SACW - 8 Feb 2016 | Misuse of laws protecting religious sensitivities / Sri Lanka: Post-war discourse / Bangladesh: Artists Silenced / India: Silencing of Writers and Right to Dissent / Tributes to Intizar Hussain & Randhir Singh / Coup d’État in Brazil? / Big Pharma’s Worst Nightmare

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 8 February 2016 - No. 2884 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Post-war discourse must be sensitive to survivors - statement by Friday Forum
2. Republic of fear | Asma Jahangir
3. India - Protect the Right to Dissent: Statement by Prominent Citizens Regarding Assault on Social Movement Activists Campaigning on Transparency and Accountability in Rajasthan
4. Intizar Hussain (1923-2016) - Tributes & resources
5. India: Prof. Randhir Singh (1922-2016) - Tributes
6. Pankaj Mishra and Salil Tripathi on the Arundhati Roy case and other Indian writers being silenced by Hindu nationalists
7. India: Death of the public university | Satish Deshpande
8. India: A test of dignity and democracy | Gautam Bhan 
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: Taking pride in prejudice - violent expressions of racism by Radhika Santhanam
  - India: Sagarika Ghose on Religious leaders united against homosexuality
  - India: The Puzzle of the BJP's Muslim Supporters in Gujarat (Raheel Dhattiwala)
  - India: On Gandhi’s death anniversary, need to do more than lament the tragedy (Gopalkrishna Gandhi)
  - Attempts being made to convert India into a Hindu nation: Sharad Pawar
  - India: Targetting of Dalit Student at TISS by RSS supporters Hosting Talk by Rajiv Malhotra (Sonali Waghmare)
  - India: Haryana govt may soon issue special beef licenses to foreigners who live in the state ? (reports)
  - India's Government Is Becoming Increasingly Antiscience (Apoorva Mandavilli)
  - India - Banaras Hindu University’s slide to the Right: Pro-RSS teachers get top billing, ABVP students get priority
  - India: In Supreme Court, Congress led Kerala govt supports ban on women’s entry at Sabarimala temple
  - India:: Muslim personal law founded on Quran, SC can't question it: Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hind
  - India: The Dalit question as answer to Hindutva (CP Bhambri)
  - India - 2008 Malegaon blasts: NIA under fire from former prosecutor as it seeks to drop MCOCA charges
  - HRD Alert - India - Urgent Appeal for Action – Delhi: Brutal beating by Police at protest before the headquarters of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Delhi
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Nepal: 20 years wasted - Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it (Editorial, Nepali Times)
11. Bangladesh: Artists Silenced at Dhaka Art Summit | Ahmad Ibrahim
12. India: Ensuring privacy in a digital age | Ranjeet Rane
13. A brief history of the Indian judiciary's torrid affair with free speech and obscenity | Gautam Bhatia
14. Refashioning Europe - Implications for Russia and India | Krishnan Srinivasan & Hari Vasudevan
15. Susan Burch on on Savelli and Marks, 'Psychiatry in Communist Europe'
16.  Democracy in the Crucible: Impeachment or Coup d’État in Brazil? | Alfredo Saad Filho
17. Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists by David Aaronovitch review – at home with the hard left | Nick Cohen
18. Big Pharma’s Worst Nightmare  | Sarah Boseley

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1. SRI LANKA: POST-WAR DISCOURSE MUST BE SENSITIVE TO SURVIVORS - STATEMENT BY FRIDAY FORUM
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With the increased public discussion of issues related to post-war accountability and truth in Sri Lanka that is likely to take place in the coming weeks and months, there is a great likelihood that statements and reportage will evoke charged emotions and potentially trigger further distress in affected people across Sri Lanka
http://sacw.net/article12367.html

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2. REPUBLIC OF FEAR
by Asma Jahangir
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on misuse of laws protecting religious sensitivities
http://sacw.net/article12368.html

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3. INDIA - PROTECT THE RIGHT TO DISSENT: STATEMENT BY PROMINENT CITIZENS REGARDING ASSAULT ON SOCIAL MOVEMENT ACTIVISTS CAMPAIGNING ON TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN RAJASTHAN
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The Jawabdehi Yatra is a peaceful caravan of people committed to bringing about transparency and accountability. It attempts to raise awareness and uses methods of community monitoring including public hearings and the filing of grievances to promote better delivery of public services and entitlements. On 16 January 2016 the Jawabdehi Yatra was violently attacked by a mob let by a BJP MLA Kanwarlal Meena in Aklera, Jhalawar, Rajasthan. There has been widespread condemnation of the attack on Jawabdehi Yatra but the key figures behind this attack remain at large.
http://www.sacw.net/article12355.html

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4. INTIZAR HUSSAIN (1923-2016) - TRIBUTES & RESOURCES
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Intizar Hussain was one of Pakistan's towering literary figures and his death is seen by critics as marking the end of an era.
http://www.sacw.net/article12358.html

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5. INDIA: PROF. RANDHIR SINGH (1922-2016) - TRIBUTES
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A great teacher directs us to the right path. This is what Randhir was, and will be remembered for. He is perhaps the only teacher in the Department of Political Science who became a cult figure, inspiring young people to critically engage with society.
http://www.sacw.net/article12354.html

see also: India: Prof Randhir Singh - an inspiring Marxist intellectual by Pritam Singh http://www.sacw.net/article12363.html

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6. PANKAJ MISHRA AND SALIL TRIPATHI ON THE ARUNDHATI ROY CASE AND OTHER INDIAN WRITERS BEING SILENCED BY HINDU NATIONALISTS
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Author Roy is facing criminal trial for contempt of court in India. Of course, Narendra Modi's government has left no clear fingerprints on this scene of a crime against art and thought
http://www.sacw.net/article12356.html

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7. INDIA: DEATH OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY | Satish Deshpande
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Even as Indian higher education faces its toughest challenge — the inclusion of hitherto excluded groups — the public university is becoming insecure, narrow-minded and conservative
http://www.sacw.net/article12351.html

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8. INDIA: A TEST OF DIGNITY AND DEMOCRACY | Gautam Bhan
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Today, as the Supreme Court hears the curative petition on Section 377, it has an opportunity to remember its promise to be the last resort of the oppressed, to let dignity be the domain of all.
http://www.sacw.net/article12352.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================
  - India: Taking pride in prejudice - violent expressions of racism by Radhika Santhanam
  - India: Sagarika Ghose on Religious leaders united against homosexuality
  - India: The Puzzle of the BJP's Muslim Supporters in Gujarat (Raheel Dhattiwala)
  - India: On Gandhi’s death anniversary, need to do more than lament the tragedy (Gopalkrishna Gandhi)
  - Attempts being made to convert India into a Hindu nation: Sharad Pawar
  - India: Targetting of Dalit Student at TISS by RSS supporters Hosting Talk by Rajiv Malhotra (Sonali Waghmare)
  - India: Haryana govt may soon issue special beef licenses to foreigners who live in the state ? (reports)
  - India's Government Is Becoming Increasingly Antiscience (Apoorva Mandavilli)
  - India - Banaras Hindu University’s slide to the Right: Pro-RSS teachers get top billing, ABVP students get priority
  - India: In Supreme Court, Congress led Kerala govt supports ban on women’s entry at Sabarimala temple
  - India:: Muslim personal law founded on Quran, SC can't question it: Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hind
  - India: The Dalit question as answer to Hindutva (CP Bhambri)
  - India - 2008 Malegaon blasts: NIA under fire from former prosecutor as it seeks to drop MCOCA charges
  - HRD Alert - India - Urgent Appeal for Action – Delhi: Brutal beating and ill treatment of the students and women protestors in Delhi by Delhi Police/denying their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association to register their protest before the headquarters of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right wing Hindu nationalist organisation in Delhi
  - India: Dear Mr Doval, we need to talk about Hindutva terror
  - Colour of hate: Attack on Tanzanian girl shows racism is alive and well in India (Shuma Raha)
  - India: ‘Embers from Muzaffarnagar made Narendra Modi PM,’ says BJP leader
 
-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: FULL TEXT :::
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10. NEPAL: 20 YEARS WASTED - THOSE WHO DON’T LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT (Editorial, Nepali Times)
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(Nepali Times 5-11 February 2016 )

This week marks 20 years since the start of the Maoist conflict, and in a few months it will be 10 years after it ended.

It was Baburam Bhattarai of the Samyukta Jana Morcha, the electoral avatar of the underground Maoists, who on 4 February 1996 presented the government of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba with a list of 40 demands that he wanted fulfilled in two weeks ... or else.

Deuba did not pay much attention, as he was unduly distracted with infighting within his Nepali Congress party and an impending visit to New Delhi. Bhattarai never intended to wait two weeks anyway, and launched simultaneous attacks on police stations across the country on the night of 13 February 1996. A day before Valentine’s Day, the Maoists went on the warpath.

The attack on the Holeri police station was led by Barsha Man Pun (currently secretary of the UCPNM and former finance minister) and Nanda Kishor Pun (now Nepal’s vice-president).

Bhattarai knew that many of the 40 demands were not within the Prime Minister’s power to fulfill: like clipping the wings of the king and royal family, removing ‘unequal’ clauses in the 1950 Indo-Nepal treaty, and scrapping Gurkha recruitment. And there were absurd demands that seem to have been included just so that the list would contain a total of 40: banning ‘lurid’ Bollywood movies, and ‘ending cultural pollution’ of the nation. So, Deuba took off for New Delhi and it was while he was still in India that he heard that the Maoists had started a war back home.

There was much -- and fervent -- hope for democracy and development after the street protests in 1990 that led King Birendra to lift the ban on political parties and the writing of a new constitution. The press was unshackled, and foreign investment flooded into the country. Local elections ensured accountable leaders, and for the first time, democracy delivered development.

Yet, democracy was slow to address entrenched social inequity, social injustice and structural discrimination. The Maoist war set out to address these problems, but as Professor Krishna Khanal tells our correspondent Om Astha Rai on page 14-15, the 40 points were just a ruse for the Maoists to get to power. And because the objective conditions for revolution were so explosive, the spark they lit in Holeri in 1996 spread like wildfire across the country. A feckless state fanned the flames with characteristic mismanagement and apathy. When the state did act, security forces unleashed brutal crackdowns in the Maoist heartland, pushing ordinary people -- who had wanted no part in the war -- to the Maoist fold.

It was a calculated rebel strategy to target elected village and district councils. By the end of the conflict the Maoists had bombed 90 per cent of VDC buildings. More than 17,000 people died in ten years, 1,400 are still listed as ‘disappeared’, tens of thousands were wounded, and millions were internally displaced or became refugees in India. There were massive human rights violations by both sides. Development was pushed back by decades, infrastructure projects got further delayed, jobless youth left the country in increasing numbers to find work overseas.

The conflict and prolonged political transition delayed major hydropower and infrastructure projects, which is why we still suffer 15-hour power cuts every day. Investors fled, jobs disappeared, and nearly 18 per cent of Nepal’s population, mainly young men, work abroad.

Looking back at the 40-point demand, Maoist ideologue-in-chief Baburam Bhattarai should have a tinge of regret. But he probably does not because Maoist communists are not one to say 'sorry', or admit they are ever wrong. Now, Bhattarai has erased the ‘c’ word from the manifesto of his non-communist New Force party. His website no longer has pictures of himself as a young revolutionary. He has photoshopped his own history.

Bhattarai’s 40 points included some pretty outlandish demands, but you couldn’t argue about many other socially progressive ones like a minimum wage for workers, free health and education, an effective disaster relief mechanism, protection of domestic industry, and job creation through infrastructure development.

One of the 40 Maoist demands from 1996 was the ‘elimination of corruption’. Laudable, but lamentably laughable today given the level of graft we witnessed during the two Maoist governments since 2008. Today, the Maoist party has fragmented into five pieces and is a shadow of its former self. A loony fringe led by Netra Bikram Chand hasn’t learnt its lesson and is still talking about a ‘protracted war’.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. 

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11. BANGLADESH: ARTISTS SILENCED AT DHAKA ART SUMMIT
by Ahmad Ibrahim
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(Alal O Dulal | https://tinyurl.com/hfbxs77)

On 7 February 2016, Tibetan artist Nortse and Indian artists Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam had their photographs and art installations removed from the Dhaka Art Summit taking place in Shilpakala Academy.

It has been claimed by media that the removal was at the behest of the Chinese ambassador to Dhaka.

The art project by Nortse was titled Prayer Wheel, Big Brother and Automan (2007) which showed the artist don traditional Tibetan clothes along with modern objects to show the surveillance that marks their lives.

Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam produced a piece called “Last Words”, which consists of five facsmilies of five last messages written by the self-immolators in Tibet, along with their English translations. Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam depicted Tibetan monks in the act of self-immolation as a way of political and religious protest against the occupation of Tibet by the Chinese government.
Photo courtesy: Wasifa Nazreen

Photo Courtesy: Wasifa Nazreen

At the end of the 6th of February, both artists were still depicted on the walls of the Art Summit. On the 7th, what greeted the visitors and patrons were blank stretches of white wall with white frames. It was as if the works had never existed.

This is not the first time the Chinese government has tried to shut down political art work that aims to show the real face of Chinese occupation of Tibet. More reprehensible, however, is that it happened inside the walls of an institution that was proclaiming itself to be a haven of bold art and artistic expression.

That, if the media reports are true, the Chinese government could go to such lengths to silence an exhibition happening thousands of miles away shows the depth of their oppression over an entire country. Since February 2009, 142 Tibetans have self-immolated in their homeland, 120 dying from their actions.


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12. INDIA: ENSURING PRIVACY IN A DIGITAL AGE | Ranjeet Rane
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(live mint - 28 JAnuary 2016)

Citizens are unaware of how their personally identifiable information is collected, stored, used and shared

On 28 January 1981, the European Council signed the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, popularly known as Convention 108. It is the first legally binding international treaty dealing with privacy and data protection. The day has since been celebrated as Data Protection Day in Europe and as International Data Privacy Day around the world. In today’s era of digitization, it is imperative that we understand the concept—and importance—of data privacy.

According to an Internet and Mobile Association of India report, India has around 400 million Internet users. This number took a decade to reach 100 million from 10 million, three years to reach 200 million and just another year to reach 300 million. The Internet is essentially a data ecosystem where every node is engaged in generation, transmission, consumption and storage of data. The scale of this data ecosystem can be gauged from the fact that by 2019, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross India’s Internet protocol networks every hour.

But the situation is such that while we are generating such high volumes of data—most of which is of the “identifier” type that is used to identify a person, a thing or an entity in the ecosystem—we do not have in place measures that safeguard the privacy of this data, nor regulate data retention by platforms collecting it. As a result, ordinary citizens are unaware of how their personally identifiable information is collected, stored, used and shared. Further, as governance-driven digitization (Aadhaar, digital lockers, direct account transfers) fuels large-scale sensitive data collection and storage, the Information Technology Act, with its limited scope to penalize government agencies for breach of data privacy, is the only legal instrument available to citizens against contravention of their privacy in the data ecosystem. This leaves citizens exposed—as in 2013, when the Maharashtra government simply lost the personal data of 300,000 Aadhaar card applicants.

The need of the hour is a comprehensive legislation that provides for a right to privacy as a fundamental entitlement to citizens. The groundwork for such legislation has already been laid in 2012 by a Justice A.P. Shah-headed group of experts constituted by the Planning Commission. The commission had proposed a set of national privacy principles that would place an obligation on data controllers to put in place safeguards and procedures that would enable and ensure protection of privacy rights. These include: notice (to be given to users while collecting data); choice and consent (of users while collecting data from them); collection limitation (to keep user data collected at the minimum necessary); purpose limitation (to keep the purpose as adequately defined and narrow as possible); access and correction (for end users to correct or delete their personal data as may be necessary); disclosure of information (private data should not be disclosed without explicit consent of end user); security (defining responsibility to ensure technical, administrative and physical safeguards for data collected); openness (informing end users of possible collection and utilization of personal data); accountability (institutionalize accountability for adherence to these principles).

The proposed framework aims at being technology neutral and compliant with international standards already in place to protect user privacy. It also recognizes the multiple dimensions of privacy and aims at establishing a national ethos for privacy protection, while remaining flexible to address emerging concerns. It seeks horizontal applicability with both the public and private sectors bought under the purview of privacy legislation. An attempt to introduce such legislation in Parliament failed in 2011 as there could not be a consensus on which government agencies could seek exclusion from such provisions and collect citizen data without any oversight.

Until such provisions are established by law, it will be necessary to adopt mechanisms that ensure compliance towards use of privacy enhancing technologies (PET). PETs are essentially processes and tools that allow end users to safeguard the privacy of their personally identifiable information that they willingly provide to government agencies and other service providers. PETs put the end user in control over what information to share, with whom to share and a clear knowledge of the recipients of this information. The use of data encryption and mandating multi-factor authentication for access to end user data can be examples of other PETs that can be implemented by service providers and government agencies alike.

Our government needs to start with aligning our technology laws with the evolving Internet landscape. User privacy concerns and secure designing should be integrated in the charters of respective standard-setting organizations. There needs to be active user education that makes them aware of their choices. Lengthy and complex privacy policies that practically hand over control of user data to the platforms collecting it need to be replaced with ones that are user friendly in draft and execution. Policy documents that address these concerns need to be widely discussed and debated in the public domain. Recently, the Indian government released its draft Internet of Things Policy and it devotes only one line to the need to have security and privacy standards. The policy document on Smart Cities is indifferent to these concerns as well.

Last year, the Supreme Court referred to a constitutional bench the petition seeking inclusion of the Right to Privacy under Article 21 (Right to Life). While the verdict of the honourable court is still awaited, we can take the first steps towards safeguarding ourselves by voluntarily inculcating digital privacy principles.

Ranjeet Rane works with the information protection team at Symantec India.


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13. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INDIAN JUDICIARY'S TORRID AFFAIR WITH FREE SPEECH AND OBSCENITY
by Gautam Bhatia
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(livemint.com - 7 Feb 2016)

During his obscenity trial in the colonial courts, Saadat Hasan Manto was asked why he had used the word “bosom” to describe a woman’s breasts. “What should I have called them,” he retorted, “Peanuts?” The courtroom erupted with laughter, and Manto was censured by the judge for indulging in “tawdry humour”. One Constitution and many decades later, much has changed in the legal firmament, but judicial squeamishness has remained a fixed star.

Last year, in determining whether a Marathi poet had been correctly charged with obscenity for writing a poem about Gandhi, justice Dipak Misra of the Supreme Court engaged in a 120-page disquisition about literary merit, obscenity and free speech, but redacted the offending poem itself. The series of meaningless words and blank spaces that remained left readers who had struggled through the judgement without even a few choice Marathi expletives for their pains.

As a matter of fact, justice Misra’s delicate moral reticence has been the hallmark of the Indian judiciary’s approach to obscenity. Like sedition, which we discussed in the previous column in this series, and like many other notorious speech restricting provisions that we shall go on to discuss, the constitutionality of obscenity was challenged before the Supreme Court, and upheld by it.

Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, which penalized—but did not define—obscenity, was brought to the apex court in 1964, in a case called Ranjit Udeshi vs State of Maharashtra. At issue was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book about an aristocratic woman’s amorous escapades with her gamekeeper. The book had been banned. Ranjit Udeshi, a Bombay bookseller, was caught in possession of unexpurgated copies, and prosecuted.

He challenged both his prosecution and the constitutionality of obscenity itself. He lost.

Ranjit Udeshi vs State of Maharashtra, which effectively created and defined obscenity law in post-constitutional India, is a very curious judgement. One half of it reads like the imprecations of a stern, Victorian schoolmaster, and the other half the ardent scribbling of a high school English student’s unreconstructed pretentions to literary criticism.

Then chief justice Mohammad Hidayatullah began by observing that “it can hardly be claimed that obscenity which is offensive to modesty or decency is within the constitutional protection given to free speech or expression, because the article dealing with the right itself excludes it. That cherished right on which our democracy rests is meant for the expression of free opinions to change political or social conditions or for the advancement of human knowledge”.

Obscenity, on the other hand, “has extremely poor value in the propagation of ideas, opinions and informations of public interest or profit”. Obscenity was of such poor value, in fact, that the accused need not even be given the basic protection that criminal law normally accorded, which is the requirement of intent, or knowledge.

According to the learned chief justice, a writer of obscene literature could be prosecuted whether or not he knew that what he was writing was obscene, and similarly, a bookseller could be prosecuted for the sale of obscene literature, unless he could show that it was sold without his knowledge or consent.

Did this mean that a bookseller now had the obligation of reading every book that he commissioned from his distributors, and determining for himself whether or not a court might declare it obscene? Well, it was either that, or keeping a team of lawyers on permanent action stations.

This raised a bit of a problem, however. Obscenity was now criminalized without the need for knowledge or intent, but it was still nowhere defined in the Indian Penal Code. So, chief justice Hidayatullah cast around for a satisfactory definition, and naturally, hit upon an 1863 case from Victorian England: R v Hicklin.

According to this definition, the test was whether “the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall”.

There is a deep irony here, because just four years before, the Hicklin test had been abandoned in its very country of birth. In fact, even as Lady Chatterley’s Lover was being brought to court in India, the US, the UK and Australia had either lifted decades-old bans upon it, or had seen the publishers triumph in court.

Not for the first time, however—and not for the last—the Supreme Court resolutely set its face against the progress of law in the Commonwealth, and decided that the notoriously repressed and repressive England in the 1870s would be the model for the Indian republic to follow.

Soon after the judgement, the legislature codified the Udeshi opinion into law, and Section 292 now bears the language of the Hicklin test, with its oddly quaint terminology of corruption and depravity, and its infantilization of the citizenry.

There remained the matter of the book itself. The time had come for the chief justice to don the mantle of the literary critic. “The poetry and music which Lawrence attempted to put into sex apparently cannot sustain it long and without them the book is nothing,” he wrote. “The promptings of the unconscious particularly in the region of sex is suggested as the message in the book. But it is not easy for the ordinary reader to find it. The Machine Age and its impact on social life which is its secondary theme does not interest the reader for whose protection, as we said, the law has been framed.”

The last line—“for whose protection… the law has been framed”—is crucial, because it is at the heart of how the Hicklin test, as mentioned above, treats citizens as infants: obscenity law is not for the protection of the strong-minded, but those whose—in the words of the chief justice—“prurient minds take delight and secret sexual pleasure from erotic writings”.

In other words, the obscenity law is not for the strong-willed, the severe and the austere, but for those who simply cannot control the stirrings in their loins when they read Lawrence’s “divagations with sex” (again, the words of the chief justice).

To give the Supreme Court its due, in the 50 years after Udeshi, its judges struggled valiantly to break free of Hicklin’s fetters, making gradual, incremental advances (until all that was brought to a shuddering halt by justice Misra last year).

In the 1970s, judges began to take the opinion of literary experts in the field, thus sensibly refusing to follow chief justice Hidayatullah’s foray into literary criticism. In the 1980s and 1990s, they abandoned the vulnerable, depravity-prone proto-pervert of Udeshi and Hicklin for the “reasonable, strong-willed individual”.

And in 2014, in Aveek Sarkar vs State of West Bengal, the Supreme Court finally repudiated the 1863 English Hicklin test, and adopted instead the 1957 US test developed in Roth. Progress, of sorts!

According to the Roth test, the key aspect is not the tendency of a work to lead to moral depravity or corruption, but whether it appeals to the “prurient” interest—i.e., whether the work is designed predominantly to excite lustful thoughts, without any other redeeming feature. This is hardly satisfactory in its own right, but it is certainly an improvement over Hicklin.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the Supreme Court will ever manage to shake off the weighty chains of the moral guardianship of the nation, that it draped upon itself, unasked, 50 years ago.

Gautam Bhatia is a New Delhi-based lawyer. A more detailed critique of the Ranjit Udeshi judgement, and of the Supreme Court’s obscenity jurisprudence, may be found in his book, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution.


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14. REFASHIONING EUROPE - IMPLICATIONS FOR RUSSIA AND INDIA
Krishnan Srinivasan & Hari Vasudevan
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(The Telegraph, February 4 , 2016)

January this year saw a major change in European geopolitics, with Ukraine joining the European Union's free trade area and ending its free trade arrangements with Russia. Relations between the EU and Ukraine will be further cemented through a visa regime that promises free travel and completes the association of Ukraine with the EU initiated in 2014 after the overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovych regime and the Crimean crisis. A trade embargo has been imposed by Moscow on Ukraine and duly reciprocated by Kiev. These decisions follow persisting uncertainty during 2015 over Ukraine's status as a result of the rebellions in eastern Ukraine against the Kiev government. Political association with the EU had meant little to chaotic and corrupt Ukrainian political practices, and economic association had been put on hold while the Minsk accords kept civil conflict in eastern Ukraine at a low ebb.

Subtly, however, Ukrainian security arrangements were adapted piecemeal to the requirements of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russia expected to be involved in discussions regarding Ukraine's future, and exercised restraint in its support for its anti-Kiev allies in eastern Ukraine as provided for under the Minsk agreement, whereas Brussels and Washington hoped for the economic collapse of the Russian government under the weight of their sanctions. Neither expectation came about, but the West could take satisfaction from this turn of events. Leading the cheerleaders are Ukrainian émigrés like Taras Kuzio, scholars like Timothy Garton Ash and Anne Applebaum, and that Cold-War-horse of the American Democratic Party, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Although the pro-Western government in Kiev is widely unpopular, with massive disillusionment and radicalization growing, the economy in a shambles and corruption and venality rampant, the EU feels that the developments in Ukraine, dire though its internal situation may be, could yet provide a boost to the beleaguered EU economy. There are no indications that energy supplies from Russia will be affected and, given the prevailing low oil and gas prices and the severe pressure on Moscow's revenues from energy exports, there is little likelihood of any default in gas supplies from Russia. More significantly, the change in Ukraine's economic status is an important step in the EU's evolution and its centring around a possible future Berlin-Warsaw axis. It may eventually provide a shot in the arm for Europe's most powerful economies, although business methods will have to adapt significantly to Eastern European practices. For London this may well pose a challenge, whereas in Paris it might be viewed as an opportunity. For capitals like Athens and Madrid, it introduces a new factor in their calculations, namely a large and impoverished population affiliated to the EU that will add competition for jobs and will certainly threaten income levels.

In Ukraine itself, there will be continuing problems in the Russian-speaking eastern provinces. Though the Minsk accords have been prolonged, the anti-Kiev forces feel let down and warn that they will return to the battlefield. But this is only one aspect of the larger problem of Ukraine's fragile national identity and the Russian refusal to accept the existing situation. Ukraine's steps towards the West are nothing short of momentous and place under strain the brittle national consensus between its various groups, because this development ends a relationship between Ukraine and Russia that is almost half a millennium old and brings into sharp focus Ukraine's known inability to sustain itself as an independent integral state. The Russia-Ukraine connection was initially the result of a treaty signed in Moscow in 1654 between representatives of the Ukrainian Cossacks and the government of Tsar Alexis Romanov. Cossacks at that time spoke a language akin to both Russian and Polish but written in the Cyrillic script used in Russia. This treaty was intended to prevent the agonizing choice faced by the Cossacks between the enserfdom of Ukraine by Poland, whose client-state it was, and the imposition of despotism by the Ottoman Empire and its ally the Tatar khanate of Crimea. Despite the treaty, however, the Cossacks found they could not survive without the Polish marcher lords to the West, although they were drawn towards making common cause with the Russian settlers in the East. With Poland's collapse and Russia's rise, these elements came together to constitute the nationally unstable entity of Ukraine, which was further endangered by post-World War II map adjustments and Nikita Khrushchev's ill-advised gift of the Crimea. Now, with war in its East, internal discord and Russian ill-will, just how viable this putative nation will be in its new role as an EU associate has to be open to serious doubt.

For New Delhi, these developments in Europe have two implications: it marks the intensification of a trend in world politics that relates to India's backyard and could provide new economic opportunities. As Russia has shown through its intervention in Syria, it is prepared to be assertive beyond its immediate neighbourhood and not likely to be cowed down by the West. The turn of affairs in Ukraine, marking the further alienation of Russia from the West, will reinforce the linkage between the powerful Russian military and the energy establishment and the Chinese economy. Outliers in this relationship are the members of the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union and Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan. In terms of international alignments, one manifestation is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, of which India has become a member. The Russia-China connection involves initiatives that cover trade in major resources, including energy and manufactures, and financial arrangements that operate outside the scope of convertible currencies. As the sphere of operations grows within this tightly defined economic space, the utility and flexibility of its arrangements will prove attractive in India's greater hinterland. India cannot turn away from these developments since the alternative is an open-ended East Asian international trade and economic arena dominated by the United States of America, for which India will be ineligible owing to its inability to open its markets sufficiently to integrate with the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

The rising interest of the Narendra Modi government in these developments was on show in Moscow during the prime minister's recent visit, where both Indian private and public sectors were present and the preference of New Delhi for Russian military hardware and nuclear technology was again on the table. The terms of further economic involvement as well as India's wariness were also on display in the discussions over a possible return to the erstwhile rupee-ruble trading arrangements. Also important for India, the EU's association with Ukraine will require a reconsideration of future engagements with Europe, which is a major source of investment and trade. Europe as constituting a territory of safe business arrangements, where rules are transparent even though complex, has become increasingly disturbed, with nationalist and chauvinist attitudes forcefully on display in some member-states. British, French and German connections have always been a useful safety belt for India, but clearly, Balkan and Eastern European habits of administration, judicial order and business negotiation will increasingly shape EU regulations and their implementation. A swing in perspective may be required to re-engage Eastern and Southwestern Europe which have long been dark zones on the New Delhi horizon after the Soviet disintegration and the Yugoslav civil war. Greater attention to capitals like Warsaw and Bucharest may prove worthwhile, invoking technology networks and opportunities from the India-Comecon connections that have now long receded in memory.

K. Srinivasan is a former foreign secretary. H. Vasudevan is a specialist in Russian and European history at Calcutta University

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15. SUSAN BURCH ON ON SAVELLI AND MARKS, 'PSYCHIATRY IN COMMUNIST EUROPE'
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 Mat Savelli, Sarah Marks, eds. Psychiatry in Communist Europe. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 240 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-137-49091-9.

Reviewed by Susan Burch (Middlebury College)
Published on H-Disability (January, 2016)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

Challenging standard interpretations of psychiatry in communist-era Europe, this collection offers important contributions to the social history of medicine. The ten chapters illustrate a rich variety of topics, particularly around treatment options, national-cultural differences, and contest within the Soviet psychiatric profession. As the editors astutely note, global politics and culture wars across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have strongly shaped historical studies of psychiatry in communist Europe. They acknowledge the powerful impact of "psychiatric abuse"--a phrase commonly invoked to describe Soviet efforts to discredit and subdue political dissidents and ideas that challenged the state. According to Mat Savelli and Sarah Marks, however, "the intensity of debate regarding the issue of psychiatric abuse has, on the whole, deflected attention away from attempts to understand the development of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the USSR in a wider context" (p. 6). Consequently, their anthology primarily explores less familiar terrain.

Each chapter centers on a different geographical context. This is a great asset of the work. As counter-stories to one another, the various focused studies of communist Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia shatter the stereotype of the Soviet bloc as monolithic (and primarily ethnically Russian). Those generally interested in the USSR will appreciate the editors’ introduction, which details some of the complex and fractured relations between members of the Soviet Union. It also acknowledges gaps in the research collection, such as the absence of essays about Albania. Overall, the scholarly scope of the volume is varied--mostly to the anthology’s benefit. Some essays examine individual institutions: one particularly vivid work details the (in)famous Kaschenko Hospital outside of Moscow as a way to understand the impact of broad forces across the USSR and the power of individual medical professionals. Other works consider large regions, such as Central Asia or the whole USSR, highlighting tensions between center and periphery. Tensions in the field of religious diversity are, however, confined primarily to discussion on indigenous (Muslim) healers in Central Asia.

Several pieces demonstrate especially innovative historical interpretations. Alisher Latypov’s insightful study of the "narcomania” (drug addiction) in Central Asia, for instance, shows how the construction of this psychiatric category especially cast narcotic addiction as a “regional problem” (pp. 73-75). In this Soviet construction, indigenous medical practitioners were portrayed as “backward” cultural relics whose use of opiates directly contributed to “narcomania.” Such depictions, Latypov deftly explains, affirmed Russian Soviet superiority and justified the center’s efforts to Sovietize peripheral regions. The chapter by Volker Hess on psychopharmaceuticals in West and East Germany draws attention to what he calls the “magical triangle” of science, industry, and the state (p. 154). This powerful essay clarifies how, before the 1960s, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) enjoyed considerable exchanges of research knowledge, medical societies, and pharmacological materials. After the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, Hess contends, the psychopharmacological innovation slowed to a near halt in East Germany. Hess’s case study challenges standard historical interpretations of the modern medical industrial complex that rely heavily on Western (non-communist) contexts.  

Benjamin Zajicek’s chapter, “Insulin coma therapy and the construction of therapeutic effectiveness in Stalin's Soviet Union, 1936–1953," details how this therapy “came to be seen as an effective, modern, and distinctly Soviet treatment" even after political-scientific attitudes shifted dramatically (p. 51). Drawing on historian Joel Baslow’s critiques of American psychiatry to understand psychiatry in a totalitarian context, Zajicek emphasizes social and institutional factors, including personal and professional, in constructing medically effective treatments. Soviet psychiatrists’ shifting representations of insulin coma therapy proved contradictory, Zajicek shows. But each depiction served multiple, often sustained, purposes, including justifications for additional resources, professional affirmation, and an abiding belief in the promise of “cure” for presumed psychiatric disabilities. Matt Savelli’s chapter on youth drug use and psychiatry in Yugoslavia notes the rise of the medicalization of the issue and then its de-medicalization, but does not engage deeply with changes among political regimes and how these connected to psychiatric practice.  

As a collection thoroughly rooted to the social history of medicine, Psychiatry in Communist Europe ultimately may have limited offerings to disability historians interested in more critical study of key concepts like “mental health,” “cure,” and “normalcy,” or of ableism and other interlocking systems of power and privilege. Another conspicuous drawback is that people deemed mentally ill play a restricted role in this work. Most often, they appear as case studies supporting larger theoretical arguments and as subjects (“patients”) of psychiatric interventions. Still, the extensive array of primary sources cited, and the variety of topics and settings offered, demonstrates the scope for continuing study in this sphere. As Sarah Philips, Frances Bernstein, Jitka Sinecka, and other critical disability studies scholars have shown, Soviet and post-Soviet histories raise significant, challenging, and necessary questions for our field.[1] It is hoped that Psychiatry in Communist Europe may spark additional projects to pursue those questions.

Note

[1]. Sarah Philips, “'There Are No Invalids in the USSR!': A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009), available at http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/936/1111; Frances Bernstein, “Panic, Potency, and the Crisis of Nervousness in the 1920s,” in Everyday Subjects: Formations of Identity in Early Soviet Culture, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and Jitka Sinecka, “Peeping over the wall: Communism, Goffman and the deinstitutionalisation of people with autism in the Czech Republic,” in The Imperfect Historian Disability Histories in Europe, ed. Sebastian Barsch, Anne Klein, and Pieter Verstraete (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2013), 215-234.


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16.  DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIBLE: IMPEACHMENT OR COUP D’ÉTAT IN BRAZIL? | ALFREDO SAAD FILHO
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(E-International Relations, Jan 14 2016)

Brazil is the world’s sixth largest economy, a prominent member of the G-20 and the BRICS group of large emerging countries, and the host of the 2014 Football World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. The country has also attracted attention since the Presidential election of PT (Workers’ Party) candidates Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2002 and 2006, and Dilma Rousseff, in 2010 and 2014. Their administrations have played a leading role in the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’; Brazil has also achieved considerable gains in employment and distribution, and was one of the few nations where social spending rose in the current ‘Age of Neoliberalism’.

Yet, Brazil finds itself enmeshed in the worst economic contraction in a generation, coupled with a political deadlock fuelled by a parade of corruption scandals. A particularly grotesque one has engulfed the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, who is struggling for his political life while, simultaneously, leading impeachment procedures against President Rousseff. Even if her administration survives, Rousseff is unlikely to regain the ability to pass legislation through a bitterly hostile Congress, further impairing the country’s economic prospects.

This is calamitous for Brazil, and potentially lethal for the PT. At the end of his second administration, Lula enjoyed approval rates bordering on 90 per cent, and Dilma Rousseff’s approvals hovered around 70 per cent until 2013. The collapse has been relentless: her popularity is now stuck in single digits. There is profound cross-class discontent, a mass-based political right has emerged for the first time since the 1960s, and the mainstream media has been promoting a vicious campaign against the PT and anything approaching even social democracy. If they succeed, there may be a long-term shift to the right in the largest country in Latin America. 

Lula’s search for political hegemony

The forces driving today’s economic and political crises can be traced back to the incompatibility between two transitions taking place in last 30 years: the political transition from military rule to democracy, that was sealed by the progressive Constitution of 1988, and the economic transition from import-substitution industrialisation to neoliberalism, that was consolidated by the macroeconomic policy ‘tripod’ imposed in 1999, including inflation targeting and Central Bank independence, liberalisation of capital flows, and permanently contractionary fiscal and monetary policies.

The Constitution is socially inclusive; it has democratised and decentralised power and mandated the creation of a Swedish-style welfare state, including extensive social rights and income guarantees. In contrast, neoliberalism promotes the interests of internationalised capital in general and finance in particular, concentrates economic and political power and imposes an exclusionary democracy cloaked as ‘macroeconomic stability’. The friction between incompatible principles of social organisation – democracy or neoliberalism – helps to explain both the election of Lula, and the destruction of his successor.

Correspondingly, for 25 years Brazilian political life has been structured by the conflict between the social-democratic PT and the hardline neoliberal Social Democratic Party, PSDB. In Poulantzian fashion, these parties are closely aligned with two fractions of capital. Domestic capital is based primarily on construction, shipbuilding, the capital goods industry, agribusiness and national banks. They have supported the PT in exchange for subsidised state finance and institutional protection supporting their complex relationship of competition and co-operation with global capital. Internationalised capital includes foreign firms and their associates across finance, insurance, globally-integrated manufacturing and the mainstream media which, although overwhelmingly owned by domestic capital, is committed to neoliberalism and rejects the notion of a ‘national’ development strategy. This group is represented by the PSDB.

The PT administrations promoted the interests of domestic capital and the workers with considerable success during the period of prosperity afforded by the commodity boom pulled by the USA and, subsequently, by China. For example, these administrations supported the expansion of the oil chain through the state-owned Petrobras, the country’s largest firm; the shipbuilding industry recovered from the disaster imposed in the 1990s by the PSDB administration of F.H. Cardoso that reduced it to 5,000 workers. Under Lula, profits ballooned and employment in the shipyards rose to 105,000. The PT administrations reduced real interest rates from a peak of 22 per cent, under Cardoso, to 3 per cent, under Dilma, and dramatically expanded subsidised finance through the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), that became the largest development bank in the world.

These governments also benefitted the organised workers and the poor, both indirectly through the expansion of the economy, and directly through the government’s wage, employment and transfer policies. The minimum wage rose by 72 per cent in real terms between 2005 and 2012, and social provision increased through pensions, benefits and the flagship Bolsa Família cash transfer programme. Economic prosperity and a supportive administration also facilitated social struggles. There were around 300 strikes in 2003, and less than 20 per cent of collective actions led to real wage gains; in 2013 there were 2,000 strikes, and 95 per cent of agreements increased real wages.

Yet social and economic achievements did not create a stable political hegemony. For example, the PT and its close allies never controlled more than one-third of seats in Congress. Instead, they always depended on broad alliances with unreliable parties and opportunistic groups in order to pass legislation. In the meantime, the mainstream media remained ravenously hostile to Lula and Dilma, often orchestrating the parliamentary opposition. The Judiciary is also firmly aligned with the political right. Finally, corruption remains an essential link between politics and business life. Thievery and underhand transfers supplement the machinery of the state, democratic processes and the institutional modalities of representation of the elite. It is only natural that, in the 1990s, the PT decided that in order to win elections instead of being honourably defeated, it needed to begin distributing favours to its business supporters, and reward unprincipled politicians in exchange for their support. There is no other way to govern the country. These crooked circumstances were incompatible with political coherence, and the PT was always tripping on the verge of calamity.

The favourable winds of the global commodity boom supported Lula’s programme of income distribution, but his economic ambitions were constrained by the neoliberal policy tripod. Fiscal and monetary austerity, large capital movements and incoherent industrial policies overvalued the currency and promoted economic precarisation. Brazil created millions of jobs in the 2000s, but they were mostly precarious and poorly paid posts in urban services. Infrastructure funding was always lagging, creating a yawning gap between rising consumption levels within the household and the provision of public goods and services, especially transport, water, sanitation, security, schooling and health. Mass frustration crept in. In the meantime, the upper middle classes felt increasingly alienated from the government, because of their exclusion from power and the feeling that ‘their’ taxes were funding feckless hordes and arrogant arrivistes, who insisted on their right of admission to shopping centres, airports and private clinics.

Brazil recovered rapidly from the global crisis through bold monetary and fiscal policies. However, the scope for success was limited because growth was driven by commodity exports, for which demand was bound to decline, backed up by fickle capital inflows. Since the economy is permanently hampered by the neoliberal policy tripod, if the external engine splutters domestic growth will falter, regardless of fiscal tweaks or bombastic attacks on corruption. If, in addition, the government is isolated politically, demoralised, and beset by an investment strike, the economy must fall off a cliff. Let us see how it happened.

The cracks are showing: Dilma’s fall, and the emboldening of the Right                             

Dilma Rousseff was never a politician, nor was she a member of the PT until recently. She was a manager and a fixer, and was offered the Ministry of Energy in 2003. There, she oversaw the massive expansion of the country’s oil industry. She subsequently became President Lula’s Chief of Staff. Dilma succeeded in both posts and Lula, at the height of his powers, anointed her PT candidate to his succession.

Once elected, Dilma tilted economic policy further away from neoliberalism. She introduced more expansionary fiscal policies, lowered interest rates, imposed marginal capital controls, funded additional state investment, expanded transfers and intervened in multiple sectors. The outcome was ruinous. The government expected the global crisis to peter out but, instead, it deepened. Quantitative easing in the advanced economies wreaked havoc with the Brazilian real; the media intensified its attacks, and domestic capital refused to invest since it could neither control the government nor claim easy profits. The current account deficit ballooned, and the economy tanked. The government lost the ability to conciliate conflicting interests. The urban poor rebelled in 2013, but their protests were hijacked by the right-wing media and a bitterly hostile upper middle class.

Dilma campaigned for re-election with a left-wing message, warning against the neoliberal adjustment planned by her PSDB rival. However, once victorious, Dilma appointed as Finance Minister a banker connected to the PSDB, and gave him free rein to restore the government’s ‘credibility’ through a sharp fiscal and monetary contraction. The left cried foul, and Rousseff’s working class supporters felt betrayed. The retraction of demand during a protracted global crisis triggered the collapse of investment. Output nose-dived and unemployment mounted. The economy contracted 3.5 per cent in 2015, and 2016 can be just as bad. The gains from the 2000s are being wiped out as we speak. International capital is waiting for Dilma’s fall; domestic capital is cowering, and the formal sector workers are dumbfounded by their losses. The informal workers suffer heavily, through the evaporation of opportunities for income, employment, education and social advancement.

The media, the (PSDB-controlled) Federal Police and the Judiciary tightened the screws in 2014, and successive corruption scandals have come to light. The Federal Police’s ongoing Lava Jato operation has unveiled a large corruption network centred on Petrobras and including cartels, fraud and illegal funding for several parties. Blanket media coverage focusing on the PT alone badly dented the government’s credibility. Several politicians and party cadres were jailed, followed by some of the country’s most prominent businessmen, but only those supporting the government. A two-pronged campaign was launched to restore the right to power regardless of the elections. On the one hand, the media suggested that the PT was uniquely corrupt and corrupting, and that the businesses aligned with it had violated the law and perverted democracy. On the other hand, the police and the judicial system have sought to throttle the party. The message was clear: anyone funding the PT illegally will be imprisoned; their companies will be destroyed and the shareholders will pay dearly. Having survived for years through the favours of the rich at the expense of the militancy of the poor, the PT was in a bind. It had no explanation to offer, no programme to advance, and no strategy to climb out of the hole.

The attack against Rousseff and the PT forged a right-wing mass opposition demanding the ‘end of corruption’ and ‘Dilma’s impeachment’, even though there is no legal justification for it. Examination of the opposition’s grievances leads to a laundry list of unfocused and conflicting dissatisfactions articulated by expletives rather than logic: the demand for the President’s impeachment has no legal substance. The process is an attempted political coup d’état: the PSDB and the media refuse to accept the outcome of the 2014 elections and they have decided to depose the President and restore the hegemony of globalised neoliberalism regardless of Constitutional niceties.

At this point in time, it is impossible to predict whether or not Dilma will be impeached or forced to resign. Underpinning this uncertainty is the impasse between social forces defending an inclusive Constitution and those imposing an excluding neoliberal system of accumulation. These disputes emerge through a dysfunctional political system, a distorted economy and a regressive social structure: a democracy without legitimate sources of party funds, a hollowed out manufacturing base supported by large-scale agribusiness, an economy without prospects of generating quality jobs for its workers or capacity to distribute income in a fiscally sustainable manner, and élites clinging to their privileges and resenting any attempt to build an inclusive citizenship. A political hegemony resolving these impasses will not be built easily or rapidly. The agony is not over. The end is not even close.
About The Author (Alfredo Saad Filho):

Alfredo Saad Filho is Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London. His research interests include the political economy of neoliberalism, industrial policy, alternative macroeconomic policies, and the labour theory of value and its applications.

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17. PARTY ANIMALS: MY FAMILY AND OTHER COMMUNISTS BY DAVID AARONOVITCH REVIEW – AT HOME WITH THE HARD LEFT | Nick Cohen
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(The Guardian - 17 January 2016)
The columnist’s account of his Marxist upbringing is compassionate and wise
Sam and Lavender Aaronovitch on a Vietnam demo in Hyde Park, 1966.
Sam, far right, and Lavender Aaronovitch on a Vietnam demo in Hyde Park, 1966. Photograph: courtesy David Aaronovitch / Penguin-Random House

When the Soviet Union fell, my grandfather’s second wife did not share the wonderment at the passing of one of the most terrible regimes humanity has seen. She felt as if her life had been wasted, and hinted that her one consolation was that my grandfather had not lived to see it.

“How could you?” I thought as I listened. The same question powers David Aaronovitch’s account of his communist upbringing, and takes it far beyond the boundaries of memoir into an often moving and always wise examination of the legacies of childhood.

David Aaronovitch: Me, Mum, Dad… and Stalin

It took Aaronovitch time to realise “the complete otherness” of his shabby Hampstead home. (Intellectuals could afford to live there in the 1960s.) Not everyone thought that God Save the Queen was an anthem of oppression, apparently, or sent their children to Socialist Sunday Schools. It wasn’t as normal as it seemed for the police to pick up your parents. Nor did all his classmates have a Communist party to hand to give them “a place to be on almost every question”.

His father, Sam, was a charismatic agitator and tireless autodidact. He was born in the Jewish slums of the old East End. A bright boy without hope of a decent schooling, he educated himself at the “University of the Ghetto”: Whitechapel Library – described in the lines of the working-class poet Bernard Kops.

“Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be.

That door of the library was the door into me

And Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”

Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

Sam’s history provided a partial answer to the question: “How could you?” Like my grandfather and many others, he found that the Communist party and the wider Labour movement allowed him to travel to a new world, and one in which his class was no longer a handicap. The Communist party is gone, the Labour movement is dying, and the government is closing the libraries. His successors won’t be so lucky.

It was once said that the largest political party in Britain was the ex-Communist party. From the late 1940s on, Sam knew all the intellectuals, who joined and resigned – not all of them smartly enough to preserve their reputations. “He heard me out like an officer interviewing a rookie,” Doris Lessing said of Aaronovitch père, and said he “looked forward to reading my denunciations” when she resigned. She duly did and painted Sam as a cynical cultural commissar in The Golden Notebook: “tight, defensive and sarcastic”.
Sam Aaronovitch addressing a rally in Islington, north London in the mid-60s
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Sam Aaronovitch addressing a rally in Islington, north London in the mid-60s. Photograph: courtesy David Aaronovitch / Penguin-Random House

Lavender, Sam’s wife and David’s mother, could not have been more different. Like my grandfather’s second wife, like many on the far left today, she was from the upper middle class. Her father was a career army officer, who retired as a lieutenant colonel. He dumped her with family friends after her young mother died, and ended his days as a nasty old man who sponged off everyone he could while bitching about “fuzzy-wuzzy” foreigners swindling the taxpayer. Why did communists want a revolution? Lavender’s story provided a partial answer too: there was much to revolt against, and not only in Britain’s colonies but closer to home.
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Aaronovitch doesn’t follow suit by bitching about his childhood. He knows that growing up in a communist family had its blessings. Instead of learning about kings and queens, he was taught about Greece under the colonels and impermissibility of racial prejudice. He may have had an odd upbringing, he says, but who can deny its richness?

The temptation for him and the reader is to join those who say that communists were better than the Nazis, and scorn conservatives who draw a moral equivalence. To his credit, Aaronovitch won’t slosh on the whitewash. He says that Lessing had a point about his father’s dogmatism. He investigates the Soviet spies his family knew, and the half-forgotten men who can still produce a shudder among leftists of a certain age. On the party’s instructions, James Klugmann and Derek Kartun produced screamingly mendacious indictments of eastern European communists, who had often been their friends when Stalin decided to kill them. As with today’s propagandists for Putin and Assad, that they were citizens of a free country, who would have suffered nothing more than a few harsh words from their political allies if they had refused to take the Moscow line, makes their behaviour all the more contemptible. Whatever else you say about British communism, you must begin by admitting it was the servile accomplice of an unspeakable regime.

Aaronovitch opens with a quote from a letter from Arnold Wesker’s mother about Chicken Soup with Barley, Wesker’s story of the disintegration of a Jewish communist family. “Who’s going to be interested in that, silly boy? It’s about us. It won’t mean a thing to anybody else?” He has no need to be nervous. His humanity, as well as his flair and his scholarship, ensure that his autobiography is more than just a parochial history. Aaronovitch could easily have written a Marxist misery memoir. His parents were hopeless. His mother blamed and belittled her children for the problems in her marriage and childhood. His father was an energetic adulterer, who eventually ran off. Both were violent.
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But instead of aping the old Stalinists and denouncing them, Aaronovitch shows them as creatures of their circumstances. How could they have done it? Easy – his father found social mobility and radical energy in communism. His abandoned mother found the opposite. Marxism gave her order and certainty. The party was her replacement for the parents she had lost.

They reacted to their circumstances as we react to ours. Children brought up in religious and political cults are not so different from everyone else. We are all defined by what we accept and reject from our childhoods. In Aaronovitch’s case, his rejection of Marxism turned him into an effervescent and essential writer, the enemy of every species of conspiracy theory from right or left.

If he cannot find the malice to condemn his parents, the rest of us can surely thank them.

Party Animals is published by Jonathan Cape (£17.99). Click here to buy it for £14.39


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18. BIG PHARMA’S WORST NIGHTMARE 
Sarah Boseley
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(The Guardian, 26 January 2016)
 
Jamie Love has spent years battling global drug companies, unshakable in his belief that even the world’s poorest people should have access to life-saving medicines. Is it time that our own government listened to him?

On a hot August afternoon in 2000, four Americans arrived for a secret meeting at the central London penthouse flat of an Indian billionaire drug manufacturer named Yusuf Hamied. A sixth person would join them there, a French employee of the World Health Organisation, who was flying in from Geneva, having told his colleagues he was taking leave.

Hamied took his guests into the dining room on the seventh floor. The room featured a view of the private gardens of Gloucester Square, Bayswater, for which only the residents possess a key. The six men sat round a glass dining table overlooked by a painting of galloping horses by a Mumbai artist (Hamied has racehorses stabled in three cities). The discussion, which went on all afternoon and through dinner that evening at the Bombay Palace restaurant nearby, would help change the course of medical history.

The number of people living with HIV/Aids worldwide had topped 34 million, many of them in the developing world. Hamied and his guests were looking for a way to break the monopoly held by pharmaceutical companies on Aids drugs, in order to make the costly life-saving medicines available to those who could not pay.

Hamied was the boss of Cipla, a Mumbai-based company founded by his father to make cheap generic copies of out-of-patent drugs. He had met only one of the men before – Jamie Love, head of the Consumer Project on Technology, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the US political activist, Ralph Nader. Love specialised in challenging intellectual property and patent rules. For five years, he had been leading high-profile campaigners from organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières in a battle to demolish patent protection.

Patents grant protection on inventions, guaranteeing those who hold them a period of monopoly to recoup costs – in the case of drug companies, this can be as much as 20 years. With no competition, pharma companies can charge whatever they want. Love, an economist and self-confessed patent nerd, had taken on politicians, civil servants and corporate lawyers, arguing against unfair monopolies on products from software to stationery. His overwhelming concern at that point was the many millions of lives cut short for want of affordable medicines. He had been asking everybody he could think of, from the United Nations to the US government, one question: how much does it actually cost to make the drugs that keep somebody with HIV alive?

“Watching Jamie with government officials who are sceptical is a thing of intellectual beauty, because there really is nobody who can rebut him when he gets under way,” said Nader in September on his radio show in southern California. “Jamie is a global hero. He has saved many, many thousands of lives by beating Big Pharma and reducing the cost of drugs for poor people overseas.”

Love had flown from his home in Washington to London with Bill Haddad, an investigative journalist who had been nominated for a Pulitzer prize for exposing a pharmaceutical company cartel that was fixing the prices of antibiotics in Latin America. Haddad was now the CEO of a company called Biogenerics, which made cheap copies for the US of expensive branded medicines, once they were out of patent.

Drug company's loss could be Africa's gain

The meeting was confidential, because their targets were the wealthy and powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies who were fierce in defence of their patents. For four years, a three-drug cocktail costing between $10,000 and $15,000 per year had been available to treat people with HIV in the US, and other affluent countries. But in Africa, a diagnosis remained a death sentence. In 2000, more than 24.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa had HIV. Many of them were young, many also had children and could not afford life-saving treatment. Love had a word for this state of affairs: racism.

The month before the Gloucester Square meeting, 12,000 people from all over the world had convened in Durban, South Africa for a fiery and impassioned International Aids Conference, to demand affordable drugs. There were marches in the streets, and singing, dancing and the throb of drums in the conference hall. A white constitutional court judge, Edwin Cameron, took the platform to declare that he was HIV‑positive and to denounce a world in which he could buy his life but others had to die. A small boy born with HIV, named Nkosi Johnson, moved people to tears with a plea for acceptance and understanding. He died, without treatment, the following year, aged 12. Nelson Mandela, the former president, closed the conference with a statesmanlike appeal for action.

At the London meeting, Love had a question for Yusuf Hamied. How much, he asked, as they sat around the glass table in their shirtsleeves in the summer heat, does it cost to make Aids drugs?

Hamied had been making the antiretrovirals that hold HIV at bay for a while. In India, thanks to the 1970 Patents Act, in which his father had been instrumental, drug patents granted in the US or Europe did not apply – yet. (The World Trade Organisation’s trade-related intellectual property rights, or Trips, agreement requiring all nations to recognise international patents did not come into effect in India until 2005.) The cost of manufacturing a drug, Hamied told Love, is barely more than the cost of the raw materials.

Nkosi Johnson addresses the International Aids Conference in 2000, in Durban. South Africa. Photograph: Juda Ngwenya/Reuters

By the time the visitors headed back to their hotel, a plan had been hatched. Hamied would make Triomune, a cheap, once-daily pill combining the three Aids drugs sold by different manufacturers for such huge sums in the US and Europe, and sell it in Africa and Asia for a fraction of the cost.

Fifteen years on, it is no longer just the poor who cannot afford the drugs they need. New medicines for lethal diseases such as hepatitis C and cancer have been launched on the global market at such high prices that the richest countries in the world are having to find ways to ration them. And Jamie Love is back in the fray.
* * *

In 2010, the cause Jamie Love has fought for all his life suddenly became intensely personal. His wife and colleague, Manon Ress, was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer. Ress asked her doctor how long she had. Not 10 to 20 years, she was told, but probably five to 10. That was good news. Long enough to get a dog.

Within days of her diagnosis, Ress started chemotherapy, but since both her mother and her sister had suffered from cancer, it was possible she had an inherited genetic propensity to the disease that could affect which treatment she should be given. There were delays in getting the test – probably, Love believes, because it was patented.

“It took weeks before we got the result back and I was so angry,” said Love. “You are just reeling with not knowing what the hell is going on and not even knowing what the stages mean and trying to figure everything out. And then you realise that the reason why she didn’t get the test is because the fucking price was so high that she wasn’t recommended for it earlier. It is very cheap to perform but very expensive because of the patent. This is sort of crazy.”

You need a lot of luck, not just positivity, when cancer strikes | Deborah Orr

Ress’s aggressive cancer responded to the drug Herceptin for a time. When that stopped working, Ress was prescribed T-DM1, marketed by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche as Kadcyla. The drug was originally listed in the UK at £90,000 per patient per year, making it the most expensive breast cancer drug ever sold.

“I have it every three weeks and there are very few side-effects – dry eyes and a dry mouth and joint pains,” Ress told me. That was trivial stuff compared to the chemotherapy, which had given her infections, stopped her tear ducts working and wrecked her sight, which had to be corrected by a cataract operation. And Kadcyla worked straight away. “Immediately three tumours disappeared. There is still one on the lung, but that is getting smaller.”

Love struggled to understand how the tragedies he had fought against all his life had turned up at his own front door. Thanks to him and his colleagues, Aids drugs are now affordable everywhere in the world, but advanced cancer drugs are not. And while Ress could – through her insurers – buy extra years of life, she and Love were outraged that other women, even in rich countries, did not have the same opportunity.

Initially, Ress did not want to speak publicly about her illness and treatment. But she knew that the willingness of people to be open about their HIV-positive status was one of the reasons why the global battle for Aids treatment was won. Ress decided she could advocate, with a passion. “It is outrageous to me that some women are not getting the drug, depending on where they were born,” she said. “It should not be a matter of luck.”

Jamie Love and his wife Manon Ress, who has breast cancer. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Ress’s fight for survival shifted Love’s perspective, he explained to me over a pint of lager on a chill evening in London last spring. He had spent years focusing on drugs that were just coming to the end of their patent life – drugs that were by that time almost two decades old. But better cancer drugs are being developed every year. For the sake of women like his wife, Love realised he needed to be working on access to new drugs, not just the ones coming to the end of their patent protection.

At 66, Love still has the broad shoulders of a man who has known hard physical work. On the night we met, he was preparing to present his radical plan to slash the cost of Kadcyla. He was also looking forward to a video call with Ress, to tell her about the conference in Cambridge on intellectual property rights where he had spent the previous two days. Ress was in Washington DC, where she walks her beloved Airedale terrier for around six miles every day.

Since Kadcyla first came on the market, after protracted negotiations, Roche has agreed to reduce the price. (Details of these negotiations are kept secret from the public and the company’s competitors.) However, the NHS still views it as too expensive for general use.

In response, Love came up with a scheme. In October, a coalition of campaigners set up by Love sent a letter to health secretary Jeremy Hunt, proposing a solution as radical and surprising as his scheme for Aids drugs. The UK government, Love urged, should override the patent on Kadcyla, pay Roche compensation – a process known as compulsory licensing – and authorise a company to make cheap generic copies.

    It was a bold, unprecedented move, challenging a first-world government to take on Big Pharma

It was a bold, unprecedented move, challenging a first-world government to take on Big Pharma. Yet there was an undeniable logic to it. The government could not afford to treat all the women who needed the drug at the price Roche wanted. And if Love could persuade the government to embrace his scheme by issuing a compulsory licence for T-DM1, it would set an important precedent – one that could change the cosy relationship between rich countries and Big Pharma for ever.
* * *

Jamie Love has never worked in healthcare. His crusade for access to medicines developed out of an early recognition that the drive for profit of big corporations was harming the poor. After graduating from high school, Love left his home town of Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle, and went to Alaska to work in the fisheries. When he took his first job in a cannery, he was lodged with a Filipino crew. About a month later he was moved into the white workers’ bunk house. “I had much better accommodation, a raise, more privileges and things like that and they put me in a different union. But I’d got to know the Filipinos and I was struck by the injustice of the whole thing,” he said.

Two years later, he was looking for work in Anchorage, and while collecting unemployment benefit, he started to become aware of the damaged lives around him. “They were runaways, drug addicts. They were outside the system. So I was eventually involved in this social services operation. We set up a free medical clinic and eventually a free dental clinic, a legal clinic and other things as well.”

People would arrive at the clinic with possible cancer symptoms, saying they were unable to find a doctor who would see them because they were uninsured and relied on Medicaid, the state-funded healthcare for the poor. Love and his friends rang all the local doctors they could find and asked whether they would accept Medicaid patients – and then got the local papers to run a list, naming and shaming those who refused. The press ran the story with headlines such as: “Doctors to patients: drop dead”.

Love discovered he was not cut out for social work. On a personal level, he struggled to cope with the individual tragedies around him. So he set out to tackle poverty and social injustice by changing the underlying system. In the late summer of 1974, he set up the Alaska Public Interest Group, and campaigned for oil companies to hand over a portion of their revenues to the local community.

As his campaigning work grew, Love, who only had a high school education, felt that he needed more formal training and some academic credentials. Supported by recommendations from the governor of Alaska, among others, he leapfrogged undergraduate college and was admitted to a graduate programme on public administration at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He then joined the doctoral programme at Princeton.

Love had met his first wife, an artist, in Alaska, and they had a son. When they separated, Love found himself living alone in Princeton with a four-year-old. One of his neighbours in accommodation for students with families was a young Frenchwoman, separated from her husband, who also had a four-year-old boy. She was the daughter of a French artist and an American journalist. Her name was Manon – like the opera, said Love.

“Our kids were playing together, so she was my babysitter and I was her babysitter,” recalled Love. “If she went out and dated someone, I’d take care of her kid. She’d lend me her car if I was taking someone out. So eventually I took her to a circus and then I was quite smitten by her.”

In 1990, Love began working at the Center for Study of Responsive Law, a non-profit consumer rights organisation founded by Ralph Nader. Love focused on intellectual property rights. In 1995, he started the Consumer Project on Technology, now called Knowledge Ecology International. He worked on the investigation of Microsoft’s monopoly position in the web browser market. “I was the only one in the office who was really very techie, so I took the lead in beating up on Microsoft for about a year,” said Love. “Which is why I’ve got this deep, bad relationship with Bill Gates.” Years later, they clashed over access to medicines: Gates, who has put millions into vaccine research, strongly supports patents as an incentive to drug companies to invent new and better medicines.

    I took the lead in beating up on Microsoft for a year. Which is why I’ve got this deep, bad relationship with Bill Gates
    Jamie Love

Love had been working on the question of what constitutes a fair cost for medicines, on and off, since 1991. But the moment that would shape Love’s career came in the spring of 1994, when he got an invitation from Fabiana Jorge, a lobbyist for the Argentinian generic drug industry. Argentina, like India and Thailand, had a robust generic drug industry making cheap versions of medicines invented in north America or Europe. But the Argentinian government was coming under intense pressure to enforce international drug patents. The US government, which enjoyed very good relations with Big Pharma, wanted the Argentinians to implement the Trips intellectual property rights treaty and prevent generic copies of medicines being made.

Jorge was rounding up anybody she could find who had ever been critical of Big Pharma, including an adviser to Bill Clinton in the White House, to speak at a conference in May, held by the Latin American pharmaceutical industry in San Carlos de Bariloche, in the snow-covered Andes. Love accepted the invitation, and when he and his team arrived in Buenos Aires, they went straight to the US Embassy and demanded an explanation of what the US was up to. He was told that the Clinton administration was putting pressure on Carlos Menem, the Argentinian president, to issue an executive order upholding drug patents. As he listened to the embassy official’s explanation, Love became increasingly angry. He recalled his outburst: “And you are willing to have the president of Argentina become a dictator, bypass all the legislative safeguards of a democratic system? That’s what we’re doing in the United States? So these people that are really poor will pay higher prices for drugs. That’s America, right? It’s like – you’ve got to be kidding! I had no idea! It was like – wow!”

He would spend the next 20 years battling for access to drugs for the poor.

* * *

Big Pharma has a simple justification for charging high prices for drugs: it costs a lot of money to invent a medicine and bring it to the market, so the prices have to be high or the companies will be unable to afford to continue their important research and development (R&D). The figures drug companies usually cite are from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston, Massachusetts, which describes itself as an independent academic institution, despite the fact that it receives 40% of its funding from industry. In 2000, it put the cost of bringing a drug to market at $1bn. By 2014, that had risen to $2.6bn.

But those figures have been contested by Love and other campaigners. Many drugs begin as a gleam in the eye of a university researcher: somebody in academia has a bright idea and pursues it in the lab. Much medical research is funded by grants from public bodies, such as the US National Institutes of Health, or, in the UK, the Medical Research Council. When the basic research looks promising, the compound is sold, often to a small biotech firm.

Big Pharma has its own teams of lab researchers, but over the years the biggest drug companies have increasingly gained new drugs by buying smaller biotech firms with promising compounds on their books. Campaigners argue that the actual R&D carried out by the big profit-making companies – and the cost – is much less than they claim. A Senate finance committee carried out an 18-month investigation into the cost of the new Gilead hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi. In December 2015, it found that the price, set at $1,000 a pill, did not reflect the actual cost of R&D. Gilead stood to recoup far more than the $11bn it had paid to acquire the small biotech company, Pharmasett, that had produced Sovaldi and a follow-on treatment, Harvoni. “It was always Gilead’s plan to maximise revenue and affordability, and accessibility was an afterthought,” said Senator Ron Wyden at a news conference to announce the findings.

Even where a company has invented and developed the drug itself, there are other factors that push up the price. The cost of developing the many drugs that have been through trials and failed to work are factored in – more controversially, so is advertising and marketing.

Love was figuring out how to challenge these cost factors back in 1994, when Ellen t’Hoen of Health Action International in the Netherlands was organising a meeting to figure out what the consequences of the Trips agreement would be. Love emailed her to ask if he could attend, and she booked him to speak. They have been close collaborators on access campaigns ever since.

“He blew everyone out of the water,” t’Hoen said. “It was one of those visionary Jamie presentations, linking patents to questions of [alternative] financing for R&D. He is always way ahead of the game. He is always thinking about things that most people don’t even understand.”

Over the next few years, Love became known for his formidable grasp of intellectual property rules. His papers and blogs posted on the internet were picked up around the world. In 1998, Bernard Pécoul from Médecins Sans Frontières got in touch. Love didn’t know what MSF was, but Ress did. They were cool, she said: he absolutely had to speak to them.

A powerful alliance was beginning to form against Big Pharma. There were millions of people with HIV/Aids in South Africa by the end of 1998 – more people were dying of Aids there than in any other country. Yet at that critical moment, some 40 drug companies including the UK’s GlaxoSmithKline brought a joint legal action in Pretoria to block the South African government from buying cheaper medicines from abroad. Over three years, they retained almost every patent lawyer in South Africa and spent millions preparing a case that would deny treatment to the poor in the interests of profit.

Finally, in response to an international outcry, the drug companies abandoned the case, but not before the action had done lasting damage to their public image. Aids activists in the US and in Europe accused the companies of having blood on their hands. In this turbulent atmosphere, it was clear to Love that if campaigners wanted affordable medicines of all sorts for the poor, they should be focusing their energies on Aids drugs – public opinion was on their side and millions of lives were at stake. “I’d been following Aids but only really on the periphery of it and not very involved,” Love recalled. “I felt like, oh my God, I’m actually going to be able to do something about this.”

Trials had shown that a three-drug cocktail of very expensive antiretroviral drugs could not only keep people with HIV alive but healthy enough to live and work normally. The cost, around $15,000 a year per patient, was out of the question in sub-Saharan Africa.

People with HIV live almost 20 years longer than in 2001

The way to drive the price down, Love believed, was through compulsory licensing. The patent owner would get compensation, but not the enormous profits they might have expected.

At first, his idea met with strong resistance. “Compulsory licensing was considered a mechanism that we would never use,” said t’Hoen. It might be illegal and it would certainly outrage Big Pharma, whose lawyers would fight it. Love did not care. He was more than willing to take Big Pharma on.

In March 1999, Love’s Consumer Project on Technology cohosted a meeting of around 60 public health and consumer NGOs in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, on compulsory licensing as a means to get drugs to people who needed them, and could not afford them. There was passion and excitement at what the drugs company Merck later derided as a “boot camp” for smashing patents. There were representatives from the US patent trademark office and drug companies, people from the European Commission and WTO, and Aids activists – anyone who would be affected by the issue wanted to hear how this might work.

With their demands honed and targeted, the campaigners won a resolution from the World Health Assembly, the policy-making annual conference where all governments are represented. The WHA effectively supported not only access to medicines but, specifically, compulsory licensing. Love had made the resolution as sharp and pragmatic as possible, he said. “Otherwise it’s just another crappy WHA resolution that comes and goes and nobody pays any attention.”

He and t’Hoen were sometimes frustrated by the levels of incomprehension that met their work on trade agreements and drug pricing. “One time he looked at me and said, ‘Ellen, let’s face it – we’re nerds on this issue.’ But that’s part of his strength. He does not let go. His organisation is relatively small. If you compare it to an organisation like MSF, it is nothing. It is a couple of people. Yet the things they managed to do.”

When Yusuf Hamied met Love and the rest of the group in August 2000, Hamied said he was already manufacturing the individual drugs needed to treat people with HIV. He was prepared to make the drugs available at low cost, but he needed a guaranteed market. He had made a cheap version of AZT, the first Aids drug, in 1991, but had been forced to throw away 200,000 bags of the chemical because the Indian government did not have the money to buy it, even at $2 a day. He agreed to make a single drug to treat HIV at low cost, if his guests would help him market it.

The following month, at a meeting of the European Commission, Hamied publicly offered to make this three-drug Aids cocktail for $800 a year. His company, Cipla, would also help other countries make their own Aids drugs, he announced, and give away the single drug, nevirapine, that prevented mothers from passing HIV to their babies in childbirth. Haddad described it as a moment when you could hear the breath being sucked out of the room.

Hamied waited for his phone to start ringing – but the calls he expected from HIV-hit governments or donor organisations asking to buy Triomune did not come. “And one bright day, on 6 February 2001,” said Hamied, “when I was absolutely despondent that nothing was happening, Jamie rings me up from America and says, I’ve been thinking as to what we should do. Is it possible for you to reduce the price of the drugs to below $1 a day? That was Jamie’s idea.”

An HIV patient receives the antiretroviral drug Triomune, in South Africa. Photograph: Gideon Mendel/Corbis

Hamied agreed to offer the cocktail to MSF for Africa at $1 a day. With this precedent, Aids drugs would now be affordable for developing countries or donors willing to help them.

Love had won, but he had made enemies in the companies fighting to defend their intellectual property rights. He discovered that private detectives had been hired to spy on him. “One day a guy came over and knocked on our door. We opened the door and the guy said, ‘You don’t know me. I know you. For the past two years it’s been my job to follow what you do every day,’” Love recalled. The man had just been fired from PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and wanted to let Love know he was being watched.

Love’s organisation was also struggling for funds. As they moved into global issues, Nader, whose organisation focused on the US, stopped bankrolling them. Other philanthropic foundations in the US pulled out of work on intellectual property (Love believes this was a result of lobbying from drug companies and other corporations that campaigners had targeted). They slimmed down, pared back the staff, stayed in budget hotels, but they kept going.
* * *

Manon Ress eventually gave up her teaching job to join Love in Washington DC. They had two children together, a boy and a girl, as well as the two they already had from previous relationships. Love was away a lot, travelling around the world to speak and lobby governments. It put pressure on their marriage. After a bumpy patch, Ress started working with Love at Knowledge Ecology International, campaigning on copyright issues. (It was Ress who decided in 2008 that they should help the World Blind Union, which had been fighting the copyright restrictions on books that prevented them being cheaply adapted to braille and audio versions. She and Love drafted a treaty that would allow exemptions to the normal copyright on books for the benefit of blind, visually impaired, and reading-disabled people. It took five years of hard work to get it adopted.)

After Ress’s cancer diagnosis, the cost of medicines became very personal for both of them. Love started to ask generic firms whether they could make a version of Kadcyla, or T-DM1. He went to see an Argentinian company that also manufactures in Spain. Biological drugs such as T-DM1 are made from living organisms such as sugars or proteins and are complicated to manufacture. To make a biosimilar – a copy of a biological drug – some research and testing is required.

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche launched Kadcyla onto the UK market in February 2014 at a list price of £90,000 – the average cost of treatment for a single patient over 14 months. Trials had shown the drug extends life for women with incurable breast cancer by at least six months, but in April 2014, the government’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which decides whether drugs are sufficiently cost-effective to be used in the NHS, turned it down. The Cancer Drugs Fund, set up by the government in 2010 to provide funding when life-extending drugs were judged unaffordable, covered the cost of treatments until April 2015, when NHS England, which runs the fund, declared it would be dropping Kadcyla from the list.

At this point, Love saw an opportunity to make the drug available at a cheap price in an affluent country and set a precedent for access to affordable medicines for the entire world.

A consultant analysing a mammogram.

Love and Ress approached breast cancer charities in the UK and talked to healthcare experts. On 23 June, they made their way by plane and train and taxi to Oxford to discuss their plan with Dr Mohga Kamal-Yanni of Oxfam, a long-time fellow campaigner on access to medicines in the developing world.

Ress walked rapidly into the small meeting room at Oxfam’s HQ in the Cowley business park. She was small and chic, with a French shrug and a tendency to gesticulate. She wore a pink shirt loose over blue jeans, with pink shoes and handbag. She was quick and funny, often dominating the conversation. The hospitable Kamal-Yanni suggested they might like a bus ride round Oxford after the meeting before a home-cooked meal at her house. “Does he look like a tourist?” laughed Manon, pointing at a sheepishly smiling Love.

For several hours, the pair talked Kamal-Yanni through the proposal. She had many questions, including a major worry: how to get public support in a country where, unlike the US, nobody knows how much medicines cost. Nobody in the UK, she told Love, blames pharma for high prices.

But Love was undeterred. On 1 October, he made his move. The health secretary Jeremy Hunt received a letter from the Coalition for Affordable T-DM1, a group put together by Love and Ress, involving doctors, patients and campaigners in the US, Europe and UK. It proposed that Hunt should tear up the patent on Kadcyla, allowing either the manufacture or the importation of a cheap copycat version. Under the Crown Use provisions of the 1977 Patents Act, the government could legally set aside Roche’s patent and issue a compulsory licence, provided it gave the company “affordable compensation”. Love had found a loophole and invited the British government to use it.

Chris Redd of the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry in Plymouth, one of the signatories, felt the proposal would allow the British public to hold the government to account. “There are 1,500 UK citizens living with breast cancer right now, who could be kept alive by this medication. The solutions are all there in the document. The only question that remains is whether our government is more interested in protecting its citizens or the shareholders of a multinational drug company,” he said.

Love was not so naive as to think the government would open its arms to him. This was a difficult idea for a Conservative government that backs pharma companies and free markets, but it was in a bind, unable to foot the very high cost of new, life-extending drugs that patient groups were clamouring for. Audaciously, Love proposed that the UK government could invest in the research funding, which would give it a financial stake in the drug and ensure it got it at cost price. The UK could even sell it to other countries afterwards and make a profit.

On 4 November, NHS England announced that Kadcyla would stay on the Cancer Drugs Fund list, after Roche agreed, following lengthy negotiations, to lower the price – although it declined to say by how much. Within days, however, Nice announced its final decision on the drug. It was still too costly for general NHS use. Nice is restricted to a threshold of £30,000 for a year of good-quality life per patient or £50,000 for an end of life drug. Kadcyla still broke the ceiling. So while the fund would provide the money to pay for patients in England to get it, those in other parts of the UK could lose out – and the future of the Cancer Drugs Fund is anyway uncertain.

The British government is still pondering Love’s proposal. He keeps going: making frequent trips to Romania, urging its government to embrace compulsory licences on the new hepatitis C drugs, which, with a million infected people, could bankrupt its health system. Ress goes with him to Geneva, or Argentina, when she is needed – and when she can – between her three-weekly visits to hospital. Meanwhile, she walks the dog. “I don’t think my oncologist knows dogs live as long as seven or eight years,” she observed with wry humour. “But I’m going to be here long enough to see another grandchild – and another resolution at the World Health Assembly.”

  
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