democracy”. He said he had zero intention of going to Russia. Temerko has given more than £1.3m to the Conservative party. He would not be drawn on whether the Kremlin had interfered in the EU referendum vote in support of Leave, but said that he opposed Brexit.

An investigation by Reuters, based on conversations with Temerko, alleges that he supported Johnson’s campaign to take Britain out of the EU – at least initially. It said the industrialist had funded some of Johnson’s key allies in parliament, including James Wharton, who ran Johnson’s successful prime ministerial campaign. Johnson and Temerko were close, sharing bottles of wine and sometimes calling each other “Sasha”, it added.

In contrast to Temerko, Chernukhin keeps a low public profile. The former banker turns down interview requests and has not publicly explained why she has given the Conservative party more than £1.7m. Born in the Soviet Union, Chernukhin is the biggest female donor in British political history and one of the Tories’ most important cash supporters.

Her largesse seems directed at whoever is the Conservative leader. In 2014, she paid £160,000 at a Tory fundraiser to play tennis with Cameron and Johnson, then the PM and London mayor. She paid £135,000 in April 2019 for a dinner at the luxury Goring hotel with Theresa May, also then the PM, and several female cabinet members.

Other donations have flowed to Brandon Lewis, the former Tory party chairman. He has received £24,500, according to Electoral Commission filings. He defended the donations in media interviews on Thursday. Cash has also gone to Theresa Villiers, who sits on the ISC. In February, Chernukhin spent £45,000 on another game of tennis with Johnson and Ben Elliot, the Tories’ co-chair. The SNP is calling on Villiers to return the money.

Chernukhin’s husband served as a Russian minister in 2000, during Putin’s first presidential term. He was chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a bank and state corporation with reported close ties to the Kremlin security establishment. He later left Moscow and became a British citizen in 2011. The couple have an £8m London mansion, owned by an offshore trust, a jet and two yachts.

Lubov Chernukhin (fourth from right, next to Theresa May) paid £135,000 to attend a dinner last year with senior female Conservatives at the Goring hotel in central London. Photograph: Elizabeth Truss/Twitter

Another prominent figure is Andrei Borodin, the former president of the Bank of Moscow. In 2013, Borodin attended the Conservatives’ summer ball with his wife Tatiana Korsakova, a model, four months after receiving political asylum. He spent £40,000 on a portrait of Margaret Thatcher.

The payment was made by Henley Concierge, a firm registered to a cottage on Borodin’s £120m country estate near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Borodin said he did not discuss party policy at the event, nor make a donation. Russian authorities have accused him of a massive fraud. Borodin denies this and says he’s the victim of a politically motivated witch-hunt.

Business and property

Super-wealthy businessmen from former Soviet countries also control a dizzying array of UK assets spanning football clubs, oil and gas and multimillion-pound mansions. Their financial clout affords members of this select group considerable influence and access to Britain’s professional and ruling classes.

Perhaps the most high-profile London-based oligarch, thanks to his £140m purchase of Chelsea Football Club in 2003, is Roman Abramovich. The Israeli-Russian billionaire has limited UK business interests outside football, but his extensive property portfolio includes a 15-bedroom mansion in London’s prestigious Kensington Palace Gardens, bought for £90m in 2011.

The Chelsea owner’s wealth is derived partly from proceeds from the controversial privatisation of the oil giant Sibneft after the fall of the Soviet Union. When Sibneft needed an international communications chief it turned to Greg Barker, who would go on to become Conservative energy minister under David Cameron.

Lord Barker of Battle, as he has been known since his elevation to the House of Lords, has also worked for another Russian businessman with the ear of Britain’s powerful elite, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska attracted public attention in 2008 over claims that he discussed making a donation to the Tories with George Osborne, during a meeting held aboard his yacht in the Mediterranean.

Roman Abramovich, pictured in the stands at Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge ground, in 2017 - the last year Chelsea won the Premier League. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

In 2017, Deripaska listed his En+ energy and metals group on the London Stock Exchange and turned to Lord Barker to serve as its chairman. The Tory peer received a bonus of $4m (£3.14m) after helping Deripaska get the company removed from a list of firms hit by US sanctions.

Barker and Deripaska are not the only peer and oligarch double-act on the UK business scene. The legendary oil dealmaker and former BP boss Lord Browne is executive chair of billionaire Mikhaeil Fridman’s Letter One Energy group, which has a one-third stake in the oil and gas company Wintershall DEA.

Fridman and Browne enjoy a longstanding business relationship that includes the foundation of TNK-BP, a joint venture involving British oil supermajor BP and a group of three billionaires, including Fridman, under the banner AAR. The relationship between BP and AAR often proved acrimonious and TNK-BP boss Bob Dudley was at one stage forced to flee the country fearing for his safety. After a power struggle, AAR eventually sold its half in the venture to Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft. That deal left BP with a near-20% stake in the Kremlin-backed company, making cordial Russian relations vital for BP. Rival Shell also has interests in Russia via the huge Sakhalin-2 offshore gas project.

One of the other billionaires behind AAR, Sir Leonard (Len) Blavatnik, also wields significant influence in the UK. Blavatnik was born in Odessa, in Soviet Ukraine, but has renounced Russian citizenship and is a dual US-UK citizen. Blavatnik has amassed a vast business empire, including Warner Music. He endowed Oxford University by spending £75m to found the Blavatnik School of Government. He also sponsors the Baillie Gifford literature prize and is the main benefactor of multiple London museums and art galleries. Like Abramovich, he owns a mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, a property that has been valued at up to £200m.

Greg Barker, a former Conservative minister, has worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

But that pales in comparison to the estimated price tag on Witanhurst, often referred to as Britain’s most expensive home. The mansion in London’s upmarket Highgate was bought for £50m in 2008 by the family of the Russian fertiliser baron Andrey Guryev, through an offshore company called Safran Holdings, located in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. It has been valued at more than £300m after extensive refurbishment.

A few miles across north London lies Arsenal Football Club, in which the Uzbek-born Russian metals, mining and publishing billionaire Alisher Usmanov was a long-time shareholder – even at one time considering a full takeover. Ultimately he sold his shares for £550m in 2018 to the US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke.

One of London’s most successful Russian businessmen is Andrey Andreev. He has made a fortune of close to £1bn by founding dating apps, including the female-focused Bumble and Badoo.

• Luke Harding’s latest book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West (Guardian Faber) is available from the Guardian Bookshop.

(Source: The Guardian)

Why women make better crisis leaders

While many countries continue to grapple with escalating COVID-19 outbreaks, two have declared theirs effectively over: New Zealand and Iceland. It is no coincidence that both countries’ governments are led by women.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Icelandic counterpart, Katrin Jakobsdottir, have both received considerable — and well-deserved — praise for their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. But they are not alone: Of the top 10 best-performing countries (in terms of testing and mortality), four — Estonia, Iceland, New Zealand and Taiwan — have woman leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen have also been commended for their pandemic leadership.

Women account for less than 7 percent of the world’s leaders, so the fact that so many have distinguished themselves during the COVID-19 crisis is noteworthy. But that’s not all. Some of the worst-performing countries are led by unapologetically old-fashioned “men’s men.” Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s entire persona channels a retrograde masculinity and a patriarchal view of women. Accordingly, he has called the virus a “measly cold,” boasting that he “wouldn’t feel anything” if infected.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and other female national leaders have received high praise for their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. | BLOOMBERG

In the United Kingdom — which has recorded the most COVID-19 deaths in Europe — Prime Minister Boris Johnson also has a history of sexist comments. Like Bolsonaro, Johnson’s first instinct was to minimize the threat COVID-19 poses, though he changed his tune after being infected and ending up in an intensive care unit.

It’s the same story with U.S. President Donald Trump. A leader who came to power gloating about powerful men’s ability to assault women sexually — which he and his supporters dismissed as “locker room banter” — Trump has often worn his misogyny like a badge of honor. He, too, has consistently downplayed the COVID-19 crisis, focusing instead on “making China pay” for allowing the virus to spread beyond its borders.

Just as leaning into masculine stereotypes seems to correlate with poor pandemic responses, many observers seem to believe that woman leaders’ success may be rooted in their traditionally “feminine” qualities, such as empathy, compassion and willingness to collaborate. Forbes called Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s televised address to her country’s children an example of the “simple, humane innovations” that are possible under female leadership.

This reading is outdated, reductive and simply wrong. Trump and his ilk may act tough, but ultimately their leadership is an incompetent charade of bluster, vacillation and self-aggrandizement. High-performing female leaders, by contrast, have been resolute, assessed the evidence, heeded expert advice and acted decisively.

Following the mantra “go hard and go early,” Ardern imposed a strict lockdown four days before New Zealand’s first COVID-19 death. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen introduced more than a hundred public health measures in January — when the World Health Organization was still casting doubt on the possibility of human-to-human transmission.

If traditionally “feminine” traits don’t explain female leaders’ strong performance in times of crisis, what does? The answer may be related to the path women take to power, which is generally more demanding than that faced by men. In particular, it may be linked to the “glass cliff” phenomenon, whereby women are more likely than men to be appointed to leadership positions that are “risky and precarious.”

Research into the glass cliff began with the finding that, before appointing men to their boards, companies in the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index typically experienced stable share prices. Before appointing a woman, however, those same companies often experienced five months of poor share-price performance. Another study found that companies listed on the U.K. stock exchange tended to increase gender diversity on their boards after experiencing big losses.

A similar tendency can be seen in politics. Margaret Thatcher became leader of a Conservative Party in crisis and prime minister after a “winter of discontent.” Archival analysis of the 2005 U.K. general election found that female Conservative Party candidates tended to contest seats that would be significantly more difficult to win (judged according to their rival’s performance in the previous election).

Ardern also got her break by being thrust onto a glass cliff: She became the leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party in 2017 after poor polling forced her predecessor to resign. A mere two months later, she became the country’s youngest prime minister in 150 years.

According to the researchers, the glass cliff may appear because organizations are more willing to challenge the status quo when the status quo isn’t working. The visible difference of having a woman in charge could also reassure stakeholders that change is happening. As for the women, they may be more likely to accept leadership positions in times of crisis because they have fewer opportunities to reach the top. They can’t simply wait for an easier post to open up.

Regardless of why it happens, the fact is that by the time a woman reaches the heights of corporate or political power, she is likely to have overcome massive hurdles. With men, that is possible but far from guaranteed. Johnson (who was fired from multiple jobs for lying) and Trump (with his meticulously documented history of business failures, including several bankruptcies) never seem to run out of second chances. These leaders’ paths to power are characterized more by plush cushions than glass cliffs — and it shows.

While many factors are shaping outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic, leadership is undoubtedly one of the most important. It should surprise no one that, by and large, it is the leaders who have already had to prove themselves who are the most effective. That very often means they are women.

(Source: JT)

How did British Indians become so prominent in the Conservative party?

Since Thatcher’s day, the Tories have held the community up as a model minority. The tactic appears to be paying off

Last week, the “most Indian cabinet” in British history realised a long-standing dream of the Tory right: the introduction of a purposely cruel “points-based” immigration system. Finally, as many were quick to point out, we saw the limits of “representation politics” laid bare – the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the three other British Indians appointed to Johnson’s cabinet will only embolden Tory racism. But there is a more important story to tell here about how the modern Conservative party came to embrace British Indians – one that runs through Nairobi, Harrow East and occupied Kashmir.

Indian migration to Britain took place in two significant waves. The first was in the late 1940s and 50s, when migrants were recruited directly from India by successive governments to fill the labour shortage that resulted from the second world war. They mostly settled in the Midlands and the north-west of England, working in foundries and textile manufacturing. These migrants were heavily involved in building Britain’s antiracist and trade union movements in the 1950s and 60s, drawing on lessons learned from anti-colonial struggles back home to organise their communities in Britain. To this day, these communities are disproportionately working class and Labour voting.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s family are among the so-called twice migrants, who arrived from east Africa in the 1960s and 70s. Photograph: Facebook

The second wave of Indian migrants to Britain were the so-called “twice migrants” who arrived from east Africa in the 1960s and 70s, having been expelled or encouraged to leave by the newly independent regimes in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The families of our chancellor, home secretary and attorney general are all part of this latter group.

So how and why have their descendants become so prominent on the Tory frontbenches? The answer begins in 1895, with the creation of the British East Africa Protectorate. British officials envisioned the protectorate, which occupied roughly the same area as modern-day Kenya, as the “America of the Hindu”, a settler-colonial project to be led by Indians on behalf of the British.

In the early 20th century, thousands of Indians (mostly Goans, Gujaratis and Punjabis) were imported into east Africa as subcolonial agents of civilisation. They were required to work in colonial administration and serve in the colonial police and army, to keep the “native peoples” in order. At the same time, more than 30,000 indentured labourers were brought over from India to build the Kenya-Uganda railway.

Many of these labourers chose to settle in the protectorate after the railway was completed. They were soon joined by many more Indian subjects, who moved freely to the protectorate in search of economic prosperity. Functioning as a subordinate ruling class, Indians in east Africa enjoyed success in business, finance and the professions throughout the colonial period, and gained significant control over the economy. By the time Kenya won its independence in 1963, Indians – who accounted for less than 3% of the population – owned more than two thirds of the country’s private non-agricultural assets.

Ugandan Asians arrive at Stansted airport, October 1973. Photograph: E Hamilton West

When this group of Indians arrived in Britain, many brought with them the considerable wealth they had accrued (along with a hostility towards black Africans). Others brought with them the benefits of English-language education. These advantages virtually guaranteed the economic success of east African Indians in Britain, especially in the retail businesses of Margaret Thatcher’s “enterprise economy”, for which they soon became known. Rishi Sunak’s pharmacist mother and Priti Patel’s newsagent-owning parents were typical of their generation.

The Conservative leadership of the time identified this demographic as potential voters. From the 1980s onwards, the Tories began to court an imagined “Indian community”, limited to east African Indians who had settled around London. Successful British Indians were held up as evidence of what could be achieved under a free-market Conservative government. In 1988, Thatcher welcomed the new Indian high commissioner to Britain with the following words: “We so much welcome the resourceful Indian community here in Britain. You have brought the virtues of family, of hard work and of resolve to make a better life … you are displaying splendid qualities of enterprise and initiative, which benefit not just you and your families but the Indian community and indeed the nation as a whole.”

Fast-forward to 2010, and the Conservatives held 30% of the British Indian vote. After 30 years of Thatcherite ideology, British Indians were the most pro-Conservative ethnic minority, after the Jewish community. After decades of gradual advance, this number soared to 40% in 2017. In the 2019 election, as the Conservatives chased a realignment towards white northern voters based on racist scaremongering, support in constituencies with high Indian populations increased substantially again. At every point, this has included members of both groups of Indian migrants. Now British Indians make up 15% of the Tory cabinet.

The Tories have now managed to extend their appeal beyond the “two time” migrants by finding common cause in a project of Islamophobia. Supported by the Indian government and its far-right ruling party, the BJP, the Conservatives have exploited a sharp rise in Hindu nationalism within the British Indian community to play Hindu, Sikh, Jain and Muslim communities off against one another.

Conservative MP Bob Blackman on the campaign trail in East Harrow ahead of the 2015 election. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

The Conservative campaign in Harrow East, a marginal constituency in which 25% of the voters are of Indian origin, provided the clearest example of this. The constituency’s Conservative MP, Bob Blackman, whose Twitter background photo shows him smiling next to Prime Minister Modi, saw fit to retweet a post by the far-right commentator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (alias Tommy Robinson) that highlighted Muslim violence against Hindus. He stated that he had done this in error, but along with others in the Conservative party, he has encouraged the portrayal of Labour as “anti-Hindu” and pro-Muslim, citing Labour’s perceived support for the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination as evidence. In the 2019 election, his majority increased by more than 6,000 votes, and he was sworn into parliament on the Bhagavad Gita.

Seventy years after India liberated itself from colonial rule, the old colonial tactics of divide and rule continue to govern Indians in the metropole. Overcoming this is not an impossible task. However, the relative ease with which we Indians in Britain have found ourselves in this situation should be of serious concern. That the latest expansion of Britain’s punitive border regime can be drawn up and legitimised by the sons and daughters of migrants reveals the limits of an antiracist discourse that claims a common “lived experience” as the grounds for political action.

Our community’s history of antiracist struggle in Britain can show us another way to confront these issues. When Indian migrants first arrived in Britain in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, they joined forces with recently arrived African-Caribbean migrants to form a unified “black” community of resistance. They responded to state neglect, racial violence and racist policing with a range of radical self-help initiatives, run through organisations such as the United Coloured People’s Alliance, the Black Liberation Front and the British Black Panther Movement. This is a story of community and class solidarity based on shared resistance. It should be recovered to prepare us for the fight ahead.

(Source: The Guardian)

Trump’s quiet power grab

The president’s administration is attempting to bring thousands of federal employees under his control, and the public is largely unaware.

Throughout the federal government are thousands of officials who do not direct courtrooms, but who are, in a sense, judges. They are federal employees who preside over trial-like disputes, hear evidence and testimony, and make decisions that can deeply shape people’s lives, such as the granting of asylum and veterans benefits. These executive-branch employees are administrative adjudicators.

The Trump administration has launched an obscure but dangerous effort to undermine this system, and to dictate both the appropriate circumstances for commencing adjudication and the rules that govern how disputes with agencies are resolved. If the Trump administration’s strategy works, it will have steered the federal bureaucracy further toward an authoritarian future in which all executive-branch policy making must bend to the whims of a single individual, the president.

Although precise data are hard to find, recent work by two leading administrative-law scholars suggests there are roughly 12,000 of these agency adjudicators of various types across the federal bureaucracy, as compared with about 870 permanently authorized federal-court judges. Though the number of matters these adjudicators handle is very hard to come by, a 2016 estimate suggests that they decide more than 750,000 cases annually, which would be about double the number of civil and criminal felony case filings in federal district court.

FABRIZIO BENSCH / REUTERS

A plurality of administrative adjudications involve Social Security disability claims. But there is extensive variety among the several hundred agencies and programs involved in administrative adjudication. Some agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, engage in licensing. Others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Trade Commission, impose penalties for legal noncompliance. Numerous adjudication schemes across multiple agencies involve disputes about government payments, the awarding and administration of government contracts and benefits, and the imposition of employee discipline. A database created by Stanford Law School and the Administrative Conference of the United States numbers these programs and the agencies involved in the hundreds.

The public is, for the most part, quite oblivious to much of this activity’s scope and importance, much less the Trump administration’s attacks on its integrity. What is at stake is not the specific resolution of individual disputes—at least not thus far—but rather the authority to dictate the general rules by which agencies decide individual cases, cases in which accuracy and impartiality are key values.

Administrative adjudication is essential to the effective implementation of federal law. For some agencies, adjudication is a necessary component of policy making, because the statutes they enforce are extremely general and sweeping; specificity gets fleshed out on a case-by-case basis. Indeed, prior to the 1960s, administrative adjudication was more prevalent than issuing general regulations as a policy-making vehicle. For example, the National Labor Relations Board  is charged with combatting “unfair labor practices.” It gives that standard meaning by bringing cases against individual employers who engage in activity the NLRB suspects is unlawful. These matters are tried before officials called administrative-law judges, or ALJs, whose decisions are reviewable first by the five members of the NLRB and then, if appealed, by a federal court. Lawyers working on subsequent labor disputes can consult the administrative orders that emanate from these adjudicative proceedings, just as they would read court decisions, to find out how the NLRB interprets the law. This is, likewise, how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) pursues “unfair or deceptive trade practices,” and how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prosecutes a variety of offenses under the federal Securities Act.

Congress also empowers a wide variety of administrative judges to be the first-line decision makers regarding individual applicants for all sorts of government benefits. The largest group comprises the ALJs who work for the Social Security Administration. Other agencies use different categories of administrative judges to approve applications under programs as diverse as veterans benefits, patents, and refugee asylum. ALJs enjoy a number of statutory protections intended to depoliticize their service and to protect, within bounds, the independence of their judgment. Other agency adjudicators with different titles almost always enjoy less protection for their decision-making independence, based on their agencies’ governing statutes.

The Trump administration is now waging a two-pronged attack on the independence of all administrative adjudicators, including ALJs, and the agencies that employ them. The first prong involves telling agencies, via executive orders, how to exercise the discretion that Congress has given them to conduct adjudication. One such order, from October 2019, boasts the lofty title “Promoting the Rule of Law Through Transparency and Fairness in Civil Administrative Enforcement and Adjudication.” Among its provisions is a limit on when agencies may judge a private party’s past conduct to be unlawful based on a general legal standard. The executive order says that no such agency determination may be issued unless the agency has first warned the public—through a specific rule—that the general legal standard prohibits the conduct the agency would now challenge.

This may not sound like much, but in practice it would make the work of a number of federal agencies far more difficult. Consider this scenario: The FTC finds that a company has been using artificial intelligence in a novel way to ascertain which of its online customers can most effectively be tempted by a misleading, if not outright duplicitous, sales pitch. The FTC has never encountered the practice before. The FTC’s statute currently gives the agency discretion to launch an administrative proceeding against the company to determine whether the technique should be deemed a forbidden “unfair or deceptive trade practice.” If, based on the agency’s policy deliberations and a carefully assembled factual record, the FTC determines that the practice is “unfair” or “deceptive,” it could prohibit the company’s future use of that practice. What the FTC could not do would be to penalize the company for its pre-adjudication conduct—for example, by levying a fine—if no prior FTC proceeding had warned the company that it was violating federal law. The relief—as lawyers call a remedy to a legal problem—would have to be entirely forward-looking. The Supreme Court has approved this manner of administrative adjudication since 1947.

Under the Trump order, the FTC would not be allowed to proceed as I have described. It would first have to conduct a rule-making on the fairness of AI-guided online sales practices before it could go after any firm. This might be grossly inefficient and would disable the FTC from developing a nuanced factual understanding of regulated practices through individual cases. The Trump order does insist: “Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof.” The problem with this promise not to “impair” is that the order’s so-called fair-warning requirement, if applied to delay or prevent adjudication, would do just that. On this issue, Trump’s order either alters the discretion of administrative agencies or it is meaningless.

The second and even more aggressive prong is the Trump administration’s campaign to undermine independent agencies, which conduct a lot of the highest-profile administrative adjudications. The aim is to put an end altogether to the idea of independent officers in the executive branch. An agency is considered an “independent agency” if its head or heads may be dismissed by the president only with good cause—typically, “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect of office.” Conventional understanding is that presidents may fire at will any administrator who lacks such statutory protection. The Department of Justice under Trump, however, has been working hard to nudge the Supreme Court into determining either that any statutory limits on presidential at-will removal authority are categorically unconstitutional or that “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect of office” must be interpreted broadly enough that failure to follow any presidential directive would become “good cause” for dismissal. This would effectively end, for example, the independence of the Federal Reserve System.

The Justice Department’s first attempt at curtailing independence came in a 2018 case called Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission. The issue in Lucia was whether ALJs used by the SEC were “officers”—as opposed to “employees” of the United States—and thus had to be directly appointed by the SEC itself. (Under Article II of the Constitution, Congress may allow heads of agencies to appoint “inferior” officers. The president must appoint “principal officers” with Senate advice and consent. Congress has free rein for determining how “employees” may be hired.) The Court determined that the ALJs were indeed “officers” under the Constitution. It thus concluded that the SEC had acted unconstitutionally by allowing its chief administrative-law judge, working with SEC staff, to choose the commission’s ALJs. By not personally signing off on the appointments, the SEC commissioners had hoped to create the appearance of greater impartiality when their ALJs decided cases in which the SEC itself was a party. But given the Court’s holding, the SEC commissioners—the agency’s principal political appointees—would henceforth have to formally appoint the bureaucratic judges deciding the agency’s cases.

The Justice Department wanted the Court to go further, however. It argued that if the ALJs are “officers,” then the statute protecting them from at-will discharge would have to be narrowly interpreted so that they could be fired simply for failing to follow directions. The Court explicitly refused to discuss the issue. But the Solicitor General proceeded to issue a memorandum to all agency general counsels, advertising the Department’s eagerness to mount this argument in a future case.

A more direct vehicle for pushing the Court to invalidate agency independence from presidential control is a case to be argued on March 3, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (I helped write an amicus brief in this case defending the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure.) The Justice Department’s position is that the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1935 decision upholding agency independence, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, should be overruled. Should the Court agree, it would not only render independent judges unconstitutional within any agency, but Congress would no longer be able, through tenure protections, to limit direct presidential policy control over the principal officers who deliver each agency’s final judgments—members of the Federal Communications Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and all the similar bodies I have already mentioned. All would become removable by the president at will.

The Trump administration, in short, is challenging agencies’ ability to go after wrongdoing through administrative adjudication, and is seeking to undermine the independence of both first-line agency adjudicators and the heads of the agencies they work for. The administration appears intent on expanding this campaign. On January 30, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a request for information that could be used to inform further agency-adjudication orders. Public comments are due on March 16. The questions posed by the OMB suggest the Trump administration is interested in significantly rewriting the rules by which agencies conduct their trial-type proceedings.

By making the investigation and prosecution of regulated parties more difficult, the president threatens to create a system that, through centralized control, would allow cronyism and “agency capture” to protect corporate interests ahead of the public interest. New rules shaping adjudication could also enable political officials to make it harder for individuals to get the government benefits to which they are entitled.

A group of administrative-law scholars at George Washington University wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in Lucia warning of the disaster that would follow tightening political controls over agency adjudicators. They pointed out that “Congress devoted a substantial amount of time during the 1930s and 1940s to the question of how to structure agencies that engage in adjudication of regulatory disputes.” By statute, Congress imposed procedures for ALJs that were “specifically designed to ensure that they had an appropriate degree of decisional independence from the agencies whose cases they were to hear.” Making ALJs removable at will, or simply for failing to follow directions by political superiors, would undermine the impartiality that Congress sought to guarantee.

Impartiality is anathema to Trumpism. That the Trump administration wants to upend a long-standing system for assuring both the reality and appearance of fairness in agency adjudication may be shocking. But it is not surprising. If you consider yourself on block watch for threats to democracy, take your eyes for a moment off the president’s Twitter feed and turn your attention to administrative law. Danger is lurking amid the complexity.

(Source: The Atlantic)