29 Nov 2020

How the Privatization of Medicine in India Is Accelerating Its COVID-19 Death Toll

Yogesh Jain


Spiraling health care expenses in India have been pushing more than 55 million Indians into a state of abject poverty every year. COVID-19 has only worsened the trend for even more families—like Aghan Singh’s.

To ensure that his sick mother received the best treatment, Singh, a self-employed motor mechanic in the small town of Bilaspur, in Chhattisgarh, India, decided to take her to a popular private hospital nearby. She had been running a fever since July 7 and had also developed breathlessness by July 9. Singh rushed her to the hospital, and when they reached the emergency department around 8 p.m., her oxygen levels were dangerously low. The hospital ordered a battery of tests for COVID-19 and quickly admitted her to an intensive care unit to give her oxygen and medicine. In the first eight hours of his mother being admitted to the hospital, Singh deposited Rs 34,000 ($455) and then paid another Rs 1,96,000 ($2,627) over the next four days. To arrange money for his mother’s treatment, Singh had to sell off two and a half acres of land that he owned in his native village. Despite all his efforts, his mother’s condition worsened progressively, and she died on July 16. While still grieving the loss of his beloved mother, he was further stressed about how his family would survive the next month with most of his resources having been exhausted during his mother’s treatment.

Also in the state of Chhattisgarh, when 60-year-old Savani Bai from the village of Dhanokhar developed mild symptoms of COVID-19, she spoke to a doctor on the state helpline and was advised to go to the hospital. Since all the government hospital beds were occupied, she had to be admitted to the same private hospital in Bilaspur as Singh’s mother, where she was admitted to a general COVID ward. During her 10-day hospitalization, she was given acetaminophen and was kept under daily observation to ensure her condition was not worsening. For this basic treatment, she ended up spending Rs 85,000 ($1,137) and had to mortgage her one-acre farm to meet her hospital expenses.

“I took my mother to a private hospital near my home because it is cleaner and they admit patients swiftly throughout the day,” Singh said. Due to inadequate funding and monitoring of quality control in public hospitals, a large number of people in India are being forced to go to private hospitals for both outpatient, and to a lesser extent, inpatient care. It is a cruel joke that such a move to seek treatment in private hospitals by people is seen as a ‘choice’ rather than a compulsion.

India, which is the “second worst-hit country behind the United States,” has been fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with a fragile health system. The country saw one of the most draconian lockdowns anywhere in March, leading to a sense of panic and causing many private hospitals to simply shut up shop or turn away patients during the lockdown period. “I am 59 years old and [have been taking medication] for diabetes and hypertension for 10 years now—how could I expose myself to the risk of COVID? So I shut my hospital completely when [Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi] announced the lockdown, and reopened [the hospital] three months later,” said Ajay Chandrakar, the doctor who owns the hospital to which Singh took his mother. As a result, the avenues for seeking health care in India during a pandemic-induced lockdown were limited to the inadequate public systems. And the private hospitals that left citizens in the lurch went unquestioned and unpunished by India’s national and state governments.

In fact, this was an opportunity for the public systems to recapture their rightful position as the predominant health care providers in the country. But the public systems were unprepared for the task. There was hardly any increased funding by the center and state governments to build up the capacity of the public health care system in the country to provide treatment and care for the increasing numbers of patients during the pandemic. Instead, there was “a worrying disruption in India’s basic health services in March as local administrations focused on containing the spread of COVID-19,” reports Mint, using data provided by the National Health Mission.

Dr. Gajanan Phutke at the district hospital in Bilaspur said, “I am worried that more than 50 percent of my tuberculosis patients did not return for their drug refills in August, and I don’t know if they are still alive or not. … Immunization rates have also dropped by 50 percent in our health service,” lamented the doctor.

Private providers are able to make massive profits by charging patients exorbitantly—and national and state governments aren’t stopping them. Xavier Minz, who runs the largest private lab in Bilaspur, said, “It is time for me to make good on the losses I suffered when most hospitals were shut [during the lockdown in March]. I got permission to do the COVID Real-Time PCR lab [test] and can charge Rs 3,800 ($51) against my expenses of Rs 1,100 ($14) for a single test.”

Hospitalization and, in particular, intensive care are where private health systems make their major profits. These profits translate into patients incurring catastrophic health expenditure. Private hospitals continue to profiteer during the pandemic by the same methods they used before it—by massively inflating bills for daily bed charges and intensive care.

India has been actively promoting privatization in various social services including in health care for the last 30 years. Private-public partnership (PPP) has been one of the most common models for allowing private systems to perform a task previously done by the public systems while having the state pay for such operations. In India, physicians working with public hospitals are allowed to practice outside their place of employment and treat patients for a fee. “I took my mother to a private hospital owned by Dr. Chandrakar, who is the best doctor in my town and [has worked] in the dharam hospital [government hospitals are called dharam, which means righteous or moral] for the last 25 years.” The PPP system makes it tempting for doctors working in public hospitals to compromise their commitment to their primary role of providing care in the public system. Now in the time of the pandemic, when an acute shortage of doctors and nurses looms large, states still allow their staff to practice privately, causing this chronic problem to become worse.

Back at home after recovering from COVID, Savani Bai cursed herself on her way to work at her farm—which had been mortgaged for her treatment—wondering why she had not demanded that the packed government hospital make space for her too when she required it. Aghan Singh only blamed it on his karma, while trying to come to terms with his bleak future.

China Stabilizes as the West Dithers

Tom Clifford


Beijing.

It isn’t about what happened, it’s about what will happen. Our time has come is the catchphrase, a rallying cry. The people are told they have been cheated. It won’t happen again. We are the justice seekers. Upend the global trade order, it is skewed against us. This is heady stuff.

These are not the viewpoints of the (current) occupant of the White House but rather of another world leader.

The fallout from the 2020 US presidential election is providing fascinating viewing in Beijing. Chinese president Xi Jinping would never boast publicly that he trumped the Donald but the small shots of Baiju to ward off the Beijing chill are being consumed in the leadership compound off Tiananmen Square with more relish than usual.

Of course there are differences between the two, not least in hair styles, but the similarities are also worth commenting on. An outsider comes to power. Xi was originally meant to be premier to Li Keqiang who was meant to be president. But Xi was able to persuade the military that he was their man more than the “economist” Li.  Xi shook things up, refuses to leave office, (an option not available to Trump unless his diligent hair-dye dripping lawyers have reinterpreted the constitution in ways not attempted before) and prefers to have his country invest in itself rather than seek markets elsewhere.

Xi has abandoned “going global” for Chinese business and finance. Xi, instead, is, again you’ve guessed it, putting China first. His policies have resulted in an extension of China’s state sector. Even the Belt and Road Initiative is now seen as primarily beneficial to large-scale state firms.

A personality cult, (much more effective than Donald’s), unseen since the days of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, is being fostered. By stripping term limits from the Chinese constitution, Xi has the right to rule for life.

Nor does Xi care much for global opinion as seen by his willingness to risk international condemnation to stamp out democratic values in Hong Kong. People outside of China still have difficulty is realizing how little the former British colony matters to people on the Chinese mainland. Hong Kongers are simply viewed as ungrateful, they have liberties undreamt of on the mainland, and their economy is not as vital to China as it once was. None of this excuses the dire state of human rights in China but the party has been able to claim, unchallenged because it controls the media, that the right to work is more important than the right to vote. The job rate is national security. The party becomes less secure if the employment rate drops.

And China feels more secure now than it’s has done for centuries. And this is why the South China Sea is so important.

For the first time since Portuguese ships reached the Chinese coast five centuries ago, China is in command or believes it is in command of waters off its coast. This means that Beijing views China as secure and the party is reaping the benefits of that. One reason is sheer, old fashioned patriotism. But the other is that the military, long a byword for inefficiency and corruption, is being seen to deliver. Without a shot being fired in anger, an era of unquestioned US dominance in Asia has drawn to a close. The coverage of the South China Sea militarization in the West has been about that, the military build-up. In China the coverage has been on the security aspect.

Xi’s ascent to power took place at a time when the West was largely distracted. Financial crises, Brexit, Trump. It seemed to have enough on its plate. The West does not know how to handle Xi. Handling the West is a dilemma the Chinese president and his advisors have not had to grapple with.  He can be sanctioned in the US but get trade deals in Europe. In reality, Beijing believes the West needs China more than China needs to change. Xi feels emboldened. The West seems reluctant and dithering. You do not have to be a student of history to appreciate that this is a dangerous mix.

Britain’s Class War on Children

John Pilger


When I first reported on child poverty in Britain, I was struck by the faces of children I spoke to, especially the eyes. They were different: watchful, fearful.

In Hackney, in 1975, I filmed Irene Brunsden’s family. Irene told me she gave her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes. “She doesn’t tell me she’s hungry, she just moans. When she moans, I know something is wrong.”

“How much money do you have in the house? I asked.

“Five pence,” she replied.

Irene said she might have to take up prostitution, “for the baby’s sake”. Her husband Jim, a truck driver who was unable to work because of illness, was next to her. It was as if they shared a private grief.

This is what poverty does. In my experience, its damage is like the damage of war; it can last a lifetime, spread to loved ones and contaminate the next generation. It stunts children, brings on a host of diseases and, as unemployed Harry Hopwood in Liverpool told me, “it’s like being in prison”.

This prison has invisible walls. When I asked Harry’s young daughter if she ever thought that one day she would live a life like better-off children, she said unhesitatingly: “No”.

What has changed 45 years later?  At least one member of an impoverished family is likely to have a job — a job that denies them a living wage. Incredibly, although poverty is more disguised, countless British children still go to bed hungry and are ruthlessly denied opportunities..

What has not changed is that poverty is the result of a disease that is still virulent yet rarely spoken about – class.

Study after study shows that the people who suffer and die early from the diseases of poverty brought on by a poor diet, sub-standard housing and the priorities of the political elite and its hostile “welfare” officials — are working people. In 2020, one in three preschool British children suffers like this.

In making my recent film, The Dirty War on the NHS, it was clear to me that the savage cutbacks to the NHS and its privatisation by the Blair, Cameron, May and Johnson governments had devastated the vulnerable, including many NHS workers and their families. I interviewed one low-paid NHS worker who could not afford her rent and was forced, to sleep in churches or on the streets.

At a foodbank in central London, I watched young mothers looking nervously around as they hurried away with old Tesco bags of food and washing powder and tampons they could no longer afford, their young children holding on to them. It is no exaggeration that at times I felt I was walking in the footprints of Dickens.

Boris Johnson has claimed that 400,000 fewer children are living in poverty since 2010 when the Conservatives came to power. This is a lie, as the Children’s Commissioner has confirmed. In fact, more than 600,000 children have fallen into poverty since 2012; the total is expected to exceed 5 million. This, few dare say, is a class war on children.

Old Etonian Johnson is may be a caricature of the born-to-rule class; but his “elite” is not the only one. All the parties in Parliament, notably if not especially Labour – like much of the bureaucracy and most of the media — have scant if any connection to the “streets”: to the world of the poor: of the “gig economy”: of battling a system of Universal Credit that can leave you without a penny and in despair.

Last week, the prime minister and his “elite” showed where their priorities lay. In the face of the greatest health crisis in living memory when Britain has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe and poverty is accelerating as the result of a punitive “austerity” policy, he announced £16.5 billion for “defence”. This makes Britain, whose military bases cover the world, the highest military spender in Europe.

And the enemy? The real one is poverty and those who impose it and perpetuate it.

A Barefoot Chronicler Of Endangered Crafts

Moin Qazi


When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece

— John Ruskin

We’ve all heard of endangered species and forests —now imagine crafts are at risk of going extinct. A rising number of indigenous crafts are now in danger of becoming   endangered on account of their time-consuming nature and fewer craftspeople possessing these specialized skills. Times are changing and not all young people want to take over their parents’ old jobs, nor is it easy to attract new people to enter these trades.

Sunil Deshpande is a bamboo craftsman who is mentoring a movement for popularising bamboo craft. He has also been travelling extensively to study Indian crafts through a dialogue with the craftsmen themselves. His present obsession is chronicling these traditional crafts and the social environment which has nurtured them. His wife Nirupama Deshpande is an academically-trained social worker from a well-known school of social sciences and shares a common social chemistry with him. They have chosen for their home a village called Lavada in the Melghat forests in Amravati district of northern Maharashtra. I met Sunil recently at his small makeshift studio in Nagpur where he has enrolled young women from neighbourng slums as trainees in bamboo craft.

The preservation of crafts matters for many people as the traditional occupation is their sole livelihood. It gives them respect and dignity as well. Much of India’s heritage would be lost if people lost their traditional skills. “We have to understand the local challenges to improve their composite livelihoods,” avers Sunil. According to him, it takes local entrepreneurs, empowered to adapt easily to the nuances of local culture, to create and drive change sustainably on the ground. The challenge is to keep the cultural, social and economic balance intact. It is a very tenuous link. These crafts embody not just a socioeconomic narrative, but a political narrative as well.

Cultural mobility was restricted to only the educated upper castes that had the option to move laterally. The under castes did not have these options. This kept them rooted in their traditional identity and helped protect the pipeline of skills learned in the family milieu. These communities kept to their craft skills, partly because of forced immobility and membership of their guild remained their only identity.

Deshpande embarked on his yearlong project, “Search for talented craftsmen: a journey of communication and collaboration” as 150th birth anniversary tribute to the greatest craftsmen of all time, Mahatma Gandhi. The yet to be published monograph documents the diverse skills that weave into India’s vibrant craft landscape. Dehspande has covered almost every craft, some of these are so little known that craft connoisseurs also may not have heard of them. Although the research crystallised during the year, it has long been in the making. Deshpande has undertaken regular padyatras to understand the culture and society of these craftsmen. He is advocating for more voice for craftsmen in policy formulation and probably a small space for them in the decennial census exercise so that we have proper data  on craftsmen to work upon.

Deshpande takes us through a journey into deep blocks, villages and settlements that provide sustenance to these craftsmen who pursue crafts as diverse as clay pottery, terracotta work, metal mirror work, block printing, grass-mat weaving, black stone pottery, metalwork , wax metal casing ,scroll painting and  sheet metal work . What links them together is the ceaseless urge to keep their traditions alive even in the face of heavy odds. Moreover, all these crafts are eco-friendly, using traditional raw materials.  The techniques are also grounded in principles that harmonise with nature. Deshpande has studied the socioeconomic and cultural life of families of these craftsmen and has found close link between them.

It is tragic that what was once an abiding symbol of India’s glorious cultural legacy has left many of its tradition bearers in a state of penury. It is time for the government, businesses and entrepreneurs to infuse new economic oxygen before these traditions become extinct. Ironically, the most authentic connoisseurs of Indian arts and crafts are foreigners who are genuinely interested in patronizing them so that they withstand the onslaught of the changing state of affairs.

For every artisan,   5-6 family members depend on the craft business for daily sustenance. Over the past few decades, the number of Indian artisans has decreased substantially due to declining skills, loss of access to existing markets, and difficulty catering to new markets, resulting in migration of artisans to cities for more stable employment.

The crafts are threatened with extinction primarily by mechanisation which offers a cheaper and faster way to produce the same goods. As a result, many artisan clusters are languishing. Historically, the handmade sector was characterized by local demand, inter-dependence of communities, the use of local raw materials and patronage .Patronage is fast shrinking with consumers preferring the cheaper machine-made varieties. We live in an era of mass-produced goods where economies of scale have led to lower prices. New materials have been developed that are not just cheaper, but also more durable. Competition from the power looms     further hastened the end to the already precarious livelihood. This is a bitter reality that we have to contend with.

It is difficult to distinguish genuine handmade products from those made on power looms or the ones mass-produced by machines. Attempts at certification of genuine craft products have not taken off as consumer demand for certified produce has not grown and producers have limited incentives to adopt it.

While the origin of handicrafts is rooted in history, we have to link their future with the dual realities of culture and economy as they are not just the interpreters of India’s art but are also valuable earners of foreign exchange. They evoke the myths, legends and history of the people.

The artisan is not only a repository of a knowledge system that was sustainable but is also an active participant in its re-creation. To celebrate a craftsman’s perception of design, one must view some of our indigenous craft traditions which have evolved through an instinctive knowledge of the functional needs of a community. While the artisan continues with his craft, marketing remains a paramount problem. Though several crafts have been saved from near extinction, the grouping of artisan communities into modern-day guilds or co-operative societies has helped only in a limited way — it has just  turned despair into a sense of hope.

One of the earliest acts of the new government in India after the country attained freedom was to set up a national Board for the identification of and development of crafts. Realizing the predicament faced by the weavers in the post-independence period, the All India Handicrafts Board stepped in to provide a buffer to the weavers. In 1965, the Board instituted national awards to craftsmen. They were a public recognition of talent, skill, and above all, the creativity of these flag bearers of a hoary tradition.

A plan for the promotion of a craft can yield concrete results only if it is a sincere exercise in which the craftsmen remain the key focus. However, more often than not, such efforts are generally short term. They provide only a cosmetic treatment and are a mere band-aid, the critical issues air brushed. Indian crafts have suffered primarily because of a lack of a visionary approach from the cultural administrators.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. The basic argument is that work should not become stultifying and drudgery that it evokes little interest in the worker. It will be harmful both for the individual as well as the business. At the same time work should not become such leisure that it loses seriousness and doesn’t provide a challenge to the creative faculties of the worker.

“The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern west as the ancient east, “can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work”.

The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom. He must make what his machine is geared to make. A craftsman creates a work of art.  While most people approach their work with the mindset that they just want to get it done, craftsmen are more concerned with who they are becoming and what they are creating rather than how fast they finish it.

The genius of a craftsman can be best described by him alone. A women craftsman was once asked from whom she learnt her craft. She replied “from time as the most ancient, the parampara. We are the holders of sight and skill. We carry it in our wombs” she said. That tells us why these crafts are heirlooms handed down through generations.

Lives of Workers Should Matter

Vidyarthy Chatterjee


Contrary to what she is often made out to be, India is not a poor country. Rather, India is a rich country, the majority of whose people are so poor as to have a tough time securing two meals a day. India is a rich country with  multitudes of starving and half-fed men, women and children because practically her entire wealth has been cornered by a handful of family-owned and other corporates with the active support of successive crony governments at the Centre and in the States cutting across political and ideological lines. But arguably, never before in the history of independent India, have corporates been allowed by the State to call the shots with such impunity as is the case today.

The ascendancy of the far-Right in Indian politics, especially in the past five or six years, has seen the steady whittling away of the rights of the working man. The past few months have been truly catastrophic as far as the fate of the ‘hewers of wood’ and the ‘drawers of water’ in this country is concerned. In one fell stroke, the Narendra Modi government has snatched away, among other things, the right of the worker to an eight-hour working day which was a basic entitlement down the decades. The working class ( and its leaders) have been told in  no uncertain  terms that in view of the so-called emergency in the economy, they will have to  work for twelve hours a day, maybe longer, with no overtime pay or related facilities. Worse still, the employer would have the right not to entertain any questions in this regard from any quarter. Henceforth, there will be no court of appeal for dissatisfied workers.

In other words, using its brute majority, the BJP dispensation has struck down a long and glorious history of struggle and sacrifice whereby the working class had earned the right to an eight-hour working day. The central trade unions have criticized the move as unlawful and autocratic; a lawless law carried out in violation of the spirit of democratic accountability; and an outrage devoid of any moral sense. But who is listening, in this season of fear by disease or starvation, and all–round confusion? Truth to tell, on hindsight, the abrogation of trade union rights during the 19-month ‘declared’ Emergency in 1975-76 seems no more than a pin-prick compared to what workers and their families are being made to suffer in the present times, that is, an ‘undeclared’ Super Emergency, which may well extend to an unspecified number of years.

In this connection, the role of the Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the labour arm of the BJP, should be subjected to severe questioning. It is anybody’s guess why the organization is not coming out against the draconian measures adopted by the Modi government. It would seem that  the Prime Minister’s consolidation of personal power with the support of a handful of high-profile faithfuls in both the BJP and its ideological master, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is at the moment so complete, that no one has the guts to question his authority. But, one would have thought that for the sake of its own credibility, the BMS would go through certain motions of assertiveness; put up at least a token resistance to the dangers facing the working class. But even that was, perhaps, too much to ask for in the present climate of compromise and easy acceptance of conditionalities imposed from above.

However, coming to think of it, it should not be difficult for us to accept that the present culture of dishonourable accommodation is nothing new in Indian politics. The strength of conviction and solidity of character needed to oppose the excesses of a so-called ‘louha purush’ or ‘louha netri’ have always been in short supply in Indian society. It will not do to forget that in the days of Indira Gandhi, rare was the voice of dissent in the Congress. But, admittedly, the situation now is far worse, what with the media and even large sections of the academia burning the midnight oil to be on the right side of the demagogue in democratic disguise, also known as the ‘hriday samrat’ of the average Hindu, sorry, Hindutvawadi citizen.

It may sound bizarre, but it would seem that in the time of corona, the gods are fighting on the side of the godless. What else to make of the calamitous social and economic conditions caused by the pandemic, which are proving to be so handy to the power brokers and conmen of majoritarian politics. Taking full advantage of the popular helplessness induced by the visitation, as also the feeble resistance put up by a disunited and emasculated Opposition, the Centre is driving its juggernaut any way it pleases, no matter which section of the poor and powerless comes in its path. Corona is an unprecedented curse to hundreds of millions, but may well be considered an unexpected windfall for the ‘haves’ and their political patrons.

It is nothing short of black magic that a rich country like India should suddenly become very poor, may be even bankrupt, when asked to share its riches on a war footing with the jobless and the starving; more specifically, with those trying to make their way home hundreds of miles away on foot. A whole college of distinguished economists from Amartya Sen and Abhijit Bandopadhyaya to Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian has gone hoarse asking the Indian government to release enough funds to reach some cash, or a little cash along with a little food, to the country’s working class and other equally affected sections of society. They have been arguing that safeguarding the economic health of the country is no doubt important, but it is wrong to neglect the question of public health or that of the survival of the poorest.

But as it appears, the government, ever-mindful of the debt it owes to the corporates in many ways but principally by way of their huge donations to the BJP’s election kitty in 2014 and 2019, has allowed itself to ignore the advice of the economists. It has had no problems caving in to pressures exerted by employers, managements, and the chambers of commerce. Like Trump in the United States, Johnson in Britain, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi is a willing creature of the tycoons; of the demands of the capitalist market, what if in the process, the working class and other vulnerable sections in the present scenario of shrinking survival opportunities, are thrown to the wolves. Television footage of migrant workers run over by speeding trains and trucks, or of dead bodies of workers being fished out of train compartments, or, most poignant of all, an infant trying to wake up its mother lying dead on a railway platform, may leave a mark on ordinary viewers, but is not quite enough to move the stone-hearted ‘jan-sevaks’.

Perhaps the workers of the world also need to take a part of the blame. It’s been a long time since they last united in a focused and determined manner against those agencies which they have always known to be hostile to their daily interests. Since the workers of the world failed to unite, their traditional oppressors united with greater energy and enterprise than ever before. One does not need to be told that the policies pursued and methods adopted by governments, international financial institutions, indigenous moneybags, foreign multinationals, and last but not the least, their toadies in the newspapers, the television channels and the universities, are getting more sophisticated  and more sinister with each passing day. The present globalised order makes it particularly easy for some people of power and privilege to pursue their agenda of exploitation and marginalization against those who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow.

Till roughly thirty years ago, many artists and intellectuals would show by the nature and quality of their work, their concern for social justice without allowing it to interfere with the depth and focus of their art. In many cases, art and activism would fuse unobtrusively to show the imperfections of the human condition caused largely by the wrongdoings of political operators and their protégés in business and industry. Thirty years later, artists and intellectuals are still there but, apparently, not too many are bothered siding with the abused and the wronged. It would seem that, like careerists everywhere, they too, have been influenced by post-modernist inclinations to dismiss the need for ideas and ideologies of resistance. Sadly, this has led to a political/philosophical bankruptcy causing capitalists to rejoice and, conversely, their victims to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of dejection, if not outright resignation.

Yet, the thought that we shall overcome someday, cannot be allowed to die out. The lakhs of Indian workers who have been so outrageously victimized by the Modi government will ideally, turn around and stage a comeback once the anxiety and panic of the pandemic recede. Notwithstanding his many faults, Man is too noble a creature to die on the ‘rajpath’ without a struggle like a dog. And Covid-19, however satanic it maybe in its reach, longevity, or capacity for sheer evil, cannot be a fixture for all time to come. When the disease lessens or, hopefully, disappears, where will the perpetrators of impromptu injustices on a scale that the working class has never experienced before in free India, hide?

Dispossession and Imperialism Repackaged as ‘Feeding the World’

Colin Todhunter


The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations. Smallholder farmers are being criminalised and even made to disappear when it comes to the struggle for land. They are constantly exposed to systematic expulsion.

In 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, are eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class. Financial returns are what matter to these entities, not food security.

Consider Ukraine. The organisation Grain found that in 2014 small farmers operated 16% of agricultural land in that country, but provided 55% of agricultural output, including: 97% of potatoes, 97% of honey, 88% of vegetables, 83% of fruits and berries and 80% of milk. It is clear that Ukraine’s small farms were delivering impressive outputs.

Following the toppling of Ukraine’s government in early 2014, the way was paved for foreign investors and Western agribusiness to take a firm hold over the agri-food sector. Reforms mandated by the EU-backed loan to Ukraine in 2014 included agricultural deregulation intended to benefit foreign agribusiness. Natural resource and land policy shifts were being designed to facilitate the foreign corporate takeover of enormous tracts of land.

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, stated at the time that the World Bank and IMF were intent on opening up foreign markets to Western corporations and that the high stakes around the control of Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector, the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat, constitute an overlooked critical factor. He added that in recent years, foreign corporations had acquired more than 1.6 million hectares of Ukrainian land.

Western agribusiness has been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time, long before the coup. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. An article by Oriental Review in 2015 noted that since the mid-90s the Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council had been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.

In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds. When GMO crops were legally introduced into the Ukrainian market in 2013, they were planted in up to 70% of all soybean fields, 10-20% of cornfields and over 10% of all sunflower fields, according to various estimates (or 3% of the country’s total farmland).

Interestingly, the investment fund Siguler Guff & Co acquired a 50% stake in the Ukrainian Port of Illichivsk in 2015, which specialises in agricultural exports.

In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine. According to the Brettons Wood Project website, the government committed to lifting the 19-year moratorium on the sale of state-owned agricultural lands after sustained pressure from international finance. The World Bank incorporated further measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine approved in late June. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”

In response, Frederic Mousseau recently stated:

“The goal is clearly to favor the interests of private investors and Western agribusinesses… It is wrong and immoral for Western financial institutions to force a country in a dire economic situation amidst an unprecedented pandemic to sell its land.”

But morality has little to do with it. The September 2020 report on the grain.org website ‘Barbarians at the barn: private equity sinks its teeth into agriculture’ shows that there is no morality where capitalism’s profit compulsion is concerned.

Private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – are being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world. This money is used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. The article outlines how offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has targeted Ukraine.

In addition to various Western governments, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation’s endowment, is also investing in private equity, taking positions in farm and food businesses around the world.

Grain notes that this forms part of the trend whereby the world of finance – banks, funds, insurance companies and the like – is gaining control over the real economy, including forests, watersheds and rural people’s territories.

Apart from uprooting communities and grabbing resources to entrench an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture, this process of ‘financialisation’ is shifting power to remote board rooms occupied by people with no connection to farming and who are merely in it to make money. These funds tend to invest for a 10-15 year period, resulting in handsome returns for investors but can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food insecurity.

This financialisation of agriculture perpetuates a model of farming that serves the interests of the agrochemical and seed giants, including one of the world’s biggest companies, Cargill, which is involved in almost every aspect of global agribusiness.

Still run as a privately held company, the 155-year-old enterprise trades in purchasing and distributing various agricultural commodities, raises livestock and produces animal feed as well as food ingredients for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. This includes Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities.

A recent article on the Unearthed website accused Cargill and its 14 billionaire owners of profiting from the use of child labour, rain forest destruction, the devastation of ancestral lands, the spread of pesticide use and pollution, contaminated food, antibiotic resistance and general health and environmental degradation.

As if this is not concerning enough, the UN Food and Agriculture is now teaming up with CropLife, a global trade association representing the interests of companies that produce and promote pesticides, including highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs).

In a 19 November press release issued by PAN (Pesticide Action Network) Asia Pacific, some 350 organisations in 63 countries representing hundreds of thousands of farmers, fisherfolk, agricultural workers and other communities, as well as human rights, faith-based, environmental and economic justice institutions, delivered a letter to FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu urging him to stop recently announced plans to deepen collaboration with CropLife International by entering into a formal partnership.

HHPs are responsible for a wide range of devastating health harms to farmers, agricultural workers and rural families around the world and these chemicals have decimated pollinator populations and are wreaking havoc on biodiversity and fragile ecosystems.

Marcia Ishii, senior scientist at PAN North America, explained the serious implications of the proposed collaboration:

“Unfortunately, since Mr. Qu’s arrival at FAO, the institution appears to be opening up to deeper collaboration with pesticide companies, which are likely to exploit such a relationship for bluewashing, influencing policy development and enhancing access to global markets.”

She went on to state:

“It is no surprise that FAO’s recently appointed Deputy Director General, Beth Bechdol, comes to FAO with a history of close financial ties to Corteva (formerly Dow/DuPont).”

The FAO has in recent years shown a commitment to agroecology but, in calling for an independent FAO, Susan Haffmans from PAN Germany, argues:

“The FAO should not jeopardize its successes in agroecology nor its integrity by cooperating with precisely that branch of industry which is responsible for the production of highly hazardous pesticides and whose products contribute to poisoning people and their environment worldwide.”

The July 2019 UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts concludes that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.

Agroecological principles represent a shift away from the reductionist yield-output chemical-intensive industrial paradigm, which results in among other things enormous pressures on human health, soil and water resources. Agroecology is based on a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, local calorific production, cropping patterns and diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.

Such a system is underpinned by a concept of food sovereignty, based on optimal self-sufficiency, the right to culturally appropriate food and local ownership and stewardship of common resources, such as land, water, soil and seeds.

However, this model is a direct challenge to the interests of CropLife members. With the emphasis on localisation and on-farm inputs, agroecology does not require dependency on proprietary chemicals, pirated seeds and knowledge nor long-line global supply chains.

By seeking to develop a formal partnership with the FAO, CropLife aims to further entrench its interests while derailing the FAO’s commitment to agroecology. This much has been apparent in recent times with US Ambassador to the FAO Kip Tom having attacked agroecology –  and like CropLife members – he perpetuates the myth (recently debunked by Dr Jonathan Latham in the new book   ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture’) of impending disaster if we do not accept the chemical-industrial paradigm.

Whether it involves farmers in India recently taking to the streets to protest against legislation that will throw the sector wide open to foreign agricapital, land acquisitions in Ukraine or struggles for land rights and seed sovereignty (etc) elsewhere, it is clear that a small cabal of unscrupulous global agribusiness giants are driving and benefitting from deregulated capital flows, peasant displacement, land acquisitions and decisions made at international and national levels via the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The web that global capitalism weaves in a quest to seek out new profits, capture new markets and control common resources (commonwealth) is destroying farmer livelihoods, the environment and health under the bogus claim of ‘feeding the world’.

Those farmers who survive the profiteering strategies of dispossession and imperialism are to become incorporated into a system of contract farming dictated by global agri-food giants tied to an exploitative food regime based on market dependency and corporate control. A regime that places profit ahead of biodiverse food security, healthy diets and the environment.

Farmers Protests- A test of People’s Power vs State Power

Syed Ali Mujtaba


After the anti CAA protest at Saheen Bagah in Delhi, the farmers protest is the second protest in Delhi that is currently underway in 2020. Thousands of farmers from Haryana and Punjab have marched towards Delhi to press the central government to repeal the recently enacted farm laws.

They are stopped at Haryana Delhi border by the Delhi police using water cannons and lathi charge and are dissuaded from entering the national capital. But undeterred, the farmers have not stopped their march and have vowed to continue their agitation on the Delhi border, unless the government scraps the farm laws.

Remember, the anti CAA protest at Saheen Bagah that erupted in a big way in January and February was of similar nature. Then the protests were held in a peaceful manner and was sustained by community leadership in which farmers from Punjab had some role to play.  The anti- CAA protests abruptly ended without accomplishing the goal to force the government to roll back the citizenship laws. This was due to Delhi riots, Coronavirus alarm and the national lockdown.

Now it remains to be seen, how the farmers protest may play itself out in the current situation.  The news amid the farmers’ protest is that some mosques in Delhi have opened community kitchens to provide food to the agitating farmers arriving from Punjab and other states.

These food kitchens are set up in Delhi mosques and the organizers have shared their number to farmers to contact them for free delivery of food. The organizers plan to do this activity as long as the situation demands.

It may be recalled that during anti-CAA-NRC in Delhi farmers from Punjab came to Delhi and stood by the side of the protestors running the community kitchen to sustain the protest. Now it looks that the anti – CAA protestors want to pay back the famers by serving them with food that they did so months ago.

It remains to be seen how the BJP government responds to the farmers’ protest.  Will they call the farmers for talks or continue to ignore them as they did to the anti- CAA protesters at Saheen Bagh. Will the government use strong arm tactics to clear the protesters as they did in the last stage of the anti-CAA protests.

What will be the role of BJP leader Kapil Mishra in removing the protestors? Everyone remembers his warning in which he wanted to clear the anti-CAA protests. His role in Delhi communal riots that targeted the Muslims. Will this BJP leader organize 1984 programme against the farmer’s majority the protesters being the Sikhs.

Will the anti-CAA protesters spring up again in Delhi and join the farmers’ protest on the border and storm the national capital to press for their demands jointly.

If all this happens will the government allow it or try a Tiananmen Square solution that remains to be seen?  As all this happens how the media is going to report this story. Will it side with the protesters or make them doing acts of sedition?

This is a powerful situation that is building on the borders of the national capital. At the heart of the farms protest is a test of people’s power vs state power.

28 Nov 2020

French police filmed violently assaulting music producer in Paris

Will Morrow


A video published Thursday of the violent police assault of a music producer in central Paris has provoked outrage in France and internationally.

The video’s release comes three days after the police rampage at Republic Square against a peaceful refugee encampment, and as the Macron government is pushing through a law to criminalize the filming of the actions of police officers. Published by the online publication Loopsider, the video of the attack has already been seen more than 12 million times.

The victim, Michel Zecler, was returning to his recording studio in the city’s 17th district last Saturday evening, just after 7:30pm. He entered the building after seeing a group of police officers nearby. He was not wearing a mask, which is required by coronavirus lock-down restrictions. Unknown to Michel, and without any warning, the police entered the studio as well and approached him from behind.

The video taken by a neighbour showing a group of police assaulting Michel on the street outside his studio

“Before hearing anything I felt a hand that pushed me, or pulled me, and then they asked me to leave. I said I was in my place… It happened so fast that I asked myself if they were real police.” One of the police officers was in civilian clothing. The events were captured on the studio’s CCTV camera. The police entered the room with Michel, closed the door behind them, and beat him for several minutes. He was kicked a dozen times, punched twenty times, and hit with a truncheon another 15 times, mainly on the face and the skull.

“I said to myself, if I fall to the ground I am not going to get back up,” Michel, who has come forward publicly to the media, told Loopside. At no point in the video does he offer any resistance. Michel, who is black, said the officers repeatedly abused him with racial slurs, calling him a “dirty negro.” The attack only stopped when a group of teenage music artists who were in the recording studio on the floor below managed to force their way into the room, causing the police to flee outside.

“They are 16-year-old kids,” Michel said. “They asked me what happened, and I said I had no idea. I was covered in blood.” The officers then smashed a window and threw a teargas canister into the room. “I told myself this is going to be my last day,” he said.

A second video of the street shot from above by neighbors shows a group of at least seven police huddled around the entrance of the building as Michel leaves. Two of them are pointing what appear to be guns at him. When he leaves onto the street, the police surround him and beat him from all sides. Two officers went inside to find the youth, who had hidden from the teargas. “They started hitting us,” one told the media later. “Then I heard, ‘Camera! Camera!’ It was the [neighbours] who were filming. From the moment I heard that, they stopped hitting us.”

Michel was then brought to the local police office, where the officers—unaware of the CCTV footage—filed false charges of rebellion against him, claiming he had “dragged” them into his studio, attacked them, and reached for their weapons. He was placed in detention for 48 hours. The charges were only dropped when the video was shown to the police.

Music producer identified only by his first name, Michel, is pictured at a press conference in Paris. (Image credit: screen capture)

“Without this video, I would be in prison today,” Michel said. “I would be in prison and all my loved ones, my friends, would have thought, like the police said in their statements, that I had wanted to take their weapon, that I had hit them.” As his comments make clear, there is nothing particularly unique about the latest incident of police violence. Had it not been filmed, Michel would have been like countless other victims of police aggression whose claims are denied by the police themselves.

The Macron government, fearful of an explosion of opposition in the population, released a cynical statement Friday that the president was “shocked” when he saw the videos. He has allegedly requested a report from Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. The three police have been suspended, and Darmanin has claimed he will “press” for their dismissal. Another internal police investigation, which invariably result in clearing the officers of all wrongdoing, has also been announced for Monday’s police assault at Republic Square.

Behind these empty statements, Macron, who hailed fascist dictator Petain as a “great soldier” in 2018, is rapidly building an authoritarian police state, and moving to grant the police impunity for their violence against the population. The assault of Michel has only underscored the significance of the government’s “global security” law, passed by the National Assembly on Monday, which criminalizes filming police in public places, on the basis of subjective criteria that the police fear they may be physically or psychologically harmed as a result of the video.

The government is now attempting to counter mass opposition to the law with the announcement that it has appointed a special commission to “re-write” the relevant Article 24 before the law is submitted to the Senate in January. A demonstration today against the law was banned by police, but the ban was overturned by the administrative court last night, allowing the protest to proceed.

The latest police outrages and the government’s law have been criticized by the Socialist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France, and the Greens. All of these parties support the buildup of a police state in France, having backed the two-year state of emergency imposed under the Socialist Party government of François Hollande.

Their fear is that Macron’s open turn toward a dictatorship will trigger an explosion of working class opposition. Voicing these fears, Le Monde published an editorial yesterday, “Police: A grave crisis of command,” warning: “Gérald Darmanin, chosen by the President of the Republic to appeal to conservative voters, is threatening to drag the country into a terribly dangerous spiral of unrest, aggravated by the many tensions tied to the lock-down.”

The editorial absurdly presents police violence as a problem of “leadership,” and its proposal amounts to a call to replace the internal police control organization with a “control organization that is truly independent.”

In reality, Macron’s drive to a police state is part of a turn toward authoritarian forms of rule by capitalist governments around the world. It is driven by the tremendous growth of social inequality that has been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic and the preparations of the ruling class to brutally suppress opposition in the working class. For the past two years, Macron’s police have beaten thousands of “yellow vest” protesters and striking workers, shot dozens of eyes out with rubber bullets, and blown off hands with stun grenades.

The fact that this repression has been directed at the entire working class demonstrates that police violence is fundamentally a product of class, not racial, oppression.

The latest assault on Michel appears to have been motivated at least in part by racism, which is deliberately cultivated in the police forces by the ruling class, where there is a strong base of support for the neo-fascist right. The cultivation of fascistic police aims to ensure that these forces are capable of brutal violence against the entire working population.

Moreover, countless similar incidents have taken place against workers of all ethnicities. On January 3, police killed Cédric Chouviat, a white delivery driver, during a traffic stop, by kneeling on him as he cried “I’m suffocating”—the same phrase used by George Floyd before he was killed by police earlier this year in the United States. In June, Farida, a white health worker of Arabic background, was filmed being violently assaulted by police during a protest demanding improved health funding.

Australian paramedics under mounting pressure

Margaret Rees


Paramedics are in a frontline profession subject to the danger of coronavirus infection, with at least coronavirus 42 of them contracting the virus during Victoria’s recent “second wave.” Even before the pandemic, however, paramedicine was recognised as one of the most dangerous jobs in Australia.

An ambulance in Sydney earlier this year (Credit: Wikimedia, Helitak430)

According to Safer Work Australia, the government body responsible for workplace health and safety and compensation, paramedics had the highest rate of injury of any occupation prior to the COVID-19 crisis.

Consequently, these workers are subject to extremely high stress levels, and many face serious physical and mental health issues.

One 2020 academic paper from South Australia’s Flinders University examined the mental health and wellbeing of paramedics compared with other professions. It discovered they have far higher rates of mental health disorders, workplace violence and injuries, fatigue, sleep disorders and suicidal ideation than other jobs.

The study outlined patterns of frustration, helplessness, trepidation and feelings of being overwhelmed, leading to compassion fatigue and self-blame. Shift work reduced the time for recovery and had a negative impact on family roles, disrupting the structure of home life. Most paramedics work a mixture of day and night shifts, which is known to be one of the most damaging work patterns.

The paper described the workplace as resembling a “big brother” environment, in which relations with management were increasingly strained.

On-road staff felt that managers failed to understand, appreciate or respond to the distress of critical incidents.

Particular case types, such as the death of a baby or child, could contribute to significant distress. The strategy to cope was often to “compartmentalise” the event and associated emotions.

Given the workload pressures and performance indicators governing their jobs, the paramedics often had no time to deal with the effects of critical events.

The report explained: “In Australia, historically, these services had their origins in paramilitary culture, with a strong hierarchical chain of command, which in turn prizes stoicism in the face of adversity and compliance, with little sense of worker control or clinical autonomy, but also a high level of teamwork, camaraderie and public service.”

International studies also identified the adverse psychological, physical and social effects that can ensue for ambulance personnel. An English study has shown that a “mixture of high intensity and mundane work often created a difficult shift for paramedics’ mindset, with little respite or time for debriefing and dealing with administrative requirements during periods of intense emotions.”

That is, it can be extremely stressful to alternate a period of high intensity work such as dealing with injured or dangerously ill patients, and then to have to turn to operational and bureaucratic work requirements, with little time in between.

Often the culture of metrics (key performance indicators used by managers) meant that on-road staff become more concerned about the speed in which a job was performed, than caring for the patient.

Recently the issue of workplace culture came to the fore in Ambulance Victoria. Rasa Piggott is an advanced life support paramedic who wrote an open letter to Ambulance Victoria’s board chair Ken Lay alleging “active discrimination and instances of abuse in our workplace” and “horrible instances of sexual misconduct.”

Piggott called for an independent review and cited instances of “managers advising staff not to get pregnant if wanting to pursue a higher role, stating that they will not be considered for promotion if they plan on becoming pregnant and attempting to demote a person to a junior role for taking parental leave.”

Many paramedics have reported that most male paramedics supported gender equality, but a “boys club” culture was entrenched in some long-standing pockets of management.

Complaints cited by the Victorian Ambulance Union also related to the ‘culture” fostered by Ambulance Victoria and “the feeling that current or prospective MICA [intensive care] paramedics cannot voice their concerns due to fear of vilification, victimisation or other differential treatment.”

Ambulance Victoria had to resort to engaging the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission to investigate the allegations of bullying.

Management treatment of staff also came under fire on social media. One female paramedic wrote on Facebook: “You are my hero Rasa. Well done, young lady. I’ve put up with this for over 20 years. I love what I do. I’m proud to be a paramedic. But it has been the most stressful career I’ve ever had. Not due to the work, but dealing with management.”

These allegations highlight the range of problems faced by paramedics.

The issue of shift work was the subject of a 2018 national study, which found that of 18,600 employees, 57.8 were doing rotating shift work, 20.2 percent had a regular daytime schedule and 27.1 percent would often return to work with less than a 12 hour break.

The same survey revealed that 6.5 percent had suicidal thoughts and three percent had suicide plans.

Another national study of 893 paramedics in 2018 found that 55.9 percent suffered total burnout, 43.4 percent suffered patient related burnout, 62.7 percent suffered work related burnout and 69.1 percent suffered personal related burnout.

These figures make clear that problems with the workplace culture in Victoria are not confined to that state, but are prevalent nationally. The emphasis on productivity, regardless of the human consequences, has created a crisis everywhere.

Above all, the plight of paramedics is the outcome of the gutting of public healthcare by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, at the state and federal levels. As part of a broader onslaught on social spending and working class conditions, they have refused to provide the necessary funding for paramedics and every other aspect of the health system, while presiding over a massive growth in the wealth and profits of the corporate and financial elite.