Survival in Stalin's Russia

Harsh Kapoor Wed, 06 Jul 2016 15:00:03 -0700

South Asia Citizens Wire - 7 July 2016 - No. 2903 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Terror attack in a Dhaka Cafe - Select Editorials from
Newspapers in South Asia
2. Bangladesh: Horror and Sorrow in Dhaka - Tahmima Anam / The sinister
manifestations of history - Subir Bhaumik
3. Pakistan: Discrimination based on religion faced by a media worker - PILER's
letter to Information Minister, cc to DG of APP
4. The Brexit working class counter-revolution: British lefties who are
rejoicing today risk being engulfed by a right-wing firestorm | Harsh Kapoor
5. India: Should RSS Volunteers be permitted to join Government Services? | Ram
Puniyani
6. India: "And then the government fell. But the books continued!" An interview
with Romila Thapar
7. 1991 report on the exploitation of professional blood donors by the blood
banking system in India released in digital format
8. India: Narendra Dabholkar - A champion of rationalism

9. Recent On Communalism Watch:

- UK: Campaigners Urge Government to Fully and Impartially Investigate Sharia
bodies - Press release from secular feminists in Britain
- India: Modi Govt Reshuffle Nine out of 20 the ministers upgraded and inducted
today are from the RSS
- Bangladesh has degenerated into an Islamic fundamentalist country and
government is responsible for it
- India: Meet the "Muslim rapist" - Hindutva propaganda machine's latest
product (Aditya Menon)
- Announcement : Public event in Calcutta 'Bangladesh: Humanity, Free thinking
under attack' (9 July 2016)
- After every gruesome crime undertaken in the name of Islam there are the
inevitable calls for a "moderate Islam"
- Bangladesh: Dhaka attack - Why denouncing the terrorists as being untrue to
Islam is completely ineffectual (Ikhtisad Ahmed)
- Bangladesh: What Kind of Prime Minister Are You, Sheikh Hasina? | Javed Anand

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Letter from Kabul : Afghanistan’s Theorist-in-Chief | George Packer
11. India: Avoiding the zombie city algorithm | Anant Maringanti
12. Review: Shodhan on Sharafi, Mitra, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia:
Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947
13. Following the Brexit vote, I fear tolerant Britain is lost for ever |
Gilane Tawadros
14. Review: Elena Osokina. Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art
of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927-1941

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1. BANGLADESH: TERRROR ATTACK IN A DHAKA CAFE - SELECT EDITORIALS FROM
NEWSPAPERS IN SOUTH ASIA
========================================
Select editorials in daily newspapers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India on the
killings of people in a cafe in the Gulshan district of Dhaka.
http://www.sacw.net/article12855.html

========================================
2. BANGLADESH: HORROR AND SORROW IN DHAKA - TAHMIMA ANAM / THE SINISTER
MANIFESTATIONS OF HISTORY - SUBIR BHAUMIK
========================================
In June, in some desperation to bring to book those behind the seemingly
unending series of murders, the Bangladesh police had launched a nationwide
crackdown on Islamist radicals believed to be responsible for the murder of
secular bloggers, publishers, writers, Hindu priests and Buddhist monks,
Christian pastors and even Baul music exponents. More than 14,000 suspects were
nabbed within a week.
http://www.sacw.net/article12856.html

========================================
3. PAKISTAN: DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RELIGION FACED BY A MEDIA WORKER - PILER'S
LETTER TO INFORMATION MINISTER, CC TO DG OF APP
========================================
Letter from Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research to the Federal
Minister for Information and Broadcasting with a copy to the Director General
of Associated Press Corporation
http://www.sacw.net/article12842.html

========================================
4. THE BREXIT WORKING CLASS COUNTER-REVOLUTION: BRITISH LEFTIES WHO ARE
REJOICING TODAY RISK BEING ENGULFED BY A RIGHT-WING FIRESTORM | Harsh Kapoor
========================================
Brexit is a triumph of national chauvinism and is damaging to the left
http://www.sacw.net/article12853.html

========================================
5. INDIA: SHOULD RSS VOLUNTEERS BE PERMITTED TO JOIN GOVERNMENT SERVICES? | Ram
Puniyani
========================================
An old controversy resurfaced lately. After the alleged denial of government
jobs to candidates linked to the RSS
http://www.sacw.net/article12852.html

========================================
6. INDIA: "AND THEN THE GOVERNMENT FELL. BUT THE BOOKS CONTINUED!" AN INTERVIEW
WITH ROMILA THAPAR
========================================
Violence against Muslims, against socialists, against intellectuals, against
women – India has been witnessing a pattern of tragic events since the coming
to power of the right wing government, whose actions and policies scream out
‘Intolerance!'. The country's citizens and its media, deemed as the fourth
pillar of democracy, have been taking sides without entirely understanding the
situation. We interviewed Professor Emeritus Romila Thapar on these issues.
http://www.sacw.net/article12828.html

========================================
7. 1991 REPORT ON THE EXPLOITATION OF PROFESSIONAL BLOOD DONORS BY THE BLOOD
BANKING SYSTEM IN INDIA RELEASED IN DIGITAL FORMAT
========================================
The AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) is releasing the digitized version of
its report titled “Blood of the Professionals” – a report on the exploitation
of professional blood donors by the blood banking system in India.
http://www.sacw.net/article12849.html

========================================
8. INDIA: NARENDRA DABHOLKAR - A CHAMPION OF RATIONALISM
========================================
Three years ago, atheist and rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar was shot in the
back of the head from close-range and in broad daylight by motorcycle-borne
assailants when he was on his morning walk. He was 67.
http://www.sacw.net/article12818.html

========================================
9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================

-> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

========================================
10. LETTER FROM KABUL : AFGHANISTAN’S THEORIST-IN-CHIEF
by George Packer
========================================
(The New Yorker, July 4, 2016 Issue)

President Ashraf Ghani is an expert on failed states. Can he save his country
from collapse?

Ghani is Afghanistan’s Jimmy Carter—a visionary technocrat who has alienated
potential allies and has no feel for politics. Photograph by Adam Ferguson
for The New Yorker

Ashraf Ghani, the President of Afghanistan, wakes up before five every morning
and reads for two or three hours. He makes his way daily through an inch-thick
stack of official documents. He reads proposals by applicants competing for the
job of mayor of Herat and chooses the winner. He reads presentations by
forty-four city engineers for improvements to Greater Kabul. He has been known
to write his own talking points and do his own research on upcoming visitors.
Before meeting the Australian foreign minister, he read the Australian
government’s white paper on foreign aid. He read four hundred pages of the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report on the day of its release, and
the next day he apologized to General John Campbell, the American commander in
Afghanistan, for having not quite finished it. He reads books on the transition
from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, on the Central Asian
enlightenment of a thousand years ago, on modern warfare, on the history of
Afghanistan’s rivers. He lives and works in the Arg—a complex of palaces inside
a nineteenth-century fortress in central Kabul—where books, marked up in
pencil, lie open on desks and tables.

Two decades ago, Ghani lost most of his stomach to cancer. He has to eat small
portions of food, such as packets of dates, half a dozen times a day. He
sometimes takes digestive breaks, resting—and reading—on a narrow bed in an
alcove behind his office in Gul Khana Palace. Or he sits with a book in his
favorite spot, under a chinar tree in the garden of Haram Sarai Palace, where
the library of the late King Zahir is preserved. During the Presidency of
Ghani’s predecessor, Hamid Karzai, the library was a dusty pile of antique
volumes. After Ghani took office, in September, 2014, he organized the royal
collection. Whereas Karzai filled the palace with visitors and received
petitioners during meals, Ghani often eats alone. After twelve years in power,
Karzai and his family walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars from
Afghan and international coffers. Ghani’s net worth, according to his
declaration of assets, is about four million dollars. It consists largely of
his house, on four acres in western Kabul, and his collection of seven thousand
books.

A trained anthropologist who spent years doing field work for the World Bank,
Ghani has been in and out of the Afghan government ever since the overthrow of
the Taliban, in 2001. His abiding concern has been how to create viable
institutions in poor countries overrun with violence, focussing on states that
can’t enforce laws, create fair markets, collect taxes, provide services, or
keep citizens safe. In 2006, Ghani and his longtime collaborator, a British
human-rights lawyer named Clare Lockhart, started a consultancy, the Institute
for State Effectiveness, in Washington, D.C. Two years later, they published
“Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.” It
describes the core functions of a state and suggests such measures as tapping
the expertise of citizens in building institutions. By then, the theme was no
longer a technical subject. The chaos in Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan threatened global security.

Theorists are rarely given such a dramatic chance to put their ideas into
practice. Afghanistan has been at war ever since the Soviet invasion of 1979,
when Ghani was a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate at Columbia University.
Most of the country, including several provincial capitals, is threatened by
the Taliban, even as the insurgency devolves into a network of narco-criminal
enterprises. In sixty per cent of Afghanistan’s three hundred and ninety-eight
districts, state control doesn’t exist beyond a lonely government building and
a market. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have established a presence in the
east. Afghanistan can’t police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary
and assistance to insurgents. (In May, Mullah Mansour, the Taliban leader, was
killed by an American drone strike while driving from Zahedan, Iran, where he
reportedly consulted with Iranian officials, to his base, in Quetta, Pakistan,
with a fraudulent Pakistani passport.) Afghanistan’s finances depend on foreign
aid and opium. Corruption is endemic. After the departure of a hundred and
twenty-seven thousand foreign troops, in 2014, the economy collapsed,
unemployment soared, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans abandoned the
country. Ghani is the elected President of a failed state.

A slight man with a short gray beard and deep-set eyes under a bald dome, Ghani
bears a resemblance to Gandhi, except that he does not seem like a man at
peace. He hunches over and winces, head tilted, and when he gestures he keeps
his elbows pinned to his sides. He laughs at odd moments, and he can’t control
his temper. Young loyalists surround him, but he has alienated powerful allies.
Isolated in the Arg, Ghani works killingly long hours and buries himself in
projects that should be left to subordinates. “Because he’s been an academic
for a very long time, he just can’t help a mode of working that requires him to
study and analyze every problem,” a senior Afghan official said. “If he asked
for a file on garbage collection in Kabul, and he received a binder of five
hundred pages, he would finish it that night—and then take copious notes.”

Whereas Karzai talked warmly with guests for hours, leaving everyone happy,
Ghani disdains small talk, and visitors come away feeling intimidated or
slighted. Once, in Kabul, the President scheduled fifteen minutes for Ismail
Khan, a powerful warlord from western Afghanistan. Jelani Popal, one of Ghani’s
closest advisers, told him, “See him for as long as he wants or don’t see him
at all—but you can’t spend just fifteen minutes.” Ghani stood firm: the corrupt
and brutal emir of Herat was worth exactly a quarter of an hour.

Ghani is a visionary technocrat who thinks twenty years ahead, with a deep
understanding of what has destroyed his country and what might yet save it.
“He’s incorruptible,” the senior official said. “He wants to transform the
country. And he can do it. But it seems as if everything is arrayed against
him.” Ghani is the kind of reformer that the American government desperately
needed as a partner during the erratic later years of Karzai’s rule. Yet he has
few admirers in the State Department, and in Kabul the élite don’t hide their
contempt. They call Ghani an arrogant micromanager and say that he has no close
friends, no feel for politics—that he is the leader of a country that exists
only in his own mind. Ghani is Afghanistan’s Jimmy Carter.

Many observers don’t expect Ghani to complete his term, which ends in 2019, and
2016 is described as a year of national survival. “This is the year of living
dangerously,” Scott Guggenheim, an American economic adviser to Ghani, said.
“He’ll either make it or he won’t.”

The stone walls of the Arg are fortified with concrete blast walls and
checkpoints manned by armed guards. Outside, barricades and razor wire divide
Kabul’s streets into the private armed encampments where Afghan élites and
foreign diplomats live. The public must steer clear, and the city is choked
with traffic. When it rains, the rutted streets flood; when fighting in the
north cuts power lines, the streets go dark. Periodically, a suicide bomber
detonates a murderous payload. American officials no longer risk driving—from
dawn to dark, helicopters clatter over the U.S. Embassy compound. Smelling
weakness, Afghan politicians scheme in lavish compounds built with stolen
money, each convinced that he should be inside the Arg. In the mountains around
Kabul, the Taliban are just a few miles away.

“My father’s mother really had a profound influence on me,” Ghani said. “She
literally began her day with an hour of reading. But the most fundamental
impact was education.” We were seated in facing chairs, in a ceremonial room on
the second floor of Gul Khana Palace. The soaring walls and pillars were of
green onyx, the doors of inlaid walnut. Ghani, by contrast, looked like a
well-off shopkeeper, in a traditional dark-gray shalwar kameez and a black
coat, conveying that he is a native son and drawing a firm line between his
current life and the decades he spent in American universities and with global
institutions.

In 2011, Ghani and his daughter, Mariam—an artist who lives in
Brooklyn—published a pamphlet titled “Afghanistan: A Lexicon,” a
mini-encyclopedia that chronicles cycles of reform, reaction, and chaos that
have recurred in the country. The opening entry is on Amanullah, Afghanistan’s
king from 1919 to 1929. Amanullah was the first great modernizer: he oversaw
the writing of a constitution, improved education, encouraged freedoms for
women, and planned an expansion of the capital. He also fought to make
Afghanistan’s foreign policy independent of Britain. But Amanullah offended key
elements of society, including the mullahs, and he was overthrown by tribal
leaders. Although Amanullah “accomplished a remarkable amount,” Ashraf and
Mariam Ghani wrote, he “did not succeed in permanently changing Afghanistan,
since his ultimate failure to forge a broad political consensus for his reforms
left him vulnerable to rural rebellion.” Rapid modernization undone by
conservative revolt became both template and warning for Afghan progressives,
“who have returned again and again to his unfinished project, only to succumb
to their own blind spots.”

Ghani comes from a prominent Pashtun family. His paternal grandfather, a
military commander, helped install King Nadir, who assumed power shortly after
Amanullah’s overthrow, in 1929. Ghani’s father was a senior transport official
under Nadir’s son, King Zahir, who reigned for forty years. Ghani was born in
1949. He grew up in Kabul’s old city, spending weekends and vacations riding
horses and hunting on the ancestral farm, forty miles south. He was teased at
school—he was undersized, and sometimes bent over like an old man—but he
impressed classmates with his seriousness. In 1966, his junior year of high
school, he travelled to America as an exchange student. At his new school, in
Oregon, Ghani won a student-council seat reserved for a foreigner. “The first
council meeting, we made some simple decisions,” he said. “Lo and behold, the
next week they were implemented, because the council had access to money.” The
experience shaped his thinking about development: “You can get together, you
can talk as much as you want, but if there’s not a decision-making
process—that’s where democracy really matters.”

In 1973, Ghani received a political-science degree from the American University
of Beirut, where he fell in love with Rula Saade, a Lebanese Christian. They
got engaged, and in 1974, after Ghani returned to Kabul to teach, his
prospective father-in-law paid him a visit. “You’re going to end up in politics
and you’re going to ruin my daughter’s life,” Rula’s father said. Ghani
replied, not quite truthfully, “I’m totally committed to being an academic.”
(The couple married in 1975, and, in addition to Mariam, they have a son,
Tarek.)

In July, 1973, the monarchy was overthrown by the King’s cousin Daoud, who
became Afghanistan’s first President. Daoud initially aligned himself with the
Communists and, according to the Ghani “Lexicon,” he “reiterated the flawed
model of modernization imposed from above.” In 1978, Communist troops shot
Daoud to death as he tried to hide behind a pillar in Gul Khana Palace.
Assassination followed assassination until the end of 1979, when the Soviets
invaded and the jihad began. The Arg is haunted by its murdered occupants.

In 1977, Ghani and his family left Afghanistan, and he didn’t live there again
for a quarter century. At Columbia, he completed a dissertation in cultural
anthropology. “Production and Domination: Afghanistan, 1747-1901” analyzes the
nation’s difficulty in building a centralized state in terms of its economic
backwardness. The writing is almost impenetrable: “By focusing on movements of
concomitant structures, I have attempted to isolate the systemic relations
among the changing or non-changing elements that combine to form a structure.”
The author moves between clouds of abstraction and mounds of
data—nineteenth-century irrigation methods in Herat, kinship networks in
Pashtun financial systems—without readily discernible priorities.

In the eighties, Ghani taught at Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins, and in 1991 he
became an anthropologist for the World Bank, based in Washington, D.C.
Travelling half the year, he became an expert on finance in Russia, China, and
India. “He really had a moral purpose—solving poverty for real people,” Clare
Lockhart said. “When he arrived in capital cities, he’d go to the markets to
see what people were buying and selling, then he’d go out to the provinces and
villages. He’d interview groups of miners.” Such field work was unusual for a
World Bank official. James Wolfensohn, who became president of the bank in
1995, shifted its emphasis from simply lending money to poor countries to
attempting to reduce poverty. He wanted to know why African and Latin American
countries that followed the bank’s liberalization policies remained poor. The
answer had to do with corruption, weak institutions, and ill-conceived
practices by donors. Wolfensohn ordered a review of the bank’s programs, and
Ghani submitted many blistering critiques, which made him unpopular with his
colleagues.

Meanwhile, he was preparing for a future in Afghanistan. In 1997, with the
Taliban controlling most of the country, a Columbia graduate student
interviewed Ghani at the World Bank. “When we get peace in Afghanistan, we’ll
go to New Zealand to learn best practices for raising sheep,” Ghani said.
“We’ll go to Switzerland and study hydroelectric projects.”
Afghanistan—mountains, deserts, ungoverned spaces—has always seemed to offer a
blank slate for utopian dreamers: British imperialists, hippie travellers,
Communists, Islamists, international do-gooders. Alex Thier, who worked for the
U.N. in Afghanistan in the nineties and, later, with Ghani in Kabul, described
him as an “N.G.O.-style revolutionary, as if he grew up in a cadre of the World
Bank rather than in the Communist Party.” To be a visionary is, in some ways,
to be depersonalized, to refuse to see what’s in front of one’s face.

On September 11, 2001, Ghani was at his desk in Washington, and he knew
immediately that everything was about to change for Afghanistan. He drafted a
five-step plan for a political transition to a broad-based Afghan government
that could be held accountable for rebuilding the country; he warned against
funding and arming the warlords who had brought Afghanistan to ruin and the
Taliban to power. During the American-led war against the Taliban, a small
group of experts—including Lockhart, the Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, and
the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, then the U.N. special envoy for
Afghanistan—met at Ghani’s house outside Washington. That December, the group’s
work influenced the Bonn Agreement, which mapped steps toward representative
rule, while leaving unresolved the conflict between Ghani’s vision of a modern
state and the interests of regional power brokers.

Six months later, Karzai became Afghanistan’s leader. Ghani’s first job in the
new administration was to coördinate and track foreign aid. He believed that
Afghans needed to set their own priorities for development rather than be at
the mercy of the conflicting agendas of foreign countries and international
agencies. Some Afghans and Westerners saw Ghani, after decades in the U.S., as
a foreigner in his own land. But he is a prickly nationalist who would have
been an egghead anywhere. He had a particular animus toward Western aid
officials who had plenty of money and power but scant knowledge or humility. He
once dressed down a contingent from the U.S. Agency for International
Development for their incompetence. Ghani was among the first to foresee that a
flood of foreign aid could enrich foreign contractors and turn officials
corrupt while doing little for ordinary Afghans.

With Hanif Atmar, the Minister of Rural Development, Ghani created the National
Solidarity Program—grants in amounts of twenty thousand to sixty thousand
dollars for twenty-three thousand Afghan villages, largely funded by the World
Bank. (The idea came from similar World Bank programs that Ghani had studied in
Indonesia and India.) Afghan villagers were required to elect a council of men
and women, devise their own goals—such as clean water or a new school—and make
public their accounting figures. In one case, thirty-seven villages pooled
their money to build a maternity hospital. Clare Lockhart met families just
returned from exile in Iran, living in animal-skin shelters. One woman,
describing the importance of the grant, told her, “It’s not about the money.”

“Don’t tell her that,” another villager said. “She’ll take the money away.”

“I don’t have that authority,” Lockhart explained.

The first woman finished her thought: “It’s that we’re trusted to do this.”

The N.S.P. was one of Afghanistan’s most successful and least corrupt programs.
A new school cost a sixth of one built with a U.S.A.I.D. contract. Paul
O’Brien, an Irishman who served as an adviser to Ghani, said Ghani understood
that “the key to development is strong domestic institutions that can regulate
all the actors around them, including international do-gooders.” When Ghani
challenged foreigners to tell him what accountability measures they wanted in
return for giving Afghan institutions control of the money and the agenda,
“they wouldn’t do it,” O’Brien said. Donors had brought their “development army
in all its glory, and that meant outputs and contracts and boxes checked.”

Instead of sending money to local communities through Afghan channels, donors
like U.S.A.I.D. bid out contracts to large international companies, which in
turn hired subcontractors and private security companies, none of which had a
long-term stake in Afghanistan. In a 2005 ted talk on failed states, Ghani
called such programs “the ugly face of the developed world to the developing
countries,” adding, “Tens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on
building capacity with people who are paid up to fifteen hundred dollars a day,
who are incapable of thinking creatively or organically.”

The National Solidarity Program didn’t get to write Afghanistan’s future. Some
estimate that during the peak years of foreign spending on Afghanistan only ten
to twenty cents of every aid dollar reached the intended beneficiaries. Waste
on a scale of several hundred billion dollars is the work of many authors, but
the U.S. government was among the chief ones.

In the summer of 2002, Karzai named Ghani Minister of Finance. The Ministries
of Interior, Defense, and Foreign Affairs were more obvious bases for building
personal power, but Ghani put in twenty-hour days, holding staff meetings at 7
a.m., in a building with shattered windows and no heat. He introduced
anti-corruption measures, established a centralized revenue system, and created
a new currency, supporting it with the traditional hawala network of money
trading. He urged his staff to take on the drug and land mafias that were
infiltrating the state, saying, “We need to hit them everywhere, so they won’t
have the space to establish networks.” This was the blank-slate phase of
post-Taliban Afghanistan, and Ghani became the most effective figure in the new
government. “The golden period of the Karzai rule was when Ashraf Ghani was
Finance Minister,” Jelani Popal, a deputy in the Finance Ministry, said.
“Karzai was a people person and kept the integrity of the state and society,
but Ghani was the de-facto Prime Minister and the main engine of reform.”

Ghani’s temper, perhaps inflamed by the effects of his stomach cancer, became
notorious. He shouted at Afghan staff and Western advisers alike. Zalmay
Khalilzad, then the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, had known him for
decades—they were in college together in Beirut—and he challenged Ghani: “Why
do you have such a bad temper?” Ghani denied it, Khalilzad repeated stories
he’d heard, and they went back and forth until Ghani slammed his fist on a
table and exploded: “I don’t have a temper!”

Ghani’s combination of probity and arrogance antagonized the entire Karzai
cabinet. When he discovered that the Minister of Defense, the Tajik warlord
Mohammed Fahim, was padding his payroll with tens of thousands of “ghost”
troops, Ghani slashed Fahim’s budget. Ghani later heard that Fahim went to the
Arg and told Karzai that he wanted to murder Ghani—to which Karzai replied,
“There’s a very long line for killing Ashraf.”

In 2004, after being elected President, Karzai made noises about dismissing
Ghani. Lakhdar Brahimi asked Karzai, “Do you have anybody better than him?”
Karzai said no. Brahimi encouraged him to try to work with Ghani, even though
he knew that nobody in the cabinet supported Ghani, either. Brahimi asked
Ghani, “You’ve been here three years and you don’t have a friend in this
country?” Ali Jalali, then the Minister of Interior, said that Ghani had
clashed with cabinet members from the Northern Alliance, such as Fahim, in his
campaign to take power away from the warlords. Several people also told me that
Khalilzad had been competing with Ghani since their university days and
leveraged American influence over Karzai to undermine Ghani. (Khalilzad said
that he had tried to get Karzai to change his mind, but failed.) By 2005, Ghani
was gone. He later insisted that he had resigned because the government was
descending into narco-corruption.

The government lost its brightest light. “If he had stayed, Afghanistan would
be completely different today,” Popal said. Karzai, a master at keeping his
various constituencies in the tent, had no interest in the ideas that consumed
Ghani. With the American troop presence too small to secure the country, Karzai
used foreign largesse to empower local strongmen, whose behavior led to the
return of the Taliban.

Ghani briefly became chancellor of Kabul University. A former student there
remembers that he was always either yelling at groups of undergraduates or
promising things that he couldn’t deliver—a state-of-the-art library, for
example. Karzai tried repeatedly to bring Ghani back. Once, in 2008, he
summoned Ghani and Popal to the Arg. “I made a mistake,” Karzai said. “I’ll
give you more power than before.” He offered Ghani the Ministry of Interior.
Ghani refused, saying, “You are a very suspicious man. You listened to people
and fired me.” Privately, Ghani confided to Popal that he planned to run for
President against Karzai the next year. By then, Popal was in charge of the
powerful department of local governance. “I know all the districts,” he told
Ghani. “You don’t have a chance.” Ghani insisted that he could give speeches
that would mobilize millions of Afghans. “It doesn’t work that way,” Popal told
him. “You need to establish relationships.”

I met Ghani in Kabul in the spring of 2009, as the campaign was about to begin.
He had given up his American citizenship in order to run. He described a
“double failure” in Afghanistan: a failure of imagination by the international
community and a failure by Afghan élites “to be the founding fathers—and
mothers, because there are some—of a new state.” He received a group of
university students in his home, a beautiful post-and-beam structure in
traditional Nuristani style. Ghani listened to the students complain about nato
firepower killing civilians, about Afghan corruption, about American
manipulation of the election in Karzai’s favor. They didn’t know that American
officials, disillusioned with Karzai, had encouraged Ghani to run against him.
Before I left, Ghani gave me a chapan, the intricately woven coat of northern
Afghanistan, and a copy of “Fixing Failed States.” I saw no sign of a volatile
character—he was confident of his prospects.

But Popal was right: Ghani had no following, and he received a humiliating
three per cent of the vote. Karzai was reëlected amid charges of rampant voter
fraud that embittered his closest challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, and fatally
damaged his relationship with the United States. Karzai, who could not run for
a third term, withdrew into the Arg and steeped himself in conspiracy theories
about the West. A billion-dollar Ponzi scheme was exposed at the country’s
largest bank. Karzai’s final years in office were a political death agony.

During this period, Ghani was in charge of preparing Afghanistan for the
withdrawal of nato forces and the handover of military authority to the Afghan
Army by the end of 2014. The job, which was pro bono, allowed him to travel
around the country, visiting provincial governors, corps commanders, and
district police chiefs. It was a kind of listening tour, convincing him of the
people’s desire for reform.

In 2014, he ran again for President. He published a three-hundred-page campaign
manifesto, “Continuity and Change.” It was a classic Ghani production. “It is
very smart in diagnosing all these problems,” Alex Thier said. “He’s an idea
factory with all these proposals—but you don’t read it with a sense that they
will all be accomplished.” When you cut through the language, the manifesto is
a call for the empowerment of the Afghan people against corrupt élites:
“Outstanding individuals, intellectuals, women, young people, producers of
culture, workers, and other parts of society wish for change, and we want to
respond to this wish.”

Ghani stopped wearing Western suits and started using his tribal name,
Ahmadzai. He hired young campaign aides who were savvy about social media, and
he gave rousing speeches declaring that “every Afghan is equal” and that “our
masters will be the people of Afghanistan.” There were rumors that he was
taking anger-management classes.

During the campaign, Farkhunda Naderi, a female member of parliament, suggested
in a TV debate that the next President should name a woman—the first—to
Afghanistan’s high court, which has the power to nullify laws deemed contrary
to Islamic law. “Unless you get a woman on the Supreme Court, all the rights
women get are on the surface and symbolic,” she told me. Naderi had suggested
the idea to Karzai, only to be told that no woman was qualified. Karzai’s wife,
a doctor, was rarely seen in public during his years in the Arg, but Rula Ghani
was a prominent surrogate for her husband during the campaign, to the delight
of some Afghans and to the chagrin of others. During a campaign speech at a
Kabul high school, Ghani announced his intention to select a woman for the
Supreme Court. Naderi, who was in attendance, listened in disbelief. “I was
like, ‘Wow!’ He was brave to do that.”

In a naked attempt to win the votes of minority Uzbeks, Ghani selected Abdul
Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, as a candidate for Vice-President. Dostum is
accused of so many killings that he’s barred from entering the United States.
Ghani once called him “a known killer.” Naderi was forced to defend Ghani to
friends who supported human rights. “It means he’s a politician,” she told
them. “If you’re going to do something in Afghanistan, you can’t import other
people. You have to do something with the people who are here.” This had been
the dilemma for Afghan reformers ever since King Amanullah: how, when, and
whether to compromise. Ghani was showing that he, too, could play politics the
old, dirty way.

In the first round of voting, on April 5th, Ghani came in second among eight
candidates, with thirty-one per cent. Abdullah Abdullah, who had lost to Karzai
in 2009, led, with forty-five per cent. Elegant and diplomatic, Abdullah was a
familiar figure in Afghan politics. Of Pashtun and Tajik parentage, he was
identified politically with the Tajiks. Abdullah and Ghani had served together
in the first Karzai cabinet, with Abdullah as Foreign Minister, and they shared
pro-Western, pro-reform, anti-corruption views. “I’ve known Abdullah since 1995
and Ghani since 2002,” Thier said. “These guys really care. They are not
cynical, they’re not trying to turn the affairs of state to their own benefit.”
Three-quarters of the nearly seven million voters chose one of these two
candidates—evidence that, despite years of war, foreign interference, and
disappointed hopes, Afghans still wanted a modern country.

Inevitably, the runoff between Ghani and Abdullah, in June, played out along
ethnic lines, with Pashtuns—the country’s largest group—consolidating around
Ghani. When early official results showed Ghani leading, Abdullah claimed a
fraud on the scale of the 2009 election. An adviser to Abdullah blamed Karzai
and his handpicked election commissioners, saying that they wanted power to
revert to agreements among élites, with Karzai as kingmaker, if not king.

Fifteen thousand Abdullah supporters marched on the Arg to protest the
election. Ghani’s circle was equally adamant. His campaign coördinator at the
time, Hamdullah Mohib, recalls a meeting in which Ghani advisers discussed
bringing a hundred thousand people into the streets. Ghani told them, in his
didactic way, “A civil war lasts on average ten or fifteen years, and even then
they’re very hard to end—ours is still going on. I can guarantee that tomorrow,
if you march on Kabul, the first bullet will be fired. If anyone can guarantee
when the last bullet will be fired, then I’ll allow the march.”

The U.N. mission in Kabul supervised an audit. James Cunningham, the American
Ambassador at the time, recalls, “The U.N. and E.U. people really worked their
asses off, being accused every day of malfeasance by one side or the other.
There were fistfights inside hot warehouses, and lots of yelling.” The audit
showed fraud on both sides, more of it favoring Ghani than Abdullah. American
officials feared that the dispute could cause Afghanistan to fracture along
ethnic lines. In July, 2014, a document circulated in the State Department:

We should be modest about the audit mechanism—given the apparent closeness
of the election and the involvement of the chief electoral officer in fraud, it
is almost impossible that we will ever know who won . . . with sufficient
clarity to persuade his disappointed opponent. The audits are a way to buy time
for political accommodations and eventually to certify and add some credibility
to a result.

American officials spent the summer negotiating a deal between Ghani and
Abdullah. The loser would have to accept the other as President, without
conceding the final vote, and in return would be named Chief Executive
Officer—a Prime Ministerial position that doesn’t exist in the Afghan
constitution. (The suggestion came from Ghani.) The results of the audit would
not be released, to spare the defeated candidate a loss of face. Both Ghani’s
and Abdullah’s camps resisted the arrangement, each certain that it had won
outright. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment that September, there was
a strong chance that, for lack of an agreement, Karzai would stay in office or
that Abdullah and the Northern Alliance would declare a parallel government.
Daniel Feldman, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan,
who was involved in the negotiations, said, “If Karzai had stayed in, or if
there had been a parallel government, that would have been the end of our
presence in Afghanistan, and probably the end of Afghanistan—civil war on top
of the Taliban.”

By mid-September, the audit had been finished: Ghani was judged the winner. But
Abdullah wasn’t ready to concede. Secretary of State John Kerry called Ghani
from Paris; citing the audit, he said that if fraudulent votes were discounted
the gap closed significantly in Abdullah’s favor. Ghani took this to mean that
the U.S. believed he had lost an election he’d tried to steal. If he was taking
anger-management classes, they didn’t work. He summoned Feldman to his house
for a chewing-out that lasted several hours. Grudgingly, Ghani and Abdullah
accepted a compromise. On September 21st, they signed a document creating a
National Unity Government. On the crucial issue of the distribution of
political appointments, Abdullah had wanted the language to read “equal” and
Ghani “fair.” They compromised on “equitable.” Since there was no word for it
in Dari, one had to be invented: bara barguna, or “equalish.” The N.U.G. was an
act of statesmanship on both sides, but no one was happy with it. To the
public, it suggested that Afghan democracy was a back-room deal brokered by
élites and foreigners.

Ghani was inaugurated on September 29, 2014. It was the first peaceful transfer
of power in Afghanistan since 1901, but Ghani and his aides felt that he had
been forced to become something less than Afghanistan’s legitimate President.

When Ghani took office, his approval rating was above eighty per cent. Eighteen
months later, in March, when I met him in Kabul, it was twenty-three per cent.

In our interview, I asked how “Fixing Failed States” had guided him as
President. “It’s a road map for where do you begin, when you arrive, and what
you do as a leader,” Ghani answered. “One of the first things I did was to ask
my colleagues in the cabinet to prepare hundred-day action plans.” He went on,
“Organizations are accumulations of historical debris. They are not consciously
thought. So when you ask the Education Ministry ‘What’s your core function and
who’s your client?’ they laugh at you. When I say that the client is the Afghan
child—and the Ministry is an instrument, not the goal—it’s greeted with shock.
It’s a new idea.”

This thought led Ghani to expound on Mountstuart Elphinstone, a
nineteenth-century Scottish envoy and the author of “An Account of the Kingdom
of Caubul,” which described the egalitarian nature of Afghan society. From
there, Ghani’s mind jumped to the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman, Amanullah’s
grandfather, who imported the authoritarian idea of hierarchy from his years in
exile in Russia. Then, as an example of the “inherited élitism” that distorts
Afghan politics, Ghani told the story of a young man he had named Deputy
Interior Minister, who had ordered a policeman beaten for stopping his vehicle
because of a violation, and was then made to apologize on national television.
Finally, Ghani arrived at the reign of Amanullah: “I call it the unfinished
reform. A section of the élite was reformist, and then they met popular
resistance. Today, the public is unbelievably aware of the constitution, of the
world, and of its aspirations. The public is reformist.”

Seated across from Ghani, I found it hard to follow this two-hundred-year
history of Afghan élitism. In retrospect, I can see its brilliance. But it
still doesn’t seem like a road map for governing.

It was as if, after decades of thinking and reading and writing, he had to
solve all Afghanistan’s problems at once. He assumed that he had a mandate from
“society.” The élites were finished—“they’re out of touch,” he said. He began
to impose his vision on every corner of government. He retired more than a
hundred generals who had been skimming money from troop contracts. He demanded
the resignations of all governors and cabinet ministers, and announced that
nobody who had served in those capacities could do so again, thereby alienating
fifty or so political veterans in one blow. He fired forty high-level
prosecutors who had falsified their résumés. From an American-built command
center in the basement of one of his palaces, Ghani held regular
videoconference calls with his military commanders. He reviewed the portfolios
of every international donor agency. Every Saturday, he sat at a long table in
a wood-panelled room in Gul Khana Palace and chaired a committee on
procurements, spending several hours reviewing contracts to make sure that they
represented clean government. Ghani believed that doing such chores was the
only way to solve Afghanistan’s core problems.

He trusted so few people that he could find nobody to hire as his spokesman,
nobody to be mayor of Kabul. During cabinet meetings, some ministers felt so
intimidated by Ghani that they busied themselves taking notes to impress him.
Amrullah Saleh, a respected former intelligence chief, who was left out of the
administration, said, “There is a silence in his cabinet, and it’s a
treacherous silence. Ghani is not physically alone—he is intellectually alone.”

The public began hearing about ambitious projects. Ghani had become an
authority on Afghanistan’s water resources, and he announced plans for
twenty-nine dams, leaving the impression that they would be finished in two
years. After a conversation with Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister,
Ghani told aides that India’s private sector would soon be investing twenty
billion dollars in Afghanistan—a figure that seemed to come out of nowhere.
Daniel Feldman, the American Special Representative, found Ghani’s ideas
equally inspiring and implausible: “We’d walk out of meetings and say, ‘I’m not
sure what country he’s talking about. It’s not Afghanistan. It sounds like a
canton in Switzerland.’ ”

One morning in Char Chenar Palace, Ghani met with forty-four civil
servants—forty men and four women—in charge of planning a new municipality
northeast of Kabul, a variation on a project that has enticed Afghan reformers
since Amanullah. As the engineers stated their pedigrees and their areas of
expertise, Ghani jotted down notes while snacking on nuts, taking particular
pleasure in introducing aides who had gone to Harvard or who had been named
Silicon Valley’s engineer of the year. “I’ve read all the documents of the
proposals you’ve submitted,” he said. “Let’s have a discussion of them.” One by
one, the engineers and city planners presented slide shows about recycling,
parking garages, solar-powered buses, electronic databases for title deeds.
Ghani seemed perfectly happy spending a morning hearing ideas from young
technocrats. Outside the Arg, mayorless Kabul was inundated with rainwater and
uncollected garbage.

In “Fixing Failed States,” the chapter on politics is titled “Failed
Politics”—Ghani’s book supposes that politics is destructive. He doesn’t think
in terms of interests and bargains. He believes that people will act correctly
once the reasonable course is shown to them (or imposed on them). After
becoming President, Ghani all but ignored the traditional politics of
Afghanistan—tribal networks, patronage systems, strongmen.

Under Karzai, politicians came to the palace with requests for money or for
favors, and he heard them out. By one estimate, members of parliament stole a
billion to a billion and a half dollars a year. During Ghani’s first year in
office, he refused to meet with favor seekers. His chief of staff, Abdul Salam
Rahimi, made himself so inaccessible that the joke around Kabul was that you
had to call the President to see the chief of staff. Karzai used to pay the
family of a power broker named Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani more than a hundred
thousand dollars a month in “expense money” to keep its support. (Karzai denies
this.) Ghani cut off the family, and Gailani’s sons became Ghani’s enemies.
Something similar happened with Abdul Rassul Sayyaf, a former mujahid and one
of the most powerful men in Afghanistan. “His initial request was for key
ministries and provinces, so he could give them away,” one of Ghani’s advisers
told me. “He didn’t get them. He was upset. What was more upsetting was he was
no longer seen as close to power—he could no longer buy people’s loyalty.”

In Afghanistan, politics is the only path to status and power, which is why the
scramble for government jobs is so fierce. Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, a banker and
former Finance Minister, supported Ghani during the election. According to
Ahady, Ghani promised him the Foreign Ministry, but when the time came Ghani
hedged. Ahady became an opponent as well. “I’ve not promised any portfolio to
anyone,” Ghani told me. “Mr. Ahady, if his sense of commitment to this nation
is by portfolio, then he should judge himself.”

Last year, the notorious police commander of Uruzgan Province, Matiullah Khan,
was killed, and tribal elders came to Kabul to discuss his replacement. Ghani
initially wouldn’t see them, but his advisers insisted. The elders wanted the
job to go to Matiullah Khan’s brother. Ghani said that he would seek the best
candidate, and later rejected their choice. In the following months, nearly two
hundred security posts in the province fell to the Taliban as policemen changed
their flags and switched sides.

Ghani was capable of giving in to political reality. He allowed two strongmen
to stay on—Atta Mohamed Noor, the governor of Balkh Province, in the north, and
Abdul Razziq, the police chief of Kandahar—even though they were known for
corruption and human-rights violations. They were essential partners in the
fight against the Taliban, and under American pressure Ghani yielded.

One of Ghani’s young aides told him, “People say you’re not doing politics.”

“What kind of politics?” Ghani asked.

“You’re not meeting leaders, members of parliament, mujahideen.”

“It’s by choice that I don’t.”

“Why?” the aide asked. “These political élites are attacking you, and you’re
losing political capital you need for reforms.”

“If I meet them, they will be all over me,” Ghani replied. “First, they’ll ask
for my fingers, then my hands, then my legs. We will engage only if the
discourse changes. When the time comes, you will see me meeting with them.”

Ghani’s intransigence aroused so much resentment that he couldn’t get
parliament to approve some of his key appointments. Until recent weeks, he had
no intelligence chief and no confirmed Defense Minister. When he named a
candidate to be the first female Supreme Court justice, parliament narrowly
voted her down. Predictably, the National Unity Government failed to work. The
signed agreement included no specifics on the distribution of appointments, and
Abdullah and Ghani vetoed each other’s choices, or one of them held the process
hostage until the other gave in. Ghani’s candidate for Attorney General was
blocked while Abdullah’s camp tried to get one of its own hired for Minister of
Interior. One of Abdullah’s top aides, a diplomat named Omar Samad, was
appointed Ambassador to Belgium, the E.U., and nato. In April, Samad was about
to travel to Brussels when the President’s office sent him a letter withdrawing
nato from the portfolio. Samad rejected the deal and left Kabul to be with his
family in Washington. “Tiny power struggles are going on,” Samad told me. “It’s
a game of domination.”

The paralysis in Kabul so concerned Washington that President Barack Obama
chided both leaders in a videoconference call in March, telling Abdullah, “The
political agreement that you signed with President Ghani, as far as we know,
did not give you veto power.” The Attorney General–Interior Minister swap
finally went through. But Ghani’s advisers remained frustrated, blaming the
N.U.G. for their inability to carry out their agenda. It’s a view that commands
little sympathy in Washington.

Ghani retains the loyalty of a few protégés, among them a man in his early
thirties named Hamdullah Mohib. His parents had sent him to Britain in 2000, at
the age of sixteen, in order to avoid conscription by the Taliban. Arriving at
Heathrow without papers or money, he was taken on by a social-services agency
as an unaccompanied minor. Alone in London, Mohib worked his way through
college and graduate school, studying computer engineering. In 2008, he heard
about a lecture at the London School of Economics by an Afghan politician who
had written a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Mohib arranged to have the
author speak to an Afghan student association in London. As Mohib and his
friends waited for their guest to arrive, they went outside to hold parking
places for the twenty-five-car entourage they expected. “I saw a man carrying
his laptop bag, walking up the sidewalk,” Mohib recalls. “I was impressed. And
then when he started talking—I’d never heard an Afghan politician talk like
this. The others—it was all a show. And here was a man, it was all substance.
He didn’t talk about himself. It was about Afghanistan and what we could do to
fix it.”

Mohib worked on Ghani’s unsuccessful 2009 campaign, and in 2014 he became a top
adviser. After the election, Ghani made Mohib his deputy chief of staff, then
named him Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United States. The appointment
rankled senior politicians, as if Ghani had given the post to an errand boy.
Ghani was signalling the eclipse of the generation of Afghans who had made
their names fighting the Soviets and one another.

“This is the critical time in our country’s history—my generation understands
that,” Mohib said. “We either build systems and institutions that will protect
my family and other people’s families, and good people will rise to the top—or
we will lose, and the corrupt mafia win. If they win, it will be fiefdoms and
the same families passing power from one generation to the next.”

One night, I had dinner in Kot-e-Baghcha Palace with Scott Guggenheim, the
American economic adviser to Ghani. He worked with Ghani at the World Bank and,
in 2002, helped create the National Solidarity Program. Guggenheim, a
gregarious sixty-year-old who favors Indonesian shirts, was now living
virtually alone, amid servants, in the palace. Heads of state had been invited
to use it as a guest house, but almost none of them would stay overnight in
Kabul. Guggenheim was given the room where, in 1979, a Communist leader was
said to have been smothered in his bed.

Over dinner, Guggenheim said, “Ashraf’s biggest problem is not that he’s a bad
politician but that he has a twenty-five-year vision and everyone thinks it
means next year. He throws out completely unrealistic dates as placeholders.”
Guggenheim described the terrible hand that had been dealt to Ghani, who took
office amid the withdrawal of nearly all foreign troops. Afghanistan’s legal
economy depended on U.S. bases and contracts, and after the withdrawal
unemployment reached forty per cent—a disaster that the World Bank
underestimated so drastically that donors hadn’t earmarked money for an
emergency jobs program. American spending in Afghanistan went from about a
hundred billion dollars in 2012 to half that last year. At the same time, the
Afghan Army had to assume full responsibility for fighting a resurgent Taliban,
with fewer weapons. Guggenheim compared the start of Ghani’s Presidency with
Obama’s in 2009—“but with John Boehner as his Vice-President.” Hopelessness
returned among Afghans, and a hundred and fifty-four thousand of them emigrated
to Germany last year. Ghani chastised citizens for fleeing their country.

The Americans, Guggenheim went on, wanted Ghani to pursue incompatible paths:
to fight corruption while keeping the corrupt Old Guard in the fold. Few people
in Kabul could say what America’s policy in Afghanistan was. “Ask any senior
U.S. statesman: Is there any strategy at all, besides withdrawal?” Guggenheim
said. “They were so focussed on that unity government, getting it to hold
together, they forgot about having an effective government.”

Around Kabul, people were waiting to see if the government would fall. Peace
talks that Ghani had initiated with Pakistan were going nowhere. Afghanistan’s
double-dealing neighbor had been unable, or unwilling, to bring the Taliban to
the table. Why would Pakistan negotiate an end to the war when it was close to
securing its goal—an Afghanistan so weakened by the Taliban that it would
become a client state? The fighting season was expected to be worse than ever.
A Western diplomat took out a map and showed me Taliban positions north of
Kabul, along a strategic highway in Baghlan Province. “If Baghlan falls to the
Taliban, they’re very quickly on their way to Kabul,” the diplomat said. The
Afghan Army would concentrate its forces on defending provincial capitals while
ceding rural areas, but this meant that the government would keep losing
ground. At the American Embassy, officials were said to be reading cables sent
from the Embassy in Saigon in 1975, just before the American evacuation of
South Vietnam.

The Afghan Army is constantly on the defensive, suffering heavy casualties.
Without the continued presence of American troops in the country, it would very
likely collapse. In a return to “the Great Game” of the nineteenth century,
Afghanistan would be exploited by its neighbors—Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China,
and India. “We need what’s called a ‘hurting stalemate,’ ” another Western
official told me. “Because there are élites in Kabul and Islamabad and
Rawalpindi who shop in the same malls in Dubai and are happy for the war to
grind on.” He added, “Over ten years, we’ve gone from trying to bring good
governance and security and development and rule of law to survival. . . .
There’s still a lot of ways the government could fall.” He mentioned the
possibility of widespread public unrest. Last November, after the Islamic State
decapitated seven Hazara civilians in southern Afghanistan, thousands of
citizens nearly overran the Arg, and some palace officials imagined themselves
going the way of their predecessors.

The other path for Ghani’s fall is political. Recently, he has been more
willing to play by the old rules—for example, he named Gailani to the sinecure
position of chairman of the High Peace Council. But the powerful men Ghani has
angered are plotting their way back into power. The agreement signed nearly two
years ago by Ghani and Abdullah called for electoral reforms, local elections,
and a constitutional assembly to be completed by September of this year, in
order to enshrine Abdullah’s job in the constitution. None of this has
happened, or will anytime soon, because of political infighting and the
war—giving Ghani’s enemies an opening to denounce the government’s legitimacy.
Karzai, who meets regularly with the opposition, is said to advocate the
convening of a loya jirga, a traditional assembly, which could lead to Ghani’s
ouster and the naming of a new President. Umer Daudzai, Karzai’s former chief
of staff—who had been the point man for handling cash from the Iranian regime,
with a bill-counting machine in his office—told me, “Ghani has made everybody
around him an enemy. There’s nobody left. One day, I was watching his wife on
TV, and my wife said, ‘Why are you watching her so closely?’ I said, ‘I’m
waiting for her to explode—Rescue me!’ ” Daudzai has formed a political
coalition to take over the Arg when the chance comes. “If there is going to be
change, there is only one way,” he said. “Ghani resigns.” A Western official
with long experience in Afghanistan told me that the notion of a junta
installed by a military coup was not far-fetched.

In Kabul, there is strikingly little evidence of the long and costly American
effort. I asked Amrullah Saleh, the former head of intelligence, what had been
achieved in Afghanistan in the past fifteen years. “From the American point of
view, very little,” he said. “From the Afghan point of view, very much. I may
have a lot of personal grievances, but, if you look at the picture from a
bird’s eye, things have changed enormously.” Saleh didn’t mean roads or dams.
He meant the transformation of Afghan society, of public discourse, among
activists and intellectuals, women and youth. “Prior to 9/11, the biggest theme
of our discussion was: How do you form a state? Today, it’s not that. The
biggest discourse today is how the state can deliver, how the state can
survive, how Afghanistan’s diversity can remain intact, and how it can be a
partner with the world community.”

Those themes have engaged Ghani throughout his life. Although Saleh is one of
his critics, he believed that Ghani could still do important things, and he did
not want to see him go the way of other reformers in Afghan history. “For me,
the pain is that as people see very little being delivered by this government,
by this President, it will not only mean the failure of Ashraf Ghani,” Saleh
said. “It will also mean the failure of technocracy in Afghan politics.”

George Packer became a staff writer in 2003.

This article appears in other versions of the July 4, 2016, issue, with the
headline “The Theorist in the Palace.”

========================================
11. INDIA: AVOIDING THE ZOMBIE CITY ALGORITHM
by Anant Maringanti
========================================
(livemint.com - 29 JUne 2016)

If we approach cities as if all they require are software products to be
activated to a new life as smart cities, all we will be doing is paying rent
for server stacks for data warehousing

Social scientists and planners have been asking for granulated data for a long
time. Clunky, outdated data preserved in outmoded formats makes Indian
urbanization one of the most opaque processes in the world. Yet, at a time when
new data technologies and new promises of openness are in the air, social
scientists and planners appear to be wary. They seem to think that urban life
is up in the air like never before. Corporate and political bluster aside,
Indian city managers apprehend heightened uncertainties like never before. What
explains this dissonance? What do we need to do create a robust urban
imagination?

Cities are palimpsests. The postman knows the boundaries of his daily beat. The
bus conductor knows the route that he navigates trip after trip. The milk man
knows which door to knock morning after morning. The newspaper boy knows which
of his rolled up missiles is to be aimed at which balcony week in and week out.
The swanky new shopping mall can only be aligned with the 400-year-old city
wall. The households in the gated community are reminded of the fact that they
are sitting in the foreshore of the 700-year-old lake when rainwater floods
their basements—year after year.

Cities are Janus-like—one face is constantly improvising and learning new
routines of self-regulation. The other seeks to meticulously create rules that
are accepted as legitimate by everyone for the whole to be orchestrated.
Planning, regulating and catalyzing change in such places requires data. But it
equally requires discretion. It requires intimate knowledge of the local.
Change driven exclusively, and undemocratically is a recipe for chaos and
misery.

The improvising, self-regulating city operates tactically. It conceals and
reveals, dodges and embraces, ducks and thrusts forward, disrupts in minute
invisible ways and yet finds its own rhythms. The planned, regulated city
operates strategically. It structures, creates opportunities and obstacles. It
exercises authority and puts in place infrastructure. Data is created by people
who act strategically and tactically. While there can never be a perfect
symmetry between the two, they can and should work together, however uneasily,
for cities to remain functional. Investments in data technologies without
appreciation of this coexistence of different ways of cities create hopelessly
entangled legacies of infrastructures and routines.

Take the simple case of bus tracking software. With easy availability of GPS
technologies, many schools in our cities are now offering GPS tracking services
to parents of children. When the school bus approaches the stop near home, the
parent receives a text message. A scroll appears on the local TV screen. The
bus is geo-fenced—i.e. when it goes off its ordained route, a deviation alert
is recorded and transmitted to everyone. This technology-enabled service is
billed as one that saves the parents precious time, makes schools more
accountable and children safer. The data is supposed to be useful to ensure
that the bus driver is not siphoning off fuel. It is useful to plan school bus
routes. So far so good. But what happened to the idea of decent schooling in
the neighbourhood? Why are children commuting such long distances through
strange, unfamiliar and threatening territories?

This puzzle gets even more intriguing when we consider the fact that till date,
not one among the State Transport Undertakings (STUs) which run fleets of
thousands of buses in Indian metropolises has fully embraced bus tracking
software. Most of them still deploy fleets based on the direct observations
reported by controllers and depot managers. Equipped with electronic Ticket
Issuing Machines (TIMs), each of the thousands of conductors logs in
information about each of the thousands of tickets issued by them in a shift.
Most of them still make schedules based on the assumption that running time is
a simple function of time and distance, ignoring the rush hour slowdowns. Since
a large percentage of crew are contract workers whose monthly income is linked
to the number of trips made in a shift, they resort to speeding and skipping
scheduled stops. Introduction of data technologies without paying heed to
changing work routines and contracting norms has resulted in large amounts of
unusable data at one end and disenfranchised bus crews at the other. STUs’
strategy is undermined by the employee tactics.

Take the case of stray dog population in Indian cities. It is the
responsibility of the public health wings of municipal authorities to keep the
population of stray dogs in Indian cities under check.

In many cities, it varies between five to ten humans per dog. They are required
by law and policy to neuter dogs and release them into their old
neighbourhoods. Increases in dog population result in higher competition for
food and mating and leads to aggressive behaviour and poor health occasionally
endangering humans. Yet, more and more municipalities are relying on contract
workers, who due to lack of familiarity with neighbourhoods, create war-like
conditions on the streets when they catch dogs for sterilization. Hospitals are
reporting dog menace near mortuaries and general wards. Dog census,
sterilization data, and neighbourhood assessments are all important for
creating safe and compassionate neighbourhoods for humans and non-humans—in
this case, stray dogs. But equally important are local knowledge, behavioural
studies, physical planning and neighbourhood institution building. Smart
initiatives that are blind to this lead to programmes like the ones adopted by
some smart cities recently—insert microchips in stray dogs, install
surveillance systems around mortuaries, hire more data entry workers to monitor
the situation.

Government agencies in Indian cities—public utilities, service providers,
regulators, local governments—are all virtually under siege from vendors of new
technologies.

With large chunks of government work being outsourced, the capacities within
these agencies to deal with their day-to-day functions has dramatically come
down in the last two decades. The casualty in this is native intelligence. If
we approach cities as if all they require is software products to be activated
to new life as smart cities, all we will be doing is to pay rent for server
stacks for data warehousing.

Smart city initiatives ought to be imagined as interventions into living
organisms—not algorithms that can activate doddering zombies. This can be done
if we listen out carefully for the urban voices and actors (and that includes
dogs and monkeys and other neighbours) that are being systematically ignored.

Anant Maringanti is the director of Hyderabad Urban Lab, a multi-disciplinary
urban research institution based in Hyderabad.

========================================
12. REVIEW: SHODHAN ON SHARAFI, MITRA, LAW AND IDENTITY IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA:
PARSI LEGAL CULTURE, 1772-1947
========================================
Mitra Sharafi. Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture,
1772-1947. Studies in Legal History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014. Illustrations. 368 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-04797-6.

Reviewed by Amrita Shodhan (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-Asia (June, 2016)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Parsi Legal Culture: A Detailed Ethnography of a Distinctive Tradition

Mitra Sharafi’s account of Parsi legal culture is a comprehensive and detailed
legal ethnography of the Parsis of the early twentieth century. It studies the
way in which Parsis in Bombay (India), Burma, and generally in the British
Empire took to the law as profession as well as a means to solve their
disputes. The book is a most important contribution to the field of almost
nonexistent scholarship on colonial Parsi social history. While there are a
host of interesting old biographies, which Sharafi uses expertly, there are
very few critical studies of the colonial experience of the Parsis. Sharafi
looks at a range of Parsi legal developments in the formalized British courts,
primarily from 1865 onward, when the Parsi Matrimonial Acts were codified and
the Matrimonial Court set up. Most of her case histories are from the early
twentieth century.

The most striking and ambitious claim of the book is that the Parsis were
exceptional in inserting themselves in positions of power in the colonial legal
system so that the agents in the colonial legal field—from legislation to
dispute settlement—were themselves Parsis. Thus, she suggests that they
manipulated colonial structures to suit their community’s needs, perceptions,
and tastes. This might be seen as an intervention in the debate on the
modalities of colonial rule and its impact on Indian communities. The debate in
the field has ranged from the argument that the imperial administrators ruled
by local mores and the colonial era was no great break from previous rulers to
the argument that the colonial rulers transformed Indian society beyond
recognition, either by excessive, inadequate, or inappropriate intervention.[1]

Sharafi’s position seems to support the first argument that colonial rule was
undertaken by extensive collaboration with the natives. However, she is less
interested in this historiographic argument. As befitting the lawyer that she
is, her book focuses on attesting how the natives used the system for their own
new and burgeoning social and religious interests. Thus, her book documents the
changes that were ongoing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
not buying the argument of changeless Indian society, nor the unremitting
anticolonialism. She suggests that the Parsis were similar to the other Indians
who worked the colonial system and contributed to its making but were
exceptional in the extent to which they inserted themselves in the colonial
system to work it for themselves. She develops this understanding in order to
situate the elite Parsis employed as colonial judges and lawyers adjudicating
Parsi disputes and inter-Parsi personal and religious matters.

The attempt to demonstrate Parsi agency and “their desired models of the family
and the community” as somehow autonomous of the imperialist reading of
Zoroastrian history makes for a most thought-provoking read (p. 24). Sharafi
talks of a Parsi habitus in the law in Bombay to answer the question of
autonomy. She says Parsi habitus was first visible in the 1830s and reproduced
in concentrated form with the development of a subculture of Parsi litigation
until 1947. She outlines this inhabitation of the legal system over a very long
period with thick descriptions and immense detail about the use of the courts
both as litigants and the types of cases that come to court and legal
professionals manning the courts. Her footnotes, as detailed as her text,
provide context to the Parsi practices with reference to Hindu, Muslim Jewish,
and Armenian case law as well as broader imperial references to Australian and
African cases and legal practices.

Sharafi’s book examines Parsi legal engagement through three “mirrors” through
the colonial period of 1772 to 1947 (p. 30). The three are legal culture and
litigation; legislation, primarily the Matrimonial Acts and the Matrimonial
Court; and Parsi legal engagement on questions of trust law and membership in
the community.

Section 1 analyzes legal culture primarily through litigation, chiefly
matrimonial and personal issues taken to court. Here she argues that
Zoroastrian legal material and rules were not translated until late in the
colonial period and thus were not seen to be guiding the Parsis in the early
period. She also suggests that the Parsis had no robust legal institutions.
This contention is contradicted in the second section with some documentation
of the role of the Parsi Panchayat and admitting that early nineteenth-century
information on the Parsi Panchayat was not accessed or accessible. Thus her
study of Parsi litigation is primarily from the early twentieth century when
the colonial courts were firmly established. She examines the field of legal
pluralism for the Parsis and finds only references to informal friends and
family as sources of legal authority in this period. There is no reference to
panchayats as judicial bodies in this late period. There is a tantalizing
reference to formal arbitration bodies. This could form the subject of another
important study. It would also be interesting to follow up the Parsi Panchayat
in an earlier period, from the early nineteenth century, and examine cases even
on appeal to the British courts from the panchayat. Harry Borradaile’s
two-volume Reports of Civil Causes Adjudged by the Court of Sudder Adawlut
(1863) are full of appeals against panchayat decisions of different castes in
the 1800s-20s.

Sharafi documents an interesting overlap and orientation toward state law among
Parsis and the use of formal law even in private arbitration. Anyone further
interested in this state of legal pluralism could refer to the excellent work
of Gopika Solanki, Adjudication of Religious Family Laws (2011), on Bombay.
Solanki’s study provides an interesting comparison with the current state of
the interpenetrated worlds of state law and community or private practice.
Sharafi’s description of the private arbitrators and people being warned of
what “outcome might be expected from going to court” is reminiscent of
Solanki’s contemporary findings and suggests some modification of Parsi
exceptionalism (p. 45).

The second section of the book looks at Parsi legislation. Here she looks at
the making of the Parsi personal law code and the setting up of the Matrimonial
Court. The Parsis rejected the application of primogeniture and coverture and
lobbied for the making of their own law. The engagement of Parsi lawyers is
well attested, and she documents well the twists and turns in the saga of the
making of the law. This is documented with a nice set of family histories of
Parsi lawyers and in-depth studies of men like D. F. Mulla. Humorous anecdotes
and cartoons give a textured sense of legal life. This makes for an interesting
ethnography of the full range of Parsis in law, from clerks, bailiffs, and
translators, to officials in courts and jails, and judges.

The last part of this section examines the application of the Matrimonial Acts
through case records. Again most of the record is from the early twentieth
century. It documents in some detail various disputes in family practices:
polygamy, prostitution, child marriages, domestic violence, and divorce.
Sharafi demonstrates her skill as a storyteller, and you might find the story
of a family you know as I did of a Parsi family in Ahmedabad and their marital
quarrel (p. 146n120, the story of Jehangir Vakil). This section delineates the
decline of the Parsi Panchayat as an adjudicatory body elected from the
Anjuman. In the context of the present study, this is only a minor coda and
thus she can conclude that there was no “robust ... forum for dispute
resolution among the Parsis, the colonial courts filled the gap” (p. 82).
Perhaps the courts replaced the panchayat. In fact, the Matrimonial Court with
its Parsi jury is a very good panchayat in a certain sense.

The third section, titled “Beyond Personal Law,” reflects on the making of the
community, showing the role of lawyers and judges in settling cases with
reference to the practice of trusts as well as community membership. The
in-depth study of several cases—the juddin (non-Parsi) conversion controversy,
the Parsi Panchayat case (1906-8), and Bella’s case in Burma (1925)—presents
the story of how the community has built its boundaries over the last hundred
years. She argues that activist judges like Justice Dinshah Dhanjibhai Davar
have provided extensive judgments on the basis of their own value system and
ideals and knowledge about Zoroastrianism. Would they have found it impossible
to do so without “their own” judges? What does it do to the colonial system to
have partisan judges? Her study of the activist role of Justice Davar and
others reminds one of Marc Galanter’s path-breaking article “Hinduism,
Secularism and the Indian Judiciary” on Hindu judges, especially Justice
Pralhad Balacharya Gajendragadkar, and their role in reinterpreting Hinduism in
court.[2] Sharafi takes forward Galanter’s work on the social history of Indian
judicial structures and histories.

The book is a mine of information drawn from interesting research done in
various archives across the world, from the Scottish dales (to examine the
background of some of the characters in her story) and London, to Bombay and
Burma. The book is also beautifully illustrated with almost thirty cartoons and
photographs. It should be of great interest to those interested in Parsi
history, colonial lawyering, and the growth of religious communities. The
extensive footnotes make it a very useful resource for academics in a range of
disciplines in history and law, focusing on customary practices, legal
pluralism, and colonial legalities. The footnotes would be more accessible if
the complete references had been repeated in the bibliography. As it stands,
the bibliography is a very select listing of sources. The index is also limited
and does not provide comprehensive access to the text. The book will go into a
second and paperback edition, where the referencing can be extended. This work
has already set the benchmark and laid down the parameters for a discussion of
Parsi history. It also makes a significant contribution to our understanding of
the colonial experience.

Notes

[1]. Among others, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from
the Eighteenth Century to the Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996); and Sudipto Kaviraj, The Imaginary
Institution of India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

[2]. Marc Galanter, “Hinduism, Secularism and the Indian Judiciary,” Philosophy
East and West 21, no. 4 (October 1971): 467-487.

========================================
13. FOLLOWING THE BREXIT VOTE, I FEAR TOLERANT BRITAIN IS LOST FOR EVER
by Gilane Tawadros
========================================
(The Guardian - 4 July 2016)

As instances of race hate crimes increase, I wonder what happened to the open,
tolerant nation that offered refuge to my family 46 years ago

As I posted my vote to remain in the EU into the ballot box, I had an
overwhelming sense of teetering on the edge of a precipice. My parents were
political exiles, compelled to leave President Nasser’s Egypt in 1970 when
friends and neighbours were too scared to air their views in public and knocks
on the door in the early hours meant imprisonment and possibly torture. My
parents weighed up their options: stay in their own country surrounded by
everything that was warmly familiar; or uproot their family so that their
children could be free to speak their minds and determine their future?

They chose the latter. After some deliberation about where to go – the United
States, Australia, Canada or Britain – they chose Britain. They loved the BBC
World Service, which they considered a beacon of free speech, and were
connected to Britain, as so many millions of people are, through the legacy of
empire and colonialism, through language and education, and above all through a
deeply held belief in the British values of tolerance, inclusion and openness.

Related: After a campaign scarred by bigotry, it’s become OK to be racist in
Britain | Aditya Chakrabortty

And so, in middle age, they left behind everything they knew to embark upon a
risky venture. My father, who had been an engineer and senior officer in the
Egyptian air force, studied computer science and took menial jobs to support
his young family. In spite of the financial struggles and the petty, mundane
humiliations, my parents were convinced they had made the right decision.

After I had cast my ballot, I took the bus to Shepherd’s Bush tube station. A
campaigner was distributing “vote remain” stickers to passers-by. I
photographed him. A young woman standing behind me on the bus smiled: “This
feels very emotional,” she said. “I’m Polish and I feel like no one wants me to
be here. But who would be willing to accept the minimum wage as we do? My
sister lives in Germany and is training to be a lawyer. It’s different there.”

France and Germany, I once thought, were less tolerant than the accommodating
Britain. In France – where I lived for a time – you were either French or
“other”; there was no middle ground, no hyphenated identity. But Britain was
different. You could never belong completely but you could embrace Britishness
and enjoy a hybrid, contingent form of belonging: black British,
British-Egyptian, British-Asian and so on.

It wasn’t 100% British in a pure, cricket-white, cricket test sort of way, but
it was British enough, and left room for the well of other cultural experiences
and influences that shaped your identity. In turn, this hybrid, contingent
identity enabled Britain to grow into a 21st-century nation infused with the
intellectual, artistic and social influences of countless other cultures,
making it richer and more interesting.

Related: Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply | Randeep Ramesh

When did that change? That is the question that has haunted me for the past
week, since I woke last Friday morning and reached for my phone to learn the
result of the EU referendum. The change did not happen overnight. It happened
slowly.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the change started but it has come in small
steps rather than substantial leaps. The slow souring as multiculturalism
stopped being something to be celebrated, becoming instead a watchword for an
ill-advised dalliance with something dangerous; the spreading view that racism
and prejudice were issues for individuals after all, and not institutional and
systemic as the inquiry into the botched investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s
brutal murder had established. the increasing hostility towards British Muslims
in all parts of British society; and the heightened fear of migrants and
refugees, which reached fever pitch during the campaign. Now that reports of
race hate crime are soaring, it seems undeniable that the vicious and
irresponsible rhetoric of politicians and media in the days and weeks leading
up to the referendum has fostered toxic sentiments.

I feel bereaved, as though I may have lost something very dear, and I’m
terrified that what I have lost may be irrecoverable. Strange as it may seem, I
am in mourning for St George. Born in what is now Israel to a Greek family, he
was a soldier in the Roman army in Italy and he died in what would become
Turkey. This is the version of Englishness I think is worth fighting for:
embedded in Europe, connected to the world, not frozen and immutable. If we
can’t be Europeans in a constitutional sense then now is the time to reclaim
and redefine Englishness as an identity, culture and politics that is
intrinsically diverse, worldly and constantly evolving.

========================================
14. ELENA OSOKINA. OUR DAILY BREAD: SOCIALIST DISTRIBUTION AND THE ART OF
SURVIVAL IN STALIN'S RUSSIA, 1927-1941. Edited by Kate Transchel. New York:
Routledge, 2015. 288 pp. $47.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-56324-905-1.
========================================

Reviewed by Alexey Golubev (University of British Columbia, Department of
History)
Published on H-Material-Culture (June, 2016)
Commissioned by Marieke Hendriksen

The book under review is not brand new. Its first Russian edition was published
in 1999 by Rosspen, one of the leading academic publishers in Russia; the
English translation appeared from M. E. Sharpe in 2001; and the second Russian
edition came out in 2008. Its author, Elena Osokina, who at the time of writing
was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, used an extraordinarily rich body of archival sources that
gave her work a textbook status in the studies of consumption and everyday life
during Stalinism. At the same time, this book is of interest not only to
historians of the Soviet Union, but also to a broader audience of scholars of
material culture. Our Daily Bread is an excellent study of social effects of
commodities and their circulation, which is all the more illuminating as it
examines a period of radical political, economic, and social transformations,
when the ability of commodities to suggest and materialize forms of social
organization became particularly visible.

The study begins with 1927, a watershed year in Soviet economic history, when
the Soviet government announced a highly ambitious program of accelerated
industrialization known as the First Five-Year Plan. Prior to 1927, the Soviet
government had tolerated certain elements of market economy, first of all in
agriculture and retail trade, as a measure to overcome the post-Russian Civil
War economic and social crisis. However, the accelerated industrialization
campaign required a massive redistribution of wealth from the agricultural
sector to heavy industry. Market tools failed to provide the Soviet government
with a lever against peasants unwilling to sell their products below market
prices for the abstract needs of industrialization. This is a well-known story,
which Osokina discusses in chapters 1–3 from different perspectives. We meet
Soviet officials with their ideological concerns, political visions, and
economic ideas; rank-and-file bureaucrats who had to meet production quotas set
by the First Five-Year Plan and were ready to resort to any means in order to
fulfill them; urban communities facing food shortages and blaming the
countryside for them; and, of course, Soviet peasants who bore the brunt of the
Soviet government’s determination to “phas[e] out the market and replac[e] it
with the planned economy” (p. 8). Chapter 4 describes the climax of this
confrontation between the Soviet government and independent farmers. Osokina
shows here how the accelerated industrial development acquired its own momentum
that demanded a fast, effective, and ruthless extraction of wealth from
agricultural producers, destroyed the remaining elements of the market economy,
and led to a collapse in food production and, eventually, the Soviet famine of
1932–33.

The destruction of the national market had one important consequence for the
Soviet commodity: its free circulation was now replaced by two other forms of
distribution. One was the state rationing system, another was the black market.
This led to important social and cultural changes that Osokina discusses in the
remaining six chapters of her book. The combination of the state monopoly on
the distribution of commodities coupled with their shortages (beginning with
bread, a basic staple of the Soviet diet) prompted Soviet leaders to introduce
differentiating rationing schemes for different social groups. In chapters 5–7,
in particular, Osokina shows how in the course of the early 1930s the
satisfaction of consumer desires among Soviet citizens became a reward from the
state. Different levels of consumer satisfaction depended on one’s level of
contribution to the Soviet national economy. As a result, different access to
commodities acted as a kind of social topography that redefined Soviet social
space on the basis of one universal factor: the intimacy of one’s relation to
authority. While education, occupation, or social origin did matter in one's
navigation through Soviet social space, its fundamental structure was more
amorphous and spontaneously forming: social distinction in the Stalinist USSR
was measured in terms of symbolic distance to the authority, and this distance
was materialized in the different access to commodities. Osokina nicely
demonstrates it in the appendix of her book, where she structures her rich
empirical material into tables showing supply norms established by the Soviet
government for different categories of its citizens. In 1931, for example,
there were four categories of workers in the Soviet Union, a classification
defined by their ability and willingness to meet or, better, to exceed the
production quotas as well as by the importance of the factories where they were
employed in the industrialization plans. The workers in the highest rationing
category received 4.4 kg of meat per month, while those attributed to the next
three categories received, in descending order, 2.6 kg, 1 kg, or nothing at
all. Butter was rationed only to the first two categories of workers (400 and
200 gr, respectively), and eggs (10 per month)--only to the highest one. The
state’s position as the only legitimate provider of material welfare created a
social hierarchy in which satisfaction of a consumer desire was a measure and a
result of one’s position within this hierarchy. The black market that Osokina
examines in chapters 7 and 10 further contributed to this social change by
draining economic resources from disadvantaged population groups to the people
whose social position was closer to the new power vertical.

Our Daily Bread is, thus, an important intervention in our understanding of
social change in the Stalinist USSR. Most works on consumption and material
culture in the USSR focus on the Soviet government’s intentional efforts to
restructure Soviet society in a kind of a social engineering experiment. For
example, Julie Hessler’s A Social History of Soviet Trade (2004) approaches the
period of the 1930s as the time when the state authorities adopted a new model
of “cultured soviet trade” as a means to construct a more civilized, rational,
and controllable society. Vera Dunhan’s earlier In Stalin’s Time (1976) argued
in a similar way that during late Stalinism the Soviet state used consumption
to solicit cooperation from the Soviet “middle class,” whose intellectual
expertise became a key resource in the technological confrontation with the
Western bloc. These approaches have been extremely productive in our
understanding of the politics of consumption in the Stalinist USSR. What we can
learn from Elena Osokina’s book with its focus on consumption practices is that
the dramatic social changes of Stalinism were, perhaps, not just orchestrated
by the Soviet government, but were also a product of a new social form of the
Soviet commodity. In a very materialist logic, Our Daily Bread demonstrates how
the world of Soviet people came to reflect the world of Soviet things that had
changed dramatically with the onset of radical economic reforms based on the
ideas of planned economy. Following commodities in their trajectories through
Soviet social space, this book shows the work of deep social structures that
shaped Soviet society in the 1930s, influenced its later evolution, and are
still visible in post-Soviet societies.

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/

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SACW - 07 July 2016 | Afghanistan’s Theorist-in-Chief / Pakistan: Discrimination in Media Agency / Bangladesh: Terror in a Dhaka Cafe / India: RSS in the Govt ? / Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 / Brexit working class counter-revolution / Survival in Stalin's Russia

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