John Kampfner tells Naresh Fernandes how we made money and lost our liberty.
A couple of years ago, British journalist John Kampfner began to notice a disturbing phenomenon: across the world, people seemed quite willing to surrender political freedoms in exchange for the promise of economic prosperity. To test his hypothesis, he began to talk to people around the planet, in countries as different as Singapore and Russia, India and Italy.
“We have taken to valuing our sense of well-being as the ultimate liberty,” Kampfner told Time Out in an email interview. “We feel deprived if we cannot exercise our material rights. For us all, consumerism has become the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain.”
Why are you alarmed by the willingness of citizens to give up political freedoms if their governments guarantee their standard of living?
I call it the pact. The model is Singapore, the state in which I was born. I am constantly struck by the number of people I know who are keen to defend a system that requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a very good material life. The pact also belongs to the so-called democracies, such as the USA and the UK, and even India, the world’s most populous democracy. It is played out in different circumstances and cultures. We choose different freedoms that we are prepared to cede. We do so at our peril.
You note that the gap between democracies and autocracies is narrowing. What evidence is there of this happening?
Whatever systems we happen to live under, our priorities are more similar than we would ever want to admit. We give up what I call “public freedoms” – the freedom to participate actively in the public/political realm – in return for our newly-treasured “private freedoms”. These freedoms are the freedom to lead our lives as we wish – to wear what we want, live where we want, sleep with whom we want, own property, run businesses, and most important of all, to make and spend money.
With the threat of global terrorism looming over us, surely governments are justified in enacting stronger anti-terror laws? How else could they contain such an enormous threat?
For sure, the events of 9/11 in the US or 7/7 in the UK left an indelible mark. Tony Blair said in 2005 after the outrages in London that “the rules of the game have changed”. India is no stranger to terrorism. The events of 26 November, 2008 posed a terrible challenge. The initial security reaction was tardy and inefficient, but in the longer term India emerged with a creditable mixture of improved security but also restraint.
The initial fury of wealthy Indians at the Mumbai bombings arose from the realisation that their pact had been broken. They had enjoyed a comfortable relationship with politicians and the state. They would demand little from the state and receive little in return, except the right to avoid taxation. The elite had seceded from active politics and had been happy to do so. They never asked questions of the security forces when violence was meted out to the less fortunate. But what they did not expect, or take kindly to, was that their lives would be put at risk by incompetents at the Home Ministry, police department, army or intelligence services.
Many Indians are quick to identify China as a country that’s managed to raise its standard of living very rapidly, contending that it’s probably worth it for us to give up a few freedoms if we could improve our lives so quickly. But are the Chinese people happy with this trade-off?
On the great question of Chindia, I like to quote an observation from the Indian journalist Pallavi Aiyer. “While in China the Communist Party derived its legitimacy from delivering growth, in India a government derived its legitimacy simply from having been voted in,” she writes. “The legitimacy of democracy in many ways absolved Indian governments from the necessity of performing. The Chinese Communist Party could afford no such luxury.” China’s pact is strikingly different, therefore. There seems little thirst, particularly among the growing wealthy classes, for breaking the political stranglehold of the Communist Party. As long as it ensures stability and provides steady economic growth, then that provides a necessary and so far sufficient level of liberty.
India is growing at around seven per cent a year but approximately 37 per cent of the population lives under the poverty line. Yet India’s middle classes barely seem to be exercised by this. How do you explain their indifference?
Politics and business have worked together to use power as a means of enrichment. The comfortable classes, the people over the past 20 years who could have used the country’s new wealth to engineer improvements, either turned a blind eye to society’s failings or played their part in them. They could have been active in the public realm and sought great social justice and redistribution of the nation’s resources, without having to sacrifice very much. Unlike in authoritarian states, they would not have been punished for causing trouble. They chose not to. The level of complicity, therefore, is higher.
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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